The Politics of Permaculture: Towards an Ecologically Situated Approach to Resource Policy and Governance

The contributions to environmental politics of Torgerson, Oelschlager, Dryzek, Harrè and others, converge in their respective acknowledgements that the shift towards an ‘ecologically situated’ approach to environmental policy, including resource governance, will require the emergence and consolidation of a new lingua franca of environmental discourse. In this paper, I suggest that an extrapolation of permaculture ethics may provide a gambit through which such a discourse may be assembled and organised. I examine six key signifying elements derived from Orr and Capra’s approach to ecological literacy – network, nested system, flow, cycle, development and dynamic balance – and explore the implications that these might have for resource governance and policy, including the (re)framing of assessment indicators, energy auditing, resource management and integrated planning and development.

Corporate Citizenship: What are the Social Responsibilities of Australian Business? School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences Occasional Paper Series No. 6

Corporate Citizenship: What are the Social Responsibilities of Australian Business? School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences Occasional Paper Series No. 6

Essays on Development Policy and the Political Economy of Conflict

Electoral Rules and Leader Selection: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Community Groups. Despite a large body of work documenting how electoral systems affect policy outcomes, less is known about their impact on leader selection. We study this by comparing two types of participatory decision making in Ugandan community groups: (i) vote by secret ballot and (ii) open discussion with consensus. Random assignment allows us to estimate the causal impact of the rules on leader types and social service delivery. Vote groups are found to elect leaders more similar to the average member while discussion group leaders are positively selected on socio-economic characteristics. Further, dropout rates are significantly higher in discussion groups, particularly for poorer members. After 3.5 years, vote groups are larger in size and their members save less and get smaller loans. We conclude that the secret ballot vote creates more inclusive groups while open discussion groups favor the already economically successful. Preparing for Genocide: Community Meetings in Rwanda. How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure. The practice was highly politicized and, according to anecdotal evidence, regularly used by the political elites for spreading propaganda in the years before the genocide. This paper presents the first quantitative evidence of this abuse of the community meetings. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. Selection into Borrowing: Survey Evidence from Uganda. In this paper, I study how changes to the standard credit contract affect loan demand and selection into borrowing, using a representative sample of urban micro enterprises, most with no borrowing experience. Hypothetical loan demand questions are used to test whether firm owners respond to changes in loans' contractual terms and whether take-up varies by firms' risk type and other firm owner characteristics. The results indicate that contracts with lower interest rates and less stringent collateral requirements attract less risky borrowers, suggesting that there is scope for improvement of standard financial contract terms. Credit Contract Structure and Firm Growth: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial. We study the effects of credit contract structure on firm outcomes among small and medium sized firms. A randomized control trial was carried out to distinguish between some of the key constraints to efficient credit use connected to the firms' business environment and production function, namely (i) backloaded returns (ii) uncertain returns and (iii) indivisible fixed costs. Each firm was followed for the 1-year loan cycle. We describe the experiment and present preliminary results from the first 754 out of 2,340 firms to have completed the loan cycle. Firms offered a grace period have higher profits and higher household income than firms receiving a rebate later on as well as the control group. They also increased the number of paid employees  and reduced the number of unpaid employees, an effect also found among firms that received a cash subsidy at the beginning of the loan cycle. We discuss potential mechanisms behind these effects.

Social control and knowledge in democratic societies

In this article we introduce the notions of knowledge policy and the politics of knowledge. These have to be distinguished from the older, well-known terms of research policy, or science and technology policy. While the latter aim to foster the development of innovations in knowledge and its applications, the former is aware of side effects of new knowledge and tries to address them. While research policy takes the aims of innovations as largely unproblematic (insofar as they help improving national competitiveness), knowledge policy tries to govern (regulate, control, restrict, or even forbid) the production of knowledge.

Regional policy and spillovers from FDI in the UK

This paper tests one of the fundamental assumptions of regional policy makers over the last 20 years. Western governments, in seeking to attract internationally mobile capital have spent significant sums of public money on subsidies and grants. This is justified on the basis that the social returns to FDI are significantly greater than the private returns, due to productivity or technology spillovers from inward investors to domestic industry. However, this paper generates some estimates of these spillovers for both assisted areas and non-assisted areas in the UK, and questions the size of these social returns, arguing that productivity spillovers do not occur in regions where significant inward investment incentives are available.

Third sector organisations and social welfare : a study of the role of social service and charitable organisations in Taiwan

This study is about the role and operation of ‘third sector’ organisations (TSOs) within the Taiwanese social welfare context. TSOs have increased dramatically and become actively involved in social service provision. This phenomenon has not only had significant impact on the development and operation of TSOs in Taiwan but it is also of increasing interest to public policy academics. The latter are especially interested in the implications for the government-third sector relationship. This research examines the reasons why TSOs have been established, why they actively participate in social service provision, and their role and operation within the social welfare context of Taiwan. The study has both quantitative and qualitative data. It sampled ‘social service’ and ‘charitable’ organisations (SSCOs), which are the main type of TSOs in Taiwan, to examine their role, operation and interaction with government. Questionnaires were mailed to collect quantitative data first. After the quantitative data were collected and analysed, semi-structured interviews were undertaken to collect qualitative data. The study found that TSOs in Taiwan exist in a highly institutionalised environment, which is affected by traditional Confucian ideas and contemporary Western ideas such as social justice and civil rights. The rapid growth of TSOs has a strong connection with the desire to fill social service gaps left by government and family. TSOs mainly play the role of service provider rather than that of advocate. They cooperate with government in social service provision and have developed different types of symbiotic relationships with government. A ‘resonance effect’ between government and TSOs was also found as they implement social policy.

The effect of social influence and curfews on civil violence

We investigate the policies of (1) restricting social influence and (2) imposing curfews upon interacting citizens in a community. We compare and contrast their effects on the social order and the emerging levels of civil violence. Influence models have been used in the past in the context of decision making in a variety of application domains. The policy of curfews has been utilised with the aim of curbing social violence but little research has been done on its effectiveness. We develop a multi-agent-based model that is used to simulate a community of citizens and the police force that guards it. We find that restricting social influence does indeed pacify rebellious societies, but has the opposite effect on peaceful ones. On the other hand, our simple model indicates that restricting mobility through curfews has a pacifying effect across all types of society.