EU actorness and effectiveness under political pressure at the Copenhagen climate change negotiations

This paper analyses the extent of European Union (EU) actorness and effectiveness at the fifteenth United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009. For over a decade the European Union has been characterised as a leader in international climate policy-making and as an important actor in international climate change negotiations. The COP15 meeting in Copenhagen has overall brought about disappointing outcomes, especially from the perspective of the European Union. This casts doubts on EU leadership and begs the question of what has happened to EU actorness and effectiveness in this field. In terms of actorness we take Jupille and Caporaso (1998) as a point of departure and then specify a more parsimonious actorness framework that consists of cohesion and autonomy. Effectiveness (i.e. goal attainment) is seen as conceptually separate from actorness. Effectiveness is conceptualised as the result of actorness conditioned by the ‘opportunity structure’, i.e. the external context (of other actors, events and ideas) that enables or constrains EU actions. We hold that the EU’s actorness has been only moderate, especially given somewhat limited preference cohesion. In terms of the opportunity structure in Copenhagen we argue that the high degree of politicisation constrained the EU’s ability to negotiate and thus to attain its goals. Another external factor that had a substantial adverse impact on the EU’s effectiveness at the Copenhagen negotiations was the strong involvement of other actors with rather different positions, namely the United States (US) and the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China).

The Experience of the Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen

The Arnamagnæan Institute, principally in the form of the present writer, has been involved in a number of projects to do with the digitisation, electronic description and text-encoding of medieval manuscripts. Several of these projects were dealt with in a previous article 'The view from the North: Some Scandinavian digitisation projects', NCD review, 4 (2004), pp. 22-30. This paper looks in some depth at two others, MASTER and CHLT. The Arnamagnæan Institute is a teaching and research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. It is named after the Icelandic scholar and antiquarian Árni Magnússon (1663-1730), secretary of the Royal Danish Archives and Professor of Danish Antiquities at the University of Copenhagen, who in the course of his lifetime built up what is arguably the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in the world, some 2,500 manuscript items, the earliest dating from the 12th century. The majority of these are from Iceland, but the collection also contains important Norwegian, Danish and Swedish manuscripts, along with approximately 100 manuscripts of continental provenance. In addition to the manuscripts proper, there are collections of original charters and apographa: 776 Norwegian (including Faroese, Shetlandic and Orcadian) charters and 2895 copies, 1571 Danish charters and 1372 copies, and 1345 Icelandic charters and 5942 copies. When he died in 1730, Árni Magnússon bequeathed his collection to the University of Copenhagen. The original collection has subsequently been augmented through individual purchases and gifts and the acquisition of a number of smaller collections, bringing the total to nearly 3000 manuscript items, which, with the charters and apographa, comprise over half a million pages.

Vaughan, Suzi and Armstrong, Wendy (2009) Threads of tension. In: Vaughan, Suzi and Schmidt, Christine Margaret, (eds.) Five Fashion Musings. Post Pressed, Brisbane, Qld, pp. 9-15.

five:fashion musings is an upcoming 2009 publicaton to celebrate the fashion discipline's five-year milestone at the Queensland Unviesity of Technology. it represents a body of work by fashion practitioners, aceademic and educators commissioned to explore their research in fashion theory, practice and pedogogy through five key themes.

Who or what decides how stakeholders are optimally engaged by governance networks delivering public outcomes?

As the problems involving infrastructure delivery have become more complex and contentious, there has been an acknowledgement that these problems cannot be resolved by any one body working alone. This understanding has driven multi-sectoral collaboration and has led to an expansion of the set of actors, including stakeholders, who are now involved in delivery of infrastructure projects and services. However, more needs to be understood about how to include stakeholders in these processes and the optimal ways of developing the requisite combination of stakeholders to achieve effective outcomes. This thesis draws on stakeholder theory and governance network theory to obtain insights into how three networks delivering public outcomes within the Roads Alliance in Queensland engage with stakeholders in the delivery of complex and sensitive infrastructure services and projects. New knowledge about stakeholders will be obtained by testing a model of Stakeholder Salience and Engagement which combines and extends the stakeholder identification and salience theory (Mitchell, Agle, and Wood, 1997), ladder of stakeholder management and engagement (Friedman and Miles, 2006) and the model of stakeholder engagement and moral treatment of stakeholders (Greenwood, 2007). By applying this model, the broad research question: “Who or what decides how stakeholders are optimally engaged by governance networks delivering public outcomes?” will be addressed. The case studies will test a theoretical model of stakeholder salience and engagement which links strategic management decisions about stakeholder salience with the quality and quantity of engagement strategies for engaging different types of stakeholders. The outcomes of this research will contribute to and extend stakeholder theory by showing how stakeholder salience impacts on decisions about the types of engagement processes implemented. Governance network theory will be extended by showing how governance networks interact with stakeholders through the concepts of stakeholder salience and engagement. From a practical perspective this research will provide governance networks with an indication of how to optimise engagement with different types of stakeholders.

Staking a claim : the role of stakeholders in government

The stakeholder approach which emerged under the auspices of new public management has been in use in public agencies for the past 25 years. However it remains a difficult and demanding task for agencies to determine who their stakeholders are and how to optimise interactions with them. This paper will examine how government agencies identify, classify and engage with stakeholders who have competing demands, differing access to resources and the ability to exert political pressure. To do this, the stakeholder approaches of nine agencies at three levels of government in Queensland were studied. The contribution of this paper is the development of a Stakeholder Classification Model for Public Agencies which could be used to create more focused and relevant stakeholder interventions.

Learning, language and leadership : conduits to dynamic public service networks

Networks are having a profound impact on the way society is organised at the local, national and international level. Networks are not ‘business as usual’. The defining feature of networks and a key indicator for their success is the strength and quality of the interactions between members. This relational power of networks provides the mechanism to bring together previously dispersed and even competitive entities into a collective venture. Such an operating context demands the ability to work in a more horizontal, relational manner. In addition a social infrastructure must be formed that will support and encourage efforts to become more collaborative. This paper seeks to understand how network members come to know about working in networks, how they work on their relationships and create new meanings about the nature of their linked work. In doing so, it proposes that learning, language and leadership, herein defined as the ‘3Ls’ represent critical mediating aspects for networks.

Inter-agency working : good intentions and interaction dynamics

This paper explores inter-agency working and examines the implications of inter-agency operations for delivering multi-domain service outcomes. Cross-agency collaborative approaches to service delivery are suggested to provide the vehicle for achieving integrated service and policy goals. However, it is argued these need to be crafted ‘fit’ for purpose’ and may not be the requisite approach for all joint purposes. Moreover, some commentators suggest that the optimism about these partnership arrangements and cross-agency actions to resolve complex multi-dimensional problems may be misplaced and propose that further research into the actual rather than desired consequences of these arrangements may find that, at times, partnership working creates negative effects. While collaboration and partnerships are often framed as the way to achieve real breakthroughs in service delivery across agencies, there remain key challenges to interagency working. As more and insistent calls for agencies and other community actors to work together in resolving complex social problems are heeded, the implications of working across organizational boundaries need to be further investigated. This paper investigates cases of inter-agency programmes to understand the dimensions and limitations of inter-agency working. The paper concludes by offering a framework for better inter-agency working that has applicability across all sectors.

Managing infrastructure transitions : a complex adaptive systems perspective

Engineering assets such as roads, rail, bridges and other forms of public works are vital to the effective functioning of societies {Herder, 2006 #128}. Proficient provision of this physical infrastructure is therefore one of the key activities of government {Lædre, 2006 #123}. In order to ensure engineering assets are procured and maintained on behalf of citizens, government needs to devise the appropriate policy and institutional architecture for this purpose. The changing institutional arrangements around the procurement of engineering assets are the focus of this paper. The paper describes and analyses the transition to new, more collaborative forms of procurement arrangements which are becoming increasingly prevalent in Australia and other OECD countries. Such fundamental shifts from competitive to more collaborative approaches to project governance can be viewed as a major transition in procurement system arrangements. In many ways such changes mirror the shift from New Public Management, with its emphasis on the use of market mechanisms to achieve efficiencies {Hood, 1991 #166}, towards more collaborative approaches to service delivery, such as those under network governance arrangements {Keast, 2007 #925}. However, just as traditional forms of procurement in a market context resulted in unexpected outcomes for industry, such as a fragmented industry afflicted by chronic litigation {Dubois, 2002 #9}, the change to more collaborative forms of procurement is unlikely to be a panacea to the problems of procurement, and may well also have unintended consequences. This paper argues that perspectives from complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory can contribute to the theory and practice of managing system transitions. In particular the concept of emergence provides a key theoretical construct to understand the aggregate effect that individual project governance arrangements can have upon the structure of specific industries, which in turn impact individual projects. Emergence is understood here as the macro structure that emerges out of the interaction of agents in the system {Holland, 1998 #100; Tang, 2006 #51}.

Bwembya Chikolwa interviewed by Nicole Lindsay for Herald Sun 20th August 2009, Property trusts hit hard by US crash,

Listed Australian property companies wrote off more than $8.5 billlion from their ill-fated US investment adventures during this reporting season.

Bwembya Chikolwa quoted by Mike Taylor for Money Management 7th September 2009, Thaw for listed property

Australian property bond markets are starting to improve, but don’t expect a return to the buoyant days of the past any time soon.

Moving from Awareness to Knowing, Understanding, Speaking and Doing: Indigenous Women Academics in Higher Education. National Tertiary Education Women's Conference, 18-19 July 2009, South Melbourne, Victoria.

Bronwyn Fredericks was asked to outline some of the issues faced by Indigenous women academics.