Global change – Policy Translation: Guide to Interpretive Approaches to Governance

Discovering Suriname

Suriname is a country that is well-known in The Netherlands because it was a Dutch colony and there are many Surinamese who live in The Netherlands, mostly people with Hindustani background, but also creoles (people of African and European descent) and Surinamese with Indonesian roots. I taught at a public administration programme, and the composition […]

Public Policy Bits: Grassroots Movements (Transition Initiative)

Today (18 April) in my class on sustainable development, we watched this video on transition network, an initiative to create and distribute the network of sustainable communities across the world. I think the students liked it. I thought that it would be a good idea to share this with the readers of my blog, and […]

New Paper on Security in the Mekong River Basin. NEW PUBLICATION!

After three years of writing and revising, our paper on various ways of security being framed in the Mekong River Commission has come to light in International Relations journal Globalizations. Here one may read it. This is yet another wonderful collaboration with Andrea Gerlak with whom it is pure pleasure to work and write. The key […]

BBC: Big Tobacco Paying Bribes

I was recently taking breakfast with two friends in a quiet district of Amsterdam. While enjoying our salmon on omelet, and conversing in Dutch, we updated each other on our lives. A friend of my friend had a new job, he became a manager of a pharmaceutical company which works with plants. His job is […]

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 […]

“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 […]

New Article! Ways of Knowing Water: Water Security and Integrated Water Management. NEW PUBLICATION!

After waiting for over a year, finally our article is online! This article is titled “‘Ways of knowing’ water: integrated water resources management and water security as complementary discourses“, Andrea Gerlak and I wrote it for International Negotiations and Environmental Agreements (INEA), a well-respected journal in the area of environmental policy and political science. The […]

Global Governance of Biofuels. NEW PUBLICATION!

Farhad Mukhtarov co-authored a new paper (short communication) with Professor Patricia Osseweijer from Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and dr. Robin Pierce from Harvard Law School (US). It appeared in the last issue of 2014 of Bio-based and Applied Economics, a new journal devoted to the issues of energy transition and bio-economy as viewed […]

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. […]

Institutional Design in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. NEW PUBLICATION!

The Journal of Environmental Science & Policy will feature in early 2015 an article co-authored by Farhad Mukhtarov, Svenja Fox, Nozila Mukhamedova and Kai Wegerich. This article is an attempt to resolve the tensions between the need for institutional reform and learning in this process and the paramount importance of the policy context in determining […]

Public Policy Bits: Ways of Knowing Public Policy

Farhad Mukhtarov and Andrea Gerlak have just published an article in Policy Sciences, a well-respected political science journal, on Ways of Knowing and Integrated Water Resources Management. In this article, the authorss came up with the argument that there are 3 ways of knowing reality, and public policy for that matter, which they named prescriptive, discursive […]

Public Policy Bits: Techno-fixes?

Albert Einstein famously proclaimed that “you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it”. But we keep trying to fool ourselves that we can. We see technology as our ultimate solution, from extending our lives through synthetic biology, to arguing that we must have genetically modified food and other organisms as we are […]

River Basin Organizations and Global Governance. NEW PUBLICATION!

River Basin Organizations are ubiquitous nowadays. They carry different functions, forms and are founds across the world. However, what is the history of their evolution and who are the actors behind their prominence in water governance? Who are interested in the promotion of river basin organizations and how those actors have achieved their goals?

International Workshop on Water Security, Jerusalem 17-18 December, 2012

The Jerusalem Water Group of the Hebrew University is organizing a Workshop entitled “The Securitization of the Water Discourse” and to be held on December 17-18 in Jerusalem. The key-note speakers at the workshop will be Aaron Wolf, François Molle, Eran Feitelson and Max Boykoff. The theme of the workshop is the securitization of the […]

Bio-Economy Transition and Land Grabs

Energy transition to bio-based materials for fuel and heat is experiencing hype. Such transition has many attractions: away from fossil fuels that generate the climate change and dependence on the Middle East and Mr. Putin, as well as new forms of governance in which food, fuel, materials and medicine will come from an integrated source […]

Policy Translation: Guide to Interpretive Approaches to Governance

Category: Global change