RC32 - Public Policy and Administration

Call for Submissions Law and Social Science Program National Science Foundation Workshop

Climate Change Governance: Law, Risk Management, and Decision Making Hosted by University of California, Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center Incline Village, Nevada June 20-21, 2013

There may be no greater risk facing human societies than that posed by climate change. And yet, our understanding of how to collectively best respond is limited, and knowledge is fragmented across disciplinary boundaries. Our workshop will seek to initiate deeper discussion of climate change around the concept of governance by bridging across a diverse group of scholars. Our goal is to share different disciplinary perspectives and to work on common problems. The broader impacts of this workshop will include the creation of an ongoing community of scholars, possibly in the form of a collaborative research network, to carry on dialogue about how to align scholarship across disciplines, levels, and across the academic and policy/practical/public realms.

Given that climate change crosses many conventional boundaries and jurisdictions of law, regulation, and government and challenges the expectations that many hold regarding proper modes of “governance” we have planned the workshop around three themes. The first will consider how to construct and align modes of governance across differing societal levels or “scales” from individual to community, community to region, region to nation, and nations to global institutions. The second theme concerns fragmentation of contemporary “expert knowledge” on climate change, law, regulation, and governance and the associated lack of interaction across disciplines. We will consider how social scientific theory, methods, and empirical research might be brought into a more productive dialogue across disciplinary and scholarly boundaries. Third, we plan to devote attention the problem of social science’s role in addressing and planning for climate change in public and policy settings. This is a problem of practice.

Workshop Format and Submission Process We are soliciting those scholars interested in participating in a forward-looking conversation reaching across disciplinary boundaries to further our advancing our understanding of governance and climate change. Interested applicants should provide a 300 word abstract describing a related research concept that they are currently developing or considering. These research concept statements should be linked to at least one of the three problem areas: scale, expert knowledge, and theory/practice. Research concept statements must be submitted to the workshop organizers by December 15, 2012.

Organizers Ryken Grattet, Sociology, UC Davis and the Public Policy Institute of California (rtgrattet@ucdavis.edu) Debbie Niemeier, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis (dniemeier@ucdavis.edu) Thomas Beamish, Sociology, UC Davis (tdbeamish@ucdavis.edu) URL: https://sites.google.com/a/ucdavis.edu/climate-change-and-governance-workshop

The Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna together with the Life-Science-Governance Research Platform (LSG), the Austrian Political Science Association (ÖGPW) Institute of Forest, Environmental, and Natural Resource Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU) hosts the 8th International Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) conference under the title "Societies in Conflict: Experts, Publics and Democracy".

Call for panels: Please submit your panel proposal at ipa2013@univie.ac.at by 30th November 2012 Affairs such as Stuttgart 21, the ‘Occupy movement’s’ response to the financial crisis, ecological problems, or diverse controversies around novel technologies, are timely examples of conflicts between groups of publics and the political establishment. Such movements put into question the status of legitimate knowledge and the articulation of legitimate representation. They question, at the same time, routine operations of traditional democratic institutions, and reintroduce the question of how to define “the political” and “politics” in general. The 8th continuation of the IPA conference gives therefore a special focus to the intersection of policy analysis with Science and Technology Studies (STS) by highlighting the relation between publics and experts around one of the fundamental keywords of politics: “conflict”. We conceive conflicts as constellations of knowledge and power, in which diverse actors are gathered around values, meanings and practices. The complexity of current policy issues and the institutional ambiguity create a demand for new forms of dealing with conflicts. They also invite us to study formats, in which the meaning of expertise and citizen participation can be renegotiated in performative manners. Rearticulating policy settings along the relation between experts and publics is one of the main challenges of current research on democracy, governance and policy practices. Actors increasingly establish their positions through argumentations or performances, while the increased need for public acknowledgment recasts the issue of citizen’s participation or the framing of “experts”. These ideas are not entirely new: interpretive policy analysts have investigated mechanisms through which knowledge becomes the central device of power, creates institutions and governs them and/or legitimizes agendas of policy actors. In a similar vein, STS scholars have shown that scientific knowledge can legitimize political agendas or block them. Towards that end, they have investigated, how “experts” get their status and how they shape and are shaped by “publics”. By debating and analyzing the shape of diverse “publics”, they have also launched the question of whose knowledge counts as legitimate in specific time and place. In the last decades, questions like these have regained the interest in both policy analysis and STS. How do we think about the study of conflicts through interpretive lenses? What aspects do we consider both as analysts and practitioners, when facing conflicts and controversies in environmental, urban, planning or health care policies? In how far do the current policy debates force us to rethink, what we mean by “political” and “politics”? What is the role or function of policy analysis and analysts in times of multiple crises? These are some of the pending issues that will be addressed at the IPA conference 2013. We therefore welcome proposals for panels that reconsider the relationship between publics and experts and engage one or more of the following themes: • Questioning of traditional models of government, administration and policy-making in response to the relationship between experts and publics. • Theoretical reflections on the ontological dimension of a “conflict”: investigating the meaning of “politics” and “the political”. • The intersection of STS approaches with particular theoretical or philosophical approach (e.g. pragmatism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, etc.). • The role of performativity and engagement in policymaking and democratic governance • Case studies from particular policy issue arenas that deal with “conflict” (e.g. the new challenges of environmental politics; bio-politics; local governance; asylum or immigration policy; food policy; urban and regional planning; issues of risk and novelty). • Interpretive perspectives on community conflict resolution practices; policy evaluation; leadership; network organizations; and other public management questions. • The relationship between practitioners and policy analysis. • Clarification of approaches in use (e.g. varieties of discourse analysis or narrative analyses; the role of rhetoric and metaphor, the role of arguments, the role of emotions). • Methodological issues in doing critical policy analysis (e.g. reflexivity in policy analytic practices; getting, and using, feedback from ‘informants’; issues in using new recording technologies; data collection and analysis; evaluating software programs). Panel proposals should have no more than 500 words and should contain a theme, a rationale for the session, and a brief discussion of its contribution to the IPA community. Proposals should list a chairperson and names of all organizers of the panel, including institutional affiliations and (electronic) addresses. Panel proposals should be based on the assumption of 1½-hour time slots with fifteen minutes per presentation. Please submit your panel proposal at ipa2013@univie.ac.at by 30th November 2012 Note: After the notification about acceptance of the panel, a call for papers will be launched, to which scholars can respond. A limited number of free-floating papers will be accepted.

General information on IPA 2013 Interpretive research in the study of politics represents a leading challenge to positivism and scientism in the name of a methodological pluralism that is sensitive to meaning, historical and social context, and the importance of human subjectivity. Important revisions of policy analysis in its linguistic, argumentative or practice turns have promoted recent research in the field. These concepts and streams have shown to which extent politics and policy practices are governed and shaped by discourse. The Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna together with the Life-Science-Governance Research Platform (LSG), the Austrian Political Science Association (ÖGPW) Institute of Forest, Environmental, and Natural Resource Policy at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU) hosts the 8th International Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) conference under the title "Societies in Conflict: Experts, Publics and Democracy". The IPA conference is an annual meeting of researchers and practitioners from around the world. Its 8th continuation gives a special focus to the intersection of policy analysis with Science and Technology Studies (STS) by highlighting the relation between publics and experts around one of the fundamental keywords of politics: “conflict”. How do we think of the study of conflicts through interpretive lenses? What are current societal challenges of politics and how do these challenges shape the general understanding of democracy, expertise and power? What implications can we derive for policy analysis, when investigating conflicts and controversies in environmental, urban, or health care policies? How are these implications handled in the field of science and technology studies, and what can policy analysis learn from this scholarly work? The IPA plenary sessions and panels are aimed at rethinking and debating the theory and practice of different methods of interpretation and critical explanation in policy analysis, in particular the relation of policy expertise to publics and democratic governance.

The main issue to be analysed during the conference would be Europeanization of public administration and public policy, especially in Central and Eastern European countries. The organizers, chaired by Professor Ivan Kopric (University of Zagreb, Croatia), propose to plan some 40-45 participants (50 as a maximum), with two streams dealing with public administration and public policy issues in the European context. The two streams will not be separated, but interwoven, in order for all of us to be able to attend all the panels (instead of just a selection) and to listen, to discuss, and to learn from each other. More information will be coming soon, in the next Newsletter.

The IPSA Research Committee on Comparative Public Policy has proposed a section on “Policy Design and Policy Change: Time Strategies and Leadership”, as part of the Academic Programme for the ECPR’S 8th General Conference hosted by Sciences Po, Bordeaux. We would like to invite you to submit a panel proposal for this section before 6th October (please see below for more detailson how this should be done):

Section Title: Policy Design and Policy Change: Time Strategies and Leadership

Section chairs are Giliberto Capano (Professor, University of Bologna-Forli) and Michael Howlett (Professor, Simon Fraser University) – both executive members of IPSA RC30

Section Abstract:

Policy change can occur accidently or as a result of a conscious process. Thelen, Hacker and others have noted several common routes or mechanisms through which change occurs, such as “layering”, “conversion”, “drift” and “replacement”. While studies of policy design have typically focused on ‘replacement’, in which an entirely new set of goals and means replaces an older one or, in the case of a novel policy area, creates an initial regime, it is also the case that other processes such as layering – in which new goals and means are added to existing ones , conversion – in which new actors and ideas are injected into old forms, and ‘drift’ - in which old policies are allowed to become estranged from their original purposes to serve new ones – are all capable of conscious manipulation and design. Panels in this section are intended to explore these change processes and the leadership strategies involved in their conscious use to affect policy change. Papers will provide empirical case studies of change and design processes as well as examine conceptual aspects of the subject.

The conference "DOES LANGUAGE MATTER? Different Voices, Different Stories: Perspectives on Language Use in Climate Change Text and Talk" will take place at the University of Bergen, on Thursday 25 October 2012 followed by a workshop for PhD candidates and master students on Friday 26 October 2012.

Keynotes

"Too hot to handle? Climate change communication and its public response"

Marianne Ryghaug, professor, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Studies (CenSES)

"A Nelson Mandela Approach to the Polarization of Global Warming"
Samuel George Philander, Knox Taylor Professor of Geosciences, Princeton
University and Research Director of ACCESS (African Centre for Climate and Earth

System Science), Cape Town

Preliminary registration to conference coordinator Anje Müller Gjesdal: anje.gjesdal@uib.no

Students and PhDs: free

For the workshop 26 October:
The topics of the conference will be followed up by the organisers in collaboration with professor Marianne Ryghaug and Dr Michael Jones in a one day workshop for 15 -20 PhD candidates/ master students. On the basis of submitted abstracts, 6 –-8 participants will get the opportunity to present and discuss their work.

Deadline for submission of abstract (approx. 500 words): 31 August 2012

To be sent to coordinator Anje Müller Gjesdal: anje.gjesdal@uib.no with copies to Kjersti Fløttum (kjersti.flottum@if.uib.no) and Trine Dahl (trine.dahl@nhh.no)

Roskilde University Sunrise Conference 2012 "Transforming Governance, Enhancing Innovation"

October 29-31, 2012

Conveners of the Roskilde University Sunrise Conference 2012 is pleased to invite you to participate in the annual Sunrise Conference on ‘Transforming governance, enhancing innovation’ to be held in Roskilde, Denmark on October 29-31, 2012.

Conveners of the Roskilde University Sunrise Conference 2012 is pleased to invite you to participate in the annual Sunrise Conference on 'Transforming governance, enhancing innovation' to be held in Roskilde, Denmark on October 29-31, 2012.

The conference will explore how public administration and governance can be transformed in order to enhance innovation in public services and policy. Rising expectations, fiscal constraints and the growing number of wicked problems and policy deadlocks spur the need for public innovation. Public and private actors must interact and collaborate in order to define problems and challenges, generate creative ideas and build ownership to new and bold solutions.

Here is the full program for the conference on Converging and Conflicting Trends in the Public Administration of the US, Europe, and Germany, hosted by the German Research Institute for Public Administration (GRIP) Speyer, Germany and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) of Indiana University, to be held at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, Germany;

The Berlin Conference Steering Committee and its partners invite papers for this year’s ‘Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change ’. The 2012 conference, which will be held in Berlin from 5-6 October, 2012, will be the 11th event in the series of annual European Conferences. With this year’s conference theme “Evidence for Sustainable Development” we address the knowledge basis of political decisions required for sustainable development, the construction of evidence, and the ways evidence is used in decision-making.

Shaping innovation in governance? Inducements, opportunities and limitations for engaging with governance in the making 31 May – 1 June 2012, Berlin

The Third Berlin Forum Innovation in Governance is pivoted on the question of whether and how innovations in governance can be deliberately shaped. This suggests a focus on the relation between knowledge and politics in processes of advancing new forms of governance. More specifically, we are interested in discussing the relation between, on the one hand, a discourse of innovation in governance, theoretical models of change, the articulation of designs and strategies, and, on the other hand, the agency of innovation, actual practices of forging alliances, softening established orders, configuring and evaluating new arrangements, and linking up with broader transformation processes as they unfold. The Forum will open with a public keynote dialogue between Frank Fischer (Rutgers University) and Andrew Stirling (University of Sussex) on challenges of innovating governance for sustainable development.