Climate Change v. Financial Crisis: Constructing and communicating risk among experts through standard-setting in the EU
OU, Po-Hsiang / University of Oxford
《Abstract》
“Risk” is the common notion of climate change and financial crisis. We talk about the “risk of dangerous global warming” and the “risk of macroeconomic instability”, but are concepts of risk in these two cases exactly the same? Experts stress the importance of “risk communication” with the assumption that lay people perceive risks differently from scientific experts, but do scientists and policymakers really have identical understanding of risks? The impacts of climate change and financial crisis go beyond national borders, but how can we regulate these risks on a transnational scale? This article will explore the socio-political dimension of risk conceptualization, the communication of risk among experts, and the inherent transnational nature of risk. These three “motifs” will be approached through a historical analysis of two standard-setting processes about risks in the European Union: the famous 2°C temperature target of climate change mitigation and the notorious 3%/60% to GDP deficit/debt fiscal criteria of the Stability and Growth Pact.
The two EU cases are good starting points to reveal the complex construction and communication of risk in regulatory standards. Not only because the EU is a transnational regime, but also its standard-setting process depends heavily on expert communications, and the two risk cases can provide sharp contrasts in socio-political contexts. It is of course impossible to review all perspectives of wide-ranging risk literature in one article. However, while dominant risk theories focus on the role of expertise, transnationality as well as the social, cultural and/or political dimensions of risks, little attention is given to how exactly experts communicate among themselves to construct risks, and risk studies locating at transnational levels or comparing cases across different disciplines are rarely seen.
This research seeks to fill this gap and link risk theories with empirical analyses. By examining official documents and other grey literatures of the EU, critical risk communications between scientists and policymakers that contributed to the final risk regulatory standards are found in the 1990s. The two degree target on climate change, on the one hand, was basically formulated as one of many suggestions from the expert body (i.e. the European Environment Agency) and politically chosen by the Council of Ministers; on the other hand, the complicated fiscal rules went through a series of secretive debates between economists and politicians that tied closely with the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty and the realization of the Economic and Monetary Union. Although both numerical standards had some arbitrary factors in their decision-making processes, the importance of numbers is different: the two degree label links strongly with the notion of dangerous climate change, whereas later discussions on the risk of macroeconomic imbalances drifted away from the fiscal ceilings to their actual interpretation and exceptions. These results suggest that differences in expertise and socio-political contexts hugely influence the way ‘risk’ is constructed and communicated transnationally among experts. The ‘expert’ perception of risk might not be as ‘professional’ as we thought.
Keywords: climate change, financial crisis, risk communication
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Women´s Employment, Living Arrangements and Residential Location Choices in Germany
《Abstract》
Over the last
decades, Germany, like many other European
countries, has witnessed remarkable social changes, especially due to
improvement of educational opportunities of men and women, growing
economic welfare, increase in women´s orientation into the labour
market and changes in women´s roles. These changes mentioned have
gone along with differentiation of
households and women´s employment behavior. The importance of
traditional family, married couples with children, is decreasing for
mid-adulthood. Men and women live increasingly in the so-called new
living arrangements, such as single, living apart together, single
parenthood, cohabitation etc.. In addition, employment patterns in
households alter distinctly.
These
changes of households and employment patterns are different between
men and women. Moreover, women take great risks. In
addition to the paid work, women still take on the main
responsibility for childcare and house work, while men remain
the main breadwinner of the family. At the same time, participation
in the labour market enables women to free from being depending on
family. In Germany, the incompatibility of the work and family life
is very pronounced. Thus, in comparing to other European countries,
women´s employment in Germany is characterized by part-time work and
employment interruptions, particularly when small children live in
the household.
Employment,
family-related and domestic work play a central role in the spatial
and temporal patterns (räumlich-zeitliche Struktur) of our everyday
life. Thus, residential location can be viewed as the reference point
of various activities among all household members. Based on the main
responsibility for the family, the employment behavior and workplaces
of women are strongly determinated by commuting distances.
Consequently, women´s employment is more dependent on the regional
job opportunities than men´s.
In this study, I
will investigate the spatial and temporal patterns in relation to
employment behavior and living arrangements. By using the
Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey data from 1993 to 2008, the
descriptive empirical analysis focuses on gender aspects and the
changes since the 1990´s. The following questions will be addressed:
How did
the distribution of living arrangements of women change? And which
regional differences could be observed?
How were
the employment patterns in households differentiated? And in this
context, which role did education play in the social inequality?
How can
we understand the relationship between residential location and
living arrangements of women?
What
was the relationship between women´s commuting to work and various
forms of living arrangements? And were there regional differences?
What was
the relationship between residential mobility and household
employment patterns?
Even two decades
after German reunification, the differences
in terms of living arrangements and employment behavior between East
and West still persist due to the former political system of GDR and
weak economy. Therefore, the analysis needs a separate investigation
for East and West Germany.
Keywords：Women´s Employment
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How do German political scientists publish their research results?
CHI, Pei-Shan / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
《Abstract》
The emphasis of this study is to investigate the publication and citation characteristics of items in the social sciences with special attention for different document types. By analyzing the publications of two top-ranking departments of political science in Germany, this study will thus explore the publishing behavior and citation pattern in political science. Following the result, this study will try to recommend a suitable coverage of bibliometric databases and develop a stable evaluation method for the social sciences.
Keywords: publication/citation characteristics, political scientists,
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Taiwan's International Isolation and its Aid Effectiveness in Swaziland since the 1960s
WU, Yi-Chen / School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
《Abstract》
The literature on official development assistance (ODA) tends to focus on either ODA from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or ODA from emerging donors (e.g., China, India, and Russia). Donors from both categories are full members of the United Nations. What is little covered in the existing literature is ODA from Taiwan, a country with which only 10% of the countries in the world recognize their diplomatic alliance, but one which has offered its ODA to other countries mostly continuously since the 1960s.
This paper aims to critically examine Taiwan's ODA and identify why and how, and under what circumstances, Taiwan has offered aid; what kinds of aid it has offered; which countries it has offered aid to; and what positive or negative outcomes the aid has generated.
Taiwan established official relations with Swaziland in 1968, the year Swaziland declared independence, and has continuously provided ODA since then. Using Taiwan's ODA in Swaziland as a case study, we find that Taiwan's aid is actually Janus-faced: On the one hand, Taiwan introduced rural technologies to Swaziland, while on the other, the aid was given to pro elites, with relatively little attention paid to environmental sustainability and multilateral cooperation.
We conclude that Taiwan's ODA, which to some extent does facilitate rural development and poverty reduction, is actually an institutional leak in a mainstream aid agenda due to its international ambiguity. Behind the humanitarian development concerns, Taiwan is unfortunately constrained by its political goal of maintaining the diplomatic alliance as the first priority.
Keywords：Official development assistance, Taiwan, Swaziland
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Rereading
Crimean War Poetry:
Epistemology,
Poetic Form and Ethics of War Representation
HO, Tai-Chun / University of York
《Abstract》
Victorian
war poetry, especially that written in the Crimean war (1854-56), has
long been disparaged as patriotic verse glorying war in an uncritical
and chauvinistic manner.
This
dismissive view, however, must be understood as a reaction against
Victorian poetry at a time when early modernist poets and critics
were constructing a poetic canon of First World War poetry promoting
a dichotomy between combatant-civilian’s representation of the war
that privileged the traumatizing experience of soldier-poets on the
western front at the expanse of the voices of civilians. This
paper argues that civilian poets’ political
engagements with the conflicts of the Crimean war as exemplified in
their home-front poetry were far more complex and intertwined than
has
previously been suggested: a civilian’s poetic response involved
the inter-related questions of epistemology, poetic form and ethics,
which affected the production and reception of a war poem at specific
historical moments of the war. After offering a brief analysis of the
challenges facing civilians writing poetry from the perspective of
home-front in the socio-historical contexts of the Crimean war with a
particular focus on the shifting role of the civilian poet and the
impact of the press on home-front responses, it will concentrate on
two strands of poetic representation of the conflict: the reworking
of newspaper texts and early nineteenth-century war poetry. By
examining Tom Taylor’s “The Due of the Dead,” published in
Punch on 28 October 1854, an immediate response to Thomas Chenery’s
article in The
Times
(dated 12 October 1854) and several verbal and visual reworkings of
Thomas Campbell’s “The Soldier’s Dream” (1804), I will
demonstrate the ways in which civilian poets negotiated the ethical
issues emerging in the war and problematized by the newspaper reports
of the sufferings of soldiers in the Crimea: questions such as the
function of home-front poetry and the government’s responsibilities
for the British soldier and his family left at home.
Keywords：Victorian war poetry, civilian poets, Crimean War
