William Ascher

Public Involvement Methods in Natural Resource Policy Making: Advantages, Disadvantages and Trade-Offs

Public involvement methods in natural resource policy making: Advantages, disadvantages and trade-offs.

Science and social responsibility

Science in the aggregate has not lived up to its promise to work for the benefit of society as a whole. This problem stems from the narrow perspectives that basic and applied researchers typically take to their work. Among the barriers to broadening those perspectives, the most tractable is the myth that the overriding purpose of science in human affairs is prediction; that such predictions are prerequisites for major policy decisions; and that scientific inputs to these decisions are objective and value-free. This article challenges the myth from three standpoints - epistemology, the historical context, and contemporary case studies - as a step toward improving the responsibility and accountability of science to society.

Coping with Complexity and Organizational Interests in Natural Resource Management

To cope with the daunting challenges posed by system complexity while maximizing their organizational interests, resource management institutions must implement strategies aimed at reducing some of the particular dimensions of complexity. Virtually all of the recent initiatives to improve resource management—ecosystem management, adaptive management, stakeholder negotiation, disturbance prevention, multiple mandates for resource management agencies, resource homogenization, restoration ecology, the creation of protected areas, the restoration of local-user rights, and algorithmic resource exploitation rules—are vulnerable to inappropriate interest-driven simplifications, many of which result from patterns of perverse learning. A research agenda designed to identify better means of coping with complexity and the effects of organizational interests could help to improve resource and environmental management.

Knowledge in the policy process: Incorporating new environmental information in natural resources policy making

Efforts by both natural and social scientists have brought significant new bodies of information to bear on natural resources policy making. Among these have been new insights in conservation biology and landscape ecology, new methods for valuing intangible resource benefits, and new frameworks for resource accounting. The use of these new sources of information is analyzed from a Lasswellian policy process perspective, with illustrations from recent experience with U.S. national forest planning. A distinction is made between the impact of new information on ‘ordinary’ as contrasted to ‘constitutive’ policy making. This experience suggests that these new sources of information may increase emphasis on sustainable, multiple benefit use of resources, but they can also shift power away from non-expert actors, undermine rights arguments, polarize debates over appropriate resource use, and delay timely decisionmaking.

New development approaches and the adaptability of international agencies: the case of the World Bank

Certain “realist” views of the international economic regime construe international financial agencies as straightforward reflections of the power and interests of nation states. However, the World Banks responsiveness to a wide range of demands for new development priorities and approaches also depends on the compliance of its huge staff. The staffs discretion in shaping, implementing, discrediting, or resisting these approaches requires an organizational-theoretic analysis of the sources of acceptance of or resistance to particular initiatives. Role-set theory accounts for many of the motivational sources of resistance. The capabilities to resist new initiatives through “bureaucratic politics” can be understood through March and Simons emphasis on the importance of absorbing uncertainty. On the basis of these theories and findings on attitudes expressed by Bank staff, strategies can be developed to enhance the Banks responsiveness to such initiatives as greater emphasis on the alleviation of poverty. Theory and findings also provide a basis for speculating on the characteristics required of an international agency to warrant treating it as an autonomous variable in the international system.

The ambiguous nature of forecasts in project evaluation: Diagnosing the over-optimism of rate-of-return analysis

Abstract Development projects often have low economic rates of return, despite high ex ante forecasts. By reviewing several sets of project appraisals undertaken by the World Bank, this paper isolates the technical/methodological sources of this bias. There are several types of failures to account for the fact that unforeseen conditions are more likely to reduce rather than enhance the true rate of return, but the ambiguity in the status of ‘predictions’ in project evaluation allows unreasonably conditional, optimistic forecasts to be used where usually more pessimistic absolute forecasts would be appropriate.

Mineral Wealth, Development and Social Policy in Indonesia

Indonesia has been moderately endowed with natural resources, most notably hydrocarbons, hard minerals and forests. The export revenues have sometimes been channelled constructively into sound development projects and social programmes, though with serious problems arising on occasion. This chapter assesses the chequered experience with hydrocarbons. After situating Indonesia’s hydrocarbon wealth in comparison with that of other hydrocarbon-exporting countries, the chapter outlines the approaches and problems that have marked Indonesias general experience with converting natural resource wealth into development, especially in making social services available and accessible, and then focuses on the patterns specific to hydrocarbon revenues. Despite leakages in converting hydrocarbon revenues into social programmes, reforms under the Suharto administration (1967–98) and subsequently have been impressive. In addition, though institutions directly involved with hydrocarbon exploitation have been weak, Indonesia has long benefited from strong institutions in the central management of economic policy, finance and planning.

Harold D. Lasswell : an annotated bibliography

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Development Strategies and the Evolution of Violence in Africa

For many people outside of Africa, the continent conjures up images of perpetual violence seemingly revolving around ethnic or religious identity. Atrocities in Darfur, genocide in Rwanda, clan warfare in Somalia, and long history of the Tuareg rebellions in Mali support habitual understandings of Africa as the “dark continent.” Two decades ago, African officials criticized the Western media for their “unbalanced” accounts “motivated only by the pursuit of the sensational—coups, corruption, chaotic economics, crocodile attacks, and quaint tribal rites” (Ebo 1992, 17). This representation of Africa has hardly changed: well-screened reports of telegenic Nigerian rebels pointing their AK-47s at the adventurous CNN anchor, gangs of soldier-thugs rampaging through the Congo, and Somali’s children with stomachs bloated from hunger. These images, reinforced by those of investors at the Haradhere stock exchange trading shares in upcoming Somali pirate attacks, continue to emphasize “the Four Horsemen of Africa’s Apocalypse: Poverty, Famine, War and Corruption.” 1 Popular images of that kind, exaggerated for general audience by political war thrillers, like Die Another Day (2002) and Blood Diamond (2006), have surprisingly extensive backing in academic literature. To some of the analysts looking from afar, African violence is seen as the sad legacy of colonialism; to others as manifestations of corruption, greed, ancient tribal hatreds, or simply the feasibility of engaging in insurrection. For North Africa, the stereotype is uncompromising religious conflict, among Muslim groups or between Muslims and secularists.

Economic development strategies and the evolution of violence in Latin America

Latin America is a region with a long history of intergroup violence. Consistent with Tolstoy’s famous observation that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Latin America stands out in several ways. No other world region has thus far seen such a variety of forms of violence. Through most of the twentieth century, the continent was plagued with civil wars and large-scale guerrilla warfare, social uprisings and violent revolutions; its inhabitants endured many coups d’etat and military interventions and brutal military dictatorships coupled with state and nonstate terrorism. Though at the turn of the millennium, many of these “traditional” forms of violent confrontation have ceased or have been greatly attenuated, they have been topped by the upsurge of urban crime (“slum wars”), proliferation of violent youth gangs, and intensification of domestic violence as well as “drug wars” and state-led “wars on drugs.” Latin America has a dubious distinction of leading the world in most global indices of violence.