bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Women Entrepreneurs, Global Microfinance, and Development 2.0
Authors: Gajjala Radhika , Tetteh Dinah
Published: May 2016

The 1970s brought forth strong movements for the financial empowerment of women and women’s labor rights protections in rural, developing world regions such as India. For instance, 1972 is when the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was registered as a trade union in India. Its main goals were full employment and self-reliance for women from the unorganized sectors. In the 1970s, several developing world countries saw the rise of microfinance interventions. What started as a public policy strategy and intervention for rural finance in the newly independent India of the 1950s has shaped subsequent patterns for rural credit and microcredit in most of the developing world. For instance, the Bank Dagang Bali (BDB) was established in Bali, Indonesia, in September of 1970, and the Grameen Bank was established in Bangladesh in 1974. Around the same time, the U.S.-based NGO Accion began to give loans in Brazil. The founder of the Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, became a legend and is well known for his belief that women make better borrowers than men because they find ways to repay the loans. As a result, a development model has emerged that focuses on women’s self-empowerment through micro-entrepreneurialism and the promise of microfinance.

Simultaneously, in global settings, there emerged a model of “Development 2.0,” which uses Web 2.0 tools and practices to mobilize connectivity, action at a distance, and relational, interpersonal investments through digital and mobile tools. The resulting model of microfinance therefore occurs through Web 2.0 and mobile phone–based technologies and also works to connect women and girls from the Global North (including immigrants) and women and girls from the Global South through movements such as The Girl Effect. What we see here is a paradigm based in a neoliberal market economy framework that mobilizes women’s labor from the Global North and from the Global South in the service of a global digital financial capitalism. This article maps out a literature review that connects the idea of Development 2.0 with the economic and political visibility of the girl child and of the woman as the one who empowers while also still needing to be empowered.
European Media Communications Policy, Development, and Governance
Authors: Harcourt Alison
Published: May 2016

European communications policy is defined as European level coordination of national policies by institutions such as the European Union (EU), Council of Europe, European Broadcasting Union, and national regulatory networks. EU initiatives are, in general, directly binding on member states comprise policies governing cross-border broadcasting (television, radio, online streaming), telecommunication services relating to media, content distribution (networks and subsidies), public service media definitions, advertising restrictions and quotas. EU initiatives are composed of four main components: legislation (directives, regulations, and decisions), soft governance (self-regulation and other forms of European level coordination), competition law and distributive policies (e.g. the MEDIA subprogram of the Creative Europe program). Directives, regulations, decisions, and competition case rulings are directly binding on member states. Soft policy coordination takes place between the European institutions and national regulatory authorities (NRAs). It is used primarily to coordinate implementation between NRAs and establish common EU positions on international platforms. It has also been instrumental in setting benchmarking exercises and the exchange of best practice in areas where there is no EU legal basis for legislation, such as media transparency, freedom, pluralism, and independence.
End of Life Communication
Authors: Keeley Maureen P.
Published: May 2016

End of life communication includes both verbal and nonverbal messages that transpire following a diagnosis of a terminal illness and death. The circumstances that occur at the end of life create opportunities for unique and important communication. Specifically, communication at the end of life is impacted by numerous and complicated factors: First, cultural views on death and dying often determine what is talked about, when it can be talked about, and who is included in the conversations. Second, the fears, desires, and needs of the terminally ill must be taken into account at the end of life as it is their personal end of life journey. Third, the nature of the relationships between the terminally ill and their family and friends have tremendous influence on the nature and topics of conversations that will be shared. Fourth, interactions with healthcare professionals (preferably with palliative care specialists) tend to be more task focused, emphasizing end of life decision making and comfort care for the terminally ill. Fifth, as people are tending to live longer with terminal illness and often doing so far from their family, professional caregivers and hospice volunteers are also engaging in meaningful and significant communication with the terminally ill.

Communication at the end of life often determines whether or not the dying are allowed to die with dignity, with some control over their final wishes, and whether they are ultimately able to obtain some peaceful closure. Within close relationships communication at the end of life has the potential for authentic conversations that bring people closer, heal old wounds, and allow the terminally ill and close others to create some final memories and to say goodbye to one another. Communication at the end of life with health professionals has the potential for both the terminally ill and their family members to have greater satisfaction with end of life decisions and control of pain for the terminally ill, as well as better outcomes regarding grief and bereavement following the death for family members. For hospice volunteers and professional caregivers, communication at the end of life teaches the necessity and complexities of interactions at the end of life for the larger society.
Critical Cultural Approaches to Gender and Sex
Authors: Sisco King Claire
Published: May 2016

Within the field of communication studies, critical cultural scholarship examines the interarticulation of power and culture. Drawing from critical theory and cultural studies, this research offers analysis of texts, artifacts, practices, and institutions in order to understand their potential to promote or preempt equality and social justice. Critical theory, which has Marxist origins, uses theory as a basis for critiquing and challenging systems of domination or oppression. The field of cultural studies focuses on social formations with a particular emphasis on media texts and the reception practices of audiences. Both critical theory and cultural studies emphasize the important interrelationship between ideology, or structures of belief, and the material conditions in which people live. Critical cultural research examines discourse and representation, including language and visual culture, as well as social relations, institutional structures, material practices, economic forces, and various forms of embodiment.

Central to critical cultural scholarship is attention to the construction, regulation, and contestation of categories of identity, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. A significant branch of critical cultural studies examines how ideas about gender and sex develop and circulate, asking how and why some constructions of gender and sex become normative and gain hegemony—or, cultural privilege—in a particular context. For example, such scholarship might critique the idealization of certain performances of masculinity and the attendant devaluation of femininity or other subordinated masculinities; or, this research might consider how particular iterations of masculinity or femininity may be counter-hegemonic, operating in opposition to prevailing ideologies of gender and sex. Critical cultural approaches also emphasize the intersectionality of gender and sex with other categories of identity. For instance, ideas about masculinity or femininity can rarely be separated from assumptions about race and/or sexuality; as such, prevailing ideologies of gender and sex often reflect the presumed normativity of whiteness and heterosexuality.
Gilles Deleuze and Communication Studies
Authors: Wise J. Macgregor
Published: May 2016

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His key writings include Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as a number of commentaries on a range of philosophers and volumes on film, literature, and painting. His is well known for his collaborations with radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, including Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze’s work focused on matters of immanence, becoming, and multiplicity. In Difference and Repetition he challenged the image of thought as representation and argued instead for the idea of thought as an encounter and event. In The Logic of Sense he explored the relation of language and event, developing his concept of sense. In his collaborations with Guattari they promoted the idea of thought as a rhizome and developed the concept of assemblage as a process of articulating and arranging bodies, discourses, affects, and other elements. Deleuze’s work therefore challenges common models and understandings of communication. In his later work he elaborated on the idea that communication was a means of control. Deleuze’s work has entered the field of communication scholarship through the influence of both Australian and North American Cultural Studies and through the uptake of his work on cinema and concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and control in media studies research.
Communicating about Genes, Health, and Risk
Authors: Parrott Roxanne L. , Worthington Amber K. , Smith Rachel A. , Chadwick Amy E.
Published: May 2016

The public, including lay members who have no personal or familial experience with genetic testing or diagnosis, as well as individuals who have had such experiences, face many intrinsic decisions relating to understanding genetics. With the sequencing of the human genome and genetic science discoveries relating genes to cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, the scope of such decisions broadened from prenatal genetic testing related to reproductive choices to genetic testing for contributors to common causes of morbidity and mortality. The decision about whether to seek genetic testing encompasses concerns about stigma and discrimination. These issues lead some who can afford the cost to seek screening through online direct-to-consumer sites rather than in clinical settings. Many who may benefit from genetic testing lack awareness of family health history that could guide physicians to recommend these diagnostic tests. Families may not discuss health history due to genetic illiteracy, with the public’s genetic illiteracy increasing their illness uncertainty and decreasing the likelihood that physicians will engage in conversations about personalized medicine with their patients. Physicians may nonetheless order genetic tests based on patients’ symptoms, during preoperative workups, or as part of opportunistic screening and assessment associated with a specific genetic workup. Family members who receive positive genetic test results may not disclose them to life partners, other family members, or insurance companies based on worries and anxiety related to their own identity, as well as a lack of understanding about their family members’ risk probability. For many, misguided beliefs that genes absolutely determine health and disease status arise from media translations of genetic science. These essentialist beliefs negatively relate to personal actions to limit genetic expression, including failure to seek medical care, while contributing to stereotypes and stigma communication. As medical science continues to reveal roles for genes in health across a broad spectrum, communicating about the relationships that genes have for health will be increasingly complex. Policy associated with registering, monitoring, and controlling the activities of those with genetic mutations may be coercive and target individuals unable to access health care or technology. Communicating about genes, health, and risk will thus challenge health communicators throughout the 21st century.
Theories of Journalism
Authors: Reese Stephen D.
Published: May 2016

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism.

The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more ethnographic research in newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have continued to highlight the ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences perspective, developed by Shoemaker and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond the ethnographic by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, as well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological).

A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and restructuring both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?
Stigma and Health/Risk Communication
Authors: Smith Rachel A. , Zhu Xun , Quesnell Madisen
Published: May 2016

Stigmas are profoundly negative stereotypes of a social group and its members that have diffused and normalized throughout a community. Being marked as a member of a stigmatized group does more than designate someone as different: stigmas denote people as discredited, devalued, and disgraced. Stigmas shape health and risk communication and are considered the leading—but least understood—barrier to health promotion.

Communication and stigmas are dynamically connected. Communication is critical to a stigma’s existence, spread, expression, coping, and elimination. Using mediated and interpersonal communication, community members are socialized to recognize and react to stigmatized people. People use communication to enact the devaluation and ostracism of stigmatized people, and stigmatized people use communication to cope with stigmatization. Stigmas also shape communication: stigmas compel non-marked persons to engage in stigmatization and ostracism of marked persons, reduce marked people’s disclosure and encourage secrecy, and shape the characteristics of personal and community networks. Last, campaigns have used communication to attempt to eliminate existing stigmas. The accumulating research, conducted from diverse assumptions about human behavior (cultural determinism, evolutionary, socio-functional), shows how easily and effectively stigmas may be socialized; how challenging they are to manage; how many facets of health and wellbeing are devastated by their existence; and how difficult it is to attenuate them.

While much has been uncovered about stigma, health, and risk, many questions remain. Among these include: How can one design messages that effectively alert the general public about imminent health threats and that successfully promote desirable behavioral changes without evoking stigma processes? How do different reactions to stigmatization influence targets and their social networks? What factors increase resistance or vulnerability to messages containing stigma-inducing content? How can one create an effective, reliable means to eliminate existing stigmas?
Freedom of Information
Authors: Stein Laura L. , Camaj Lindita
Published: May 2016

Freedom of information (FOI; also known as right to information and access to information) laws around the world establish rights and procedures around access to public information. Normative assumptions examine what’s behind FOI legislation, including rationales stemming from human and political rights frameworks, participatory democratic theory, and transparency and accountability initiatives. Although the freedom of information concept first arose as part of 18th-century enlightenment thinking, recent FOI law took shape in the mid-20th century, influenced by post–World War II human rights treaties, incentives provided by transnational organizations and funders, and individual country support for access to government information. Today, the majority of the world’s countries have FOI laws, most of which were adopted after 1990. FOI laws commonly address who can request information, who must provide information, what information is accessible, what information must be proactively disclosed, and what information is exempted from the law. FOI laws also establish procedural rules around information requests, including mandated response times for requests, appeals processes for denied requests, penalties for improperly withholding information, processes fees, and government reports on the law’s usage. Only a small percentage of people make FOI requests in most nations. Although it varies from country to country, requests from specific groups, including private individuals, commercial businesses, journalists, and nongovernmental organizations, often predominate. FOI requests may be political, professional, or personal in nature, although many FOI laws prohibit governments from asking about or evaluating the reasons for an information request. The ability of FOI laws to provide effective access to information depends on several factors. These include how the laws are written, public awareness of FOI, the cooperation and compliance of government agencies and institutions, and broader political and social conditions affecting FOI implementation and use. Scholars have measured the effects of FOI laws in both quantitative and qualitative terms. While quantitative data yield a picture of who uses FOI laws and how frequently, qualitative and anecdotal data provide ample evidence that such laws have had a positive impact on individuals’ abilities to obtain and use public information. Finally, FOI laws are necessary, but not sufficient, mechanisms for producing more accountable governments. They are unlikely to accomplish government reform on their own, but they can help expose and reform democratic deficits and push governments toward broader democratic reforms.
Regional Climate Modeling and Air-Sea Coupling
Authors: Schrum Corinna
Published: May 2016

Regional models were originally developed to serve weather forecasting and regional process studies. Typical simulations encompass time periods in the order of days or weeks. Thereafter regional models were also used more and more as regional climate models for longer integrations and climate change downscaling. Regional climate modeling or regional dynamic downscaling, which are used interchangeably, developed as its own branch in climate research since the end of the 1990s out of the need to bridge the obvious inconsistencies at the interface of global climate research and climate impact research. The primary aim of regional downscaling is to provide consistent regional climate change scenarios with relevant spatial resolution to serve detailed climate impact assessments.

Similar to global climate modeling, the early attempts at regional climate modeling were based on uncoupled atmospheric models or stand-alone ocean models, an approach that is still maintained as the most common on the regional scale. However, this approach has some fundamental limitations, since regional air-sea interaction remains unresolved and regional feedbacks are neglected. This is crucial when assessing climate change impacts in the coastal zone or the regional marine environment. To overcome these limitations, regional climate modeling is currently in a transition from uncoupled regional models into coupled atmosphere-ocean models, leading to fully integrated earth system models. Coupled ice-ocean-atmosphere models have been developed during the last decade and are currently robust and well established on the regional scale. Their added value has been demonstrated for regional climate modeling in marine regions, and the importance of regional air-sea interaction became obvious. Coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean models, but also coupled physical-biogeochemical modeling approaches are increasingly used for the marine realm. First attempts to couple these two approaches together with land surface models are underway. Physical coupled atmosphere-ocean modeling is also developing further and first model configurations resolving wave effects at the atmosphere-ocean interface are now available. These new developments now open up for improved regional assessment under broad consideration of local feedbacks and interactions between the regional atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.
Mental Models and Risk Perceptions Related to Climate Change
Authors: Bostrom Ann
Published: May 2016

Mental models are the sets of causal beliefs we “run” in our minds to infer what will happen in a given event or situation. Mental models, like other models, are useful simplifications most of the time. They can, however, lead to mistaken or misleading inferences, for example, if the analogies that inform them are misleading in some regard. The coherence and consistency of mental models a person employs to solve a given problem are a function of that person’s expertise. The less familiar and central a problem is, the less coherent and consistent the mental models brought to bear on that problem are likely to be. For problems such as those posed by anthropogenic climate change, most people are likely to recruit multiple mental models to make judgments and decisions.

Common types of mental models of climate change and global warming include: (a) a carbon emissions model, in which global warming is a result of burning fossil fuels thereby emitting CO2, and of deforestation, which both releases sequestered CO2 and decreases the possible sinks that might take CO2 out of the atmosphere; (b) a stratospheric ozone depletion mental model, which conflates stratospheric ozone depletion with global warming; (c) an air pollution mental model, in which global warming is viewed as air pollution; and (d) a weather change model, in which weather and climate are conflated. As social discourse around global warming and climate change has increased, mental models of climate change have become more complex, although not always more coherent. One such complexity is the belief that climate changes according to natural cycles and due to factors beyond human control, in addition to changes resulting from human activities such as burning fossil fuels and releasing other greenhouse gases.

As our inference engines, mental models play a central role in problem solving and subjective projections and are hence at the heart of risk perceptions and risk decision-making. However, both perceiving and making decisions about climate change and the risks thereof are affective and social processes foremost.
Perceived Temporal and Geographic Distance and Public Opinion about Climate Change
Authors: McDonald Rachel I.
Published: May 2016

There is mounting scientific evidence linking extreme weather events such as wildfires in the western United States and Hurricane Sandy with anthropogenic climate change. However, those in developed nations that contribute the most to carbon emissions associated with anthropogenic climate change are the least likely to suffer severe consequences. This asymmetry presents a challenge for climate change communication, given that those who most need to act on climate change (the largest emitters) are those likely to be the most removed from the impacts of carbon emissions, and may thus be less convinced of the critical need to act.

The psychological distance that people perceive from the impacts of climate change may also have implications for their belief in, concern about, and willingness to act on climate change. Psychological distance is the extent to which an object is perceived as distant from the self in time, space, certainty, or social similarity. Though climate change may be perceived by those in developed nations as distant on any or all of these dimensions, temporal and geographic distance are likely to be particularly important in the context of climate change, given the global nature of the problem and the long time horizons associated with predicted impacts.

Considering the potential distancing of climate change from the self, this review examines how perceptions of temporal and geographic distance impact public opinion about climate change, in terms of belief in anthropogenic climate change, concern, and support for action. Many researchers have suggested that the distal nature of climate change is a key reason for failures to engage in widespread mitigation action. However, studies of temporal and geographic distance reveal mixed effects on belief in climate change and support for action. For example, support for climate change action varies as a function of impacts being described as affecting near versus distant victims, and these effects vary as a function of political ideology, with Democrats more likely to support action when exposed to distal victims, and Republicans more supportive when victims are closer to them. Similarly, another study indicated that perceptions of global risk are associated with policy support, whereas perceptions of risk in one’s local area is linked to individual intentions to take action. These findings reveal that it may not always be ideal to perceive climate change as psychologically close in order to promote support for climate action, and a number of studies examined here explore when psychological distance and closeness may help or hinder climate change action.
Influence of Labeling and Incivility on Climate Change Communication
Authors: Howarth Candice , Sharman Amelia
Published: May 2016

Labels play an important role in opinion formation, helping to actively construct perceptions and reality, and to place individuals into context with others. As a highly complex issue, climate change invites a range of different opinions and dialogues about its causes, impacts, and action required. Much work has been published in the academic literature aiming to categorize differences of opinion about climate change using labels. However, the debate about labels acts as a distraction to more fundamental and pressing issues of policy response. In addition, the undercurrent of incivility present in the climate change debate also contributes towards a hostile and unconstructive conflict.

This is an evolving area of academic enquiry. Recent work has examined how the different labels of climate change opinions are constructed, used in practice, and portrayed differently in the public and policy spheres. The growing number of categorization systems used in the climate debate are also argued to have implications for the science-policy interface, creating a polarized debate involving many different actors and interfaces.

Moving away from unhelpful use and construction of labels that lead to incivility would enable constructive and fruitful dialogue across this polarized debate. A way forward would be to explore further the role of underlying motivations and rationales as to why these different opinions about climate change come to exist in the first place. Focusing on potential overlaps in perceptions and rationales may encourage constructive discussion amongst actors previously engaged in purposefully antagonistic exchange on climate change.
Communicating about Carbon Taxes and Emissions Trading Programs
Authors: Lachapelle Erick
Published: May 2016

In debates surrounding policy options for mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, economists of various political stripes are near unanimous in their advocacy of putting a price on carbon, whether through a tax or emissions trading program. Due to the visible costs imposed on industry and consumers, however, these policies have been resisted by carbon-intensive industries and by an ideologically divided public, producing incentives for vote-seeking politicians to avoid implementing comprehensive and stringent carbon prices within their own borders. In this highly politicized environment, and considering the more recent diffusion of market-based instruments across political jurisdictions around the world, researchers have sought to identify the conditions most favorable to implementing carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs, the correlates of public support for these policies, and the extent to which different communication strategies may help build public support. How do experts, political leaders, and members of the public understand these policy instruments, and what specific approaches have been most successful in persuading policy makers and the public to support a price on carbon? In places that have yet to implement a carbon price, what can communication strategists learn from existing research and the experience of other jurisdictions where such policies have been successfully implemented? In places where carbon taxes or carbon cap-and-trade programs exist, how are the benefits of these policies best communicated to ensure the durability of carbon pricing policies over time?
Climate Change Communication in Norway
Authors: Ryghaug Marianne , Skjølsvold Tomas Moe
Published: May 2016

Climate change research, activities, and initiatives in Norway started relatively late, by international comparison. From the beginnings in the early 2000s, research has mainly followed two paths: First, media studies, typically focusing on traditional newspaper representations of climate change and the surrounding debate, and second, research on public perceptions of climate change. Initially, the research field was dominated by media studies and science and technology studies (STS). As climate change and related controversies made headlines during the mid-2000s, the authorities implemented several engagement activities and research programs to improve climate change communication, typically aiming at public education on climate change. Teaching the public about climate change as a scientific phenomenon along the lines of the “knowledge deficit model” was a favored strategy.

Research on climate change media coverage indicated that the issue was reported in the same way as other news stories: the journalistic principles of newsworthiness often led newspapers to cover global warming as a contested phenomenon, in which harsh scientific controversy was played out. Thus, the Norwegian media framed the issue similar to U.S. newspapers, giving voice to both concerned climate scientists as well as climate skeptics (representative of “balanced” reporting). Studies of public perceptions of climate change demonstrated that public opinions were largely influenced by this “balanced reporting”: although most people believed the climate threat was real, the many accounts of scientific controversy made people uncertain, and many people questioned the urgency of the issues. This was, of course, not only a result of the media accounts, but also of what the public interpreted as political inertia. Following this, a debate about the ethics of journalism surfaced, and the media increasingly downplayed the controversy angle. Recent research indicates that this may have had paradoxical consequences; downplaying controversy has made climate change less newsworthy, and it has thus been given less priority by Norwegian media.

Recently, more disciplinary groups have become interested in climate change communication, from psychology to linguistics, political science, and philosophy. Accordingly, research trajectories have multiplied, and at least two new strands surfaced: how science is communicated in traditional and new social media and the use of climate change knowledge in so-called “climate change services.” The latter strand of research typically also relates to climate change adaptation work, to a greater extent than the earlier works, where the focus has mainly been on mitigation.
Resilience
Authors: Boyd Emily
Published: May 2016

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Addressing climate resilience has become a political, economic, and ethical challenge of the 21st century. The threats posed by climate change along with associated stresses on water, land, and food security are expected to impact the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world. Social systems are also rapidly changing, influenced by aging populations, urbanization, population growth, and global markets. These changes pose major challenges to poverty eradication and livelihood security under a changing climate. In a world that is unpredictable, and consists of vulnerabilities and risks, many people remain poor, marginalized, discriminated against, and dependent on powerful elites.

Resilience is a complicated and evasive concept that has its roots in ecological theory. Increasingly, the concept is used to explore the interface between society and environment. Some consider that resilience is a process and sustainability is an outcome. Resilience is distinct to vulnerability and adaptation but needs to be defined in relation to these concepts. Resilience principles can be used to understand better how societies adapt and transform in the face of climate risk. Nevertheless, resilience is a contested concept. It is often criticized by scholars for the lack of a common definition. It is associated with systems thinking and considered devoid of describing power and agency. Measuring resilience is work still in progress.

Given the practical and conceptual challenges posed by climate change risks, how can resilience as a process help societies to better understand ways to continue to develop under stress for the benefit of societies and the environment? In particular, given that societies’ needs and environmental boundaries are often seen to be in conflict, can resilience be used as a way to reconcile these differences and help trigger ideas for creative transformations under a changing future climate?
Climate of Eastern Africa
Authors: Camberlin Pierre
Published: May 2016

Eastern Africa, classically presented as a major dry climate anomaly region in the otherwise wet equatorial belt, is a transition zone between the monsoon domains of West Africa and the Indian Ocean. Its complex terrain, unequaled in the rest of Africa, results in a huge diversity of climatic conditions that steer a wide range of vegetation landscapes, biodiversity and human occupations. Meridional rainfall gradients dominate in the west along the Nile valley and its surroundings, where a single boreal summer peak is mostly observed. Bimodal regimes (generally peaking in April and November) prevail in the east, gradually shifting to a single austral summer peak to the south. The swift seasonal shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and its replacement in January–February and June–September by strong meridional, generally diverging low-level winds (e.g., the Somali Jet), account for the low rainfall. These large-scale flows interact with topography and lakes, which have their own local circulation in the form of mountain and lake breezes. This results in complex rainfall patterns, with a strong diurnal component, and a frequent asymmetry in the rainfall distribution with respect to the major relief features. Whereas highly organized rain-producing systems are uncommon, convection is partly modulated at intra-seasonal (about 30–60-day) timescales. Interannual variability shows a fair level of spatial coherence in the region, at least in July–September in the west (Ethiopia and Nile Valley) and October–December in the east along the Indian Ocean. This is associated with a strong forcing from sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and to a lesser extent the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, Eastern Africa shows some of the largest interannual rainfall variations in the world. Some decadal-scale variations are also found, including a drying trend of the March–May rainy season since the 1980s in the eastern part of the region. Eastern Africa overall mean temperature increased by 0.7 to 1 °C from 1973 to 2013, depending on the season. The strong, sometimes non-linear altitudinal gradients of temperature and moisture regimes, also contribute to the climate diversity of Eastern Africa.
Judicial Impact
Authors: Keck Thomas M. , Strother Logan
Published: May 2016

Scholars have long been interested in judicial impact—the ability of courts to meaningfully alter policy or politics—because judicial decisions shape law, have the potential to affect many people, and may even implicate democracy in a fundamental sense. Classic studies in this tradition concern the degree to which actors outside the court comply with judicial decrees, such as whether or not (or to what extent) schools desegregated in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. However, scholars working in a variety of other traditions have likewise examined the impact of judicial decisions, though they have not always used those terms. For example, advocates of interbranch analysis have situated courts within broader ongoing policy processes, and in so doing have documented repeated instances in which policy outcomes were altered by the actions of lawyers and judges. Likewise, students of legal mobilization have documented the sometimes constitutive effects of legal ideas on a wide range of political identities, attitudes, and behaviors. In short, the concept of impact includes a variety of ways in which courts influence politics, and the field of judicial impact studies will continue to benefit from a vital diversity of methods of inquiry, subjects of analysis, and conceptions of law.
Political Representation: From Classical Research Traditions to Comparative Perspectives
Authors: Daloz Jean-Pascal
Published: May 2016

The literature on political representation is split between research traditions that have remained largely separate: a philosophical normative strand, a behavioralist one focusing mainly on the roles held by representatives, and a third, more distinctly sociological one concerned primarily with issues of representativeness. These classical perspectives have been extended through the introduction of new dimensions into the analysis. The normative tradition has thus been able to formulate novel questions by considering, for instance, issues relating to the representation of nonhuman species or of future generations. Present-day writings on political representation also depart from accepted premises by integrating additional infra-institutional forms of representation. Similarly, a postmodern vein of thought has drawn increased attention to the fluidity of the processes involved and a rather hybrid literature has emerged that combines empirical and normative ambitions. Despite claims by some analysts to have renewed approaches on the topic, there are not so much major theoretical innovations as developments relating to the dynamics of political representation itself in the contemporary era. It is important to realize that much of the analysis of political representation has been couched in very general terms and that the field itself suffers from a lack of serious comparative work. In this respect, more inductive explorations are needed into the perceptions of representation (too often reduced to mere constructivist mechanisms), the concrete logics of accountability, and the “theatrical” dimension of the relationship—in all of which there has been underinvestment by political scientists.
Modern Populism: Research Advances, Conceptual and Methodological Pitfalls, and the Minimal Definition
Authors: Pappas Takis S.
Published: May 2016

Populism is one of the most dynamic fields of comparative political research. Although its study began in earnest only in the late 1960s, it has since developed through four distinct waves of scholarship, each pertaining to distinct empirical phenomena and with specific methodological and theoretical priorities. Today, the field is in need of a comprehensive general theory that will be able to capture the phenomenon specifically within the context of our contemporary democracies. This, however, requires our breaking away from recurring conceptual and methodological errors and, above all, a consensus about the minimal definition of populism.

All in all, the study of populism has been plagued by 10 drawbacks: (1) unspecified empirical universe, (2) lack of historical and cultural context specificity, (3) essentialism, (4) conceptual stretching, (5) unclear negative pole, (6) degreeism, (7) defective observable-measurable indicators, (8) a neglect of micromechanisms, (9) poor data and inattention to crucial cases, and (10) normative indeterminacy. Most, if not all, of the foregoing methodological errors are cured if we define, and study, modern populism simply as “democratic illiberalism,” which also opens the door to understanding the malfunctioning and pathologies of our modern-day liberal representative democracies.
Institutions and the Global Political Economy
Authors: Martin Lisa L.
Published: May 2016

In a comparison of today’s global political economy with that of the last great era of globalization, the late nineteenth century, the most prominent distinction is be the high degree of institutionalization in today’s system. While the nineteenth-century system did have some important international institutions—in particular the gold standard and an emerging network of trade agreements—it had nothing like the scope and depth of today’s powerful international economic institutions. We cannot understand the functioning of today’s global political economy without understanding the sources and consequences of these institutions. Why were international organizations (IOs) such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or International Monetary Fund (IMF) created? How have they gained so much influence? What difference do they make for the functioning of the global economy and the well-being of individuals around the world?

In large part, understanding IOs requires a focus on the tension between the use of power, and rules that are intended to constrain the use of power. IOs are rules-based creatures. They create and embody rules for gaining membership, for how members should behave, for monitoring, for punishment if members renege on their commitments, etc. However, these rules-based bodies exist in the anarchical international system, in which there is no authority above states, and states continue to exercise power when it is in their self-interest to do so. While states create and join IOs in order to make behavior more rule-bound and predictable, the rules themselves reflect the global distribution of power at the time of their creation; and they only constrain to the extent that states find that the benefits of constraint exceed the costs of the loss of autonomy.

The tension between rules and power shapes the ways in which international institutions function, and therefore the impact that they have on the global economy. For all their faults, international economic institutions have proven themselves to be an indispensable part of the modern global political economy, and their study represents an especially vibrant research agenda.
Process Tracing Methods in the Social Sciences
Authors: Beach Derek
Published: May 2016

Process tracing (PT) is a research method for studying how causal processes work using case study methods. PT can be used for both case studies that aim to gain a greater understanding of the causal dynamics that produced the outcome of a particular historical case and to shed light on generalizable causal mechanisms linking causes and outcomes within a population of cases. PT as a method has three core components: theorization about causal mechanisms linking causes and outcomes, the analysis of the observable empirical manifestations of theorized mechanisms, and questions of case selection and generalization. There are at least three distinct variants of PT that stem from differences in how scholars understand the ontological nature of the theories being traced. This means there is not one “correct” way to use PT.
Austria and the European Union
Authors: Luif Paul
Published: May 2016

At the end of World War II, Austria was occupied by the four Allies. The occupation ended in 1955 on the condition that Austria would declare permanent neutrality, which the Soviet Union had required.

In the first half of the 1950s, relations with the newly founded European Coal and Steel Community were being discussed in Austria because the organization encompassed Austria’s two most important trading partners at that time, West Germany and Italy. But after the uprising in October–November 1956 in neighboring Hungary, Austria started to stress its neutrality and declined European Economic Community (EEC) membership. Instead, in 1960 Austria joined other European countries to create a less-integrated economic entity, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).

In the mid-1980s, the debate about membership in the now European Community (EC) started again. Economic problems and a narrower interpretation of neutrality led to Austria’s application for EC (later European Union) membership in July 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the applications of other EFTA countries, Austria finally acceded to the EU on January 1, 1995 (along with Finland and Sweden). The political system and its economy adjusted relatively smoothly to the challenges of EU membership; “social partnership,” the close cooperation of trade unions and business groups, while losing some of its power, could maintain its influence on Austrian politics, and Eastern enlargement of the EU brought further economic advantages for Austria.

As one of the smaller EU countries and a non-NATO member, Austria has a somewhat unique position in the EU. Environmental policy and supporting EU membership of the Balkan countries are among Austria’s important activities. But the country has no close partners in the EU because it does not participate in the “Visegrad” group with the other Central European members. This difficulty was evident during the period of sanctions against the new Austrian government in 2000.