A Human Rights Perspective on Citizen Participation in the EU's Governance of New Technologies

This article considers the EU’s approach to citizen participation in the governance of new technologies from a human rights perspective. Noting that there is a dearth of insight on the interplay between citizen participation and human rights, the article sketches the essence of its own human rights perspective as being about empowerment. This perspective is brought to bear on EU discourse on citizen participation in the governance of new technologies. Analysis of the discourse—comprising law, citizen participation in EU governance and citizen/science relations, the ‘public understanding of science and technology’, risk and bioethics—reveals a disempowering ‘deficit model’ of citizens in need of education through their participation in governance. The analysis thus suggests that citizen participation in EU governance of new technologies is not truly informed by human rights, but is instead used as a legitimating technique.

The ‘Public Interest’ Agency of International Organizations? The case of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance

This article seeks to outline and explore some of the conditions necessary for International Organizations (IOs) to perform in a public interest fashion through a case study of the Principles of corporate governance formulated by the OECD. Rather than the more commonly documented pathological and dysfunctional behavioural forms of IOs, the case of the Principles, both in their formulation by the OECD, and in their assessment by the World Bank through the ROSC process, represent an episode of IO agency protecting and promoting a wider public interest. In exercising their agency, IO staff, have made the Principles more agreeable to a wider range of interested parties, giving them a general interest orientation, in accordance with a proceduralist definition of public interest. This case should therefore encourage IPE scholars to consider carefully and systematically the sets of circumstances and conditions, which might be required for IO agency to take more socially useful forms. In the final section, three indicators are identified which might be evaluated in future research into the positive public interest agency of IOs across a range of cases.

Drivers of Supply Network Governance: An Explorative Study of the Dutch Chemical Industry.

The authors identify a number of drivers of supply network governance, a widely appraised governance form aimed at reaping the benefits of both vertical integration and market exchange. Case studies conducted in the Dutch chemical industry are used to explore these drivers. The findings identify interdependence of organizational activities and asset-specific investments as the key drivers of supply network governance in the chemical industry. Firms enjoy relational rents and tend to share knowledge in supply network relationships, however these factors seem to strengthen supply network relationships rather than create them.

Committing to Effective Climate Governance in Northern Ireland: A Defining Test of Devolution

This is the second of a two-part analysis exploring the interaction between UK devolution and governance of the national low carbon transition. It argues that devolution shaped the national climate governance regime created by the Climate Change Act 2008, but will itself be tested and even altered as the traction of the low carbon imperative intensifies. This dynamic is explored in the specific context of the UK’s most devolved region. The first article argued that devolution facilitated and arguably forced Northern Ireland’s devolved administration to give a highly qualified and potentially illusory consent to the regional application of the UK Act. The second article argues that making a more effective commitment to climate governance will be a defining test of its devolution arrangements but will require constitutional arrangements designed for conflict resolution to mature. Failure to do so will have important implications for the UK’s putative ‘national’ low carbon transition and the longer-term viability of devolution in the region.

A burning issue? Governance and anti-incinerator campaigns in Ireland, North and South

The decades of conflict in Northern Ireland created divisions between communities, with few opportunities for cooperation. However, in the 1990s opposition to a proposed cross-border incinerator brought the divided communities together. The 1990s economic boom in the Republic of Ireland generated a waste management crisis as the by-products of rampant consumerism overwhelmed the state's rudimentary waste disposal system. Three Irish anti-incinerator campaigns which have pitted local communities against the Irish state or the Northern Ireland Department of the Environment are examined. Community attempts to gain leverage within the political governance frameworks in operation on both sides of the border are examined and the various ways in which environmental movements respond to the crisis of waste management under different governance regimes are illuminated.

'Trusting the numbers': mineral prospecting, raising finance and the governance of knowledge

Mineral prospecting and raising finance for ‘junior’ mining firms has historically been regarded as a speculative activity. For the regulators of securities markets upon which ‘junior’ mining companies seek to raise capital, a perennial problem has been handling not only the indeterminacy of scientific claims, but also the social basis of epistemic practices. This paper examines the production of a system of public warrant and associated knowledge practices intended to enable investors to differentiate between ‘destructive’ and ‘productive’ varieties of financial speculation. It traces the use of the notion of ‘disclosure’ in constructing and legitimizing the ‘juniors’ market in Canada. It argues that though the work of ‘economics’ may be necessary in the construction of markets, it is by no means sufficient. Attention must also be given to the ways in which legal models of ‘the free-market’ can be translated and constantly re-worked across the sites and spaces of regulatory practice, animating the geographies of markets.

Re-imagining DDR Ex-combatants, leadership and moral agency in conflict transformation

Drawing upon criminological studies in the field of prisoner rehabilitation, this essay explores the relevance of the Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) framework to the process of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. In a similar fashion to the critique of 'passivity' offered by, for example, the 'strengths based' or 'good lives' approach to prisoner resettlement and reintegration more generally, the authors contend that the Northern Ireland peace process offers conspicuous examples of former prisoners and combatants as agents and indeed leaders in the process of conflict transformation. They draw out three broad styles of leadership which have emerged amongst ex-combatants over the course of the Northern Ireland transition from conflict-political, military and communal. They suggest that cumulatively such leadership speaks to the potential of ex-prisoners and ex-combatants as moral agents in conflict transformation around which peacemaking can be constructed rather than as obstacles which must be 'managed' out of existence.

Substitutes for legal protection: corporate governance and dividends in Victorian Britain

Companies in Victorian Britain operated in a laissez-faire legal environment from the perspective of outside investors, implying that such investors were not protected by the legal system. This article seeks to identify the alternative mechanisms that outside shareholders used to protect themselves by examining the dividend policy and governance of over 800 publicly traded companies at the beginning of the 1880s. We assess the importance of these mechanisms by estimating their impact on Tobin's Q. Our evidence suggests that dividends and well-structured and incentivized boards of directors may have played a role in protecting the interests of outside investors.

Leadership for inclusion: Conceptualising and enacting inclusion in integrated schools in a troubled society

Inclusion is increasingly understood as an educational reform that responds to the diversity of all learners, challenging the marginalization, exclusion and underachievement which may result from all forms of ‘difference’. Leadership for inclusion is conceptualized here as driving a constant struggle to create shared meanings of inclusion and to build collaborative practice, an effort that needs to be rooted in critical practice lest it risk replicating existing patterns of disadvantage. In response to calls for further research that challenge how school leaders conceptualize inclusion and for research that investigates how leaders enact their understandings of inclusion, this paper aims to increase our understanding of the extent to which leadership vision can map onto a school’s culture and of the organizational conditions in schools that drive responses to diversity. We investigate the enactment of leadership for inclusion in the troubled context of Northern Ireland by looking at two schools that primarily aim to integrate Catholic and Protestant children but which are also sites for a range of other dimensions of student ‘difference’ to come together. Whilst the two schools express differing visions of the integration of Catholics and Protestants, leadership vision of inclusion is enacted by members of the school community with a consensus around this vision brought about by formal and informal aspects of school culture. Multiple and intersecting spheres of difference stimulate a concerted educational response in both schools but integration remains the primary focus. In this divided society, religious diversity poses a significant challenge to inclusion and further support is required from leaders to enable teachers to break through cultural restraints.