Books by Laura C Mahrenbach
World Politics Review, 2024
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As ChatGPT noted, “AI has the potential to bring significant benefits to society, but it is cruci... more As ChatGPT noted, “AI has the potential to bring significant benefits to society, but it is crucial to manage its implementation and ensure that it is used in an ethical and responsible way”. Contributors to this e-book, edited by Laura Mahrenbach, discuss this tension, the technology and its governance, both here and in the future.
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Published 35 years after Palgrave Macmillan’s landmark International Political Economy (IPE) seri... more Published 35 years after Palgrave Macmillan’s landmark International Political Economy (IPE) series was first founded, this Handbook captures the state of the art of contemporary IPE. It draws on the series’ history of focussing on the oft-neglected study of the global South.
Providing interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars hailing from the global North and South, the Handbook illustrates the theoretical innovations and empirical richness necessary to explain today’s ever-changing world. This is a world in which the global South and North are not only being transformed by the end of bipolarity and the rise of the BRICS, but also by diverse global crises and growing cross-border challenges. It is a world where human development, governance and security are becoming ever more elusive, where, profoundly altered by the rise of new technologies, the structure of relations between nations itself is changing, becoming increasingly interconnected, both digitally and physically.
Understanding these issues is of critical importance to better understand and comprehend current and future global transformations. This Handbook is the ideal primer for all scholars, practitioners and policy makers looking to do so.
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As emerging powers deepen their involvement in world trade and global governance, it is crucial t... more As emerging powers deepen their involvement in world trade and global governance, it is crucial to explore the what and the why of their strategic choices vis-a-vis the World Trade Organization. This book does just that, examining the trade policy decisions of two emerging power states, Brazil and India, since 2001. In this timely work, Laura Carsten Mahrenbach develops a broad-based analytical framework which addresses trade policy within EP states, in their regions and on the global level. The findings underline the importance of examining domestic factors when trying to understand strategic decisions by emerging powers. They also have important implications for our understanding of the role of emerging power states in global (trade) governance.
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"An interesting and sophisticated analysis, this book provides valuable reading for students andscholars working on contemporary trade issues and rising powers." - Amrita Narlikar, University of Cambridge, UK
"The foreign economic policy of emerging powers is a highly timely subject. This book presents a much-needed comparative treatment of the role of Brazil and India in trade negotiations. Based on very comprehensive document analysis and many interviews, it contains a wealth of empirical information that will be of great value to policy-makers and scholars. Laura Mahrenbach is to be commended for developing a convincing argument in favour of a domestic politics-approach towards emerging markets international behaviour." - Andreas Nölke, Goethe University, Germany
"This book examines the causes for India's and Brazil's international trade strategies in an exemplary, theoretically guided and empirically profound way. In this highly welcome comparative analysis, Laura Carsten Mahrenbach conceptualizes the the potential influence of societal ideas and interests in well developed hypotheses and tests them systematically in detailed case studies. Thus, her book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the role of domestic politics in shaping governmental strategies and to the international political economy of emerging powers." - Stefan A. Schirm, Ruhr University, Germany
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Papers by Laura C Mahrenbach
Interest Groups & Advocacy, 2023
Understanding interest group systems is crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced demo... more Understanding interest group systems is crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies, but less is known about its relevance in developing and nascent democracies. While advocacy studies in the Global North have exploded since the late 1990s, exploration of organized interest activities in the Global South remains a niche topic, impeding comparative analysis. In this introductory essayand in this special issue-we make a case for why investigating lobbying in the Global South can improve theoretical and empirical understandings of advocacy processes and make our work more relevant for contemporary policy questions. We also provide tips for how to best engage with the unique challenges of lobbying in Southern policymaking settings and processes. Drawing on the findings from the special issue, the essay concludes by presenting a contemporary research agenda for interest group scholars which identifies where synergies already exist and where South-South and North-South comparative case studies can be built. In so doing, we promote a mutually beneficial dialogue which tables existing research contributions and gaps in each region as opportunities for communal discussion and learning.
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New Media & Society, 2021
OPEN ACCESS__SEE LINK BELOW___
As emerging powers forge ahead with big data initiatives, questio... more OPEN ACCESS__SEE LINK BELOW___
As emerging powers forge ahead with big data initiatives, questions arise regarding the implications of these programs for governance in the Global South more broadly. One understudied aspect deals with how actors attribute legitimacy to governments’ big data activities. We explore actors’ agency in one crucial case: the world’s largest demographic and biometric data program, India’s Aadhaar. Analyzing roughly 250,000 tweets collected in the first 10 years of Aadhaar’s operation, we find that both normative acceptance and cost–benefit calculations are crucial for legitimacy attribution. This finding challenges mainstream theoretical approaches, which prioritize normative factors and often fail to examine how normative and material factors interact during legitimacy attribution. In addition, our study demonstrates a new, mixed-methods approach to measuring legitimacy attribution using Twitter data, which overcomes traditional challenges. As such, we underline the viability of Twitter...
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The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary International Political Economy, 2018
This chapter reviews changes and continuities for the development of International Political Econ... more This chapter reviews changes and continuities for the development of International Political Economy (IPE) in the twenty-first century. We highlight four themes, which authors in this handbook subsequently explore. These include necessary adaptations of IPE theory in response to changing global conditions; how global reordering affects global economic governance, production, and power relations; the diverse global crises to which actors must respond, often under intense time pressure; and a variety of emerging IPE issues on which we need new and/or more attention from IPE scholars and students. We conclude by identifying five trends which we argue would help enhance IPE understandings, ensure the policy relevance of our discipline, and prepare our students in the coming decade.
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Global Policy Opinion, 2020
w. Nick Bernards et al.
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Global Policy, 2020
--->Additional co-authors: Nick Bernards (Univ. of Warwick), Moritz Huetten (Darmstadt Business S... more --->Additional co-authors: Nick Bernards (Univ. of Warwick), Moritz Huetten (Darmstadt Business School), Tony Porter (McMaster University), Bernhard Reinsberg (University of Glasgow)
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under‐recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology‐led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under‐recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi‐stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology‐led multi‐stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long‐standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.
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Canadian Journal of Communication, 2020
Background: Emerging states, such as Brazil, India, and China (the BICs), have big plans for big... more Background: Emerging states, such as Brazil, India, and China (the BICs), have big plans for big data and digitalization. Research has identified distinct policy visions regarding how technological advances can facilitate economic development and improve governance.
Analysis: This article examines how BIC governments frame data-driven ambitions across the diverse issue areas in which governments plan to use big data, as well as how they frame the role(s) of the government and citizens in the era of big data.
Conclusion and implications: We find clear differences in discussions of big data across the BICs and across issue areas. Moreover, we show the societal changes that governments seek to effect using big data vary greatly in scope, with Brazil and India seeking more fundamental changes than China.
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Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2019
Much existing work on ideas in policymaking and lobbying has focused on how shared ideas can faci... more Much existing work on ideas in policymaking and lobbying has focused on how shared ideas can facilitate achievement of policy preferences. However, interviews with lobbyists and recent research indicates shared ideas may also hinder lobbying success – a topic largely ignored to date. I begin to address this gap by mapping out two roles for shared ideas in lobbying processes: as icebreakers to facilitate communication with politicians and as instruments in pursuit of specific interests. I subsequently propose pathways via which shared ideas may facilitate or hinder lobbying success and illustrate these mechanisms in case studies examining British preference formation during G20 negotiations over tax reform. The analysis underlines the crucial role of strategic agency and the interaction of actor’s communication strategies when seeking to understand how ideas affect lobbying success. Likewise, it highlights the value of explicitly incorporating ideas’ multivocality into studies of ideas’ role(s) in politics.
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Global Governance, 2019
Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of domestic factors in determining state preferences ... more Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of domestic factors in determining state preferences towards the reform of international organizations (IOs) and especially the World Bank. We add a new dimension to this literature by examining how partisanship and ministerial control matters for state preferences toward IO empowerment. From existing literature on domestic politics, we derive two expectations. First, partisan position will determine preferences on IO empowerment. Second, when a government is constituted by multiple parties, the position of the party with the IO’s ministerial portfolio will determine the government’s position on IO empowerment. Drawing on party manifestos and government statements before the World Bank’s Development Committee, we illustrate our argument by examining the positions of four net donors (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and two net recipients (Brazil and India) within the post-crisis reform negotiations between 2007 and 2012. By bringing domestic politics back in, this article complements existing studies on the politics of IO reform and weighs in on central debates in comparative politics and international political economy.
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Global Policy, 2018
----OPEN ACCESS!----
Given long-standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising pow... more ----OPEN ACCESS!----
Given long-standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising powers, it is puzzling that these same governments supported the transfer of substantial resources and responsibilities to the IMF and the World Bank during recent reform negotiations. We argue rising powers’ support for international organizations (IO) empowerment is linked to their concerns regarding an IO’s flexibility. We introduce two types of flexibility as being most relevant for rising powers. These include governance
flexibility – the extent to which rising powers may participate in IO decision-making – and issue flexibility – the extent to which rising power preferences are incorporated into IO policies and programs. We illustrate our argument by examining the preferences of the BIC states (Brazil, India and China) towards IMF and World Bank reforms between 2008 and 2012, drawing on archival material with over 50 statements from BIC representatives. We find, first, that there were clear links between Bank and Fund governance flexibility and the BICs’ support for empowerment of these IOs, but not for issue flexibility. Second, we find evidence indicating the strategies of individual BIC governments differ within these IOs, suggesting a need to undertake more differentiated studies of rising powers’ IO activities.
SEE HERE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.12643
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Third World Quarterly, 2018
Government intentions stand at the heart of debates about how big data can and should be used in ... more Government intentions stand at the heart of debates about how big data can and should be used in the Global South. This paper provides new insights by examining the political and economic visions promoted by emerging power governments in Brazil, India and China (the BICs). Doing so is crucial as these countries not only comprise some of the world’s largest populations, but have also demonstrated their initiative in national and international promotion of big data politics. Drawing on a content analysis of strategic and legal documents discussing the use of big data, we identify potential areas for big data cooperation among the BICs by determining the compatibility of national policy visions. Three visions are apparent: data as a force for political liberation or repression, for improving public services and for facilitating development. Successful BIC cooperation is likely related to the latter two, but less probable for the liberation/repression vision. We conclude by identifying the implications of BIC engagement with big data for the Global South more broadly.
SEE HERE: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1509700
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International Negotiation, Jun 2016
As the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) gains relevance as a rule-maker in trade governance, u... more As the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) gains relevance as a rule-maker in trade governance, understanding the reform negotiations addressing its legal framework becomes increasingly important. This paper will examine how domestic ideas and interests affect the reform positions of two of the DSB’s most active users, Emerging Power states Brazil and India. Regarding domestic interests, I draw on the domestic politics and two-level games literatures to argue that the amount and favorability of domestic sectors’ experience with the DSB affects their incentives to lobby during the reform negotiations. Interestingly, this results in both countries pursuing liberal interests within the negotiations despite having conflicting domestic interest preferences overall. Regarding domestic ideas, I find evidence that Brazilian and Indian politicians feel accountable to voters in the negotiations, contradicting claims to the contrary in the literature. This highlights the need for more research illustrating links between voters and officials in this context.
SEE HERE: https://brill.com/abstract/journals/iner/21/2/article-p233_3.xml
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India Quarterly, Dec 2015
Academic literature and the media offer a variety of monikers for emerging states like Brazil, In... more Academic literature and the media offer a variety of monikers for emerging states like Brazil, India and China, most prominently, ‘emerging powers’ and ‘emerging markets’. This article argues the terms used to describe these states create assumptions about their behaviour in global governance (GG). In order to accurately assess the impact of emerging states on international institutions, it is necessary to more systematically examine their current participation in GG. Does the use of power and economic interests in GG negotiations distinguish emerging states from traditional powers, as the ‘emerging’ part of these terms suggests? And can the content of GG negotiations predict the dominance of each factor, as implied by the ‘power/market’ part? This article tackles these questions by comparing the behaviour of one emerging state (India) and one traditional power (the United States) in negotiations at the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations Security Council. The results demonstrate that, while there is clearly something distinctive about at least India’s participation in GG, focussing on power or economic interests alone is insufficient to explain that distinctiveness or its implications for relations between rising and traditional powers in GG.
SEE HERE: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0974928415602601
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ifo Schnelldienst Vol. 15, 2008
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Book Chapters by Laura C Mahrenbach
Governing Artificial Intelligence, 2023
Laura C. Mahrenbach speaks Till Klein of appliedAI, Europe's largest initiative for the applicati... more Laura C. Mahrenbach speaks Till Klein of appliedAI, Europe's largest initiative for the application of trustworthy AI technology in companies, on December 16, 2022 regarding how AI is being put to work in the private sector.
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Governing Artificial Intelligence, 2023
Laura C. Mahrenbach speaks with Claudia Juech of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Government Innovation ... more Laura C. Mahrenbach speaks with Claudia Juech of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Government Innovation on January 18, 2023 regarding how AI is being put to work in the non-profit world.
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Governing Artificial Intelligence, 2023
Laura Mahrenbach explores AI as opportunity and threat, and argues effective governance is the li... more Laura Mahrenbach explores AI as opportunity and threat, and argues effective governance is the linchpin to close the gap between the two narratives.
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Books by Laura C Mahrenbach
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/brics-group-artificial-intelligence-governance/?share-code=93AtE4igzZK9
Providing interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars hailing from the global North and South, the Handbook illustrates the theoretical innovations and empirical richness necessary to explain today’s ever-changing world. This is a world in which the global South and North are not only being transformed by the end of bipolarity and the rise of the BRICS, but also by diverse global crises and growing cross-border challenges. It is a world where human development, governance and security are becoming ever more elusive, where, profoundly altered by the rise of new technologies, the structure of relations between nations itself is changing, becoming increasingly interconnected, both digitally and physically.
Understanding these issues is of critical importance to better understand and comprehend current and future global transformations. This Handbook is the ideal primer for all scholars, practitioners and policy makers looking to do so.
------
"An interesting and sophisticated analysis, this book provides valuable reading for students andscholars working on contemporary trade issues and rising powers." - Amrita Narlikar, University of Cambridge, UK
"The foreign economic policy of emerging powers is a highly timely subject. This book presents a much-needed comparative treatment of the role of Brazil and India in trade negotiations. Based on very comprehensive document analysis and many interviews, it contains a wealth of empirical information that will be of great value to policy-makers and scholars. Laura Mahrenbach is to be commended for developing a convincing argument in favour of a domestic politics-approach towards emerging markets international behaviour." - Andreas Nölke, Goethe University, Germany
"This book examines the causes for India's and Brazil's international trade strategies in an exemplary, theoretically guided and empirically profound way. In this highly welcome comparative analysis, Laura Carsten Mahrenbach conceptualizes the the potential influence of societal ideas and interests in well developed hypotheses and tests them systematically in detailed case studies. Thus, her book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the role of domestic politics in shaping governmental strategies and to the international political economy of emerging powers." - Stefan A. Schirm, Ruhr University, Germany
Papers by Laura C Mahrenbach
As emerging powers forge ahead with big data initiatives, questions arise regarding the implications of these programs for governance in the Global South more broadly. One understudied aspect deals with how actors attribute legitimacy to governments’ big data activities. We explore actors’ agency in one crucial case: the world’s largest demographic and biometric data program, India’s Aadhaar. Analyzing roughly 250,000 tweets collected in the first 10 years of Aadhaar’s operation, we find that both normative acceptance and cost–benefit calculations are crucial for legitimacy attribution. This finding challenges mainstream theoretical approaches, which prioritize normative factors and often fail to examine how normative and material factors interact during legitimacy attribution. In addition, our study demonstrates a new, mixed-methods approach to measuring legitimacy attribution using Twitter data, which overcomes traditional challenges. As such, we underline the viability of Twitter...
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under‐recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology‐led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under‐recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi‐stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology‐led multi‐stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long‐standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.
Analysis: This article examines how BIC governments frame data-driven ambitions across the diverse issue areas in which governments plan to use big data, as well as how they frame the role(s) of the government and citizens in the era of big data.
Conclusion and implications: We find clear differences in discussions of big data across the BICs and across issue areas. Moreover, we show the societal changes that governments seek to effect using big data vary greatly in scope, with Brazil and India seeking more fundamental changes than China.
Given long-standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising powers, it is puzzling that these same governments supported the transfer of substantial resources and responsibilities to the IMF and the World Bank during recent reform negotiations. We argue rising powers’ support for international organizations (IO) empowerment is linked to their concerns regarding an IO’s flexibility. We introduce two types of flexibility as being most relevant for rising powers. These include governance
flexibility – the extent to which rising powers may participate in IO decision-making – and issue flexibility – the extent to which rising power preferences are incorporated into IO policies and programs. We illustrate our argument by examining the preferences of the BIC states (Brazil, India and China) towards IMF and World Bank reforms between 2008 and 2012, drawing on archival material with over 50 statements from BIC representatives. We find, first, that there were clear links between Bank and Fund governance flexibility and the BICs’ support for empowerment of these IOs, but not for issue flexibility. Second, we find evidence indicating the strategies of individual BIC governments differ within these IOs, suggesting a need to undertake more differentiated studies of rising powers’ IO activities.
SEE HERE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.12643
SEE HERE: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1509700
SEE HERE: https://brill.com/abstract/journals/iner/21/2/article-p233_3.xml
SEE HERE: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0974928415602601
Book Chapters by Laura C Mahrenbach
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/brics-group-artificial-intelligence-governance/?share-code=93AtE4igzZK9
Providing interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars hailing from the global North and South, the Handbook illustrates the theoretical innovations and empirical richness necessary to explain today’s ever-changing world. This is a world in which the global South and North are not only being transformed by the end of bipolarity and the rise of the BRICS, but also by diverse global crises and growing cross-border challenges. It is a world where human development, governance and security are becoming ever more elusive, where, profoundly altered by the rise of new technologies, the structure of relations between nations itself is changing, becoming increasingly interconnected, both digitally and physically.
Understanding these issues is of critical importance to better understand and comprehend current and future global transformations. This Handbook is the ideal primer for all scholars, practitioners and policy makers looking to do so.
------
"An interesting and sophisticated analysis, this book provides valuable reading for students andscholars working on contemporary trade issues and rising powers." - Amrita Narlikar, University of Cambridge, UK
"The foreign economic policy of emerging powers is a highly timely subject. This book presents a much-needed comparative treatment of the role of Brazil and India in trade negotiations. Based on very comprehensive document analysis and many interviews, it contains a wealth of empirical information that will be of great value to policy-makers and scholars. Laura Mahrenbach is to be commended for developing a convincing argument in favour of a domestic politics-approach towards emerging markets international behaviour." - Andreas Nölke, Goethe University, Germany
"This book examines the causes for India's and Brazil's international trade strategies in an exemplary, theoretically guided and empirically profound way. In this highly welcome comparative analysis, Laura Carsten Mahrenbach conceptualizes the the potential influence of societal ideas and interests in well developed hypotheses and tests them systematically in detailed case studies. Thus, her book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the role of domestic politics in shaping governmental strategies and to the international political economy of emerging powers." - Stefan A. Schirm, Ruhr University, Germany
As emerging powers forge ahead with big data initiatives, questions arise regarding the implications of these programs for governance in the Global South more broadly. One understudied aspect deals with how actors attribute legitimacy to governments’ big data activities. We explore actors’ agency in one crucial case: the world’s largest demographic and biometric data program, India’s Aadhaar. Analyzing roughly 250,000 tweets collected in the first 10 years of Aadhaar’s operation, we find that both normative acceptance and cost–benefit calculations are crucial for legitimacy attribution. This finding challenges mainstream theoretical approaches, which prioritize normative factors and often fail to examine how normative and material factors interact during legitimacy attribution. In addition, our study demonstrates a new, mixed-methods approach to measuring legitimacy attribution using Twitter data, which overcomes traditional challenges. As such, we underline the viability of Twitter...
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under‐recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology‐led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under‐recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi‐stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology‐led multi‐stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long‐standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.
Analysis: This article examines how BIC governments frame data-driven ambitions across the diverse issue areas in which governments plan to use big data, as well as how they frame the role(s) of the government and citizens in the era of big data.
Conclusion and implications: We find clear differences in discussions of big data across the BICs and across issue areas. Moreover, we show the societal changes that governments seek to effect using big data vary greatly in scope, with Brazil and India seeking more fundamental changes than China.
Given long-standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising powers, it is puzzling that these same governments supported the transfer of substantial resources and responsibilities to the IMF and the World Bank during recent reform negotiations. We argue rising powers’ support for international organizations (IO) empowerment is linked to their concerns regarding an IO’s flexibility. We introduce two types of flexibility as being most relevant for rising powers. These include governance
flexibility – the extent to which rising powers may participate in IO decision-making – and issue flexibility – the extent to which rising power preferences are incorporated into IO policies and programs. We illustrate our argument by examining the preferences of the BIC states (Brazil, India and China) towards IMF and World Bank reforms between 2008 and 2012, drawing on archival material with over 50 statements from BIC representatives. We find, first, that there were clear links between Bank and Fund governance flexibility and the BICs’ support for empowerment of these IOs, but not for issue flexibility. Second, we find evidence indicating the strategies of individual BIC governments differ within these IOs, suggesting a need to undertake more differentiated studies of rising powers’ IO activities.
SEE HERE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.12643
SEE HERE: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1509700
SEE HERE: https://brill.com/abstract/journals/iner/21/2/article-p233_3.xml
SEE HERE: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0974928415602601
SEE HERE: https://www.crcpress.com/The-International-Political-Economy-of-the-BRICS/Xing/p/book/9781138579576
SEE HERE: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-45443-0_14
SEE HERE: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137454423
Observers have noted we are now in the midst of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” whereby new digital technologies and big data both offer the potential to address longstanding developmental challenges and simultaneously raise questions about traditional modes of governance and production. This new pattern of change is especially relevant for emerging and developing economies. How can data and digitalization provide new approaches to stubborn development problems? What challenges do governments face in pursuing such efforts? And what are the global governance dimensions within these processes?
SEE HERE: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/emerging-global-governance/egg-essays
In a pilot project at the Technical University of Munich’s School of Governance, we are currently analyzing big data-related government policies. The broader goals of the project are (1) to shed light on how governments conceptualize big data in the Global North and Global South; (2) to explain these narratives, particularly in reference to how they reflect and/or shape popular opinion; and (3) to identify the political and economic implications of big data, both within national contexts (e.g. in supporting/hindering development) as well as among Northern and Southern countries (e.g. in reference to global governance of data). In this post, we discuss the challenges we have faced in examining big data narratives within a Southern context. We conclude by making some suggestions for overcoming these issues.
SEE HERE: https://data-activism.net/2018/12/challenges-and-opportunities-of-studying-big-data-in-the-global-south/
We build upon this research by examining how the party composition of governments affects their preferences towards empowerment of international organizations. Our argument is twofold. First, the positions of parties on international cooperation are linked to the extent to which they favor or oppose empowerment. Parties can support, conditionally support or
oppose empowerment. Second, when parties in government have different positions on empowerment, the party with the ministerial portfolio responsible for a state’s activities in a
given international organization will determine the government’s preferences on empowerment of that organization. Based on an original dataset that combines party programs and government statements at the World Bank Development Committee, we illustrate our argument by examining the positions of four old powers (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and two new powers (Brazil and India) within the post-crisis reform negotiations at the World Bank between 2007 and 2012.
rules continue to favor dominant powers from the post-WWII period. But to what extent does power motivate emerging state behavior in those institutions today? And does this differ in informal governance institutions? I argue that the relevance of power for emerging power preferences and
behavior in global governance depends both on whether the institution is formal or informal and on the presence or absence of dominant states in a given institution. This argument will be briefly illustrated in four case studies demonstrating systematic variance on these two variables: the International Monetary Fund, a formal institution where emerging powers cooperate with dominant states; the New
Development Bank, an FIGO where dominant states are absent; the G20, an informal institution with both emerging and dominant state members; and the BRICS group, an informal institution where dominant states are excluded.
(EPs) preferences towards institutional empowerment? Drawing on the Koremenos, Lipson,
and Snidal rational design of international institutions framework, in this paper we argue that
whether EPs favor, oppose or simply prefer to keep the status quo in international
organizations depends on whether they consider that the current degree of centralization,
flexibility and control of the institutional design enables them to effectively influence decisions
within IOs. The results show, first, that low levels of institutional flexibility lead to more EP
support for institutional empowerment. Second, EPs prefer to maintain the status quo when
faced with low levels of centralization, implying EP wariness of the connection between IO
design and dominant state preferences. Finally, low levels of institutional control correlate
with EP support for more IO empowerment.
in the last twenty years has been the rise of the so-called emerging powers (EPs).
Through rapid economic growth and integration into the international economic system,
these states have increased the complexity of that system and, in particular, the
governance of it. This paper will explore the relationship of two of these EPs, India and
Brazil, with one of the major institutions of global economic governance, the World
Trade Organization (WTO). Specifically, it will attempt to answer the following question.
Why are emerging power (EP) states like Brazil and India, who have benefited so much
from their affiliation with the WTO and its predecessor, the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now changing their strategic approach vis-à-vis this
institution?