Search results

AbstractWe argue that a focus on practices can enrich the study of global governance by drawing attention to a wealth of informal processes and their politics. After explaining the usefulness of a practice approach, we examine four pervasive practices in contemporary world politics: hosting a global conference, accrediting NGOs, mandating a group of experts, and forming multistakeholder partnerships. For each of these established 'ways of doing things,' we provide a definition, decline its variations, and analyze its politics. Through our case studies, we show that global governance practices often generate competing social effects, by which inclusionary trends combine with more exclusionary tendencies. This common dialectic of inclusion and exclusion provides an analytical key to better understand the politics of global public policy making, including its power dynamics.

In the past 20-30 years, industrialization and informatization made the society more complicated and social conflicts more difficult to deal with; citizens and their demands diversified, and we are now in urgent need of a new public administration model that suits the changed political, economic, and social conditions. Governance thus emerged worldwide, promoting government reforms and public participation, and urging the government to delegate and empower, and quit the fields that they are not good at managing. Scholars discuss the reasons for the emergence of governance from the perspectives of managerialism, the rise of civil society, and administrative reforms. But these are not the only reasons for governance to rise to prominence. It emerged, in a way, in response to the "legitimation crisis" described by Jurgen Habermas. As society develops, citizens require more legitimacy from the government on the basis of what it already provides, and this may involve performance, participation, responsiveness, law-based administration, etc. We hereby analyze the legitimation crisis in a postmodern society and point out that the paradigm of social co-governance is a response to these legitimacy demands and that multiple parties integrate their demands using governance tools such as participation, consultation, empowerment, etc.

In this paper, the authors use the lab to test a series of policy proposals designed to constrain rent-seeking behaviour in a policymaking context. The baseline governance game is conducted in the following way: subjects are randomly assigned to groups of four, with one subject randomly selected to be the "policymaker", while the other three are the "citizens". Citizens are informed that they can use their endowments to contribute to a group account. Any amount contributed to the group account are doubled. Once citizens have made their contribution decisions, the policymaker observes the contribution decisions of each citizen, and the total amount in the group account. The policymaker formulates a distribution "policy" to distribute the tokens among all four group members. The game is repeated for 20 rounds. With this basic framework, the authors implement and test the effect of three institutions designed to constrain policymaker rent-seeking behaviour: voting, policy commitment, and punishment. The results show that voting and enforced commitment are the most effective policy mechanisms to constrain rent-seeking, and improve citizen welfare. The authors find policymaker punishment regimes to be largely ineffective, both in reducing rent-seeking and improving welfare of citizens.

Diverse Akteure im wissenschaftlichen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Bereich diskutieren Governance von Informationsinfrastrukturen unter variierenden Begriffsverständnissen. In dieser Arbeit wird mit Bezug zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie untersucht, welche Fragestellungen in relevanten Strategiepapieren diskutiert, aber auch welche dabei ausgespart werden. Die Perspektive des Spiels und der Spieleerfindung eröffnen neue Ansätze für den Umgang mit der Thematik, in welcher Regeln und Handlungsmöglichkeiten erst noch und immer wieder erprobt werden müssen.