‘Bending the Rules’: The Space between HQ Policy and Local Action in UN Civilian Peacekeeping

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 293-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Felix da Costa ◽  
John Karlsrud
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Host Country ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Institutional Policy ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
The Relationship

Recent literature has argued that a ‘dominant peacebuilding culture’ has precluded the contextualisation of peacebuilding to local dynamics. The article explores the ‘peacekeeping-peacebuilding nexus’ in practice, where civilian peacekeepers are increasingly considered to be early peacebuilders. Drawing on examples from United Nations (UN) civilian peacekeeping involvement in local peacebuilding in South Sudan, this article argues for a less reductionist and more nuanced view of local peacebuilding and the social interactions and dynamics which take place. It recognises the discrepancies between official UN Headquarters (HQ) policy and action in the “field”, and thus explores the relationship between policy and practice and the location of agency and authority in civilian peacekeeping. The article argues that the critique levelled against peacekeeping and peacebuilding for being focused on actors in host country capitals does not sufficiently take into consideration the relationship between capitals and the “field”. Rather, local peacebuilding outcomes depend as much or more on negotiations, bargains and compromises between different actors at the “field” level, than on institutional policy decision-making deriving from headquarters.

scholarly journals Union struggle and the crisis of industrial relations in Italy

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeria Pulignano
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Union Power ◽  
Social Dialogue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
The Government

This paper argues that the Berlusconi government is seeking to replace the ‘social concertation’ arrangement between government and trade unions with ‘social dialogue’ in an effort to undermine trade union ‘power’. This endeavour by the government to impose a policy of ‘social dialogue’ would severely limit trade unions' influence in economic and social policy decision-making and leave Berlusconi free to introduce reforms favouring his friends in employer organisations. One likely outcome would be the deregulation of the Italian labour market strongly damaging workers' rights.

Deliberative Policy Analysis

2018 ◽  
pp. 583-594
Author(s):  
Frank Fischer ◽  
Piyapong Boossabong
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Practical Method ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
Policy Problems

Deliberative policy analysis has its origins in the argumentative turn in policy analysis. It emerged as an alternative to the use of standard empirical-analytic methods of the social sciences to solve public policy problems. Not only has the conventional neopositivist approach failed to produce the promised results, it has generally operated with a technocratic, and largely an anti-democratic, bias. Basic to deliberative policy analysis is a method for bringing together a wider spectrum of citizens, politician and experts in the pursuit of policy decisions that are both effective and democratically legitimate. This chapter begins with an outline of the theoretical perspectives underlying deliberative policy analysis. Then, the process and practice is illustrated by the case study, which shows how the approach has moved from a theory to a practical method for policy decision-making.

scholarly journals Heuristics and Public Policy: Decision-making Under Bounded Rationality

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjit Dhami ◽  
Ali al-Nowaihi ◽  
Cass R. Sunstein
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Bounded Rationality ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Knightian Uncertainty ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Subjective Uncertainty ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jel Classifications ◽  
Bayesian Rationality

How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold? Do human beings optimize, or can they? Several decades of research have shown that people possess a toolkit of heuristics to make decisions under certainty, risk, subjective uncertainty, and true uncertainty (or Knightian uncertainty). We outline recent advances in knowledge about the use of heuristics and departures from Bayesian rationality, with particular emphasis on growing formalization of those departures, which add necessary precision. We also explore the relationship between bounded rationality and libertarian paternalism, or nudges, and show that some recent objections, founded on psychological work on the usefulness of certain heuristics, are based on serious misunderstandings. JEL classifications: D01, D04, D81, D9

Emotions and Foreign Policy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Foreign Policy Analysis ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
And Behavior

Increasingly, scholars are recognizing the influences of emotion on foreign policy decision-making processes. Not merely feelings, emotions are sets of sentimental, physiological, and cognitive processes that typically arise in response to situational stimuli. They play a central role in psychological and social processes that shape foreign policy decision-making and behavior. In recent years, three important areas of research on emotion in foreign policy have developed: one examining the effects of emotion on how foreign policy decision makers understand and think-through problems, another focused on the role of emotion in diplomacy, and a third that investigates how mass emotion develops and shapes the context in which foreign policy decisions are made. These literatures have benefitted greatly from developments in the study of emotion by psychologists, neuroscientists, and others. Effectively using emotion to study foreign policy, however, requires some understanding of how these scholars approach the study of emotion and other affective phenomena. In addition to surveying the literatures in foreign policy analysis that use emotion, then, this article also addresses definitional issues and the different theories of emotion common among psychologists and neuroscientists. Some of the challenges scholars of emotion in foreign policy face: the interplay of the psychological and the social in modelling collective emotions, the issues involved in observing emotions in the foreign policy context, the theoretical challenge of emotion regulation, and the challenge of winning broader acceptance of the importance of emotion in foreign policy by the broader scholarly community.

Measuring daily-life fear perception change: a computational study in the context of COVID-19 (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuchen Chai ◽  
Juan Palacios ◽  
Jianghao Wang ◽  
Yichun Fan ◽  
Siqi Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Computational Study ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
Media Data

BACKGROUND COVID-19, as a global health crisis, has triggered the fear emotion with unprecedented intensity. Besides the fear of getting infected, the outbreak of COVID-19 also created significant disruptions in people’s daily life and thus evoked intensive psychological responses indirect to COVID-19 infections. OBJECTIVE This study aims to develop novel digital trackers of public fear emotion during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to uncover meaningful topics that the citizens are concerned about to inform policy decision-making. METHODS We construct an expressed fear database using 16 million social media posts generated by 536 thousand users in China between January 1st, 2019 and August 31st, 2020. We employ Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to detect the fear emotion within each post and apply BERTopic to extract the central fear topics. RESULTS We find that on average, 2.45% of posts per day having fear as the dominant emotion in 2019. This share spiked after the COVID-19 outbreak and peaked at 9.1% on the date that China’s epi-center Wuhan city announced lockdown. Among the fear posts, topics related to health takes the largest share (39%). Specifically, we find that posts regarding sleep disorders (Nightmare and Insomnia) have the most significant increase during the pandemic. We also observe gender heterogeneity in fear topics, with females being more concerned with health while males being more concerned with job. CONCLUSIONS Our work leverages the social media data coupled with computational methods to track the emotional response on a large scale and with high temporal granularity. While we conduct this research in a tracing back mode, it is possible to use such a method to achieve real-time emotion monitoring, thus serving as a helpful tool to discern societal concerns and aid for policy decision-making.

scholarly journals The COVID-19 Pandemic: Informing Policy Decision-Making for a Vulnerable Population

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Nicholas Spence ◽  
Vivian Chau ◽  
Maryam S. Farvid ◽  
Jerry White ◽  
Paranthaman Rasalingam ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Decision Making

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted society. Vulnerable populations are at heightened risk for exposure, as well as adverse health and social consequences. Policymakers are operating under difficult circumstances, making crucial policy decisions to maximize impact and mitigate harm, with limited scientific evidence. This article examines the pronounced vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples in Canada to the pandemic. We highlight the importance of moving beyond individual-level risk factors associated with COVID-19 by identifying and classifying Indigenous communities most vulnerable to the pandemic. We propose the use of a social diagnostic tool, the Community Well-Being Index, rooted in the social determinants of health, to predict community vulnerability and potentially guide policy decision-making in the fight against COVID-19. 

scholarly journals Lessons and Challenges to be learned from different countries policy implication on COVID 19 recovery cases- A cross-sectional descriptive study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAIYA PATEL
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Poisson Model ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Policy Decision Making ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Background- The need to quantify the non-pharmaceutical measures in policy decision making is essential in current uncertain times of pandemic. The purpose of the current study is to quantify the relationship between Social Distancing measures and the Total number of tests performed with the Total number of recovered cases across 23 countries around the world, currently struck by COVID-19 pandemic.Methods- The cross-sectional descriptive study utilized STATA 16. for Poisson Model analysis using data collected across 23 countries. The statistical databases Statista, WHO situation reports, CDC website, respective country health ministry websites, and World Bank data was utilized to collected the lacking data details regarding COVID-19. The WHO regions/23 countries included in analysis are Republic of Korea, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, India, United States of America, Canada, Italy,Germany,United Kingdom,France,Austria,Croatia,Israel,Russian Federation,Spain,Belgium,Finland,Sweden,Switzerland,Iran (Islamic Republic of). The variables included in analysis are The factorial analysis of categorical data is included to quantify the levels of social distancing measures and its effect on the total number of recovered cases until April 2nd, 2020. Results- There exists a positive relationship between the improved number of recovered infected cases, and Social distancing measures of lockdown, the total number of tests performed depending on the stage at which it is completed. The availability of total medical doctors in each country affects the number of recovered cases in that particular country. Conclusion- Future studies might use it as a foundation for evaluation modeling in public health for policy decision making.

Modeling Foreign Policy Decision Making

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 136, 138
Author(s):  
RICHARD L. MERRITT
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
Policy Decision Making
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