Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

On ‘love of country’

Love of country! There’s a curious phrase. Love of a particular patch of earth? Scarcely. Put a German down in a field in Northern France, tell him that it is Hannover, and he cannot contradict you. Love of fellow-countrymen? Surely not. A man will like some of them and dislike others. Love of the country’s culture? The men who know most of their countries’ cultures are usually the most intelligent and the least patriotic. Love of the country’s government? But governments are usually disliked by the people they govern. Love of country, we see, is merely a sloppy mysticism based on ignorance and fear. It has its uses, of course. When a ruling class wishes a people to do something which that people does not want to do, it appeals to patriotism. And, of course, one of the things that people dislike most is allowing themselves to be killed.

Ambler, Eric. Journey into Fear. (New York: Knopf, 1943; rpt. Bantam), p. 166.

Responding to Kenneth Green on renewable energy

On CBC’s The Current this morning, Kenneth Green – the Senior Director for the Centre for Natural Resources at the Fraser Institute – made quite a string of erroneous claims about climate science, renewable energy, and the climate change activist movement.

His most serious error, I think, was arguing that states like Ontario and Germany are going to regret their decision to invest in climate-safe and renewable forms of energy. Like a lot of mistaken analysis about energy politics, Mr. Green’s ignores the necessity of decarbonizing the global economy if we are not going to cause so much climate change that we completely wreck human prosperity, while simultaneously endangering huge numbers of lives and critically important natural systems.

In the decades ahead, it’s going to be states like Canada that seriously regret the energy choices they made at this time. While others will have begun the necessary transition to energy sources that we can rely on indefinitely, Canada will eventually need to make the same transition more rapidly and at greater expense. We will need to scrap inappropriate high-carbon infrastructure including oil sands projects, pipelines, and tight oil and gas hydraulic fracturing projects – and do so well before the end of what their economically viable lifetimes would be in the absence of climate change. Then, we will need to build appropriate infrastructure at a greater pace and a higher cost, while suffering worse impacts from climate change. These impacts will be worsened both by Canada’s direct contribution to the severity of climate change and by the indirect way through which Canadian inaction has encouraged continued fossil fuel dependence in the rest of the world.

It’s disappointing that quality current events programs like The Current still feel the need to bring on fossil-fuel-enthusiast dinosaurs whenever they discuss climate change. As organizations from the United Nations to the World Bank to the Pentagon have long recognized, the question now is how to succeed in the transition to a climate-safe global economy, not whether there is any viable case for remaining tied to coal, oil, and gas.

Hopefully, this weekend’s People’s Climate March will help instill a sense of urgency and determination in political leaders and the general public. As the major economic assessments of climate change like the Stern Report have concluded unequivocally, the intelligent choice in purely economic terms is to do what states like Germany have begun: to stop investing in high-carbon infrastructure projects that are no longer appropriate for the world in which we live, to phase out fossil-fuel energy beginning with the most harmful forms like coal plants, and to commit to the deployment of a new energy system which is climate-safe and which can be relied upon indefinitely.

PubPol comp written

I wrote the public policy major field exam today, and I feel like it went OK. I have to wait at least two weeks for results, but I would be fairly surprised if I failed. On that basis, I think I will commit to accompanying Toronto350.org to the forthcoming People’s Climate March in Manhattan on September 21st.

Matt Wilder helped me out with some astute reading suggestions.

The policy garbage can

“March and Olsen… began with the assumption that both the rational and incremental models presumed a level of intentionality, comprehension of problems, and predictability among actors that simply did not obtain in reality. In their view, decision-making was a highly ambiguous and unpredictable process only distantly related to searching for means to achieve goals. Rejecting the instrumentalism that characterized most other models, Cohen, March, and Olsen (1989) argued that most decision opportunities were:

‘a garbage can into which various problems and solutions are dumped by participants. The mix of garbage in a single can depends partly on the labels attached to the alternative cans; but it also depends on what garbage is being produced at the moment, or the mix of cans available, and on the speed with which garbage is collected and removed from the scene.’

Cohen, March, and Olsen deliberately used the garbage-can metaphor to strip away the aura of scientific authority attributed to decision-making by earlier theorists. They sought to drive home the point that goals are often unknown to policy-makers, as are causal relationships. In their view, actors simply define goals and choose means as they go along in a policy process that is necessarily contingent and unpredictable.”

Howlett, Michael, M. Ramesh, and Anthony Perl. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles & Political Subsytems: Third Edition. 2009. p. 152 (paperback)

See also: The Thick of It

Peter John sums up

“A synthetic approach implies there are multiple causes of policy change and variation. Accounts that rely on one process to explain why decision making takes a particular course are too narrow and relegate other factors to some dominant principle. The common view of contemporary social scientists is that there is no one general principle governing social and political life. Instead, social scientists need to make sense of the complexity, variation, and changeability of the empirical world, which is constituted by conflicting ideas. As such, theories of policy variation and change must incorporate and account for continuous change and adoption. It is not possible to say that only institutions count, or that social and political phenomena can be reduced to economic drivers. Policy outputs and outcomes are the result of a confluence of the five processes [institutions, groups, exogenous factors, rational actors, and ideas] that the book outlines in chapters 3 to 7.

There are three sets of authors who try to synthesize these factors. They are Sabatier (policy advocacy coalition theory), Kingdon (the policy streams approach), and Baumgartner and Jones (the punctuated equilibrium model). The first seeks to combine ideas and networks in public policy, where policy subsystems are driven and sometimes fractured by large socioeconomic or external events. The second is based on the continual interplay of problems, solutions, and policies in the garbage can model of policy choice. The third is a model of agenda setting, seeking to describe how agendas and policies move fro periods of high stability to times of rapid change and fluidity. All three models are contemporary because they place ideas at the center of their analysis. The time when writers believed that only interests drive public policy is now over. Conceptions, discourse, beliefs, and norms define the process of policy making. Yet unlike some of the ideational theories described in chapter 7, Sabatier, Kingdon, and Baumgartner and Jones seek to place ideas with the complex interplay of individual choice, networks, institutions, and socioeconomic changes. Thus each framework has all these elements.

In keeping with the critical approach of this book, none of these authors quite succeeds in creating a theory of public policy. For all the role of knowledge and advocacy in Sabatier’s approach, the policy advocacy coalition framework is too static, as it is driven by outside events. Kingdon’s approach is highly attractive, but it relies too much on change and fluidity. Baumgartner and Jones neatly contrast stability and instability in the account of policy making over time, but in the end it is not entirely clear that they explain the transition between stability and change and back again.”

John, Peter. Analyzing Public Policy: Second Edition. 2012. p. 176 (hardcover)