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The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) was established in 1974 as an informal group of central bankers and bank supervisors with the mandate to formulate supervisory standards and guidelines. Although the Committee does not have any formal supranational authority, it is the de facto global banking regulator and its recommendations have been widely implemented by member and non-member states. This thesis investigates the BCBS’s governance, operation, and policy outcomes to determine the extent to which it is and has been legitimate. The point of departure for my analysis is the literature on legitimacy in law, political science, and international relations. In particular, I draw upon Global Administrative Law theory (GAL) to examine the BCBS’s legitimacy against three principles: reasoned decision making, transparency, and accountability. My analysis is guided by five overarching questions: 1) Does the BCBS give reasons for its decisions? 2) Are the Committee’s governance and decision-making procedures transparent? 3) How and by what means does the BCBS consult the public in its policy-making process? 4) How and by whom is the Committee’s performance monitored? 5) Has the BCBS taken adequate measures to corrective measures to address the regulatory failures that contributed to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC)? I argue that the BCBS has gradually become a more legitimate institution but there still exists significant room for improvement. Inadequate disclosure on the BCBS’s deliberations, inadequacy and dilution of the post-crisis regulatory reforms, the underrepresentation of those constituencies without business interest or insufficient financial resources in BCBS consultations, and the absence of meaningful oversight of the BCBS’s policies, are among the areas I highlight for reform. I set out policy prescriptions to enhance the BCBS’s legitimacy, including the establishment of a new framework for transparency; creation of a proxy advocate to participate on behalf of underrepresented constituencies in the BCBS’s policy making; and the establishment of a new body to exercise active oversight of the BCBS’s operations. ; Law, Faculty of ; Graduate

In the modern scenario of economical social and environmental crisis, even the areas of architectural/technology research are called to make resurrect a political liability able to hustle the “community” upon critical issues and loss of balance that affect the built environment and housing system, claiming the role of the University in the formulation of appropriate design strategies, to address scientific and technical choices of action. In this perspective the study on the phenomenon of unauthorized building is a process of research and experimentation, aimed to protect the heritage and to deepen the culture of design and environmental technology. In the increasing of the abusive building we find a chronic lack of project, known in its specificity of process whose aim is a quality product, both formal, performancing, and structural. And it is in this lack of project, in this irresponsible way of building, where we can see the real problem of abusive building. Investigating on the illegal housing production by triggering compensatory actions derived from a critical reading of the imbalances imposed to the housing system, thus means to come back - as Edmund Husserl says- «an die Sachen selbst» 'to things' themselves, whose settlement is made of and investigate on its phenomenological processes that have involved and/or distorted it generating the crisis of values, we must understand its structural features in its genesis and overlapping, we need to analyze the critical points and lines of force, which characterize and distinguish its transformations. We need a strategic program opened to interdisciplinary scientific debate, specifically to those sectors interested on routing every forecast concerning any changes of the existent both in terms of urban and environmental regeneration, and recovery of the building.

The decline of utopia in some western intellectual environments has become an object of interest for scientists and essayists in these last few years. Yet, little has been done to analyze the common sense production of utopias or dystopias. This article will make use of the results of a statistical survey (n=2774) to describe what can be called, in reference to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, «the grammars of change», i.e., a more or less shared representation of «what is wrong» with society, but also of the real or illusionary possibilities to transform society. The article focuses on a striking line of tension. While some people still value political action as the bearer of a possible change, most interviewees consider it obsolete and unreliable. These people, who are so skeptical about politics, tend on the contrary to (over)invest in the idea that the power of change lies within the individual, in everybody’s changing their own values and attitudes. ; El declive de las utopías entre ciertos sectores intelectuales occidentales se ha convertido en objeto de interés científico y ensayístico en los últimos años, a pesar de lo cual no se han realizado suficientes análisis sobre la producción del sentido común en relación a las utopías y distopías. El presente artículo utiliza los resultados de una encuesta estadística (n=2774) para describir lo que podrían denominarse, siguiendo la filosofía de Wittgenstein, las «gramáticas del cambio», es decir, la representación, en mayor o menor medida, común de «lo que está mal» en la sociedad, aunque también de las posibilidades reales o ilusorias de transformación de la misma. El artículo se centra en una notable línea dtensión: mientras que algunas personas todavía valoran la acción política como motor posible de cambio, la mayoría de los entrevistados la consideran obsoleta y poco fiable. Estos últimos, escépticos con la política, tienden, por el contrario, a (sobre)valorar la idea de que el poder de cambio reside en los individuos, en que cada uno cambie sus propios valores y comportamientos.

The strong recovery of the five crisis-affected countries of East Asia between 1999 and 2000 has revived the debate on the causes of the 1997 financial crisis. Initially there had been an emerging consensus that the crisis had originated from the capital account. However, some analysts see the faster-than-expected recovery as a vindication of IMF policy prescriptions, which tended to treat the crisis as a problem with the current account. This paper shows that the capital account interpretation is still relevant and that the recovery process is being dominated by factors directly related to the 1997 crisis.

Institutional amnesia can be defined in simple terms as an organization's inability to recall and use historical knowledge for present-day purposes. However, the concept requires to be defined more expansively so that its causes and effects can be fully understood in relation to crises and crisis management. This means conceptualizing institutional amnesia in broader terms as something that influences individual crisis managers, the formal institutional aspects of crisis management agencies, the cultural dimensions of those agencies, and the wider systemic location within which both actors and agencies reside. The analysis of the effects of amnesia in each of these areas reveals the profound effects that it can have on various aspects of crisis management.Institutional amnesia can affect the performance of crisis management policies and the politics of crises more generally. In particular, memory loss can be seen to influence crisis decision-making that relies upon historical analogy, crisis learning which demands that learned lessons are formally institutionalized across time, and meaning-making efforts, which draw upon recollections of the past to justify political projects in the present. The effects that institutional amnesia has on these three important areas illuminate its relevance to crisis analysis. Yet amnesia, and to some extent memory, continue to be concepts that are neglected, or referred to tangentially, by mainstream crisis scholars.

The challenges of teaching quantitative research methods in international relations are well documented. The key to igniting interest & engaging students lies in creating a participatory learning environment in the classroom. This article discusses these challenges & describes a new piece of software that may be helpful in that regard. The ICB Interactive Data Library enhances access to the information available in the ICB (International Crisis Behavior project) data by organizing it into an interactive software package (Brecher, Hewitt, & Wilkenfeld, 2000). The ICB Library is an especially valuable teaching tool because it allows students to easily access the resources from a major data collection project, which, in turn, exposes them to the challenges & opportunities offered by quantitative research in international relations. After describing the ICB Library, this article will discuss how it can be used in the classroom via problem-based learning techniques. 3 Figures, 1 Appendix, 14 References. Adapted from the source document.