Coproducing flood risk management through citizen involvement: insights from cross-country comparison in Europe

Across Europe, citizens are increasingly expected to participate in the implementation of flood risk management (FRM), by engaging in voluntary-based activities to enhance preparedness, implementing property-level measures, and so forth. Although citizen participation in FRM decision making is widely addressed in academic literature, citizens’ involvement in the delivery of FRM measures is comparatively understudied. Drawing from public administration literature, we adopted the notion of “coproduction” as an analytical framework for studying the interaction between citizens and public authorities, from the decision-making process through to the implementation of FRM in practice. We considered to what extent coproduction is evident in selected European Union (EU) member states, drawing from research conducted within the EU project STAR-FLOOD (Strengthening and Redesigning European Flood Risk Practices towards Appropriate and Resilient Flood Risk Governance Arrangements). On the basis of a cross-country comparison between Flanders (Belgium), England (United Kingdom), France, the Netherlands, and Poland, we have highlighted the varied forms of coproduction and reflected on how these have been established within divergent settings. Coproduction is most prominent in discourse and practice in England and is emergent in France and Flanders. By contrast, FRM in the Netherlands and Poland remains almost exclusively reliant on governmental protection measures and thereby consultation-based forms of coproduction. Analysis revealed how these actions are motivated by different underlying rationales, which in turn shape the type of approaches and degree of institutionalization of coproduction. In the Netherlands, coproduction is primarily encouraged to increase societal resilience, whereas public authorities in the other countries also use it to improve cost-efficiency and redistribute responsibilities to its beneficiaries.

Evaluating Promotional Approaches for Citizen Science Biological Recording: Bumblebees as a Group Versus Harmonia axyridis as a Flagship for Ladybirds

Over the past decade, the number of biological records submitted by members of the public have increased dramatically. However, this may result in reduced record quality, depending on how species are promoted in the media. Here we examined the two main promotional approaches for citizen science recording schemes: flagship-species, using one charismatic species as an umbrella for the entire group (here, Harmonia axyridis (Pallas) for Coleoptera: Coccinellidae), and general-group, where the group is promoted as a whole and no particular prominence is given to any one species (here, bumblebees, genus Bombus (Hymenoptera: Apidae)). Of the two approaches, the general-group approach produced data that was not biased towards any one species, but far fewer records per year overall. In contrast, the flagship-species approach generated a much larger annual dataset, but heavily biased towards the flagship itself. Therefore, we recommend that the approach for species promotion is fitted to the result desired.

Indigenous protest as a performance genre

Cuando se realiza una protesta política, los pueblos indígenas alrededor del mundo a menudo realizan bailes y música tradicional, también usan atuendos tradicionales. En lugar de tomar estas actuaciones como actos habituales de resistencia, este documento examina las condiciones de posibilidad que les ha permitido argumentar que tal interpretación cultural, explícita y tímida es un desarrollo reciente permitido por la globalización contemporánea. Más aun, tales interpretaciones se han convertido en un género de explicación en sí mismo, un estilo convencional para la organización y lectura de protesta indígena. El trabajo de campo se realiza en las tierras altas ecuatorianas y pretende proporcionar un marco teórico general. Se examina el trabajo político de la protesta indígena como un género de interpretación que estructura y es estructurado en la naturaleza de las audiencias a los cuales está engranado y las alianzas que esto permite.

Gift players or playbourers? Who is playing citizen science games?

Paper presented at the 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG Dundee, August 1-6, 2016.

The flexible citizen: education and citizenship

This paper considers the recent focus on citizenship within education by taking curricular reform within Scottish secondary schooling and its linkage with higher education as a case study. In Scotland the Curriculum for Excellence reform places citizenship as one of the four main capacities that pupils must work towards as part of their education. This is echoed to some extent within higher education through the Enhancement Theme reforms and the focus on graduate attributes. A unifying theme in these reforms is the need for students to work across different disciplines, to develop a cross-disciplinary perspective on the world by, for example, considering issues of sustainability in relation to scientific or technological developments. In this model of curriculum development teaching staff are considered as agents of change, enabling learners to develop their sense of citizenship in response to a fast-paced world of innovation and change. This kind of change is objectified as a need that must be responded to and met if tomorrow’s citizens are to be able to not only cope, but thrive in the world in which they inhabit. As such, the citizen is positioned as an ongoing project, as something to be worked at and worked on. However, this kind of notion of agency cloaks an neoliberal ideological construction of the citizen as a flexible resource for society, and usually in relation to economic output. The paper seeks to subject this construction of the citizen to critical scrutiny in relation to the idea that, in education, learners are developing their ability to be creative and enquiring in order to be adaptive to change.

“FOR THE UNION MAKES US STRONG”: PROTEST MUSIC IN THE 1989−90 PITTSTON STRIKE

Music making was a common practice during the 1989−90 strike against the Pittston Coal Company, an action led by the United Mine Workers of America. The types of music made varied greatly based on the contexts in which musicians and protesters were participating. In this thesis, I discuss how performers and audiences engaged with the music of the Pittston strike, with a focus on how different participatory and presentational contexts included music with similar or the same lyrics to achieve different goals. I argue that the musicians’ understanding of the people around them as potential participants, audiences, or inherent audiences shifted their use of music as they worked to use music strategically and effectively for the strike. The musical methods and considerations of the Pittston strike protesters have had a lasting impact on more recent protest movements.

Retro-Neoliberalism: Elite Counter-Protest in Latin America, 1940-1975

This research challenges the origin story of neoliberalism in Latin America. Drawing on archival data from the Mont Pèlerin Society and the personal archives of leading but neglected figures in the post-war push to rebuild economic liberalism, I present a historical geography of elite counter-protest that both predates and broadens the generally accepted “birth” of neoliberalism in 1970s Chile. Beginning in the 1940s, Latin American elites found common cause with key figures from economic liberalism’s most radical wing: the Austrian School. While existing literature links the onset of neoliberalism in Chile to the Austrian School, particularly with respect to the School’s influence on the early Mont Pèlerin Society, this dissertation is the first comprehensive inquiry to place the Austrian tradition in the ideational and organizational landscape of Latin America. Embracing a new mission that promised to save the soul of Western civilization, Latin America’s retro-neoliberal leaders collaborated with transnational actors to build a network of Austrian-inspired think-tanks and institutes of higher learning in the region. These organizations, in turn, served as recruiting mechanisms to found the Hispanic quarter of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which was dominated not (as might be assumed) by Chileans, but rather by retro-neoliberal elites from Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala, and Venezuela. By 1975, when scholars began analyzing how a run-of-the-mill economics department had been transformed into a bastion of free-market thinking in Chile, an entire neoliberal university was up and running in Guatemala, exposing all students, regardless of discipline, to the Austrian tradition – the crowning achievement of Latin America’s retro-neoliberal network. Investigating, and accounting for, the development and impact of this initiative sheds new light on the neoliberal landscape in Latin America, and raises important questions for the study of neoliberalism more broadly.

Exposition and protest

This document is a protest from the members of the South Carolina General Assembly of the United States tariff in effect in 1828.

Party 25

Party 25 involved the conception and public launch of a radically new form of political party during that year’s Australian general election. The entire project was also intentioned as a conceptual artwork. Party 25 avoided conventional party-political approaches and was neither a protest group nor an advocacy organisation, but rather a new form of political association that confronted what we understood as the debilitating limits and impotence of contemporary parliamentary democracies in transitioning our societies towards ecological sustainability.----- Party 25 was based on responding to one fundamental question which all of its policies served - “how does humanity get to the 25th century?” By basing itself on a dramatically long-term approach uncommon within conventional politics it raised the proposition that humanity does not have an assured future. Party25 therefore shaped its agendas around the idea that any future now lies in human hands and so how humanity treats the ecologies on which it depends innately determines the quality of the inseparable relationship between its being, and the being of the biophysical world.----- The project was conceived through a number of discussion papers, workshops and creative works and was launched publicly at the Judith Wright Centre Brisbane accompanied by a full length showing of evocative imagery, text and sound, a series of speeches and the launch of a succinct web presence. Through the website and this party launch a community of interested participants and creative practitioners was sought who then would form the basis of a nascent community of change.

Ubiquitous infrastructure : urban infrastructure planning and management experience of Korea

Urban infrastructure development in Korea has recently shifted from an old paradigm of conventional infrastructure planning to a new paradigm of intelligent infrastructure provision. This new paradigm, so called ubiquitous infrastructure, is based on a combination of urban infrastructure, information and communication technologies and digital networks. Ubiquitous infrastructure basically refers to an urban infrastructure where any citizen could access any infrastructure and services via any electronic device regardless of time and location. This paper introduces this new paradigm of intellectual infrastructure planning and its design schemes. The paper also examines the ubiquitous infrastructure development in Korea and discusses the positive effects of ubiquitous infrastructure on sustainable urban development.

What shapes attitudes toward paying taxes? Evidence from multicultural European countries

Objectives. Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance, several researchers have argued that citizens' attitudes toward paying taxes, defined as tax morale, helps to explain the high degree of tax compliance. However, most studies have treated tax morale as a black box, without discussing which factors shape it. Additionally, the tax compliance literature provides little empirical research that investigates attitudes toward paying taxes in Europe. Methods. Thus, this article is unique in its examination of citizen tax morale within three multicultural European countries, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain, a choice that allows far more detailed examination of the impact of culture and institutions using data sets from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey. Results. The results indicate the tendency that cultural and regional differences affect tax morale. Conclusion. The findings suggest that higher legitimacy for political institutions leads to higher tax morale.

Streamlining local government : evaluating an eGovernment initiative in south east Queensland

Recent initiatives around the world have highlighted the potential for information and communications technology (ICT) to foster better service delivery for businesses. Likewise, ICT has also been applied to government services and is seen to result in improved service delivery, improved citizen participation in government, and enhanced cooperation across government departments and between government departments. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) (2006) identified local government development assessment (DA) arrangements as a ‘hot spot’ needing specific attention, as the inconsistent policies and regulations between councils impeded regional economic activity. COAG (2006) specifically suggested that trials of various ICT mechanisms be initiated which may well be able to improve DA processes for local government. While the authors have explored various regulatory mechanisms to improve harmonisation elsewhere (Brown and Furneaux 2007), the possibility of ICT being able to enhance consistency across governments is a novel notion from a public policy perspective. Consequently, this paper will explore the utility of ICT initiatives to improve harmonisation of DA across local governments. This paper examines as a case study the recent attempt to streamline Development Assessment (DA) in local governments in South East Queensland. This initiative was funded by the Regulation Reduction Incentive Fund (RRIF), and championed by the South East Queensland (SEQ) Council of Mayors. The Regulation Reduction Incentive Fund (RRIF) program was created by the Australian government with the aim to provide incentives to local councils to reduce red tape for small and medium sized businesses. The funding for the program was facilitated through a competitive merit-based grants process targeted at Local Government Authorities. Grants were awarded to projects which targeted specific areas identified for reform (AusIndustry, 2007), in SEQ this focused around improving DA processes and creating transparency in environmental health policies, regulation and compliance. An important key factor to note with this case study is that it is unusual for an eGovernment initiative. Typically individual government departments undertake eGovernment projects in order to improve their internal performance. The RRIF case study examines the implementation of an eGovernment initiative across 21 autonomous local councils in South East Queensland. In order to move ahead, agreement needed to be reached between councils at the highest level. Having reviewed the concepts of eGovernment and eGovernance, the literature review is undertaken to identify the typical cost and benefits, barriers and enablers of ICT projects in government. The specific case of the RRIF project is then examined to determine if similar costs and benefits, barriers and enablers could be found in the RRIF project. The outcomes of the project, particularly in reducing red tape by increasing harmonisation between councils are explored.

From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation

Alvin Toffler’s image of the prosumer (1970, 1980, 1990) continues to influence in a significant way our understanding of the user-led, collaborative processes of content creation which are today labelled “social media” or “Web 2.0”. A closer look at Toffler’s own description of his prosumer model reveals, however, that it remains firmly grounded in the mass media age: the prosumer is clearly not the self-motivated creative originator and developer of new content which can today be observed in projects ranging from open source software through Wikipedia to Second Life, but simply a particularly well-informed, and therefore both particularly critical and particularly active, consumer. The highly specialised, high end consumers which exist in areas such as hi-fi or car culture are far more representative of the ideal prosumer than the participants in non-commercial (or as yet non-commercial) collaborative projects. And to expect Toffler’s 1970s model of the prosumer to describe these 21st-century phenomena was always an unrealistic expectation, of course. To describe the creative and collaborative participation which today characterises user-led projects such as Wikipedia, terms such as ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ are no longer particularly useful – even in laboured constructions such as ‘commons-based peer-production’ (Benkler 2006) or ‘p2p production’ (Bauwens 2005). In the user communities participating in such forms of content creation, roles as consumers and users have long begun to be inextricably interwoven with those as producer and creator: users are always already also able to be producers of the shared information collection, regardless of whether they are aware of that fact – they have taken on a new, hybrid role which may be best described as that of a produser (Bruns 2008). Projects which build on such produsage can be found in areas from open source software development through citizen journalism to Wikipedia, and beyond this also in multi-user online computer games, filesharing, and even in communities collaborating on the design of material goods. While addressing a range of different challenges, they nonetheless build on a small number of universal key principles. This paper documents these principles and indicates the possible implications of this transition from production and prosumption to produsage.