Search results

AbstractThis article connects two emerging debates in urban studies—the need to pay more attention to the role of nonhuman actors in urban planning and the ways in which media objects affect urban politics and planning—by examining how a video on Bogotá's car‐free Ciclovía program facilitated the adoption and implementation of a similar program in San Francisco. The analysis shows that media objects have the capacity to act as fulcrums in processes of leveraging urban policy change owing to their potential to alter urban governance structures. The article analyzes the digital storytelling and 'eye‐opening' practices through which the video enabled policy changes to be implemented in San Francisco, while also tracing the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that were involved in the production and circulation of the video through digital archival research and multi‐sited fieldwork. In doing so, it shows the active role that media objects play in shaping urban policymaking processes and provides an example of a relational methodology for studying the digital materialities through which urban policy ideas increasingly circulate.

"Best practices" are either celebrated as inspirational examples that can spur policy change and learning in other places or critiqued as "one-size-fits-all" models that do not consider the complexity of local contexts. Less is known about the forms of power, governance, and legitimacy that are embedded in the construction and mobilization of certain policies as world policy models. This article critically examines the concept of "best practice" by analyzing the case of Bogotá's Ciclovía, a weekly 70-mile street-closure program to promote urban biking and physical exercise. The analysis sheds light on the shifting rationalities and constellations of local and transnational actors, networks, and agendas that have shaped the program from its experimental beginnings in the 1970s through its construction as an international "best practice" in the 2000s.Las "mejores prácticas" suelen ser o bien presentadas como ejemplos inspiradores y creativos que pueden impulsar cambios políticos en otros lugares o criticadas como modelos "universales" que no toman en consideración la complejidad de los contextos locales. No obstante, se sabe relativamente poco sobre las formas de poder, gobernanza y legitimidad que están insertadas en la construcción y movilización de ciertos programas como modelos de política mundial. El artículo hace un examen crítico del concepto de "mejores prácticas" analizando el caso de la Ciclovía de Bogotá—un programa semanal de cierre de calles que promueve el ciclismo urbano y el ejercicio físico. El análisis arroja luz sobre las racionalidades cambiantes así como las diferentes constelaciones de actores, redes, y agendas locales y globales que le han dado forma al programa desde sus tímidos comienzos en los años 70 hasta su construcción como una "mejor práctica" internacional en los últimos años.

In this dissertation, I critically examine the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that allowed Bogotá (Colombia) to emerge as a world policy model of urban sustainable transport by analyzing the different ways in which Bogotá's policies –particularly Transmilenio BRT and Ciclovía- were mobilized in Guadalajara (Mexico) and San Francisco (United States). Policy models are either celebrated as inspirational examples that can spur policy learning in many places at once or rejected as "one-size-fits-all" recipes that do not consider the complexity of local contexts. My dissertation departs from both arguments by demonstrating that although models and "best practices" can indeed be powerful catalyzers of policy change, practices of inter-city policy circulation inevitably take place in a local and transnational field of power in which different actors strategically mobilize other cities' references to legitimize particular agendas and translate their beliefs about how the city should be organized into policy. In this dissertation I show that the wide circulation of Bogotá policies in the last decade reflects an increasing focus by the apparatus of international development on the circulation of city models as an arena to effect global impact, what I call the "leveraging cities" logic. Bogotá's Transmilenio and Ciclovía are, then, part of a larger set of cost-effective, impact-oriented and financially-sustainable policy models promoted by international development banks and global philanthropy that seek to intervene in global climate change through their replication in as many cities as possible. Yet, the politics behind the global circulation of Bogotá policies are not about "coercion from above" but rather a politics of learning, persuasion and local coalition-building that takes place through a mobile infrastructure of policy circulation in the form of policy forums, study tours, best practices guides, images and videos. A careful and qualitative analysis of who organizes these events and objects and the practices of learning and persuasion that take place in and through them is key to understand the friction between global and urban agendas that underpinned the wide circulations of the Bogotá model since the early 2000s. To study transnational policy circuits and their effect on urban policy agendas and planning, I used a combination of methods that included archival research, participant observation and more than 90 interviews with mayors, planners, bicycle advocates, bus company owners, local NGO leaders, philanthropists and others in the many sites and situations where the Bogotá model took me during two years of fieldwork.

In Mobile Urbanism, McCann and Ward have compiled a variety of high-quality articles by prominent scholars that examine urban policy circulations from a critical human geography perspective. In contrast to the burgeoning and more orthodox "policy diffusion" and "policy transfer" literature in political science and sociology, often based on assumptions of rational policy diffusion among nation-states, the authors of Mobile Urbanism build on the emerging interdisciplinary "policy mobility" approach that explores policy formation, transformation, and mobilization as a politicized, power-laden and socially constructed process that can happen at different government scales (Peck and Theodore 2010). Drawing from David Harvey's (1989) fixity/mobility dichotomy and Doreen Massey's (1991) idea of "global sense of place," and looking specifically at urban policy mobilities, McCann and Ward advance an original theoretical framework to study cities in relational and territorial terms by focusing on how local policy is constituted by both connections to other places and local 'political' contestations. Their work contributes to a newly emerging scholarship in city planning which looks at the circulation of planning ideas, expertise, and knowledge (Healey and Upton 2010).

Since October 2009, the Greek sovereign debt problem has spiraled into crisis. By the end of last year, Greek national debt stood at 115% of GDP, and the deficit had been revised up from 6-8% to 13.6%. On April 27, 2010, international ratings agencies decreased Greek bonds to junk status. On May 1, Greece agreed to a series of austerity measures that convinced the previously reluctant Germany to support a bailout package for Europe but also set off massive strikes throughout Greece. An initial 110 billion euro bailout was replaced days later with a 750 billion euro ($100 trillion) bailout of which IMF will provide 250 billion euros and EU institutions the rest. Even this news did not prevent stock market drops worldwide. Spain too lost its AAA credit rating at the end of May, further fanning fears that the crisis could spread to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, Greece faces two major obstacles to taking a truly proactive approach to recovering productivity. First, as a member of the Eurozone, which takes monetary policy out of national hands, Greece is unable to use monetary and fiscal measures in ways traditionally applied in such a situation. Second, this structural difficulty has been further exacerbated by the prevailing ideological approach to the European debt crisis, which has been framed in terms of restoring international creditworthiness and protecting foreign creditors, rather than in terms of ensuring employment and basic social needs for citizens.

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries' own and neighbors' past experiences shape elites' beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression.

AbstractElectoral coalitions between ideologically incompatible parties – among other unconventional electoral strategies – may seem to threaten effective representation, signaling a breakdown of programmatic politics. However, this perspective overlooks parties' and voters' dynamic considerations. We propose and estimate a model of dynamic electoral competition in which a short‐term ideology compromise, via an electoral coalition, offers opposition parties (and voters) the opportunity to remove an entrenched incumbent party from office, thus leveling the playing field in the future. This tradeoff provides a previously unrecognized rationale for coalition formation in elections. We take our model to data from Mexican municipal elections between 1995 and 2016 and show that coalitions between parties on opposite ends of the ideology spectrum have served as an instrument of democratic consolidation.

This paper studies the problem of experiment design by an ambiguity-averse decision-maker who trades off subjective expected performance against robust performance guarantees. This framework accounts for real-world experimenters' preference for randomization. It also clarifies the circumstances in which randomization is optimal: when the available sample size is large and robustness is an important concern. We apply our model to shed light on the practice of rerandomization, used to improve balance across treatment and control groups. We show that rerandomization creates a trade-off between subjective performance and robust performance guarantees. However, robust performance guarantees diminish very slowly with the number of rerandomizations. This suggests that moderate levels of rerandomization usefully expand the set of acceptable compromises between subjective performance and robustness. Targeting a fixed quantile of balance is safer than targeting an absolute balance objective. (JEL C90, D81)

"Latin American countries have for a long time been importers of public policies and institutions from the Global North. The colonial legacy and resulting patterns of international relations during the 20th century favoured a course of adoption and hybridization of political institutions. In recent decades, a new conjuncture has emerged in which Latin American policies have started to diffuse South-South and even South-North. Led by Brazil with Participatory Budgeting and the Bolsa Familia program, other countries in the region soon followed. The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system and bicycle policies in Curitiba and Bogota have also reached wide international recognition and circulation. And yet, despite Latin America's new role as a policy "exporter", little is known about its dynamics, causes, and effects. Why have Latin American policies been diffused inside and outside the region? Which actors are involved? What driving forces affect these processes? This innovative collection offers a new perspective on the policy diffusion phenomena. Drawing on different examples from Latin American experiences in urban local policies and national social policies, experts present a new framework to study this phenomenon centered on the mobilization of ideas, interests and discourses for policy diffusion. Latin America and Policy Diffusion will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students and practitioners working in the fields of political science, public policy, international relations and Latin American Studies."--

Latin American countries have for a long time been importers of public policies and institutions from the Global North. The colonial legacy and resulting patterns of international relations during the 20th century favoured a course of adoption and hybridization of political institutions. In recent decades, a new conjuncture has emerged in which Latin American policies have started to diffuse South-South and even South-North. Led by Brazil with Participatory Budgeting and the Bolsa Familia program, other countries in the region soon followed. The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system and bicycle policies in Curitiba and Bogot have also reached wide international recognition and circulation. And yet, despite Latin America's new role as a policy "exporter", little is known about its dynamics, causes, and effects. Whyhave Latin American policiesbeen diffused inside and outside the region? Which actors are involved? What driving forces affect these processes? This innovative collection offers a new perspective on the policy diffusion phenomena. Drawing on different examples from Latin American experiences in urban local policies and national social policies, experts present a new framework to study this phenomenon centered on the mobilization of ideas, interests and discourses for policy diffusion. Latin America and Policy Diffusion will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students and practitioners working in the fields of political science, public policy, international relations and Latin American Studies.