25 April 2017
Prof. Niilo Kauppi (University of Jyväskylä, CNRS)
“Transnational fields, global rankings and the governance of higher education”
About the speaker:
On leave from his permanent position as Research Professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Kauppi is currently Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Jyväskylä (2015-2019). He currently heads a project that deals with European integration and knowledge governance (https://www.jyu.fi/ytk/laitokset/yfi/en/research/projects/political-instituitions/trace) and is involved in another project that studies science policy and governance (http://www.fek.lu.se/en/research/research-groups/knowscience). The author and editor of 11 books and over 100 articles in political sociology, European politics, social theory and intellectual history, Kauppi is also a Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics and former vice-chair of the ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research). Recent publications include ‘A la recherche d’un langage de l’action’, Etudes internationales, forthcoming 1/2017; ‘The Politification and Politicisation of the EU’, Redescriptions 19/1, 2016 (with Kari Palonen and Claudia Wiesner); ‘Ranking and the Structuration of a Transnational Field of Higher Education’, in Normand and Derouet (eds), A European Politics of Education. Perspectives from Sociology, Policy Studies and Politics, Routledge, 2016; and ‘Postface: Sur quelques défis de la science politique francophone’, in Crespy, Benninghoff, Charlier, Leresche (eds.) Le gouvernement des disciplines académiques, Archives contemporaines, 2016.
Abstract:
This presentation explores the links between transnational fields and regulatory tools such as rankings and ratings in the case of higher education and research. In contrast to established theories of global governance such as world culture theory, the focus will be on the institutionalization of a field of higher education as a process of codification and legitimation of global dominance. In this process, powerful institutions in North America and Europe are normalized as universal beacons of scientific excellence. Regulatory tools such as rankings of global higher education are key in this process of benchmarking and naturalization. They are not neutral but favor certain types of academic and other resources. They provide an entry point for analysis of complex processes of symbolic and material power that are shaping academia. The case of the ARWU (Academic ranking of world universities) will exemplify these processes of classification and universalization of scientific excellence.
28 February 2017
Kaius Tuori (University of Helsinki)
“Law, identity and European narratives: an idea in search of a project“.
About the speaker:
Dr Kaius Tuori (PhD 2006) is Associate Professor for European Intellectual History at the Network of European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Dr Tuori is a scholar of legal history involved in research projects on the understanding of tradition, culture, identity, memory and the uses of the past. While the subject areas of these projects have been very diverse (dealing with archaeology, intellectual history, the history of Rome and its later influence, legal history, the history of ideas and anthropology), there is also a strong unifying link between them, namely the connections between ancient and modern through culture and tradition. He is currently PI of the ERC Starting Grant project ‘Reinventing the Foundations of European Legal Culture 1934-1964’ (foundlaw.org), which focuses on the idea of the common European legal tradition. His books ‘Ancient Roman Lawyers and Modern Legal Ideals’ (2007), ‘Lawyers and Savages’ (2014) and ‘Emperor of Law’ (2016) delve into different aspects of the use of the past in the European legal tradition and the role of narratives in forming social convictions. He is the author of five books, two edited volumes and numerous articles.
Abstract:
“The dilemma on the current European crises is that popular support for the ideals behind the EU, such as human rights, equality and shared prosperity, has dropped inside the union, while the massive wave of migrants making their way into the union are seeking precisely that: security, rule of law and economic opportunity. European integration rests on a narrative of teleology, of an ever closer union between European nations being vital to prevent totalitarianism, conflict and war. Much of the earlier scholarship on European integration and the law has been constitutional, examining the issues of European constitutionalism within its framework. In contrast, this project seeks to critically investigate the foundations of the European narrative about a shared heritage of law, values and ideals. The purpose is to examine the crisis through the development of conflicting narratives of Europe in 20th century thinking and its impact in contemporary policies and popular perceptions. The historical narrative of totalitarianism and, ultimately, the Holocaust, pervades European historical consciousness, but equally it serves to legitimate the idea of shared European legal roots in democracy, rule of law and legality. The aim is to study the emergence of these ideas as a response to the 20th century crises such as the Second World War as historical constructs and the rise of nationalistic counternarratives as challenges to the legitimacy of the project and the legal ideals it incorporates. Through a critical examination of the roots of the teleological narrative and its implications to law, society and culture, of rationality, legality, tolerance and pluralism, it argues that historical consciousness and identity are crucial to the formation of not only European identities but also its legitimacy”.
20 January 2016
Marta Cantero Gamito (University of Helsinki)
“Internal Market v National judiciary. Assessing the effectiveness of building a Single Digital Market under a multi-level governance system”
About the speaker:
Marta Cantero (PhD, EUI 2015) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests are Telecommunications regulation, EU law and European Regulatory Private Law. Her PhD thesis provides an overview of the telecommunications sector in the EU, and focuses not only on the substance but also on institutional and procedural aspects resulting from the particularities of the sector. Among other projects, her main research at the moment focuses on the EU’s regulatory capacity in unilateral global regulation in the field of telecommunications through the process of standardization of telecommunications services by assessing the role of the EU in international and supranational organizations and its influence in the decision-making process leading to new regulatory regimes for electronic communications globally.
Abstract:
The paper examines the implementation of the EU Regulatory Framework for Electronic Communications. In particular, it provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the institutional design of a sector-specific supervisory mechanism for the consistent application of remedies in telecoms, the so-called Article 7a procedure of the Framework Directive. This article builds on a pending case (Case 28/15, Koninklijke KPN and Others) concerning the implementation of a Commission’s Recommendation (soft-law) on costing methodologies for termination rates in wholesale markets in which the court will have to address classic and timely questions about the role and legal effect of EU soft-law in the context of the new governance debate. Accordingly, the case is expected to result in an important debate on the role of EU law. While the main focus might be solely in the legal effect of soft-law, the paper argues that the referred questions actually challenge the nature and rationale of the Article 7a procedure itself as a supervisory mechanism. Second, the case reveals the intricacies of a highly bureaucratic procedure whose raison d’être is consolidating the Internal Market for electronic communications through a consistent implementation of the European Regulatory Framework vis-à-vis national law and the judiciary through the establishment of a co-ordinated approach in the implementation of telecommunications regulation which involves a regulatory power transfer. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper illustrate well the role of new actors in law-making and the interplay between the different actors underpinned by a multi-level networked institutional apparatus where the EU and the national jurisdictions interact.
25 November 2015
Päivi Leino-Sandberg (University of Helsinki)
Transparency, Participation and EU Institutional Practice: An Inquiry into the Limits of the ‘Widest Possible’
About the speaker:
Dr Päivi Leino-Sandberg (LL.M. with distinction, LSE 2001; LL.D. Helsinki 2005) is adjunct professor of EU law at the University of Helsinki, Academy of Finland research fellow (2015-2020) and Swedish university lecturer in public law at the faculty of law, University of Helsinki. She has spent more than ten years at four different ministries (Foreign affairs, Prime Minister’s Office, Justice and Finance) acting as legal advisor and representing the Finnish government in various negotiations including the Treaty of Lisbon, Regulation No 1049/2001 on Access to documents, and the PNR and the SRF agreements. She has acted as an expert for the Legal affairs committee of the European Parliament and is a Member of Access Info Europe. She has written in particular on institutional and constitutional EU law, fundamental rights, EU administrative law and the external relations law of the EU. Her Academy of Finland Project relates to the roles allocated to law and politics in the EU legislative procedure, and how these roles affect possibilities of participation – questions that she has previously explored from another angle when working in the field.
Abstract:
The recent years have witnessed a growing concern in the EU institutions for the ways in which openness and citizen participation are believed to distract efficient decision-making. Various examples of such attitudes can be easily identified, demonstrating how the EU institutions still fail to possess a deeper understanding of the role of transparency in legitimate governance. This paper discusses the ways in which the right of public access often turns into institutional politics with the institutions and the Member States in fact buttressing their own interests. This has serious consequences for the understanding of citizens’ rights to participate in democratic decision-making. These questions are examined in the areas of legislative matters and international relations. The problems identified are then placed in the context of wider administrative culture in the relevant EU institutions, reflected in their responses to the citizens’ concerns. The paper concludes with a few remarks on the wishes of the European Council to create greater legitimacy for the Economic and Monetary Union, and the role of openness in that discussion.
28 October 2015
Tuomas Ylä-Anttila (University of Helsinki)
Cooptation of ENGOs or Treadmill of Production? Corporatism and Climate Change Policy Networks in Finland
About the speaker:
Dr. Tuomas Ylä-Anttila is the co-founder and co-director of the Helsinki Research Group for Political Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He is currently the principal investigator of the 3-year research project Climate Change Policy Networks in Finland in a Comparative Perspective, and member of the administrative team of the 20-country comparative research effort Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (see compon.org <http://compon.org>). He has published on climate change, media, social movements and globalization, and worked as a Visitig Fellow at the European University Institute and University of California Irvine.
Abstract:
The corporatist Nordic welfare states are often thought of as being exemplary in their environmental policies. While this mostly holds true for the other Nordic countries, Finland was labeled “a failing ecostate” by a recent study, due to its weak performance particularly in climate change policy. Why is Finland different? This paper uses data from a survey of 96 organizations belonging to the Finnish climate change policy network to investigate two alternative explanations. First, the cooptation hypothesis (Dryzek et al.) states that inclusive corporatist polities where environmental NGOs have support from and access to the state tend to generate less than ideal policy outcomes. This is because environmentalists need to moderate their views in exchange for funding from the state and to get political access. Second, the treadmill of production hypothesis (Schnaiberg et al.) states that the decisive feature of Nordic corporatism with regard to environmental policy outcomes is the tripartite system that links together business interests, labor unions and the state in a coalition that prioritizes economic over ecological values. Our results support the treadmill but not the cooptation hypothesis. Guided by the Advocacy Coalition Framework, we use data on organizational collaboration ties and beliefs to discern coalitions. The ENGO coalition is the least influential, least resourceful, smallest, least linked to the others and not particularly moderate. The treadmill coalition is the most influential, most resourceful, second largest, well linked to the state and least ecological in its core beliefs. The policy outcome is the result of the dominance of the treadmill coalition rather than the cooptation of ENGOs
8 May 2015
Ian Thynne (University of Hong Kong)
Governance and Institutional-Organisational Dynamics: The Centrality of Power
About the speaker:
Prof. Ian Thynne received his BA, BA(Hons) and PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is Adjunct Professor at Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong. His research addresses governance and public management, with a focus on organisational types, reform leaders and strategies, and public-private mixes. He taught and researched public governance, policy, administration and management in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Singapore and Hong Kong. He is the co-editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration and of Public Administration and Development. He authored/co-authored or edited/co-edited a number of books, international journal symposia, articles and book chapters. He had extensive experience in the design and offering of leadership development and continuing education programmes in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australasia and the Pacific.
Abstract:
Forms of power in government and governance – coercive, contractual and consensual – do not feature in governance and institutional-organisational discussions as prominently as they need to. In response, in seeking to understand the extent, exercise and efficacy of these forms of power, it is useful to address various “triplets” or “trichotomies”, including the arenas of power in terms of the state, market and civil society; the pervasiveness of power in terms of people, systems and action; the structuring of power in terms of hierarchies, matrices and networks; and the legitimation of power in terms of rules, beliefs and consent. All of these matters are relevant to institutional-organisational configurations in governance. They serve to integrate the bases of public administration, management and governance in the pursuit of the public interest.
25 March 2015
Oliver Belcher (Centre of Excellence ‘The Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities, and Transnationalization’, University of Oulu)
Objective Violence: War and the World Viewed
The discussant was Sergei Prozorov (Department of Political and Economic Studies).
About the speaker:
Oliver Belcher (PhD, University of British Columbia, 2013) is a postdoctoral researcher at the RELATE Center of Excellence, Department of Geography, University of Oulu. His research examines the interrelationships between late-modern war, experience, aesthetics, and technology. He has written widely on the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, as well as contemporary conflicts in the Middle East. He is currently writing a book manuscript titled “Contortions: Designing the Military Body for Machine Use, 1945–1971”.
Abstract:
This paper examines how U.S. military visual epistemologies shifted when computational maps were introduced in the Vietnam War. Computational mapping enabled not only a movement away from traditional forms of manual cartography, but marked the emergence of novel forms of interpretation into the U.S. military due to the “higher resolution” images, namely a reifying discourse of “precision,” as well as ontological claims that Vietnamese and military social space was “networked.” I look closely at the U.S. military’s Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), an ambitious automated data collection system launched in January 1967 that was used to geographically survey, catalogue, calculate, and measure population patterns and trends in the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam. During its time (1967–1975), the HES was the largest geographical information systems (GIS) database ever compiled. My focus in the presentation is on the techno-material practices that made the HES and its attendant ways of seeing possible, specifically the rise of new post-war disciplines of the body that became integral for automation machine use (e.g., anthropometrics, ergonomics, and human factors research). Following the work of philosopher Theodore Schatzki, the operating principle in the paper is that techno-material practices are the site where understanding is structured and intelligibility articulated. Thus, the paper concludes with the claim that it is impossible to understand late-modern modes of violence and biopolitics without accounting for the paradigmatic shifts inaugurated by mid-century computation, as well as its accompanying machine-body arrangements.
3 March 2015
John Meyer (Stanford University)
Global Diffusion
The discussant was Henri Vogt (University of Turku).
About the speaker:
John W. Meyer is Professor of Sociology (and, by courtesy, Education), emeritus, at Stanford. He has contributed to organizational theory, comparative education, and the sociology of education, developing sociological institutional theory. Since the 1970s, he has studied the impact of global society on national states and societies. More recently, he completed a collaborative study of worldwide science and its national effects (Drori et al., Science in the Modern World Polity, Stanford 2002) and a project on the impact of globalization on organizational structures (Drori et al., eds., Globalization and Organization, Oxford 2006). He now studies the world human rights regime, world curricula in mass and higher education, and the worldwide expansion of formal organization. He is a member of the National Academy of Education, has honorary doctorates from the Stockholm School of Economics and the Universities of Bielefeld and Lucerne, and received the American Sociological Association’s section awards for lifetime contributions to the sociology of education, and to the study of globalization.
Abstract:
Changes in world culture create contextual conditions increasing cross-national diffusion and structuring its character. Scientization disciplines the natural and social environments. Human empowerment and rights norms create a population of actors with much (standardized) agency. And an expanded (and standardized) educational system now at the center of social stratification everywhere links empowered humans with a common action frame. As a consequence, collective mobilizations of attitudes, opinions, and actions occur on an increasingly global scale. Institutionalized, this turns into a global expansion of formal organization in both domestic and international society. Both conflict and cooperation can readily shift to a global scale.
28 January 2015
Mark C. Miller (Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in North American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Clark University)
Governance as Dialogue: Interactions between the U.S. Congress and the Federal Courts
The discussant was Massimo Fichera (Network for European Studies).
Abstract:
In the United States, all regular courts have the power of judicial review, which in American usage means that judges can declare unconstitutional the actions of the president, the Congress, the bureaucracy, or the states. The power of judicial review gives the American courts a large role in policy-making, because many issues are decided by the courts in the U.S. but would be handled by other governmental institutions in other societies. While the U.S. Supreme Court is one of the most powerful courts in the world, scholars in the Governance as Dialogue Movement argue that the Supreme Court is not necessarily the last word on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, but instead constitutional interpretation in the U.S. is a continuing dialogue or conversation among the Supreme Court, the Congress, the president, the bureaucracy, the states, and the American people. The seminar will focus on the interactions between the American courts and the federal legislative and executive branches, as seen through the lens of the Governance as Dialogue Movement.
About the speaker:
Mark C. Miller is professor of American politics at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and former chair of the Department of Political Science. He is also the Director of the Law and Society Program there. He received his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University and his J.D. from George Washington University. He served as the Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States from 1999-2000, and he was a Congressional Fellow in 1995. During 2006-07, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Centennial Center for Public Policy of the American Political Science Association. For the academic year 2014-15, he is serving as the Distinguished Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in North American Studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. His fifth book, Judicial Politics in the United States, was published in the summer of 2014.
About the discussant:
Massimo Fichera is Lecturer in European Studies at the Network for European Studies, University of Helsinki. He was previously Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki. His interests lie in the intersection between EU and international law and constitutional theory. His most recent publication is Polity and Crisis – Reflections on the European Odyssey (Ashgate, co-edited with Kaarlo Tuori and Sakari Hänninen). Before joining the University of Helsinki, he completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He is also qualified as Avvocato in Italy.
13 November 2014
Emilia Korkea-aho (Faculty of Law)
‘In the Shadows’: The Lobbyist as Rulemaker
The discussant was Silke Trommer (Department of Political and Economic Studies).
About the speaker:
Emilia Korkea-aho is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law.
Abstract:
This talk claims that lobbyists have an as yet unrecognised and important role to play in EU rulemaking. Instead of trying to shape the proposed legislation from outside the decision-making process, lobbyists have become rulemakers in their own right, concretising and implementing policies and legislation alongside the Commission and EU agencies. This claim of lobbyists as rulemakers is based on an updated understanding of the role of lobbyists in the context of the EU’s interest group model of decision-making. In the past decade and a half, the EU has mainstreamed the ideals of expertise and stakeholder participation in its decision-making at all levels. Modern lobbyists tap into these two influential ideals in order to position and legitimise themselves as actors of rulemaking. Drawing on Weberian ideal types of legitimate authority, I first identify how different claims for authority made by lobbyists manifest themselves in actual contexts of EU rulemaking. I then assess practices of control that are in place with regard to these claims. Finally, I suggest that recognising lobbyists as the actors of rulemaking that they factually are brings them out of ‘the shadows’ and helps control the legitimacy of their claims.
15 October 2014
Jan Klabbers (Faculty of Law)
Global Governance and the Virtues
3 September 2014
Jonathan Boston (Victoria University of Wellington)
Governing for the Future: How to Bring the Long-Term into Short-Term Political Focus
Prof. Boston’s slides are available here.
The discussant was Aleksi Neuvonen (Demos Helsinki).
About the speaker:
Jonathan Boston is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies in the School of Government at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has published widely on various matters including public management, social policy, climate change policy, tertiary education policy, comparative government, and ethics and public policy. He was a member of the New Zealand Political Change Project from 1995-2002, which explored the behavioural, institutional and policy implications of MMP. During 2000-01, he served as a member of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission, and more recently he was Director of the Institute of Policy Studies (2008-11) and Co-Chair of the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty, established by the Children’s Commissioner. His recent books include Child Poverty in New Zealand (with Simon Chapple, Bridget Williams Books, 2014) and Future Proofing the State (co-edited with John Wanna et al., ANU Press, 2014).
Abstract:
There are strong political incentives for democratically-elected government to focus on policy issues of immediate concern and to give priority to policy options with positive, short-term electoral payoffs. Correspondingly, long-term risks – whether fiscal, environmental or social – are often downplayed or overlooked. Particular problems arise when long-term solutions require voters to bear costs over the short-to-medium term in order to secure future benefits or minimize future risks. The problems of climate change, child poverty and the fiscal sustainability of retirement incomes are good examples.
Various strategies have been adopted over recent decades, across both developed and developing countries, to alter the structure of incentives so that decision-makers are likely to give greater weight to the interests of future generations. Such strategies have included shifting certain decision-rights to higher levels of government, transferring certain decision-rights to non-elected (expert) bodies, constraining the decision-rights of elected officials via constitutional means, and seeking to enhance the ‘voice’ of future generations through a range of institutional, regulatory and other policy devices. But how effective have these approaches been, what lessons can we draw from recent experience, and what other ‘solutions’ might be available?
7 May 2014
Diana Coole (Birkbeck, University of London)
From Population Control to Behaviour Modification: Liberty, Coercion and Behaviour Modification in Pursuit of Sustainable Wellbeing
About the speaker:
Diana Coole is Professor of Political and Social Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on critical theory, existential phenomenology, poststructuralism and feminism and gender and her key publications include Women in Political Theory (1993), Negativity and Politics (2000), Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (2007) and most recently New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010, edited with Samantha Frost). Her current research on the ethics and politics of the population question has been published in journals such as Contemporary Political Theory, Politics, and Environmental Politics, and it is also the subject of her forthcoming book.
Abstract:
As world population surges past 7 billion towards the 11 billion projected by the UN for the end of this century, demography is re-emerging as a significant factor in deteriorating environmental trends and in challenges posed by food, water and energy insecurity. Even in many post-transitional societies like the US, UK and Australia, a surge in numbers is expected by mid-century. For this talk I take as a given the maxim that environmental problems are easier to resolve with fewer people and focus on the means that could be used to stabilise or reduce populations (especially in those affluent societies whose inhabitants have larger ecological footprints), were there a political will to do so.
I start by asking whether it is legitimate for liberal governments to intervene in reproductive behaviour, especially given connections between population control and coercion. I suggest that sometimes it is and I plot a spectrum of feasible means. At the opposite pole from coercion I place reproductive autonomy. I claim, however, that it is illusory to believe that without population policies women are free to choose their fertility careers: economic and cultural pressures severely circumscribe their choices. I designate this a ‘technicolour zone’ of constraints. But most measures fall in the middle region of my spectrum: a ‘grey zone’ where interventions manifest a mix of freedom and coercion that I regard as typical of liberal governmentality. Here I argue that social engineering and biopower provide numerous mechanisms for modifying behaviour and that these are in fact routinely used: both for pronatalist purposes and in order to ration consumption of scarce resources. I conclude that were governments convinced of the merits of smaller populations, they already have at their disposal a range of policy instruments that are no more coercive than the standard repertoire of liberal governance. I thus challenge a widespread view that social efforts to lower the birthrate are inherently unethical and suggest that the collective benefits of such policies warrant renewed public debate.
16 April 2014
James Mittelman (American University)
Drivers of Reform in Global Knowledge Governance: Repurposing Universities
The discussant was Miguel Lim (Aarhus University).
About the speaker:
James Mittelman is University Professor of International Affairs, and was founding Chair of Comparative and Regional Studies at American University. Previously, Mittelman has been on the faculty at a number of prestigious US universities, and he held teaching and research appointments in Japan, Uganda, Mozambique, and South Africa. The recipient of the International Studies Association’s 2010 Distinguished Senior Scholar award in International Political Economy, he has been named Honorary Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Mittelman’s books include The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance (Princeton University Press), Hyperconflict: Globalization and Insecurity (Stanford University Press), Ideology and Politics in Uganda (Cornell University Press), and Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (coedited, Cambridge University Press). His op-eds and letters appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and elsewhere. Mittelman has worked at the United Nations and with civil society organizations. His current book project examines the role of universities in international relations.
Abstract:
Taking universities as a key site of global knowledge governance, it will be argued that their time-honored purposes are losing ground and that another set of purposes is gaining sway. But whose purposes are ascendant in global knowledge governance? The transformation of universities’ missions is propelled by a loose meshwork of actors and processes: a complex in which networks form and may reconfigure universities. Notwithstanding differences among the purveyors of educational reform, an approximate consensus on what constitutes a “world-class university” is emerging. This process involves setting agendas and influencing opinion makers. It entails forging discourses and symbols and harmonizing programs. It includes rewarding best practices and designing instruments for assessing the results. To explore consensus formation, this research focuses on cosmopolitan actors in concrete institutions and different contexts.
19 March 2014
Carlo Martini (Department of Political and Economic Studies, Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences)
Transparency and Accountability in Monetary Policy Committees: Walking the Fine Line
The discussant was Ida Koivisto (Faculty of Law).
About the speaker:
Carlo Martini (Ph.D. Tilburg, 2011) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. He studied philosophy at the University of Padova, and Philosophy and Economics at UCLA and Tilburg University. Before moving to Helsinki, he was lecturer in the Philosophy & Economics Program at the University of Bayreuth. You can find more information on his research at www.carlomartini.net.
Abstract:
In this paper I will highlight the problems that are related to disclosing information on the workings, goals, decisions, etc. of a monetary policy committee. There is fine line that policy makers have to walk between the efficiency of a committee, which requires its ability to make successful predictions, and its transparency, which require the disclosing of as much information as is thought necessary.
Monetary policy committees are institutions that regulate the monetary policy of a national (or transnational, in the case of the EU) economy. In short, how much fiat money is to be present in an economy is a decision that pertains to a nation, but because of possible conflicts of interest, the decision is, in modern times, in the hands of an independent committee. However, the meetings and long-term decisions of these committees are for the most part secret and, in general, there is little accountability on the workings of a monetary policy committee.
One argument for secrecy is that if the market knew in advance what the long-term intentions of a committee are, investors could react to new information, thereby undermining the goals the monetary policy committee’s action (e.g. an interest rate change) had meant to achieve. But a side-effect of secrecy in monetary policy decisions is that there is uncertainty (and double-guessing) in the market, which according to some – see Blinder, The Quiet Revolution (2004) – is what makes the market unstable. I will present the details of this problem and conclude with suggestions on how to resolve the impasse.
19 February 2014
Nelli Piattoeva (University of Tampere, Institute for Advanced Social Research and School of Education)
Elastic Numbers: National Examinations Data and Government at a Distance
The discussant was Ossi Piironen (Department of Political and Economic Studies).
About the speaker:
Nelli Piattoeva (Ph.D. in education sciences from the University of Tampere, School of Education, 2011) is a fixed-term postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research in Tampere. Her doctoral dissertation concerned changes in the relationship between nationality and citizenship in two national contexts, Finland and Russia in the 1990s and 2000s, and how these changes were manifested in the citizenship education policies for compulsory school education. Since then, Piattoeva’s research interests have moved to the politics of educational evaluation at national and global levels. In 2014-2017 she will work in the Academy of Finland funded research project “Transnational Dynamics in Quality Assurance and Evaluation Politics of Basic Education in Brazil, China and Russia (BCR)”.
Abstract:
This talk is motivated by interest in the variety of ways in which massive numerical information generated by nation-wide school examinations is implicated in the practices of control and steering. I aim to describe how the exam results produced by the national high school graduation examination in the Russian Federation are used to govern and govern through different actors, from students and their families to large units such as universities and local public administration. This talk seeks to contribute to a growing pool of critical literature that treats evaluation and data production as practices of control at a distance in a historically specific socio-political context where more and more activities fall under performance measurement systems. My general argument is that data do not merely visualise practices previously hidden from the state’s eye, making them legible for regulation, but also assemble heterogeneous actors into a loose network of control which expands and blurs their roles as subjects of and subjected to government.
15 January 2014
Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça (Faculty of Law, Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights)
Soft Law, Transnational Law and Autonomous Normative Orders
About the speaker:
Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça is currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Academy Professor (Martti Ahtisaari Chair) Jan Klabbers’s research project “Towards a Credible Ethics for Global Governance” at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. More specifically, he is developing an understanding of different situational ethics (Badiou, Pragmatism, Virtue Ethics) as another form of idealism in ethical theory. He is also a Guest Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Public Law, University of Lisbon (Research stream: Towards a Global Administrative Law).
Before joining the Erik Castrén Institute, he was a sessional lecturer in Ethics in International Affairs at the University of Queensland and Australian Business Law & Ethics at James Cook University. So far, his research has focused on understanding why do we use so much law, law as a complex social system, legal normativity and interdisciplinarity in law. More public sphere oriented, he has written on the efficiency of the Portuguese civil justice system, the quality of legislation and a proposal for constitutional amendment.
Abstract:
First, I elaborate an institutional analysis of law by examining the concept of soft law. This will establish how the legal system has always had to struggle with the problem of normative sources deprived of formal legal validity. It will also make clear that any conceptualisation of law cannot stop at the law making level but has to encompass dynamic elements such as norm-use by agents as well as norm-application by courts.
Secondly, this institutional perspective will allow us to understand in detail, and compare, the domestic and international process of juridification. This theoretical explanation will further provide a testable hypothesis (the use of this terminology falls completely outside a positivistic view of science) to explain the spread of law and to describe the role of fundamental rights in this process.
Finally, I show how the conceptualisation offered in this paper significantly challenges current accounts of domestic and international juridification as the development of autonomous normative spheres refractory to external control. Furthermore, I will argue that fundamental rights are the mechanism that allows the official legal system to pierce and correct any other system using normative sources. The conceptual work will be tested by looking at international arbitration and European case law.
20 November 2013
Magdalena Kmak (Faculty of Law, Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights)
Minority Report Redux? Finnish Crimmigration Practices of Detention and Expulsion
The discussant was Jemima Repo (Department of Political and Economic Studies).
About the speaker:
Magdalena Kmak is a Lecturer in International Law and researcher at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. She is a co-director of a project “Law and the Other in Post-Multicultural Europe”. Magdalena also works as a consultant in the project “Equal Before the Law: Access to Justice in Central Asia”.
Abstract:
This presentation focuses on the practices of immigration detention in Finland as measures of the Finnish border regime. Its primary aim is to focus on the practical application of the article 121(3) of the Finnish Act on Aliens (2004), according to which ‘an alien may be ordered to be held in detention if (…) 3) taking account of the alien’s personal and other circumstances, there are reasonable grounds to believe that he or she will commit an offence in Finland’. By taking this provision under scrutiny I will first address the relationship between criminal law and administrative detention of foreigners in Finland. I will show how detention and deportation, by being applied towards foreigners suspected or convicted for crimes, became a particular measure of control. I will then argue that this relationship between the ‘bordered’ and the ‘ordered’ (Aas 2013), exemplified by article 121(3), constitutes a transitory stage between disciplinary and control societies (Deluxe 1995). Here the measures of sovereign power (banishment) and disciplinary power (punishment) become the means of new technologies of managing not only immigration but also society in general.
28 October 2013
Ida Koivisto (Faculty of Law, Centre of Excellence in Foundations of European Law and Polity Research)
Transparency as an Ideal in Global Administrative Law
The discussant was Tero Erkkilä (Department of Political and Economic Studies).
About the speaker:
Ida Koivisto is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Foundations of European Law and Polity Research, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki. She is also the coordinator of the nationwide doctoral programme “Law in a Changing World”.
Abstract:
Transparency is often deemed as a legitimating panacea in global governance. It advocates visibility and inspectability of governing. However, the modus operandi of transparency has largely eluded scholarly interest. When transparency comes into being trough words, it inevitably transforms into practices. The research proposal delves into the question of how does a visual metaphor translate into legal rules and policies and justify itself as a universal value. Transparency is examined as one of the formative tenets of global administrative law (GAL). This theoretical framework aspires both to describe and harness global power with the terminology of administrative law. The proposed study is constructed around two objectives: diagnosing legitimacy-creating rationality of transparency and mapping its normative status. The study will combine different methodological approaches: administrative legal scholarship, critical legal studies and contemporary philosophy.
25 September 2013
Panel discussion: Ten Years of Shanghai Ranking – Challenges for European Higher Education
The first global university rankings were published just a decade ago, but these policy instruments have become highly influential in shaping the approaches and institutional realities of higher education. The rankings have portrayed European academic institutions in a varying light. There is intense reflexivity over the figures, leading to ideational changes and institutional adaptation that take surprisingly similar forms in different European countries. The panel discussion assesses global university rankings as a policy discourse that would seem to be instrumental to higher education reform throughout Europe. What challenges do the global rankings pose for European higher education?
About the panelists:
Prof. Barbara M. Kehm is Professor of Leadership and International Strategic Development in Higher Education at Glasgow University’s Centre for Educational Change in the School of Education / College of Social Sciences. She is Executive Secretary of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER).
Prof. Arto Mustajoki is Professor of Russian Language and Literature and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki. He is also the Chair of the Board of the Academy of Finland (since 2010) and member of the Finnish Research and Innovation Council.
Dr. Juhana Aunesluoma is Docent in Political History and the Director of the Network of European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Since 2009, he also holds the position as board member of the University of Helsinki.
The panel chair was Dr. Tero Erkkilä, who is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Helsinki. He is also editor of the book Global University Rankings: Challenges for European Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, published in October 2013).
10 September 2013
B. Guy Peters (University of Pittsburgh)
Neo-Institutionalism and Public Policy
The discussant was Emilia Korkea-aho (Faculty of Law).
About the speaker:
Prof. Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of Government at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor of Comparative Governance at Zeppelin University, Germany. He is also an adjunct professor at the City University of Hong Kong. He has a PhD from Michigan State University and has three honorary doctorates from European universities. He is currently the founding co-editor of the European Political Science Review and was founding co-editor of Governance. He is now co-editor of the Handbook of Public Administration in Latin America, and of several book series for Macmillan. His recent publications include Representative Bureaucracy in Action (with Eckhard Schröter and Patrick von Maravic), Institutional Theory in Political Science (3rd edition), and The Handbook of Public Administration (2nd edition, with Jon Pierre).
Abstract:
The various strands of neo-institutionalism that have developed since March and Olsen’s initial call for a return to the organizational and institutional foundations of political science all have some relevance for understanding public policy. Some approaches such as the historical institutionalism and Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional and Development Analysis (IAD) framework are to a great extent defined by public policy. Other approaches, however, have more tenuous connections to policy, and focus more on the internal dynamics of organizations and institutions. This presentation will examine the utility of institutional theory for understanding public policy, using several common questions about the utility of these approaches, and the institutional approach more generally, for understanding public policy.