Suchergebnisse

Part one. The tug of war for time -- 1. How can we be good ancestors? -- 2. The marshmallow and the acorn : inside our time-torn brain -- Part two. Six ways to think long -- 3. Deep-time humility : humankind as an eyeblink in cosmic history -- 4. Legacy mindset : how can we be remembered well? -- 5. Intergenerational justice : reasons to respect the seventh generation -- 6. Cathedral thinking : the art of planning into the distant future -- 7. Holistic forecasting : long-term pathways for civilisation -- 8. Transcendent goal : a lodestar to guide humanity -- Part three. Bring on the time rebellion. 9. Deep democracy : is there an antidote for poltical myopia? -- 10. Ecological civilisation : from speculative captialism to regenerative economy -- 11. Cultural evolution : storytelling, design and the rise of virtual futures -- 12. The path of the good ancestor -- Appendix : the intergenerational solidarity index.

The persistence of rural poverty in Guatemala since the early 1990s challenges the purported association between agricultural export growth and poverty alleviation. Lack of access to education, health and credit, and the historical legacies of land inequality, labour exploitation and ethnic discrimination, are preventing growth from reaching the rural poor. Most analyses, including the World Bank's recent 'Poverty in Guatemala' report, fail to consider how the economic and political power of the country's economic elite perpetuate and exacerbate poverty. A focus on two of Guatemala's most dynamic agro-export sectors - sugar and snow peas (mange-tout), both reputed to have had a significant impact on poverty alleviation - reveals the limits on pro-poor growth. Policy recommendations to promote pro-poor growth that are derived from the analysis include full implementation of the labour code, a national land-titling programme, and cultural programmes to change elite attitudes towards poverty and development. (InWent/GIGA)

Abstract.It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructedDatabase of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the 'rest'. TheDatabaseis designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy.

It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the 'rest'. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)