Ethnography – Policy Translation: Guide to Interpretive Approaches to Governance

How organisations learn: lessons from flood risk management in England

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 […]

Transfer, Diffusion, Adaptation and Translation of Water Policy Model. NEW PUBLICATION!

On Friday July 01, I am giving a talk at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS. The details are in the announcement. The paper is to appear later this year and will be found on Publications page. Synopsis: Intensive cross-border movement of policy models is ubiquitous in the water sector. Examples include Integrated […]

Workshop on “Translation in World Politics” at Kate Hamburger Kolleg, Duisburg, Germany

Last week, on October 08-09, I took part in a workshop at the University of Duisburg’s Kate Hamburger Kolleg (Centre for Global Cooperation Research) named “Translation in World Politics”. It was very pleasing to see the ideas of policy translation making headway in other disciplines, and now also in International Relations and World Politics. I […]

Crafting or Designing Socio-Ecological Systems? NEW PUBLICATION!

Finally, our Special Issue of Environmental Science & Policy is online, and you can enjoy the articles. You can read our editorial about the issue here, and the article I wrote with colleagues on water user associations in the region here.

“The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb

After 3 years of owning the book, I finally made the effort and read the book from cover to cover. It was hard to start off, but then went in a free-flow. There are many reviews on the Internet, so I won’t go on about the book at length, only mention a few things which […]

Edward Said: Last Public Intellectual

Last autumn, I started being interested in Professor Edward Said, who is most known for his 1978 book “The Orientalism”. I won’t write about the book here, a lot has been written about it already. Edward Said, however, is much more than an author. He stands out as perhaps the last public intellectual of our […]

Oxford Bibliographies: Great Resource for Students and Researchers!

Energy Security and Water Security Farhad Mukhtarov (ADA University, Azerbaijan) and Aleh Cherp (Central European University, Hungary; Lund University, Sweden), with essential assistance from a graduate ADAU student Richard Sarpong, published 2 articles in Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford University Press. One article is about Energy Security — the concept that commands great policy attention nowadays, from […]

Science Wars: Policy Translation Debated

The debate on the travel of ideas has ignited once again, this time on the pages of the new scientific journal called Global Discourse. Founded in 2010, this journal claims not to have a particular disciplinary audience and to target inter-disciplinary approaches. It managed to raise an interesting discussion with the latest issue

bell hooks on teaching and critical thinking

One of the major things that makes my life meaningful at this particular moment is teaching and the chance to pass some knowledge and ways of thinking to my students. It is not self-esteem which I am gaining here, although I recognize that teaching is a mildly narcissistic activity which may inflate already oversize egos. […]

Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (2015)

An excellent news for the scholars and policy-makers in water policy and politics is that the new Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy is contracted and currently in progress to be published in 2015! Most excitingly, this is the first edition of such a high profile Handbook in the field of Water Policy and […]

Thoughts on ethnography and a slaughterhouse from the Annual Ethnography Symposium 2013

At the Amsterdam Ethnography Symposium, a full room of scholars, mostly anthropologists, is captivated by the charismatic speaker telling the tale of mass killing and normalization of such. The subject is the ethnography of a slaughterhouse. The element of story-telling is combined with stand-up comedy, when the presenter takes questions from the audience in the […]

Interview with Professor Martin de Jong on “Institutional Transplantation”

An interview with Prof. Martin de Jong of Delft University of Technology on ‘Institutional Transplantation’. Prof. de Jong is one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the policy transfer school in public policy. The book he has co-edited in 2002 and entitled “The Theory and Practice of Institutional Transplantation” has become a classic in this area. […]

Policy Translation: Guide to Interpretive Approaches to Governance

Category: Ethnography