What Can We Learn from Urban Crisis?

The irreversible transition towards urban living entails complex challenges and vulnerabilities for citizens, civic authorities, and the management of global commons. Many cities remain beset by political, infrastructural, social, or economic fragility, with crisis arguably becoming an increasingly present condition of urban life. While acknowledging the intense vulnerabilities that cities can face, this article contends that innovative, flexible, and often ground-breaking policies, practices, and activities designed to manage and overcome fragility can emerge in cities beset by crisis. We argue that a deeper understanding of such practices and the knowledge emerging from contexts of urban crisis may offer important insights to support urban resilience and sustainable development. We outline a simple conceptual representation of the interrelationships between urban crisis and knowledge production, situate this in the context of literature on resilience, sustainability, and crisis, and present illustrative examples of real-world practices. In discussing these perspectives, we reflect on how we may better value, use, and exchange knowledge and practice in order to address current and future urban challenges.

Comparing Japanese and US Language Spaces: A Case Study

Language spaces worldwide have much in common. However, we believe that there is a meaningful difference between spaces that are considered “language centers” in the US (USLCs) and “self-access language centers” (SALCs) in Japan. These differences provide an opportunity for practitioners and scholars involved in language spaces to learn from each other. In the current article, we investigated the Global Commons at Kyoto Sangyo University for the characteristics of both USLCs and SALCs by collecting information about it from publicly available sources and from interviews with staff. We show that it can be considered an administrative SALC (Mynard, 2019) and show how it fulfills some of the USLC mandates (Lavolette, 2018) but not others. We discuss the implications of these characterizations, including how the Global Commons could be more useful to its stakeholders. Based on this case study, scholars of both SALCs and LCs can gain new ideas for services and roles that will benefit their stakeholders and facilitate change.

Trust, Transparency and Transnational Lessons from COVID-19

The article engages in an exercise in reflexivity around trust and the COVID-19 pandemic. Common understandings of trust are mapped out across disciplinary boundaries and discussed in the cognitive fields in the medical and social sciences. While contexts matter in terms of the understandings and uses made of concepts such as trust and transparency, comparison across academic disciplines and experiences drawn from country experiences allows general propositions to be formulated for further exploration. International health crises require efforts to rebuild trust, understood in a multidisciplinary sense as a relationship based on trusteeship, in the sense of mutual obligations in a global commons, where trust is a key public good. The most effective responses in a pandemic are joined up ones, where individuals (responsible for following guidelines) trust intermediaries (health professionals) and are receptive to messages (nudges) from the relevant governmental authorities. Hence, the distinction between hard medical and soft social science blurs when patients and citizens are required to be active participants in combatting the virus. Building on the diagnosis of a crisis of trust (in the field of health security and across multiple layers of governance), the article renews with calls to restore trust by enhancing transparency.

Lessons from International Space Law: The Role of International Relations in Governing Global Commons Regions

Drawing from an analysis of experiences in outer space law, this paper provides insights into challenges involved with managing the global common spaces of the polar regions. The literature concerning governance of the international commons regions focuses on justice and equity concerning natural resources, climate change, the speed, uncertainty and consequences stemming from key actor activity in the Polar Regions. This usually boils down to successes and failures of treaty noncompliance and enforcement mechanisms, or the lack thereof. This paper highlights a current political process aimed at dismantling agreed upon terms outer space international agreements. This offers a snapshot of a political process, likely to influence evolving polar legal norms for the rapidly melting Arctic and Antarctic regions. This is a conceptual paper borrowing theoretical and methodological approaches from political science and international relations such as a Gramscian analysis, constructivism theory and critical discourse analysis, to present several interesting ideas. The purpose is to enable people to understand and explain that future colonisation patterns are unfolding today. It calls attention to issues likely to challenge and define our world in the twenty-first century.

Eskalationsrisiken im Westpazifik – Inwieweit berühren diese die Interessen der NATO?

Zusammenfassung Die NATO hat China erst seit wenigen Jahren auf dem Radarschirm und reagierte in diesem Zusammenhang auf Herausforderungen, die sich durch eine zunehmende chinesische Präsenz in Europa und in den Global Commons sowie durch Chinas Zusammenarbeit mit Russland ergeben. Allerdings vernachlässigte sie bisher eine Betrachtung der strategischen Rolle, die sie vor dem Hintergrund des chinesisch-amerikanischen Sicherheitsdilemmas bei der Vermeidung eines Großmachtkonflikts spielen könnte. Auch findet bisher das Risiko einer strategischen Gleichzeitigkeit durch koordinierte chinesische und russische Provokationen in Ostasien und in Osteuropa zu wenig Beachtung. Die NATO sollte diese Risiken ernst nehmen, sich ihrer Einflussmöglichkeiten bewusst werden und beginnen, diese zu nutzen.

A new framework for imagining the climate commons? The case of a Green New Deal in the US

The Green New Deal is arguably the most ambitious climate policy platform to gain legislative traction in the U.S. to date. A pioneering policy framework in its holistic consideration of climate change, social justice, and economic reform, the resolution would have vast implications for commons governance regimes if enacted. Planning theorists have long debated how to manage the global commons, and this paper adds to that conversation by assessing the Green New Deal’s theoretical underpinnings. Our analysis suggests that in practice, “top-down” Hardinian and “bottom-up” post-Hardinian commons theory coexist, as market and state-based interventions act as layers in the nested enterprises necessary for the formation of a polycentric approach to climate governance. This finding presents a novel theoretical perspective for studying the commons, specifically as we consider the influence of theory on developing policy imagination.

Confronting the challenges of global complexity

Enabling science to improve policy is essential to provide human security, advance well-being and protect the global commons. While advances in science and technology now permit new solutions to mounting challenges, we must use these breakthroughs to strengthen constructive collective action at appropriate scales, from the sub-national to the global. We must abandon hubris and recognize the challenge of navigating complex systems. The sole purpose of every government is to enable the well-being of its citizens. That requires thoughtful, honest efforts to design systems of governance, from local to global, that will promote equity, human security, and sustainability.

Muddying the waters: migration management in the global commons

Advanced liberal democratic states interdict migrants on the High Seas global commons. Why have liberal states engaged in this practice over the past four decades? Deterrence and humanitarian rescue explain part of this puzzle, but they are insufficient for understanding the patterns and justifications for migrant interdiction on the High Seas. Tension between states promoting international human rights and circumventing those obligations challenges expectations of liberal state behavior. International relations scholars must incorporate the global commons when explaining state behavior; ungoverned areas create exceptional zones for states to partially suspend their standard operating procedures to execute policies furthering their interests. We argue that liberal states use the regulatory gray zones of the High Seas to ‘muddy the waters’ in order to advance their security interests. States with the highest domestic refugee protections have incentives to circumvent their own obligations, which vary over time with changes to domestic asylum laws.