Collaborative Governance of Climate Change Adaptation Across Spatial and Institutional Scales

We examine two related questions that are key for understanding collaborative outcomes in complex governance systems. The first is the extent to which collaboration among policy actors depends upon their joint participation in policy forums. The second is how the scales at which these forums operate conditionally affect the likelihood of collaboration. We address these questions using data from a recent survey on actors’ collaborative interactions as well as their participation in climate change adaptation policy forums in the Lake Victoria region in East Africa. Exponential random graph models show that actors are more likely to collaborate if they jointly participate in policy forums. However, this effect weakens at progressively higher spatial levels at which forums operate. Similarly, collaboration is less likely among actors jointly participating in forums that sponsor decision making at the higher collective choice level rather than lower operational choice level. While policy forums may catalyze collaboration, our findings suggest that their capacity to do so may be subject to scale‐dependent transaction costs of political contracting.     

Resistance and radical democracy: freedom,power and institutions

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that resistance and radical democracy can be used to the good of representative democracy. I submit that resistance is about the popular power – the freedom as power – to create better institutions. I argue that the conflict and resistance that is at the core of radical democracy enables freedom and democracy and resists domination best if it is institutionalized. This counterintuitive claim is substantiated by an argument for freedom as power through representation and how the power to resist is linked to at least four domains of freedom. This builds on the work of Machiavelli, Marx and Foucault, amongst others, and insights drawn from resistance struggles across the globe. I end by proposing institutional changes to representative democracy that, I suggest, would allow us to conceive of democracy as both a form of government and a constantly destabilizing transgressive practice.     

The Fossil Human from Rabat-Kébibat (Morocco): Comparative Study of the Cranial and Mandibular Fragments

As part of the geological and chronological recontextualization of the Rabat-Kébibat quarry performed by a Franco-Moroccan team of geologists, the human remains discovered in the site and already published were reassessed. The human remains assemblage is composed of 23 cranial fragments, a mandible (including on the right I1, P3, P4, the roots of M1, M2, and M3, and of the left I1, I2, C, P3, P4, and M1), and the left half of the maxillary (including I1, I2, P3, P4, M1, and M2). Through a micro-computerized tomography analysis, the internal structure of the parietal fragment (evaluation of the thickness of the compact table and diploe) and the mandible was examined. Geometric morphometrics were applied on the tridimensional model of the mandible to investigate the conformation of the symphyseal outlines. Results were compared to a large reference collection composed of African, Asiatic, and European hominin fossils, from different chronological range. Our results allow us to clarify the phylogenetic position of the human remains from Rabat-Kebibat, in particular their relationship with other North African hominins.