1,720,974 research outputs found
Centralized or decentralized which governance systems are having a 'good' pandemic?
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects across the world, yet different countries have had varying degrees of success in their attempts to manage it. One of the reasons behind the different outcomes observed so far lies in the strengths and weaknesses of different governance arrangements leveraged to tackle the crisis. In this article we examine what we can learn about the operational capacity of different democracies through their early responses to the crisis. We provide a framework of four positive qualities of multilevel governance that might lead to greater chances of positive practical outcomes and present an illustrative case study of the experiences of Switzerland and the United Kingdom (UK). We conclude with some areas for further research and investigation.</p
Peacetech practices and their potentials for empowerment, participation and peace
No full textThis thesis takes as its starting point the empowerment and participatory potentials of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for peacebuilding that ubiquitous availability – even in conflict-affected area – seemingly presents. It seeks to explore the nature and extent of this transformative potential. It shows that the way this question has been framed to date leads to subtle and often implicit forms of technological determinism, where hopes are placed on new technologies to fix longstanding issues within peacebuilding. This thesis therefore proposes combining a practice lens with a performative view of the materiality of technologies. This performative view is translated in the concept of ‘affordances’ of ICTs – the possibilities offered for action. And so rather than asking whether new technologies can empower peacebuilders, it reframes the question towards how ICTs are actually being used in practice – what affordances are being leveraged – and whether these practices support or hinder the empowerment and participatory potentials often attributed to ICTs in peacebuilding. Practice is conceptualised as composed of three main elements: materials (including technological affordances), competence and meanings.The empirical focus of this thesis is on the Build Peace community of practice, a first global community dedicated to peacetech – the practice of using ICTs for peacebuilding. First an analysis of Build Peace discursive and material practices constructs peacetech practices-asentities to show what its constitutive elements are and how they are integrated together. The second empirical section of the thesis focuses on the performance of peacetech practices through ethnographic observation of a peacetech project in Burundi. It examines both the project’s implementation and the development of its technology. The insights generated from this mixed method approach show that ICTs can indeed afford greater participation in peacebuilding and initiate new forms of engagement in these processes, potentially resulting in empowerment. However this is less due to their ubiquitous availability and more to a combination of various technological affordances unfolding within managed, facilitated processes by actors already engaged in peacebuilding at the local level. More fundamentally this thesis shows that despite aspirations to the contrary, peacetech practices are more likely at this stage to replicate traditional peacebuilding practices than transcend them. This means that power imbalances lamented by decades of peacebuilding literature are not fixed by the availability of new ICTs, even though the technological affordances for such transformative potentials do exist. This thesis analyses some of the reasons why these are currently not actualised and proposes some ways forward for practitioners and policy makers
How trust, mistrust and distrust shape the governance of the COVID-19 crisis
No full textIt is commonplace to claim that trust is essential to effective governance in many contexts, including that of a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that trust is better understood as a family of concepts–trust, mistrust and distrust–and each of these may have different implications for the governance of COVID-19. Drawing on original measures tested through nationally representative surveys conducted in Australia, Italy, the UK and the USA between May and June 2020, we explore how these distinct types of trust are associated with citizens’ perceptions of the threat posed by COVID-19, and their behavioural responses to it. We show how public policy dynamics around the COVID-19 crisis are driven by each of the trust family members and that policymakers might gain more from promoting an information-seeking and mistrusting society, rather than a trusting one.</p
Trust and the coronavirus pandemic: What are the consequences of and for trust? An early review of the literature
No full textTrust between governors and the governed is seen as essential to facilitating good governance. This claim has become a prominent contention during the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis also presents a unique test of key hypotheses in the trust literature. Moreover, understanding the dynamics of trust, how it facilitates and hinders policy responses, and also the likely effects of these responses on trust are going to be fundamental questions in policy and trust research in the future. In this article, we review the early literature on the coronavirus pandemic and political and social trust, summarise their findings and highlight key challenges for future research. We show how the studies shed light on trust’s association with implementation of government measures, public compliance with them, mortality rates and the effect of government action on levels of trust. We also urge caution given the varying ways of measuring trust and operationalising the impact of the pandemic, the existence of common issues with quantitative studies and the relatively limited geographical scope of studies to date. We argue that it is going to be important to have a holistic understanding of these dynamics, using mixed-methods research as well as the quantitative studies we review here.</p
Trust, mistrust and distrust: a gendered perspective on meanings and measurements
Full text linkRecent work has emphasised the need for greater nuance in qualifying both the presence and absence of political trust in different political systems. The concept of trust may thus be more effectively perceived and analysed as a family with trust, mistrust, and distrust as its members. Expanding to a family of trust means that new ways of capturing these attitudes in empirical survey work may be needed and a way of critically driving that exploration is to investigate how gender influences how they are understood. In this paper, we use insights from focus group discussions on a series of newly designed trust, mistrust and distrust questions to identify: 1) how citizens perceive these different concepts and 2) how gendered these perceptions are. We then draw on new survey data gathered through the TrustGov project to test how the focus group findings impact survey responses and thus identify: 3) which survey questions are more likely to effectively measure the three concepts. We show that the differences highlighted in our qualitative work underscore the need to develop a more systematic mixed methods research agenda on both the expanded family of political trust and gender. We emphasise that global comparative work to capture diverse gender effects across different political systems are the necessary next steps for the field
COVID-19 and the blunders of our governments: long-run system failings aggravated by political choices
No full textMore urgently than ever we need an answer to the question posed by the late Mick Moran in The Political Quarterly nearly two decades ago: ‘if government now invests huge resources in trying to be smart why does it often act so dumb?’. We reflect on this question in the context of governmental responses to Covid-19 in four steps. First, we argue that blunders occur because of systemic weaknesses that stimulate poor policy choices. Second, we review and assess the performance of governments on Covid-19 across a range of advanced democracies. Third, in the light of these comparisons we argue that the UK system of governance has proved itself vulnerable to failure at the time when its citizens most needed it. Finally, we outline an agenda of reform that seeks to rectify structural weaknesses of that governance capacity.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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