Participation and Environmental Policy in Canada and the United States: Trends Over Time

This article explores trends in participation and environmental policy in Canada and the United States over three time periods: from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s; from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s; and, finally, over the past few years. The article examines possible interactions among the two variables within each country over these periods and searches out overall tendencies toward convergence or divergence. The article argues that there was divergence between the two countries in the first period, with the U.S. providing more participatory opportunities earlier than Canada and establishing a more developed regulatory framework. An overview of progress over the second period, showing some convergence among the two countries, is then provided. Canada seemed to be catching up to its southern counterpart in terms of both participatory opportunities—although they took a distinctively Canadian form—and policy decisions. More recently, however, the trend has been toward divergence. The article explains that, over the past few years, participatory opportunities in Canada have been diminished and the environmental regulatory framework has been scaled back. Although there have been some changes in the U.S. case, the scale of these changes has not been as extensive. The final section of the article then attempts to relate these broader trends in participation and policy decisions to the political context in each country. It is argued that institutional frameworks in the two countries have played a key role in the identified trends. In particular, Canada's institutional structure—specifically the concentration of power in the executive and its federal structure—has hastened these recent developments, while the U.S. institutional framework—with its multiple power centers—has acted as a brake on those who advocate significant change to the existing environmental policy regime.     

Trade and culture: the ongoing debate

ABSTRACT

The debate over how to reconcile trade liberalization with cultural policy is a long-standing one. There is great variation in how countries have navigated this debate. Furthermore, evolving individual policy approaches show noteworthy dynamism, largely in response to domestic politics, shifts in the international trading system and technological developments. This special issue explores different approaches to the trade and culture debate across geographic space, as well as the evolution across time through analysis of six cases – Canada, the European Union, South Africa, Latin America, the United States and China.     

The Dynamics of Incrementalism: Subsystems, Politics, and Public Lands

A host of research has been produced in the decade since Baumgartner and Jones' theory of punctuated equilibrium first drew attention to the dynamics of policy change over time. Much of this research follows a topic across time, highlighting the shift from negative to positive feedback as challengers push an issue from subsystem to institutional level. Far less attention has been paid to the periods between major punctuations, neglecting key questions about whether incremental periods reflect an absence of challengers or the successful defense of established subsystem interests.
This research is a comparison of policy change across two segments of environmental policy. The breakup of the timber subsystem was a clear victory for environmentalists, yet these same actors have been largely unsuccessful at dislodging established grazing interests. These findings highlight the strategic value of venue shifting for bypassing entrenched interests and illustrate the potential for successful challenges to occur in judicial venues.     

Punishment Policy in the American States from 1890 to 2008: Convergence,Divergence, Synchronous Change,and Feed‐Forward Effects

This analysis of the patterns of change in the use of incarceration by the American states from 1890 through 2008 focuses on multiple themes particularly relevant to an understanding of policy arenas in which the social constructions of target populations play an important role. Specifically, the study examines whether the states have adopted more similar incarceration levels over time (converged), whether they tend to change in the same direction at the same time (synchronous change), and whether they tend to stay in the same relative positions vis‐à‐vis one another, such that the historical policy position has long‐term implications for later policy positions (“feed‐forward” effects). The results indicate that, in spite of a century of social, political, and economic integration, the policy positions of the states have not exhibited a sustained convergence toward a common level of incarceration, but have undergone cycles, with some periods of convergence followed by periods of divergence. Change has generally been synchronous—as states tend to move in the same direction at the same time as if propelled by national forces even though incarceration levels are determined by state and local policy and the use of discretion by criminal justice officials. The results also indicate a profound “feed‐forward” effect in that the position of the states vis‐à‐vis one another historically has substantial predictive power for their position in subsequent years.     

Ultra-low fertility in East Asia: policy responses and challenges*

ABSTRACT

In the countries of East and Southeast Asia where fertility has reached ultra-low levels, there has been a flurry of developments in pro-natalist policy over the past five years or so, but its impact appears to be limited. This paper addresses the strong obstacles hindering the success of pro-natalist policies in the region, suggests key interventions that are needed, and stresses that the policies in these countries should also be considering other ways of addressing the issues. Social policy has certainly moved ahead in positive ways in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, as evidenced by parental leave policy and childcare reform, but workplace cultures have yet to follow suit. The slow changes in gender norms, along with the pressures of educating children and finding housing in the big cities where most people in the region live, are the continuing realities facing couples considering marriage and childbearing.     

Who Are Your Neighbors? The Role of Ideology and Decline of Geographic Proximity in the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

States adopt policy innovations within the confines of a dynamic American federal system, but our study of policy diffusion tends to be fairly static. Single‐policy studies incorporate temporal variation, but for only one innovation. Macro‐level analyses examine broad patterns, but often by completely pooling across policy and time. This makes it difficult to identify how diffusion patterns change over time, though Walker's early work explicitly identified such temporal instability. This study specifically examines how neighbor and ideological cues change in importance over time using a dataset of 556 policies adopted from 1960 to 2014. While the findings demonstrate the generality of many key internal, external, and policy‐level determinants of adoption, there is variation in these effects across time. Most important is the relative stability of ideological similarity between adopters and declining influence of contiguous neighbors. Further, political polarization plays a role in conditioning neighbor and ideological cues.     

Privileged Ideas and State Interests

The puzzle that intrigues us is the source of interests that guide the state in instances of state autonomy. We argue that one important source of these interests is ideas: When relative state autonomy exists over long periods of time, there is a strong likelihood of a privileged idea that informs state interests. State actors direct state policy during autonomous periods by adopting and privileging particular ideas (institutionalization), resulting in policy outcomes reflecting these now privileged ideas. This argument is examined in two case studies: nuclear weapons targeting since World War II, guided by counterforce, and federal public lands forestry policy since 1900, guided by technocratic utilitarianism.     

From Fighting Underpopulation to Curbing Population Growth: Tracing Colonial Power in German Development Interventions in Tanzania

This paper investigates how colonial power is rearticulated in policy and practice of German development cooperation in Tanzania. Drawing on archives and interviews, it analyses the emergence of interventions with regard to population control and reproductive health during Germany's colonisation of ‘German East Africa’ and compares these interventions to present-day German development assistance in Tanzania. While German policies during colonial rule addressed ‘underpopulation’ and contemporary German development aid stresses population growth to be the problem, this paper finds that racialised, gendered discourses are interconnected with the political economy of population control in both periods. It highlights that colonial power in development cooperation can only be fully comprehended by tracing the continuity of colonial discourses to material practices as well as economic interests of the Global North, and argues that critique of population politics should address population control in general – whether anti- or pro-natalist – as imbued with racism and serving the interests of capital. Such a perspective might allow us to be sensitive to possible future developments in population and reproductive health policy towards the Global South, in which antinatalist (regarding marginalised people) and pronatalist (regarding privileged people) policies run concurrently, as is the case in countries of the Global North today.     

Trade policy,climate change and the greening of business

There is under way a worldwide greening of industry, driven by the huge demand generated by China and India as emerging industrial giants whose growth cannot be accommodated by ‘business as usual’ fossil-fuelled development—for reasons having as much to do with energy security as concerns over global warming and climate change. While the role played in this process by fiscal and industry policies (e.g. carbon taxes and other market-based incentives) is well understood (even if not pursued currently in Australia), the potentially powerful leverage to be exercised by trade policy is under-recognised. There are some positive developments such as a proposed Environmental Goods Agreement being discussed in Geneva, while there are negative developments embodied in various bilateral and regional trade agreements such as the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, to which Australia has committed itself. There are rising levels of conflict over trade and climate change mitigation measures, in actions brought at the WTO against countries looking to promote green industries through measures like local content requirements being attached to foreign direct investment, or by countries imposing border tax adjustments against exporters who allegedly fail to implement carbon taxes. The issues involved are discussed in this paper and possible ways forward are proposed, along with some implications for Australia.     

Regional Disparities,Industry and Government Policy in Japan

This paper examines the time path of regional per capita income disparities in Japan during the last three decades, and analyses the determinants of this path, including government policies. Regional disparities have been quite common in most countries, and the problem has proven to be relatively intractable, though varying in intensity across time and across countries. The Japanese case is instructive in that the country has experienced several stages of the problem in a relatively brief period, and has managed to limit spatial polarization to a certain degree. This paper identifies links between broad growth policy orientations with resultant changes in regional income disparities, and suggests their policy implications for both mature and developing economies.     

Post/neo/liberalism in relational perspective

Within a decade of the new millennium new left governments in many countries across Latin America developed new constitutions that bespeak a new, postneoliberal era, supplanting neoliberal hegemony. Debates about postneoliberalism-as-governance or as a discourse lack resolution. Drawing from Foucault's lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics, which engages the relation between neoliberalism and liberalism, as well as from his general analytic approach, we cast postneoliberalism, neoliberalism, and liberalism in relational terms relative to principles not time periods, and offer precision on how different discourses co-exist and become mutually entangled and politicized in the context of neoliberal practices. We reference points in our argument with empirical research in various Latin American contexts, and in the penultimate section we thread the argument through current dynamics in one context, Nicaragua. Although overall we concur with the critical literature about the neoliberal character of pink-tide governments in practice, in the final section we depart from the prevailing approach that focuses on formal government as the bellwether of change and conclude by drawing attention to prospects for postneoliberal practices in the microspaces of daily life. Drawing from Foucault's late scholarship on ethics and mindful of the longstanding role of informality in Latin American political economy, we clarify how postneoliberal values can materialize in everyday life while formal governmental actions and policies persist as neoliberal amid liberal, postneoliberal, as well as socialist discourses.     

Convergence Theory Reconsidered: The Politics of Pensions in Scandinavia and Australia

Scandinavia and Australia share a similar sequence of pension-political developments. Starting out from means-tested minimum pensions, these countries have moved towards a dual mandatory pension structure in which the working population has access to compulsory second-tier schemes, while marginal groups are served through income-tested minimum benefits or pension supplements. However, different countries have chosen different organisational means to provide both minimum and second-tier pensions. The article accounts for pension-political developments in Scandinavia and Australia, and explains these developments by combining two traditions in the study of welfare politics which are often portrayed as dire opposites: convergence theory versus 'politics matter' theories.     

How the Pueblos Got Their Sprachbund

Pueblo societies comprise a culture area, and a zone of linguistic convergence or Sprachbund, that encompassed four distinct language families. Pueblo groups are also quite genetically homogeneous. The general forces promoting or diluting cultural differences across groups are defined and given a preliminary weighting through time for Pueblo societies. The Neolithic demographic transition and the hierarchical society transition (defined herein) contribute to homogeneity across groups derived from a single descent group, but create differences among groups derived from different descent groups. High mobility across communities and across regions contributes to cultural similarities across phylogenetically defined groups, as may adaptation to similar environments. Pronounced tendencies towards within-group conformity and linguistic purism were probably late (i.e., early first-millennium ad) developments in the Pueblo world.     

Inequality in Human Resources for Health: Measurement Issues

This article discusses options to allow comparative analysis of inequalities in the distribution of health workers (HWs) across and within countries using a single summary measure of the distribution. Income inequality generally is measured across individuals, but inequalities in the dispersion of HWs must use geographical areas or population groupings as units of analysis. The article first shows how this change of observational unit creates a resolution problem for various inequality indices and then tests how sensitive a simple ratio measure of the distribution of HWs is to changes in resolution. This ratio of inequality is illustrated first with the global distribution of HWs and then with its distributions within Indonesia. The resolution problem is not solved through this new approach, and indicators of inequalities of access to HWs or health services more generally appear not to be comparable across countries. Investigating geographical inequalities over time in one setting is possible but only if the units of analysis remain the same over time.     

Theodore Caplow. Two Against One: Coalition in Triads

The authors collect information on visual artists to allow a broad historical ranking of the most prominent artists. Their purpose is to examine the birth and work locations, and the consequential pattern of labor movement, of prominent artists over a number of long time periods. The article indicates that a relatively simple column-inch approach may suffice for the purpose of identifying the thousand or so most prominent artists, but that much more detailed source material is then required to examine the labor mobility experiences of these artists. A significant bias to the home or target market country is posited in the ranking of artists across countries, even in prestigious publications. Some preliminary data are provided on the ranking of artists by country of birth, covering a very broad historical sweep.     

Climbing the Ladder? High-Technology Export Performance in Emerging Europe

A British economist examines the development of high-technology industrial exports across the emerging Europe region over the past two decades. After arguing that the development of high-technology capabilities is a key component of economic development, he presents an original index of high-technology industrial export performance that is used to describe patterns of high-technology exports across emerging Europe. When these developments are placed in comparative perspective, it becomes evident that although the countries of emerging Europe have made considerable progress in increasing across-product sophistication of exports and in increasing across-product diversification, most have been less successful in improving levels of within-product sophistication. For emerging Europe and other low- to middle-income countries elsewhere, this will remain a key challenge for the future.     

Authoritarian Neoliberalism,Radical Conservatism and Social Policy within the European Union: Croatia,Hungary and Poland

Exploring political and social policy developments in Croatia, Hungary and Poland, three EU member states, this article addresses the hegemonic position of authoritarianism, populism, conservatism and neoliberalism, albeit articulated differently in each state. All three countries are marked by modes of governmentality that combine heteronormative familialism, repatriarchialization, nationalism, ethnicized demographic renewal and anti-immigrant sentiments. In each, a kind of layered social divestment is occurring, delivering a radical new vision of social reproduction and fundamental differentiations in terms of access to social citizenship between those seen as ‘deserving’ of support and those who are not, who are increasingly subjected to disciplinary measures. Although the degree of welfare retrenchment varies across the cases, the radical nature of restructuring, breaking down traditional notions of left and right on welfare, is suggestive of longer-term restructurings not reliant on individual politicians or parties.     

对众多不同国家的一个相同政策--浅析中国对发展中国家的政策

中国外交已走过了半个世纪的历程,其间有多次大的外交政策调整.与对美、苏主要国家政策的不断调整和变化不同,中国对发展中国家的政策更多地表现出连续性.在处理与这些国家的关系时,中国一直认为自己是这些国家群体中的一员,而且常常把这些国家当做一个整体看待.但实际上中国与这些国家内部都存在着很大的分歧.中国对这些国家的政策在很大程度上受中国与主要大国,特别是美、苏关系和中国战略的影响,在不同时期有着不同的内容,呈现不同的特点.     

Compared to What? Changes in Interest Group Resources and the Proposal and Adoption of State Teacher Policy

What is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, I estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. I find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. Further, I find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time.     

发达国家中小企业发展给我们的启示

在当前国际金融危机对从全球经济造成巨大冲击的严峻形势下,作为国家经济持续发展重要力量的中小企业应当在危机中寻找机遇,获得发展。借鉴发达国家中小企业发展的成功经验,对制定和完善我国中小企业发展政策,进一步加快我国中小企业的发展有一定的积极作用。