I have been reading and thinking about nudging for over four years now and it never stops to amaze me. Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the well-known book by Thaler and Sunstein “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” released in 2009 and winning Richard Thaler a Nobel …
A privileged foreigner With reluctance, I accepted the invitation from a senior colleague at my institute to travel to Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, in July to teach a module within the Master’s of Public Administration programme at a sattelite institute in Suriname, Lim A Po Institute (FHR). At the time of the invitation, it …
What is a learning organisation? It is one that adapts to challenges, that has an internal structure that allows communication and reflection, and that hosts individuals that trust each other enough to experiment and work together. A new open access article published in the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, one of the highest ranked …
A new research article has been published as part of research activities funded by the POWER project (Political and social awareness on water environmental challenges). The latest article is titled “Upscaling Urban Recycled Water Schemes: An Analysis of the Presence of Required Governance Conditions in the City of Sabadell (Spain)” and is co-authored by Josep …
If twenty years ago it was a default that democracy is a good system of governance, then the tables have turned today. In my class on development the majority of students, most of whom come from the Global South, did not see democracy as essential to development. In other words, democracy was neither an end …
Studying Narratives in Politics Increasingly stories and narratives are accepted as an important subject of study in politics. Stories bring together facts, emotions, fantasies and hopes. Stories are best to stitch together different ways of knowing, from abstract science to beliefs to practical knowledge from doing things. And stories speak to our imagination; some would …
Many expected that Internet would create a democratic arena in governance, help hold governments accountable and increase input from citizens to decision-making in the public sector. The time proved different. We live in the age of fake news, social media determines what we think and if anything, the government now knowns everything about it. But …
As you have noticed, the blog got a new look and a new focus. It is now exclusively professional with more attention to public policy, development, governance, the environment and science. The blog aims to become a “go-to” place for scholars and students interested in these subjects, and build an international audience that would be …
The time has come to make this news public — I am starting a new exciting job as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in September 2018. ISS is located in The Hague although it is part of EUR. My responsibilities will include teaching in …
In recent decades, adaptive governance has been advocated for meeting the challenges of unpredictable and uncertain dynamics of Social-ecological Systems (SES) (Folke, 2006; Huitema et al., 2009). Scholars ascribe a multitude of virtues to adaptive governance, such as, for example, the preparedness of populations for disturbances associated with climate change (Pahl-Wostl, 2006). Adaptive governance stands …
Next week from Wednesday to Saturday I will attend the WPSA meeting in San Francisco where I present a paper “Policy Translation: a Review of Current Research”. The programme of the conference is very exciting with many interesting panels in three sections of special interest — on public policy, environmental political economy and environmental politics. …
In 2017, a double special issue of the Journal of the Southwest was published that celebrated the career of Dr. Helen Ingram (pictured) as a scholar, mentor and colleague. The special issue contains a number of essays written by world-class scholars in the U.S. and around the world and is a must-read for anyone interested …
After a long break, here I am posting again. I hope that the most loyal readers still check the website, but no problem — even those who have forgotten about its existence are likely to come back soon as exciting stuff is going to come online! I am teaching this semester a course on the …
A new chapter on the role of reflexivity, positionality and normativity in using ethnography to study policy translation as a process is now available in the form of proofs. The final version will be published in the book “Translation in World Politics” edited by Tobias Burger and Alejandro Esguerra.
Dr. Farhad Mukhtarov has been invited to join the flagship publication of the United Nations Environmental Programme — Global Environmental Outlook 6 as a lead author. He will work in a exciting team of scholars and practitioners from all over the world on the chapter called “Policy Effectiveness”.
Last week has been unprecedented in the history of the Central European University (CEU) — it was reported in the most prestigious media outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Financial Times and many others. The reason for such an uproar is the tabled legislation in the Hungarian Parliament which would …
Finally the chapter “Transfer, Diffusion, Adaptation, and Translation of Water Policy Models” in the Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy is out online. The book itself will be printed next year.
It is hard now for me to pinpoint the moment when I became aware of the work of Edward Said and when it entered my personal and intellectual radars so to speak. (If interested in other posts on Edward Said, please see the post on On Being an Academic and a Public Intellectual and on …
This paper from 2011 in Nature.com discusses how artists and scientists can benefit each other in new and interesting ways. Above all, the complex, rewarding and at times frustrating experiences of interdisciplinary collaborations is at display through such innovative work. Another added value of such projects is the tuning of communication strategies of making science …
Trump’s presidency proves one point – that social constructivism explains the world much better than realism, positivism or whatever. Propaganda, framing of messages, providing false hopes, marketing messages to a desperate constituency — these all proved to be more important than reasons and facts. With this regard, I want to make 2 smaller points clear, …