In New Caledonia, pro-independence leaders perceive economic autonomy as a prerequisite for political independence. The Koniambo Project, a joint venture between a Canadian multinational and a local mining company, is seen by many Kanak as an opportunity
In New Caledonia, pro-independence leaders perceive economic autonomy as a prerequisite for political independence. The Koniambo Project, a joint venture between a Canadian multinational and a local mining company, is seen by many Kanak as an opportunity
Critics of attempts to achieve consensus through Habermasian 'communicative rationality' dismiss this as unachievable due to participants' selfishness and irrationality, and the inevitability of power relations. Instead, Mouffe advocates 'agonistic pluralism', a dynamic process of continual debate grounded in mutual respect. In this paper I argue that, for this to succeed, we need to recognize and embrace the role of emotion in moral reasoning. Here, I examine a dispute over wetland management in suburban New Jersey. Each side articulated distinct understandings of what was and was not vulnerable, backed by emotional appeals partly based in self-interest but that also encompassed care and concern for others. Each side accused the other of being irrational and immoral, drawing 'moral microboundaries' between them. I conclude that participants in a public debate may not simply be pursing self-serving goals, nor might open communication resolve their differences. Instead, each may be deeply convinced that he or she is advocating the most rational and moral course of action. This questions the very notion of a unitary, potentially agreed-upon 'common good' and instead challenges us to attempt to grasp each other's moral worlds, and in particular the emotional bases of these, through the seeming oxymoron that I term 'empathic agonism'.
In: Political geography: an interdisciplinary journal for all students of political studies with an interest in the geographical and spatial aspects, Band 28, Heft 4, S. 248-258
In New Caledonia, pro-independence leaders perceive economic autonomy as a prerequisite for political independence. The Koniambo Project, a joint venture between a Canadian multinational and a local mining company, is seen by many Kanak as an opportunity to loosen economic ties to metropolitan France. Indeed, unlike cases in which large-scale resource extraction has disadvantaged local groups and intensified demands for political rights, the Koniambo Project resulted from pro-independence activism. This atypical situation can be explained by the French government's strategy in New Caledonia. Violent uprisings in the mid-1980s ended with accords that promised economic development. Radical activists believed this would pave the way for independence while their opponents hoped to obviate such aspirations. Similarly, the Koniambo Project is viewed either as an opportunity for greater Kanak autonomy or as yet another in a series of actions that have used economic gains to deter pro-independence efforts.
Decentralization reforms have been the overwhelming response to failures in the targeting of public resources by the central state in developing countries. The policy debate on decentralization typically revolves around several a priori hypotheses on how the design of formal institutions of local government, such as electoral rules, affects accountability in the provision and targeting of public goods. Yet a growing body of research suggests that many rules that structure political incentives and policy outcomes are informal. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that informal rules such as legislative norms and clientelism can strongly influence political behavior and policy outcomes. This evidence makes a compelling case for both the impact of these informal institutions on political incentives and their role in complementing formal institutions and shaping the status quo when formal venues are absent or weak. How much do these formal institutions matter? How do they shape policy outcomes? In particular, do they merely substitute for weak or absent formal institutions or do they exist alongside and dominate these formal rules and institutions? In this paper, we examine the effect of informal institutions on decentralized public-resource allocation in Ghana. The decentralization policy debate in Ghana, as elsewhere, typically focuses on the role of formal institutions of local government in the targeting of local public resources. Through a comparative case study of two districts in northern Ghana, we argue that informal institutions, grounded in the rationale of partisan politics of the central state, are the key determinants of decentralized public-resource allocation outcomes. In particular, we show that this political rationale is expressed through an informal model of vote buying, and this vote buying is dictated by a national political agenda. Our findings suggest that ignoring this informal institution is likely to undermine the current efforts to reform decentralized public-resource allocation in Ghana. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; GRP32 ; DSGD