Legal Pluralism and Hybrid Governance: Bridging Two Research Lines

Legal pluralism and hybrid governance are two lines of research that address the interactions between state (official) and non‐state (unofficial) norms. Both come to similar observations, yet they seem hardly aware of each other's existence. With very few exceptions, the one does not refer to the other. This article seeks to explore whether links can be established. It presents both lines of research, identifies common ground, explores what they can learn from each other, and seeks to find whether the distance can be bridged. It concludes that legal pluralism and hybrid governance could be mutually reinforcing if scholars in the two lines were aware of and used each other's findings and methods, and saw each other as complementary.     

When Strategic Plans Fail to Lead. A Complexity Acknowledging Perspective on Decision-Making in Urban Development Projects—The Case of Kortrijk (Belgium)

Nowadays, cities formulate long-term strategies to address the challenges and opportunities they face. Numerous strategic plans or planning instruments are developed for this purpose. In this article, we would like to examine the role, impact and relevance of these types of plans in decision-making processes concerning urban development projects (UDPs) in the Flemish Region of Belgium. To what extent do strategic plans succeed in capturing and steering the complexity of spatial interventions in contemporary urban contexts? We argue that a complexity-acknowledging perspective provides a more realistic and adequate view here by seeing strategic plans as only one among many elements in the set of tangled inter- and intrastrategic processes which together determine UDPs. A comparative and qualitative case study was carried out in the city of Kortrijk. The decision-making of three UDPs was studied thoroughly. Interviewing key actors and analysing policy documents helped us to (re)construct the complex decision-making processes and to stipulate the meaning of all involved formal plans and planning tools.     

Between Leibniz and Kant: The Political Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Abstract

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.     

Domesticating Diamonds and Dollars: Identity,Expenditure and Sharing in Southwestern Zaire (1984–1997)

This article explores the impact of the recent diamond traffic on both rural and urban life in southwestern Congo-Zaire, in an attempt at a ‘multi-sited’ ethnography of the circulation of cultural meanings, commodities, money and identities in an increasingly diffuse time-space, in which the standard dichotomies between rural and urban worlds, lived world and system, traditional and modern, or precapitalist and capitalist realities have lost much of their explanatory strength. More specifically, the article deals with the widespread phenomenon of the bana Lunda, ‘the children of Lunda’, young Congolese urbanites who travel from all over southwestern Zaire to the Angolan province of Lunda Norte in order to dig or dive for diamonds in the UNITA-controlled territories. It investigates the changes brought about by the diamond trade and by the influx of these urban youngsters into the rural border area, as well as the impact of the accompanying monetization, known as ‘dollarization’, on the daily life of villagers and urbanites in Southwestern Zaire.     

De Potentia Dei: Some Western and Byzantine Perspectives

One of the questions that presented itself with the rise and development of the Christian faith was the problem of divine omnipotence. By resolving the problem of divine power, it became possible to explain many focal problems of mankind and the world, including, for example, the problem of the existence of evil, or of suffering. This article deals with two perspectives on this problem. Usually, the eleventh-century theologian Peter Damiani is pointed to as a pioneer and originator of the discussion of divine powers. But, St. Isidor's considerations were developed five centuries before Damiani wrote his famous treatise De divina omnipotentia. On the other hand, the debate in Scholasticism emerged as a long and lively discussion of different ways of defining the problem. The distinction of potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata contributed greatly to debating the general question of divine omnipotence. However, although it was useful in the theological-philosophical sense, this distinction later on provoked political solutions which sometimes served the interest of only one man.     

Transdisciplinarity in Practice: The Emergence and Resolution of Dissonances in Collaborative Research on Brownfield Regeneration

Abstract

The restoration of areas contaminated by industrial or mining activities has been a major issue in environmental research in many European countries since the 1980s, and it also constitutes a major area of research at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ. Within this research environment, a consortium consisting of natural and social scientists has developed an EU-funded research project aimed at providing problem- oriented, tailored approaches and technologies for the revitalization of contaminated areas. The approach taken by the project is one that seeks to integrate scientific and non-scientific knowledge. In this paper we show how the idea of joint knowledge production between scientists and non-scientists is pursued in the context of the project. We explore how the rather fuzzy presentation of the transdisciplinary approach in the project proposal opens the door to interpretation and appropriation by scientists and practitioners alike. We describe a number of ad hoc solutions that were deployed to overcome specific dissonances during the collaborative production of knowledge (e.g. substituting common group learning for the single-handed elaboration of concepts by one project partner, or substituting the consultation of external experts for the mere gathering of information). Finally, we show how the interdisciplinary research environment at UFZ enhances the ability of the project team to resolve dissonances, improves collaboration between partners, and increases the innovative potential of project outputs.     

The analysis of two historic fired artificial stonewares: Coade stone (18th–19th centuries) and a recent discovery from Oxnead Hall,Norfolk (16th–17th centuries)

Coade stone has played a significant role in architectural and ornamental design since its inception in the early 18th century. It is well known that earlier, experimental, architectural stoneware products existed, but few of these have been studied in detail scientifically, and only one major analytical study of Coade stone has appeared in the literature. This paper presents a new spectroscopic analysis of Coade stone along with that of a newly discovered sample from Oxnead Hall in Norfolk where it known that Sir Clement Paston experimented with artificial stone in the late 16th century. The results demonstrate that it is possible to differentiate between the two variants on the basis of both the raw materials used and the different phases formed in their production processes.     

Chemical composition characterization of ancient glass finds from <Emphasis Type="Italic">Troesmis</Emphasis>—Turcoaia,Romania

This paper reports and discusses the chemical composition of 20 glass fragments discovered during the 2012 archeological survey at Troesmis (Turcoaia, Tulcea county, Romania) and dated to the Roman and the Byzantine/Early Medieval periods. The data were obtained by two external Ion beam analysis (IBA) methods—namely Particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE) and Particle-induced gamma-ray emission (PIGE)—and they were compared to the recognized compositional glass groups from the Mediterranean region during the first millennium AD. The Troesmis assemblage turned out to contain samples belonging to several distinct categories of ancient glass, obtained from different raw materials and manufacturing procedures. Some of the analyzed vitreous finds from Troesmis were the result of glass recycling, while others were identified as deriving from Roman glass vessels imported from the Levantine or Egyptian shores of the Mediterranean. This archeometric study brings additional arguments for the long-range commercial exchanges during the Roman period.