Suchergebnisse

Includes bibliographical references. ; Presented at the Building resilience of Mongolian rangelands: a trans-disciplinary research conference held on June 9-10, 2015 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. ; This study tested the effect of institutional design principles on social outcomes of evolving pastoral institutions in post-socialist Mongolia. Using data from 77 community-based rangeland management (CBRM) groups and 392 member households, we examined the effect of donor facilitation on institutional design. We found that donor facilitation approach significantly influenced group attributes and their external environment, but not institutional arrangements. The study confirmed that small group size, homogeneous interests, and heterogeneity of well-being are important group characteristics that predict higher levels of information diversity, leadership, and income diversity. Institutional arrangements such as the presence of sanctions, group-devised rules, frequent meetings, and recording documents increased cooperation, rules, and information diversity. Similarly, access to training and local government support provided a favorable external environment for increasing social outcomes. Furthermore, group characteristics such as dependence on livestock, homogeneity of interests, and leader legitimacy were critical for increasing social capital, livelihoods, sustainable rangeland practices, and proactive behavior of members. More frequent meetings of leaders were the most influential for these outcomes. Local government support and available donor support were associated with increased trust and norms of reciprocity, sustainable rangeland management practices, proactiveness, and livestock holdings. Lastly, group attributes and external environment influenced social outcomes of pastoral CBRMs in Mongolia more than institutional arrangements.

Thought on Mongolian society

Encyclopedia of social sciences

While a great deal of attention is devoted to the Pacific region as the new chessboard of international politics, Pakistan remains a key actor in terms of both threat and potential. Two observations back this argument: first, Pakistan's fundamental roles as a state are challenged by its ongoing conflict with India and internal insurgencies. Second, due to a power-status gap, Pakistan experiences difficulties in holding specific self-conceived roles. In addition to hampering its socio-economic potential, these developments prevent Pakistan's quest for normalization in the system. As a consequence, we argue that engaging with Islamabad should be a priority for Washington so as to prevent the country from further aligning with Beijing, thus reinforcing China's regional leadership and status as peer-competitor to the United States. Indeed, as the potential for deviance in the international system arises from its normative dimension, the US, as the global leader, counts among its roles that of norm-setter and primary socializer for most states. Our research proposes to look at an old puzzle with new theoretical insights. By addressing the question of Washington's engagement towards non-conforming states, we aim to document a set of socialization processes as intervening variables linking American global role as leader and primary socializer to Pakistan's process of social integration (normalization/deviance). Drawing from sociology and social psychology, the paper seeks to explore the ability of the leader to act as a primary source of role location and status recognition towards non-conforming states so as to integrate them (back) into the US-led system.

Because of its very conception, the G1000 in Belgium cannot be categorized as a form of constitutional deliberative democracy per se. Its grassroots origin never indeed entailed to change the constitution. Yet this chapter contends that there are some constitutional deliberative democracy features in the G1000, which paradoxically were not thought of by its citizen organizers who sought in the first phases of the G1000 to avoid any political and institutional ties. In fact, their focus was much more on a high input and throughput legitimacy, rather than a high output legitimacy. Their goal was to demonstrate that ordinary citizens, randomly selected, had a say about major social and political issues and that they were wiling and able to deliberate about them, should a design conducive to deliberation be put in place. While the G1000 scored highly on the input dimensions – the quality of representation was good and the agenda could not have been more open – and fairly highly on throughput legitimacy – with a clear script and trained moderators, but with processes of aggregation insufficiently transparent –, the outputs were in the short term very limited, which was a major source of criticism as media had fostered a climate of great expectations about the outputs. The absence of formal links to the main political actors meant that the organizers could not guarantee any formal implementation of the results. So the design characteristics that increase input legitimacy also undermine output legitimacy. But on the longer term the political uptake and the social uptake of the G1000 are increasing as, on the one hand, most of the political parties are now advocating some forms of participatory and deliberative democracy and, on the other hand, several experiences inspired by the G1000 have sparked around in Belgium and in neighboring countries. This twofold output consequence of the G1000 seems to indicate that this experience has fostered some sort of constitutional deliberative democracy broadly defined.

"The archives of the Grand Secretariat currently housed at the Institute were originally kept at the Grand Secretariat Storehouse in the Ch'ing imperial palace. They were removed from the Storehouse when it underwent renovation in 1909. After the overthrow of the Ch'ing, these archives changed hands several times, and were, at one point, even sold to a paper recycling factory. Eventually, the Institute purchased them from Li Sheng-to, a book collector, in 1929 thanks to the efforts of Fu Ssu-nien, the Institute's first director. There are over four thousand Ming (1368-1644) documents and more than three hundred thousand volumes of Ch'ing (1644-1911) archival materials in this collection, including imperial decrees, edicts, memorials, tribute document, examination questions, examination papers, rosters of successful examination candidates, documents from the offices of the Grand Secretariat, documents from the offices for book compilation, and old documents from Mukden. Memorials make up the bulk these documents.The archives contain valuable source materials for institutional, social and economic historians. They record general administrative activities and legal cases, many of which cannot be found in Ch'ing legal compendia." (cited from database website)

What are the outputs and effects of deliberative mini-publics? This is probably one of the most critical questions for any deliberative endeavor. In the realm of large-scale deliberative experiments, the G1000 in Belgium holds a special place: it happened in the wake of the longest government formation ever, it sought to gather 1000 randomly selected citizens in Brussels to discuss key social and political issues, and, above all, it was a fully citizen-led initiative. Its organizers explicitly sought to avoid any political and institutional ties and their focus was much more on guaranteeing a high representativeness and a qualitative process, rather than generating strong political outcomes. While the G1000 did well in terms of representativeness and open agenda setting, the political uptake was very limited in the short term. In the longer term, however, it seems that the effects of the G1000 were larger than initially expected. A rich set of empirical data is used to analyze the interaction between the G1000 with the entire political system by looking at the relation with the media, public opinion, political parties and MPs, and other experiments in deliberative democracy. Such endeavor sheds light on the "so what" question which is key to the development of real-world deliberative democracy.