New project examines root causes of migration in Africa and the Middle East
What is the relationship between migration and development?
PODCAST: Why populism? Why here? Why now?
Are we living through a populist moment, or is the term just a journalistic cliché?
The U.S. National Cyber Strategy and 5G
What are the challenges and priorities in the American cyberspace?
Voting for development? Ruling coalitions and literacy in India
Across the world, governments skew the distribution of state resources for political gain. But does such politicisation of resource allocation affect development trajectories in the long run? We focus on the long-term effects of voting for the ruling coalition on primary education in India. Using a close-election instrumental variable design and drawing on a new socio-economic dataset of India's state assembly constituencies in 1971 and 2001, we examine whether areas represented by members of ruling coalitions experienced greater increases in literacy over 30 years. We find no evidence of this being the case, in the overall data or in relevant sub-samples. The null results are precisely estimated, and are consistent across OLS and 2SLS specifications and several robustness checks. These findings suggest the politicised distribution of some funds in the short run does not affect long-term development trajectories.
Cybersikkerhet
(In Norwegian only) Den teknologiske utviklingen og framveksten av digitale nettverk har ført til noen av de mest dramatiske endringene vi har sett på flere generasjoner. Dette gjelder både endringer i sosial samhandling, men også endringer i den mer generelle samfunnsmessige utviklingen. Disse framskrittene har også hatt viktige implikasjoner for sikkerhetspolitikk, internasjonal politikk og forhold mellom stormakter. I fokusspalten i dette nummeret av Internasjonal Politikk har vi invitert samfunnsvitere til å belyse hvordan cybersikkerhet bidrar til å endre forhold mellom stater og internasjonale organisasjoner samt internasjonal politikk.
Addressing Butterfly Questions: The Planet, Plastic Pollution and Policy Pathways at Japan's G20
In its fifth year, the 2019 G20 Interfaith Forumgathered outside of Tokyo to discuss an ambitious agenda organized under the triple-P thematic of Peace, People and Planet: Pathways Forward. While each of these broad themes guided discussions both in panels and plenaries, from the Forum’s outset it became clear that a reoccurring focus would be the importance of protecting the planet in order to support its people and to promote peace. The data presented at the Forum’s inception plenary was too compelling to ignore: according to multiple speakers, planet degradation has costed approximately $US11 trillion to date. But beyond the financial aspect, the environmental and ethical considerations that go into evaluating why this is a reality were at the core of the discussions among the Forum’s interfaithleaders. This focus instigated a number of compelling “butterfly questions” where participants probed and reflected on the implicit human aspect of environmental degradation. In their discussion, speakers often referenced the postwar tale of former Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s lamentation of no longer seeing butterflies in his imperial garden due to environmental degradation. Taking this issue up with Japan’s political leadership at the time, Hirohito instigated the establishment of an environmental program to address pollution in Tokyo, leading to great results and the return of butterflies to his city garden. But in today’s multipolar system, responding to the magnitude and pace of the transnational issues of pollution and climate change on a global scale at a time when the multilateral system is perceived to be eroding seems simultaneously dire, daunting and difficult. And the likelihood of creating an environment where butterflies would like to return seems increasingly fleeting.
Rethinking differentiated integration
Several NUPI researchers contributed to the debate about differentiated integration in the area of security and defence at the annual conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA) in Sofia, Bulgaria last week.
Neumann, NUPI og utenriksdebatten
(In Norwegian only) Iver B. Neumann begynte på NUPI i 1988. Etter tre tiår som NUPI-forsker (riktignok med en periode som Montague Burton-Professor i International Relations på LSE i London) meldte han i 2018 overgang til OsloMet. Med NUPI som plattform har Neumann satt et solid fotavtrykk i norsk offentlighet, og han er i dag en av Norges mest profilerte og internasjonalt anerkjente forskere på utenriks- og internasjonal politikk. Han er hyppig sitert, og er blant de 20 norske forskerne som publiserer mest ifølge CRISTIN-registeret.1 Han er særlig opptatt av norsk utenrikspolitisk historie, identitet, diplomati og Russland.
Knowledge Networks, Scientific Communities, and Evidence-Informed Policy
Global policy making is unfurling in distinctive ways above traditional nation-state policy processes. New practices of transnational administration are emerging inside international organizations but also alongside the trans-governmental networks of regulators and inside global public—private partnerships. Mainstream policy and public administration studies have tended to analyse the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies. By contrast, this Handbook investigates new public spaces of transnational policy making, the design and delivery of global public goods and services, and the interdependent roles of transnational administrators who move between business bodies, government agencies, international organizations, and professional associations. This Handbook is novel in taking the concepts and theories of public administration and policy studies to get inside the black box of global governance. Transnational administration is a multi-actor and multi-scalar endeavour having manifestations at the local, urban, sub-regional, subnational, regional, national, supranational, supra-regional, transnational, international, and global scales. These scales of ‘local’ and ‘global’ are not neatly bounded and nested spaces but are articulated together in complex patterns of policy activity. These transnational patterns represent an opportunity and a challenge for the study of both public administration and policy studies. The contributors to this Handbook advance their analysis beyond the methodological nationalism of mainstream approaches to re-invigorate policy studies and public administration by considering policy processes that are transnational and the many new global spaces of administrative practice.