The Changing Fortunes of a Policy Entrepreneur: The Case of Ross Garnaut

Few people inside or outside government have had a greater impact on public policy in Australia than Ross Garnaut. His report in 1990 provided a blueprint for Australia's economic ‘engagement’ with Asia, whether or not one agreed with its underlying logic and analysis. The reception of his report on climate change in 2011 could hardly have been more different. Why is it that some ideas enjoy wide support from influential actors and are enthusiastically taken up by policymakers, while others struggle to gain traction, even when backed by government? This paper provides some possible answers to this puzzle by identifying factors that facilitate or obstruct the influence and impact of ‘policy entrepreneurs’.

在澳大利亚政府内外,对公共政策影响最大的人士莫过于郜若素了。他发表于1990年的报告,你同意其逻辑分析也好,不同意也罢,反正它都为亚澳经济关系提供了蓝图。他于2011年发表的环境报却得到迥然不同的反应。何以一些观点能够得到重要社会主体的广泛支持以及政策制定者的积极采纳,而另一些观点哪怕是有政府做后盾,也难得推广呢？本文通过寻找有利或有碍“政策专业户”发挥影响的因素,对这个问题作了回答。     

Giotto: artistic realism,political realism

The conventional view of Giotto is that he was a great narrative and dramatic painter. In addition his art was ideologically aligned with the Guelph party in Florence and its allies: the papacy, the Franciscan establishment and the house of Anjou. This can be traced in his paintings, especially the fresco cycles. Internal evidence suggests that in addition to his acknowledged cycle for the Scrovegni family in Padua he was the principal artistic deviser of many of the disputed frescoes in the nave of the Upper Church at Assisi, including the paintings of the life of St. Francis.There is also evidence that many of his frescoes in various parts of Italy (including cycles no longer extant) were undertaken at the behest of the Florentine commune as part of its diplomacy. He was in fact the first artist to become part of the bourgeois ruling class, and his spatial and plastic realism was in complete accord with their interests.The Scrovegni cycle is more complex than has been realised, involving a profound allegory which fulfils the needs of the patron, expresses Giotto's world view, and at the same time serves the diplomatic interest of Florence.     

Poetic child realism: Scottish film and the construction of childhood

With this essay I suggest a move towards poetic realism in the representation of children in Scottish movies. After a brief discussion of the landscape context of film geographies I turn to the roots of Scottish film realism in British Free Cinema, with specific reference to filmmakers’ use of landscape and place‐characters. I then argue that Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay moves most fully towards the context of poetic child realism. Ramsay frames and foments a quirky poetic realism with non‐professional child actors placed in carefully crafted landscapes to create important moral and social stories that evolve from a series of shocks and an emotive collision of ideas.     

Thomas Hobbes and international relations: from realism to rationalism

This article attempts to provide a correction to the exclusive realist interpretations of Thomas Hobbes. It makes the point that Hobbes is not as close to a realist understanding of international relations as has been prevalently held. Given Hobbes's conception of man and the state of nature, the formation of Leviathan and the law of nature, it is here argued that Hobbes gives us a perception of international relations which is not always conflictual and comprises the adjustments of conflicting interests, leading to the possibility of alliances and cooperation in international relations.     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

Return to reason: reviving political realism in western foreign policy

Twenty‐first‐century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia–Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post‐Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based‐order. In this context, the use of force is considered appropriate only for humanitarian ends meeting a set of predetermined axioms laid down in chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Yet for any strategy to be effective—in an international order subject to change—a clear political aim is required, which might deviate from the general rule. Preoccupied with universal postulates, legal normativism has lost sight of the particular. The argument put forth in this article is that the failure of contemporary western foreign policy in the twenty‐first century to address this limitation or to prioritize political ends has led to strategic confusion from Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine. In this context, it might be useful to reappraise the utility of abstract rationalist approaches to global governance and return instead to an earlier understanding of statecraft that avoided premature generalizations and treated norms as maxims of prudence rather than axioms requiring universal application.     

Ghostly real estate: Haunting,debt and capitalist realism in Milan

Ghosts and analogous supernatural entities are pervasive cultural objects. Anthropologists have delved into the religious, social and cultural value of these presences in depth. However, the discipline does not seem to have dedicated enough energy to interpreting this phenomenon in late capitalist societies. Nevertheless, the relationship between ghosts and capitalism constitutes an object of great interest. The real estate sector seems to be particularly suited to investigating the logic of haunting in contemporary societies. Haunting, which gives rise to ghosts, is a compelling category for understanding power relations and economic brutality. Following Derrida, ghosts are relations that mediate different temporalities in the present. In the cases of the foreclosure I ethnographically observed in Milan, those peculiar relations are debt relationships. Judges and justice system actors who oversee the procedures, aware of the presence of ghosts, act in the awareness that this haunting can in no way be resolved, following a logic that Fisher has defined as ‘capitalist realism’.     

The Excavation of Hayonim Terrace: An Interim Report

Abstract

The site of Hayonim Terrace contains occupations of two Epipaleolithic complexes: the Natufian and the Geometric Kebaran. The prehistoric occupations of the terrace appear to span a period of transition between hunting/ collecting and food-producing economies. Excavation of the terrace has provided considerable information on the environmental setting and prehistoric adaptive strategies of this period.     

Paros,Report II: The 1973 Campaign

Abstract

Paros is one of the most important islands of the Aegean sea, known best because of its white translucent marble. The island developed a very important school of sculpture from the Archaic to Roman times. An investigation of the island started in 1969, with the support of the Greek Archaeological Service, is centered on the ancient capital of Paros, which survives in the ruins of its ancient walls and an Archaic Ionic temple, and in the northern part of the island, where recent surveys and excavations have brought to light a significant number of sites, some of which go back to the Bronze and the Dark Ages of Greece.