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A missing link? The role of international organizations in climate-related planned relocation
No full textPlanned relocation of communities to less hazardous sites is a complex process anticipated to become more prevalent as climate change accelerates. In many parts of the world, communities and national governments planning internal relocations rely on support from International Organizations (IOs) for decision-making and implementation processes. This IO assistance–ranging from policy guidelines to technical assessments, monitoring and evaluation to finance–varies widely based on diverse national and local contexts. Despite challenges including embedded power dynamics, many IOs are becoming more involved with planned relocation processes and therefore, a greater understanding of IO involvement in planned relocations to date is needed. Our analysis highlights an emergent gap in international climate mobility governance: while climate-related displacement and migration fall under existing IO mandates, there is no obvious institutional home for internal planned relocation. Current support from IOs to nationally and locally led planned relocation processes remains ad hoc and siloed, leading to gaps in international accountability and coordination, including a lack of human rights-based standards for IO engagement. In this article, we outline potential institutional arrangements dedicated to internal planned relocation and assess tradeoffs between pathways. Addressing this ‘missing link’ in institutional arrangements for internal planned relocation at the international level is essential to promote greater coordination and accountability between key stakeholders as planned relocation becomes more common in a changing climate. Key policy insights Governments and communities are increasingly relying on support from IOs to enable planned relocation away from climate harms. Unlike climate-related displacement and migration, no IO has a mandate for planned relocation, resulting in a ‘missing link’ in international governance. Current international support for communities and national governments on climate-related planned relocation is ad hoc and siloed, resulting in gaps in accountability and coordination. Addressing this void through stronger institutional leadership would hold IOs accountable for their engagement on planned relocation. Greater coordination among IOs would facilitate policy learning and knowledge exchange. Rather than creating a new entity to address this ‘missing link’, we conclude that a combination of institutional arrangements uniting existing IOs and multi-stakeholder mechanisms would best enable improved accountability and coordination. Attention to this international policy gap is urgently necessary as climate change accelerates
The problem of addressing menopause in the workplace without rigorous evidence
No full textA 2022 landmark report contained one of the most cited figures in the menopause debate: “one in ten women have left work due to menopausal symptoms”. Shani Orgad, Gillian Paull and Catherine Rottenberg review the report and write that there are problems with the “one in ten” figure. They argue that rigorous research is urgently needed on the impact of menopause on women in the workplace
Why does politics seem so chaotic?
No full textPolitics can feel very chaotic these days, and the news cycle like a never ending crisis. Nick Anstead argues that a big reason for that is a communications strategy inspired by First World War battleship camouflage, and adopted by the likes of Donald Trump
Robust statistics through the monitoring approach: applications in regression
No full textThis open access book presents robust statistical methods and procedures through the monitoring approach, with an emphasis on applications to linear regression. Illustrating the theory, it explores both large and small-sample properties. The performance of the forward search and of the monitoring of static robust estimators for regression data are illuminated through numerous data analyses using MATLAB and R. The book describes the results of many years’ work of the authors in the development of powerful methods of robust regression analysis. Robust methods are designed to analyse contaminated data. The well-established static robust methods estimate model features, such as parameter estimates, assuming the amount of contamination in the data is known. These methods are described in detail in Chapter 2 for estimation in a simple sample. The extension to regression is presented in Chapter 3, with an emphasis on S-estimation and related procedures as well as on least trimmed squares. The monitoring methods of Chapter 4, including the forward search, find the appropriate level of robustness for each data set and so avoid biased estimation from the inclusion of outliers and inefficiency due to the deletion of uncontaminated observations. This analysis is followed by examples which illustrate the use of the interactive graphical analyses associated with the authors’ FSDA toolbox. Numerical comparisons of the size and power of outlier tests appear in Chapter 5. Later chapters illustrate applications to response transformation in regression and to non-parametric regression. Extensions of the robust multiple regression model include Bayesian, heteroskedastic, time series and compositional regression, together with the clustering of regression models. Finally, several approaches to model selection are investigated and robust analyses of regression data are presented that illustrate the use of the techniques introduced earlier. Exercises are given at the end of each chapter, with solutions at the end of the book. The MATLAB code can be reproduced using MATLAB Online, without the need for a license, or via the language-agnostic Jupyter notebook environment, after installing the MATLAB kernel. Online computer code is available for all examples and exercises, together with a series of YouTube videos
Iraq, regime change and the reconstruction of the security field: the rebirth of impunity in a disaggregated state
No full textThis paper examines the causes and consequences of the politics of impunity that have come to dominate Iraq after regime change in 2003. It does this by reviewing and deploying Walter Benjamin’s work, Towards the Critique of Violence, which overtly separates law from justice, anchoring law instead into its own founding myths or gewalt. The paper places Benjamin’s work in dialogue with sociological understandings of a disaggregated or polymorphous state. It examines, in detail, the rebuilding of one of the state’s disaggregated and competitive fields, the security field and militia domination of it. This analytical framework and case study are used to examine how the politics of impunity came to dominate the Iraqi state, from the US invasion and regime change in 2003, to attempts to rebuild the coercive institutions of the state in its aftermath. The paper uses Benjamin’s notion of gewalt and foundational violence to examine how, with US assistance, the militias aligned to Iraq’s political parties came to dominate the security field and exercise coercive power with impunity
Global methane action pays for itself at least six times over
No full textWe provide a comprehensive assessment of the economic benefits and costs of global methane emissions abatement, anchored on the Global Methane Pledge. We use an integrated assessment model to estimate avoided climate damages at the global and country levels, including quantification of tipping points and risk. We further estimate air-quality cobenefits and methane abatement costs. We find that global methane action would be highly beneficial, yielding a benefit-cost ratio of at least six. It would provide larger benefits in lower-income countries, and it would reduce tipping point intensity and risk. We provide estimates of the social cost of methane to compare with previous literature and show that these estimates imply that key economies, such as the United States, European Union, and China, should be self-interested to abate methane emissions substantially
Do people better recognize inconsistencies in others’ moral judgments than their own? If so, why?
No full textThis paper explores whether people are more likely to recognize inconsistency in others’ judgments than in their own, and if so, why. It reports two pre-registered online experiments with samples representative of the UK population (N = 814 and N = 1,623). In Study 1, people are more likely to recognize inconsistency in others’ moral (and non-moral) judgments than in their own. Study 2 replicates this finding and tests three explanations: (i) motivated reasoning, (ii) selective cognitive effort, and (iii) limited insight into others’ reasoning. Ad (i), because people’s susceptibility to motivated reasoning is said to diminish when people must account for their judgments, the presence of motivated reasoning was examined by manipulating social accountability. No effect was found. Ad (ii), while people spent significantly more time (a proxy for cognitive effort) on reviewing others’ consistency than their own, this explained only a fraction of the greater rate at which inconsistencies in others’ reasoning were recognized. Ad (iii), using low confidence in consistency evaluations as a proxy for limited insight, the study did not find support for the limited insight hypothesis. The finding that people are better at recognizing inconsistency in others’ moral judgments aligns with the idea that moral consistency reasoning is a social device that operates best when we interact with others, but more research is needed to uncover the psychological mechanisms behind this effect
Skill‐biased policy change: governing the transition to the knowledge economy in Germany, Sweden and Britain
No full textHow have advanced capitalist democracies transitioned from a Fordist to a post‐Fordist, knowledge‐based economy? And why have they followed seemingly similar policy trajectories despite different economic models and sectoral specializations? We develop the notion of skill‐biased policy change to answer these questions. Drawing on a distinction between valence and partisan issues in the transition to the knowledge economy, we highlight the partisan and business group politics underpinning different policy areas to argue that policies that create or mobilize high‐level skills attract relatively broader consensus across political parties and business groups than protective labor market policies targeted at the lower end of the skills distribution. The argument is illustrated through case studies of Germany, Sweden, and the UK—three countries that have transitioned to a knowledge‐based economy but that have done so by relying on markedly different sectoral specializations
Beyond optimal fault-tolerance
No full textOne of the most basic properties of a consensus protocol is its fault-tolerance – the maximum fraction of faulty participants that the protocol can tolerate without losing fundamental guarantees such as safety and liveness. Because of its importance, the optimal fault-tolerance achievable by any protocol has been characterized in a wide range of settings. For example, for state machine replication (SMR) protocols operating in the partially synchronous setting, it is possible to simultaneously guarantee consistency against α-bounded adversaries (i.e., adversaries that control less than an α fraction of the participants) and liveness against β-bounded adversaries if and only if α + 2β ≤ 1. This paper characterizes to what extent “better-than-optimal” fault-tolerance guarantees are possible for SMR protocols when the standard consistency requirement is relaxed to allow a bounded number r of consistency violations, each potentially leading to the rollback of recently finalized transactions. We prove that bounded rollback is impossible without additional timing assumptions and investigate protocols that tolerate and recover from consistency violations whenever message delays around the time of an attack are bounded by a parameter ∆ ∗ (which may be arbitrarily larger than the parameter ∆ that bounds post-GST message delays in the partially synchronous model). Here, a protocol’s fault-tolerance can be a non-constant function of r, and we prove, for each r, matching upper and lower bounds on the optimal “recoverable fault-tolerance” achievable by any SMR protocol. For example, for protocols that guarantee liveness against 1/3-bounded adversaries in the partially synchronous setting, a 5/9-bounded adversary can always cause one consistency violation but not two, and a 2/3-bounded adversary can always cause two consistency violations but not three. Our positive results are achieved through a generic “recovery procedure” that can be grafted on to any accountable SMR protocol and restores consistency following a violation while rolling back only transactions that were finalized in the previous 2∆ ∗ timesteps
Coordinating the net zero transition: a practical framework for policymakers
No full textJurisdictions around the world have already developed and implemented policies to transition to a net zero economy. To maximise the impact and effectiveness of such policies a coordinated policy approach is necessary. To guide policymakers as they face the challenge of taking financial and economic policy decisions for the transition, this report develops a design approach based on ‘building blocks’. The approach can be adjusted in the context of the specific needs of the financial sector in the transition. It incorporates building blocks to better enable the design, implementation and evaluation of financial and economic public policy that supports the integration of climate change and environmental factors, with a particular emphasis on the intricate interrelationship between economic and financial systems, the roles of key economic and financial stakeholders and enabling improved coordination. The authors define three main building blocks, described in Figure 1: 1) foundations; 2) adjusting policies; and 3) evaluation and anticipation