Christopher Leo

May 19, 2010

IF CITIES CAN'T REGULATE URBAN GROWTH, WHO CAN? A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

In both Canada and the United States, we have largely left urban growth issues to local governments, and many local governments have failed to manage them. Many will never succeed because local councils are not, in general, able effectively to resist development interests.

As a result, the growth of our cities is, in practice, primarily responsive to the interests of developers. These interests are frequently at odds with the considerations that bear on preservation of the environment, maintenance of agriculture, an efficient infrastructure network and a transportation system that serves the population as a whole.

Therefore, in a series of posts on the multi-level governance of land use I've argued that:

• In urban growth policy, unlike many other policy domains, too much local control is a recipe for bad policy.

• This applies to major metropolitan areas and semi-rural, urbanizing communities alike.

• The reduction of local control over urban growth - in other words, centralization of power - is entirely justifiable because urban growth is every bit as much a national and global issue as it is a local one.

If local governments can't control land use, the only alternative is a meaningful degree of land use regulation at another level of government. Despite a lot of loose talk in the literature about sprawl being a global phenomenon, Europe has, in general, been more successful at land use planning than North America, and, as I argued in the first of this series of posts, a major reason is that national land use regulations lay down rules that are not as easily revoked by the political clout of developers.

Centralized land use regulation along the lines of the British Planning Policy Guidance Notes and Statements, or the German Raumordnungsgesetz (see article by Andreas Schultze Baing, listed below), are not likely to be an option in North America, but there have been serious attempts at provincial or state government intervention, and this could be a reasonable substitute for European-style national planning. In addition, both senior levels of government can and do attack land use issues in a more piecemeal manner, through such measures as environmental regulations, or conditional funding of transportation facilities.

As a result of these reflections, I am hoping to fund a three-city, international comparative case study to take a closer look at the alternatives that might be available to governments wishing, at long last, to address the issue of urban growth in a serious way. The three cities I have chosen are Portland, Oregon; the Greater Toronto Area, and Hamburg. Here's why:

Portland. The best-known, and probably most vigorously pursued, senior-government intervention in the US is that of Oregon, which is usually identified with Portland's growth boundary, but which in fact goes well beyond the establishment of an urban growth limit line, encompassing a panoply of rules governing urban growth and development. I learned a lot about how the Oregon system works when I did a case study of the politics of growth management in Portland in 1995, but since then there's been a lot of water under Portland's Burnside Bridge, so it's time for another look.

The Greater Toronto Area. In 2005, in Canada, Ontario legislated a greenbelt designed to hem in the expansion of the Greater Toronto Area, to preserve agriculture, and to conserve natural areas. In Toronto, meanwhile, a variety of measures have been undertaken to promote densification of the city; the reversal of some of the separation of residential from commercial development that has been such a troubled legacy of modernist planning; and the development of the transit system. In practice, therefore, the Greater Toronto Area is governed by a growth management regime that has much in common with Oregon's system.

Hamburg. The European case in my three-city comparison will be Hamburg, which I have chosen because it exhibits some of the complexities that have made growth management in North American metropolitan regions complicated: multiple municipalities, sprawling across three Länder: Hamburg itself, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony.

A systematic comparison of how the growth of cities is managed, considering both political and administrative dimensions of the problem, in Europe, in the Greater Toronto Area and in Portland should make it possible to gain an overview of problems and possible solutions to them.

Specifically, the objective of my research will be a cross-national comparison of different systems of land use regulation. The topic is potentially vast, so it is very important to limit the research in such a way as to keep it manageable and truly comparative. At the same time it has to be broad enough to permit a meaningful look at the question of whether growth is being managed effectively. I propose the following research questions, one of which bears on procedure, with the other two addressing results:

1. What political and administrative steps are taken, and what rules are applied, in deciding on the location and structure of new subdivisions?

2. What is the condition of infrastructure (roads, public transportation facilities and underground municipal services) throughout the urban area?

3. How well-served by public transit is the urban area?

Answers to these questions, with all the complexities they will bring to the surface, should provide a reasonable test of the effectiveness of growth management in these three regions. At the same time they will provide insights into the political, administrative, and regulatory sources of success and failure.

••••••••••••••

A brief, useful comparison of British and German land use regulatory regimes can be found in:

Andreas Schultze Baing, "Containing Urban Sprawl? Comparing Brownfield Reuse Policies in England and Germany". International Planning Studies 15 (1), 25–35.

The article in which I originally argued that centralized city planning reduces the clout of developers is:

Christopher Leo, "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

The major publication recording the results of my 1995 research in Portland, Oregon, was:

LEO, C. (1998). REGIONAL GROWTH MANAGEMENT REGIME: The Case of Portland, Oregon Journal of Urban Affairs, 20 (4), 363-394 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9906.1998.tb00428.x

Here are some other articles I have published on multi-level governance:

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy”. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506.

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth.” Journal of Urban Affairs. 28:2, 2006, 169-89.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21.

Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl, “Multi-level Governance: Getting the Job Done and Respecting Community Difference.” Canadian Political Science Review, 1 (2) 2007, September. Accessable at http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.

Christopher Leo and Todd Andres, “Unbundling Sovereignty in Winnipeg: Federalism through Local Initiative.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009.

Richard Lennon and Christopher Leo, “Metropolitan Growth and Municipal Boundaries: Problems and Proposed Solutions.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 24 (Fall), 2001, 77-104.

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy.” Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, 193-213.

Christopher Leo, with Mary Ann Beavis, Andrew Carver and Robyne Turner, “Is Urban Sprawl Back on the Political Agenda? Local Growth Control, Regional Growth Management and Politics.” Urban Affairs Review, 34 (2) 1998, 179-212.

Christopher Leo, "Global Change and Local Politics: Economic Decline and the Local Regime in Edmonton." Journal of Urban Affairs, 17 (3), 1995, 277-99.

Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton, "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.

Posted by leo-c at 2:45 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2010

CASE STUDIES CAN PRODUCE THEORETICAL ADVANCES: HERE'S AN EXAMPLE

Case studies have unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigations of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. It is argued that the case study is, at best, a preliminary step, in that it may generate hypotheses that can later be tested using such “more reliable” methods as standardized questionnaires or statistical data. In the study of politics, however, that sequence of research initiatives may well work better in reverse.

When political action generates new policies, or creates new states of affairs, these changes invariably come complete with a set of justifications, with or without a claim that the justifications are founded in scientific investigation or well-established social theory. Often, a very effective way of testing such claims, and the social science backing them, is to do a case study of the policy, or the changed state of affairs, enquiring into its causes and the effects it has produced, in order to test the validity of the original justification. A series of such case studies may, in turn, generate insights that are capable of producing theoretical advances.

Immigration and homelessness studies

A case in point is a series of case studies I've undertaken, now nearing completion, that were designed to test the efficacy of government immigration and homelessness policies, and, as well, to test some theoretical propositions I had earlier formulated - on the basis of other case studies - about the much-underestimated policy significance urban population growth rates.

In order to produce theory, studies must be grounded in theory. The starting-point for my case study series was the widely held recognition that globalization has moved cities to centre-stage in societies everywhere. Our collective well-being, both economic and social, depends on the prosperity and well-being of our cities, because, although we need food, minerals and other products of the countryside, it is cities that are our primary centres of creativity, decision-making, and ultimately of wealth-generation.

Globalization has sharpened our awareness of this reality because free trade agreements have reduced the capacity of national governments to protect urban regions from international competition, and modern communications have reduced the importance of location, plunging cities everywhere into direct competition with each other. Accordingly, we need to think carefully about how our political decision-making affects our cities. Governments everywhere, including the Canadian government, are doing that, by trying to find ways of ensuring that national policies contribute to the economic viability and social health of cities and communities.

This task is complicated by the fact that each community is as unique as each human individual. Therefore, although it is possible to set national objectives and standards that apply to all communities, complete uniformity of policy making and implementation is probably not achievable and is, in any event, undesirable, because what works in one city may not work in another. The Canadian government has addressed this reality by trying to ensure that the implementation of national policies can be tailored to the particularities of different communities.

My study focused on two examples of policies designed in this way: the National Homelessness Initiative and Immigration and Settlement. My research assistants and I looked at the implementation of these policies in three very different cities - Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick - in order to test whether these policies were successfully adapted to a range of very different local conditions.

Findings

Here are some of our most interesting findings:

The rate of a city's population growth plays a critical, and widely overlooked role in determining the appropriateness of different policy choices. Policies that may be appropriate for rapidly growing cities are different from those that are appropriate for slow-growth cities. There is a strong tendency, however, for decision-makers in slow-growth cities to pretend that they will be able to increase their rates of growth, and premise their policies on future rapid growth - growth that rarely materializes.

The National Homelessness Initiative (NHI) contained provisions for consultation with local service providers to determine how NHI funding would be allocated. However, the NHI was created to address conditions in rapid-growth cities, and federal government policy in this area was not sufficiently flexible to allow for adaptation to the very different circumstances in slow-growth cities. As a result, NHI policies that were reasonably responsive to conditions in Vancouver proved ill adapted to the circumstances of Winnipeg and Saint John.

Federal immigration and settlement policies were adapted to local circumstances via federal-provincial agreements that devolved some responsibilities to provincial governments. In Vancouver, a famously effective network of settlement service providers suffered setbacks stemming from the British Columbia government's rigidly ideological approach to service provision. In Saint John, immigration and settlement objectives were thwarted by a local culture that proved relatively unreceptive to immigration. In Winnipeg, the provincial government implemented a set of immigration and settlement policies that have been recognized as a model, thanks to extensive consultation with service providers and flexible, thoughtful administration of a provincial nominee program.

Conclusion

The theory about the surprising importance of growth rates in setting the conditions for a wide range of policies first occurred to me because I had done case studies on a variety of subjects in such rapidly growing centres as Toronto, Vancouver and Portland, Oregon; and such slow-growth centres as Winnipeg and Edmonton, when the latter was a slow-growth centre. Because I was doing case studies, I was not narrowly focused on my particular research questions because case studies require the researcher to look broadly at the context of the question being investigated. As a result, I could not help noticing the striking differences among the cities I studied, and the way in which those differences corresponded to differences in rates of population growth.

In my comparative case studies of immigration and homelessness policies, growth rates were one of the criteria I had in mind in selecting research sites. The findings of those studies gave insights into the two policy areas and into some of the problems and possibilities of multi-level governance. But they also confirmed that policy and implementation problems were different in different cities, and that those differences were strongly influenced by population growth rates.

••••••••••••••••••••••

For more about slow growth, see:

Christopher Leo and Wilson Brown, “Slow Growth and Urban Development Policy". Journal of Urban Affairs, 22 (2), 2000, pp. 193-213.

Christopher Leo and Katie Anderson, “Being Realistic about Urban Growth”. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28 (2), 2006, pp. 169-89.

For more about the findings regarding homelessness and immigration, see:

Leo, C. (2006). Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 39 (03) DOI: 10.1017/S0008423906060240

Christopher Leo, “National Policy and Community Initiative: Mismanaging Homelessness in a Slow Growth City”. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 15 (1) (supplement) 2006, pp. 1-21.

Christopher Leo and Martine August, “The Multi-Level Governance of Immigration and Settlement: Making Deep Federalism Work”. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (2), 2009, pp. 491-510.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns, “Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism". Canadian Journal of Political Science, 42 (1), 2009, 93-116.

Posted by leo-c at 1:49 PM

January 30, 2010

DOES MIXED-INCOME HOUSING AMELIORIATE POVERTY?

One of the most troubling features of the way North American cities have developed in the past quarter century is social isolation, as our own desires and the dynamics of the real estate business sort us into spaces exclusive to ever-narrower slices of humanity. Separate spaces for people of different incomes, places reserved exclusively for the elderly, spaces from which children are barred, and more.

There is much to worry about in this trend, but most worrisome of all is the social isolation of the poor - the formation of neighbourhoods largely or wholly populated by people who live there only because they cannot afford to live elsewhere; ghettos, defined by poverty and often race, and marked by deteriorating public services and facilities, as well as limited opportunities for jobs, recreation and education.

Small wonder then that policy-makers have devoted thought and effort to attempts to recapture the social diversity that once was an essential feature of cities and that, even today, is a big part of what we mean by the word "urbanity". In part this has been done by dispersal programs whereby residents of low-income neighbourhoods are offered an opportunity to collect rent subsidies and use them to move to other neighbourhoods.

Another approach has been to redevelop large-scale public housing projects that have become fearsome ghettos, and turn them into mixed-income neighbourhoods. The biggest of these efforts is the massive Hope VI scheme, which provides funding for the rehabilitation of low-income housing estates throughout the United States. A similar effort is underway in Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood, a public housing project that has gained considerable notoriety.

These programs have met with widespread opposition. Dispersal schemes have been criticized for depriving already distressed neighbourhoods of their most capable residents, on the grounds that it is they who are most likely to be motivated or able to take advantage of opportunities to move to other neighbourhoods. Opponents of public housing redevelopment programs have pointed to statistics that show a relatively small percentage of original residents returning to the redeveloped areas as proof that redevelopment is tantamount to gentrification and displacement of the poor.

Proponents of income-mixing schemes, whose pedigree goes back at least to Jane Jacobs's Death and life of great American cities, have offered a variety of reasons why mixed income neighbourhoods are better places for the poor: a middle-class presence builds social capital; middle-class people provide salutary role models; they know, and can teach others, how to take advantage of education and job opportunities; a middle class presence deters criminals, and makes it more likely that a good level of public services and facilities will be provided by the municipality.

There are plenty of arguments on both sides, and public discussion has resolved itself largely into a left-liberal ideological debate, with maximum opportunity on both sides for rhetoric and minimum enlightenment. A recent article in the Urban Affairs Review, therefore, blows over this tired controversy like a breath of fresh air. Authors Mark L. Joseph, Robert J. Chaskin and Henry S. Webber offer a careful examination of the theoretical underpinnings of the various arguments for mixed-income neighbourhoods and draw on a large literature to assess the evidence for each theory.

The outcome of their assessment is a specification of the benefits we might reasonably be able to expect to gain from mixed-income development and those that are less likely to materialize. The authors find, for example, that personal social ties between low-income and middle-income residents of mixed neighbourhoods are unlikely to develop. This largely puts paid to the notion that less well-off residents can expect to get advice regarding job or education opportunities from their better-off neighbours, and casts doubt on the idea that the affluent will provide role models for the poor (a dubious notion to begin with, given the frequency of personal problems, bad habits, and social discord throughout society).

At the same time, the evidence the authors find gives credence to the idea that a middle-class presence can provide a bulwark against social disorder and support for the provision of a high level of public services for the neighbourhood as a whole. The authors go on to point out that, if we start with a specific and realistic set of expectations for mixed-income development, we will be in a better position to make intelligent decisions about such things as the design of neighbourhoods, the mix of populations, the level and types of public services provided, and the procedures followed in implementing programs.

In three other posts, "Thinking a little harder about urban crime", "Are you tired of the sprawl game?", and "Fixing sprawl would be a lot easier if we'd focus on the problem", I provided examples of how the fixed ideological positions we love to argue about tend to defeat our intentions of improving our lives and those of others. We imagine ourselves to be standing up and fighting for what is right, but often we are in fact substituting slogans for thought, and putting up obstacles to the improvements we seek. Big ideas are well and good up to a point, but we have plenty of them. What we need more of is critical questions and smart research. Authors Joseph, Chaskin and Webber thought of a good question to ask, and have assembled answers we can use.

Want to ask some critical questions about mixed-income neighbourhoods, and do a little smart research, of your own? The points briefly summarized in this blog entry are subjected to careful analysis and thorough documentation in:

Joseph, M., Chaskin, R., & Webber, H. (2007). The Theoretical Basis for Addressing Poverty Through Mixed-Income Development Urban Affairs Review, 42 (3), 369-409 DOI: 10.1177/1078087406294043

Joseph et al also provide lots of citations of other good research, as does:

Susan J. Popkin, Bruce Katz, Mary K. Cunningham, Karen D. Brown, Jeremy Gustafson, and Margery A. Turner. 2004. "A decade of Hope VI: Research findings and policy challenges." Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. Accessed at www.urban.org.

Posted by leo-c at 3:40 PM

June 24, 2009

ETHICS GUIDELINES: LETTING THE POWERFUL OFF THE HOOK, HANGING SUBORDINATES OUT TO DRY

I'm an ethics bureaucrat - a lowly one at the moment, a member of my departmental ethics committee. I don't like the job, but I stick with it because it keeps me in touch with a system that has to change. The better I understand the system, the better my chances of helping to bring about a change.

In fact, the system changes all the time, sometimes for the better, but mostly for the worse. The most frequent changes for the worse come, not from Canada's Tri-Council Guidelines, which I criticized in an earlier blog entry and a research paper, but from well-intentioned local ethics bureaucrats who over-interpret the guidelines. The other day an ethics application crossed my desk and I spotted a change that I believe originated locally.

Ethics application forms contain checklists of things that must be included in an application. A checklist item I've never noticed before requires that a researcher doing interviews allow the interviewee to withdraw consent for the interview, not only before it begins or while it is underway, but at any time before publication. This is a really bad idea, because it invites and authorizes people in positions of power to manipulate data.

Suppose I'm interviewing a minister or a mayor, and he lets slip a fact that constitutes a crucial link in a chain of evidence pointing to corrupt practices or bad policy. After the interview, the politician reflects on what he said and realizes to his horror that he has just unmasked himself. He calls his lawyer and to his relief, the lawyer says, "Not to worry. University ethics guidelines allow you to wipe the record clean. If the professor doesn't remove the evidence from her draft publication, you can see to it that she's censured."

In other words, the ethics guidelines allow politicians to induce researchers to produce dishonest scholarship and forces scholars to comply.

When I objected to the checklist item, I was told that it constituted a necessary protection for vulnerable people - for example clients of a community development organization in a low-income neighbourhood, or lower-level civil servants. Wrong again. Although the guideline provides far too much protection for politicians and top public servants, the legalistic protection it offers people in a subordinate position is not nearly good enough.

Researchers often get valuable help from well-informed people in subordinate positions. If they provide information that proves inconvenient to people in power, they are highly vulnerable to reprisals. Relying on people to withdraw things they've said as their only protection against reprisals doesn't really protect them very much at all, because, at the time of the interview, and even afterwards, they have no way of knowing how their remarks might be contextualized in a future study.

It should be the researcher's obligation to protect informants from reprisals, and the researcher's responsibility if she fails to do so. The onus shouldn't be on respondents to withdraw their remarks (although obviously they should have the right not to respond to questions, and to demand anonymity).

Possibly our local ethics administrators have found a paragraph in the Tri-Council Guidelines that they believe justifies their addition to the checklist, or maybe they just invented it. Either way, it's both too good and not good enough.

••••••••••••

Research ethics guidelines are coming under increasingly critical scrutiny in the United States. Some samples of a growing literature:

Philip Hamburger, The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards. Chicago: University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 95, May 2005. Available from the Social Science Research Network.

James Weinstein (2007). Institutional Review Boards and the Constitution Northwestern University Law Review, 101 (2), 493-562

The Center for Advanced Study, The Illinois White Paper: Improving the System for Protecting Human Subjects: Counteracting IRB "Mission Creep", November, 2005. Available on the web site of the University of Illinois College of Law.

Excellent ongoing discussion of American research ethics guidelines may be found at Zachary M. Schrag's Institutional Review Blog.

Posted by leo-c at 7:10 AM | Comments (4)

March 1, 2009

TRYING TO START A DIALOGUE ABOUT CASE STUDY RESEARCH METHODS

I'm off to Chicago to deliver a paper about case study research methods to the Urban Affairs Association. This is a slightly revised version of a paper I delivered in Tokyo in December. I wrote the paper after it dawned on me that many of my colleagues devote a lot of their research career to case studies, as I do, but that we rarely discuss how we do them.

However, the part of my paper that stirred up the most interest in Tokyo started as an afterthought: a discussion of how research ethics protocols militate against, not only sound methodology, but also ethics itself. You can read that discussion by going to p. 12 of the attached paper.

Despite the interest in the ethics issue, I haven't given up on the idea of a dialogue about the much-neglected topic of case study research methodology. If you'd like to get to the meat of that discussion, check out Section 2 of the paper, starting on p. 4. I'm convinced that nothing is more important to the future of social science than getting case study research methods right, and I'd be really interested to learn from my colleagues what they think about the issue. I invite comments below.

In order to develop the discussion about research methods, I provide examples of research I've done in Africa and Canada. Check out section 3, starting near the bottom of p. 6, for that material.

If you're looking for an overview of the paper, here's the abstract:

“The truth”:
Epistemological, practical and ethical considerations in case study research

Abstract

Case studies have unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigation of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. It is argued that the case study is, at best, a preliminary step, in that it may generate hypotheses that can later be tested using such “more reliable” methods as standardized questionnaires or statistical data. In the study of politics, however, that sequence of research initiatives may well work better in reverse.

When political action generates new policies, or creates new states of affairs, these changes invariably come complete with a set of justifications, with or without a claim that the justifications are founded in scientific investigation or well-established social theory. Often, a very effective way of testing such claims, and the social science backing them, is to do a case study of the policy, or the changed state of affairs, enquiring into its causes and the effects it has produced, in order to test the validity of the original justification. A series of such case studies may, in turn, generate insights that are capable of producing theoretical advances, provided the case studies employ sound methodology. This paper considers the epistemological and practical questions that must be resolved in arriving at sound case study methodology. It then turns to the problems posed by institutional ethics reviews, which, though well-intentioned, inhibit the kind of critical investigation that case study research requires, both by effectively legitimizing any efforts power-holders may make to conceal facts and obfuscate analysis, and by failing adequately to protect subordinates and ordinary people from reprisals for research findings power-holders do not like.

Posted by leo-c at 5:54 PM

December 12, 2008

"THE TRUTH": EPISTEMOLOGICAL, PRACTICAL AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN CASE STUDY RESEARCH

I'll be in Tokyo next week, delivering a paper at a conference of the International Sociological Association. Drawing on examples of research I've done, in both Kenya and North America, the paper discusses issues faced by researchers who undertake critical investigations of the way political power is wielded. It looks at the problem of how to get at "the truth", as well as some obstacles posed by inappropriate research ethics protocols. Following is a brief summary of the paper, or, if you prefer, download the paper itself.

ABSTRACT

Case study research has unjustifiably acquired a reputation for being semi-anecdotal investigation of the small details of individual circumstances, research that is incapable of generating significant empirical or theoretical advances in knowledge. Drawing on a research methods literature, and on my own experience with case study research on two continents, I argue that case studies can serve as an indispensable tool, both for testing the validity of claims made for policy initiatives and political decisions, and occasionally for the generation of theoretically significant insights.

Case studies that involve critical assessments of the use of political power pose serious challenges for researchers because power holders may be in a position to exercise control over both the opinions of a researcher’s interview subjects and some of the contents of the documentary record. The challenge to the researcher is to evaluate the significance of various interviewees’ interpretations of the state of affairs or sequence of events under study, while separating out facts from interpretations, and testing the validity of factual accounts against the representation of those same facts in the documentary record. This study makes the case that power is unlikely to be so absolute as to withstand a scrutiny that includes careful cross-checking of the representation of facts in different, independent sources.

The study then turns to the problems posed by institutional ethics reviews, which, though well-intentioned, inhibit the kind of critical investigation that case study research requires, both by effectively legitimizing any efforts power-holders may make to conceal facts and obfuscate analysis, and by failing adequately to protect subordinates and ordinary people from reprisals for research findings that offend power-holders.

Posted by leo-c at 7:41 AM

June 18, 2008

WHY THE ACADEMIC WORLD NEEDS BLOGS

I've been blogging for the better part of two years. I do it because I think blogging is a necessary vehicle for academic writing and because I'm senior enough to get away with it. My Stat Counter tells me I'm getting a sizeable, serious and steady readership, including both academics and a broad cross-section of the wider community - but I get little or no professional credit for the work.

"A necessary vehicle for academic writing?" I hear you ask incredulously. I'd like to make a case that we academics need to make better use of the internet to disseminate our findings and the thinking that grows out of them. That is only likely to happen if dissemination of academic work through such media as blogs gets academic credit. Credit, however, only comes with credibility.

So, aside from the inertia and mindless conservatism that often afflicts many institutions, including academia, why do academic blogs lack the credibility to gain academic credit? I don’t need to explain what’s wrong with blogs in general. We all know that they tend to be wordy, subjective, and filled with often ill-founded opinions – everything that academic writing isn’t supposed to be.

I’ve browsed around academic blogs and found that there are in fact quite a few of them, including some very good ones. But a lot of academic blogs, too, are carelessly crafted - not greatly different from typical blogs. Very few of them contain material I’d assign my students to read, and I certainly wouldn’t encourage them to write their essays in a style that imitates even many academic blogs, let alone blogs in general.

That does appear to be happening. I haven’t studied this question systematically, but, as a teacher and marker of papers, I’m getting the impression that there’s a growing number of students who think conversational opinion pieces are what’s expected in a research essay. This is a danger we have to take seriously, and it’s very important to teach our students the difference between a written opinion and a research-based conclusion.

So if I’m having all those problems with the blogosphere, why have I become part of it? My reasons relate, not to the strengths of blogs, but to the weaknesses of academic articles.

What’s wrong with academic articles?

I was a journalist for more than three years in my early and mid-twenties, and, although I enjoyed journalism and learned a great deal from my practice of it, I felt finally that the tyranny of the midnight deadline was getting in the way of doing thorough research. I was eager to penetrate the appearances, get beyond conventional wisdom, and didn't feel that journalism offered me a sufficient opportunity to do that. So I got myself into graduate school.

But, as I started to understand better how the academic world worked, it dawned on me that the penetration of appearances comes at a cost. As a journalist I had been used to writing articles and getting reactions. If I covered a hot story, I knew from the brickbats I got the next day that my pieces were being read. I watched as the course of events was influenced by my newspaper reports.

For me, therefore, it was really conspicuous how small a readership my meticulous research efforts were getting. When you do careful research, you learn interesting things - things that I felt, and still feel, are likely to interest a significant number of non-academics. For example:

• In Edmonton in the 1980s, I documented the techniques a developer used to get city council to agree to substantial and ultimately unjustifiable government subsidies for a major downtown development. Such techniques are widely used, and it pays participants in or observers of local politics to understand them.

• In Winnipeg, I showed how city council was misled into agreeing to a bridge project that turned out to be far more expensive than promised. The techniques used to mislead council, likewise, were typical of many similar cases.

• In a comparative study of housing and homelessness in three Canadian cities, my research assistants and I showed why a federal government program that made sense in Vancouver was ill suited to Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick, and what that, in turn, teaches us about differences among cities.

In the academic world, you can’t just publish such findings in refereed journals. First you have to decide on a journal that's likely to be interested in a particular set of research findings. Next you have to re-write the article in such a way as to place your findings in a theoretical context appropriate to your chosen journal's editorial direction. An article in a refereed journal is expected to be 15-30 pages long, and you have to get it approved by an editor and a majority of three reviewers in a process that can last a year or two - and sometimes a lot more than that.

Once your gem is published, it’s only accessible to people or institutions that can afford expensive subscriptions to journals or databases. And only very few readers are going to be willing to wade through the theory to learn the interesting facts you’ve uncovered.

In short, if we were to design an academic publication system specifically for the purpose of making it as inaccessible as possible, we could hardly improve on the existing system. As a result, our assiduously researched findings rarely get to a general readership. Even university students are hard to motivate to read such materials. The reality of academic life is that we spend much of our lives asking interesting questions, and finding interesting answers to them, but too often they remain our secrets, buried out of sight in long articles almost no one reads.

I am not advocating a reform of the system of refereed publication. With all its shortcomings, it sets standards for quality research and provides a system of scrutiny that does a pretty good job of ensuring that some reasonable quality standards are met. But the internet presents us with an opportunity to do a much better job of circulating our writing much more widely, both amongst ourselves and into the wider community. These are the considerations that have governed my blog. Here's how I proceed:

An academic blog: Content and examples

My approach to blogging involves revisiting research gems, both mine and other peoples’, lifting them out of their academic context one by one and writing a short article about each one. The articles are a bit more informal than academic articles, but they preserve an academic tone and they’re not simply opinion pieces. I make the articles as readable as I can without oversimplifying and try to write interesting headlines for them.

I refrain from using the blog to express my opinions, unless those opinions are research-based. During the fall, winter and spring I get well in excess of a thousand page views a month, and the number of page views has been on a pretty steady upward climb. That suggests a readership far in excess of what academic writing usually gets.

More interesting to me than number of hits is return visits and the length of stays. I get return visits daily, and the percentage of visitors who stay more than five minutes has climbed steadily, during the most active months, from around 15 per cent to well over 25 per cent. The articles are written so that most of them could be read in five minutes or so. That suggests that my research is getting something that far too much academic research doesn’t get, a readership.

What I use the blogs for

• Disseminating research findings relevant to current issues

Example: Peak oil, suburbia and political tipping points

A critical examination of the thesis, in a recent book by James Howard Kunstler, that the rising price of oil will force rapid and thoroughgoing social change, as well as changes in the way we build our cities.

• Communicating research ideas and getting feedback

Example: How is global political action organized? A list for your consideration

An explanation of a new research project I’m working on which looks at globally networked organizations with political and social objectives as an emerging political arena that is a product of globalization. My article contained a preliminary list of such organizations. I got some interesting feedback, including comments on my list and suggestions for additions to it. It was a way of tapping into a network of colleagues who had similar interests and sharing ideas for a new research project.

• Addressing research technique issues

Example: Do ethics boards and committees pose a threat to critical research?

This article communicated my concern that the medical model on which research ethics rules are primarily based is unsuitable to critical research on politics, in two ways. It raises ethics concerns that are not real, and ignores other ethical concerns that are.

• Dissemination to the wider community

Example: Kissing frogs: Building coalitions for change in Canadian cities

This entry is addressed to my friends in Winnipeg and elsewhere who are frustrated with the way our city and others are run, but don’t know how go about trying to change it. The “kissing frogs” metaphor refers to the fact that we have to find common ground with people we disagree with if we want to build the necessary support for political change.

• Student assignments

Anyone who has taught university for any length of time knows that, if we assign a journal article to our students, a lot of them will not read it, especially if they are in first or second year. A good teaching tool at that level is an article a few pages long that raises an interesting question, shows the students how academic research can be used to answer it, and gets straight to the point doing that. Once students see the value of this kind of writing, they’ll be ready to tackle the more tedious challenge of a conventional academic article, but first we have to show them. The kinds of articles I write for my blog try to fill that bill.

In short, blogs offer both a format, and the low-cost technical means, to allow us to circulate our best research findings much more widely. Potentially this can maximize the value of the work we do, provide an opportunity to serve the wider community, and help to legitimate university research in the eyes of an often skeptical community and political leadership.

Universities should encourage their research faculty to put their findings on the internet. Ideally, this would be accomplished by crediting blogs and similar vehicles as legitimate academic publications, not on a par with refereed articles or peer-reviewed books, but roughly equivalent to think-tank articles or consulting work. This is likely to happen only if we import academic standards of quality into the blog format. Academic blogs that are rambling, conversational and poorly crafted are not a credit to the university, and are unlikely ever to capture career credits.

Posted by leo-c at 9:11 AM | Comments (4)

June 17, 2008

WANT TO KNOW HOW MEANINGLESS WEB PAGE HIT RATES CAN BE?

When we bloggers and other web site managers want to demonstrate the importance of our efforts, we usually cite the page views, or hit rates, that our page view counters return to us. I do it myself, but I always follow up by citing return visits to my blog and average length of stays. You can get a quick insight into what's wrong with hit rates by looking at a sample of the returns I get from my Stat Counter for two of my blog entries.

The Stat Counter tells me that my most popular blog entry is one entitled "What is the impact of globalization upon politics?" But when I click on "recent visitor activity" for that page, here's a fair sample of what I find.

Take a look at the line entitled "Visit length" for each entry - the length of time that each visitor stays. It's mostly goose eggs. It turns out a lot of people do internet searches containing the words "impact", "globalization" and "politics". They hit my page, but most of them don't stay to find out what I have to say.

A less popular page is entitled "Is Barack Obama the first 21st Century orator?" Here's a fair sample of "recent visitor activity" for that one:

Compare "Visit length" for that entry with the other one. See my point?

Moral of the story: Take hit rate or page view claims with a grain of salt.

Posted by leo-c at 9:41 AM

March 26, 2008

WHEN WE INTERVIEW RESEARCH SUBJECTS, HOW DO WE KNOW WE'RE GETTING THE TRUTH?

I was having a drink with a couple of colleagues, who, like me, are engaged in case study research, and the conversation turned to interviews. One of my colleagues mentioned some questionable propositions that had been put to him in one of those interviews. "I don't believe that," he said, "but if that's what they say, what are you going to do?"

I knew the answer to the question: triangulation. But it took some excavation of my own research experience to remember how I had arrived at that answer. The idea of triangulation never actually occurred to me. It presented itself, in the form of a puzzle I encountered as a graduate student immersing myself in my first primary research project, a study of Kenya's Million-Acre Settlement Scheme, the starting point for a book I later published under the title Land and Class in Kenya.

The Million-Acre Scheme was a giant development project, in which a large proportion of land previously occupied by European settlers was subdivided and conveyed to African smallholders. As I cooled my heels in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, waiting for research clearance from the Kenya government, I read everything I could get my hands on about Kenya's recent history, its agriculture and rural society, in order to gain an understanding of the research I was embarking upon.

I gathered from my reading that, although there were two types of settlement schemes, high-density and low-density, the differences between them were relatively minor. All of them, I understood from the readings, had been settled by Africans in need of land. The high-density schemes had been less successful than the low-density, but - beyond the fact that low-density settlers made a down-payment on their land, while high-density settlers did not - the reasons were not altogether clear. A colonial agriculturalist, writing about African agriculture, explained them in terms of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. Some Africans, in his opinion, were simply harder-working and more prudent than others.

Once I got my research clearance, I was in a position to do my own work on the settlement scheme. The heart of my planned research was two sets of interviews with large random samples of the farmers in one high-density and one low-density settlement scheme. As I began to talk to people, it quickly became evident that the differences between the two schemes, and the people who got the land, were dramatic. A preponderance of the low-density settlers were upwardly mobile: absentee landlords in many cases and often owners of multiple pieces of land or businesses in different parts of the country.

The high-density settlers, by contrast, were mostly poor. All settlers, high and low-density, were required to pay for their land in instalments, and although this clearly posed no problems for the low-density settlers, many of their high-density counterparts were scratching a living from manifestly inferior soil, and struggling, or failing, to meet the payments. In short, the literature said one thing and the farmers were telling me something very different. What to do?

My puzzlement drove me to the Kenya National Archives in search of documentary evidence of who these two types of settlers were and how they had come to the land they occupied. The archives helped me to solve the puzzle. The solution is complicated, but, long story short, in doing my two sets of interviews, I had stumbled upon Kenya's rural class system, and found the key to a fascinating and disturbing story of colonial duplicity and manipulation. My discovery, and the follow-up work in the archives, transformed my study from a development politics case into a study of the evolution of Kenya's agrarian class system through the colonial and post-colonial eras.

As you might guess, the farmers and the archives told different aspects of the same story. My archival sources confirmed the observations I made on the ground. The history I was able to read out of them confirmed that the two types of settlement schemes did indeed serve two different social classes and explained how that came to be. In short, the archives and the interview findings agreed that the secondary sources from which I gained my initial impressions were wrong.

My research taught me a great deal about Kenya's history and its agrarian class system. It also focused my mind, once and for all, on the fact that, if you can find three independent sources for the same story, you have a very good chance of working out who's got the story right. That was my first experience with triangulation, which, ever since then, has become my modus operandi. It has served me well. In this blog, I relate two cases, that of the Eaton Centre in Edmonton and the Norwood Bridge in Winnipeg, where triangulation helped me get to the bottom of stories in which facts were being shaded or misrepresented.

In the Kenya case, my interviewees had the story right. More frequently, it is interviews that are least likely to be a reliable source of factual information. As a rule, I treat interviews as an invaluable source of background and context, because no one understands a situation better than those who have lived through it.

However, in assembling the facts - times, places, precise questions at issue - I always bear in mind that the facts cited in interviews are likely to be shaded by the frailties of human memory and the reality that we are all prone to remembering things as we wish they were, not necessarily as they are. (I think I remember this story as it actually was!)

Accordingly, I look for confirmation in documents or secondary sources of any facts I glean from interviews, and teach my research assistants to do the same. Of course, neither documents nor secondary sources are infallible. The best way to get near the truth is to look to all three types of sources for mutual confirmation, and never to settle for less than two.

Therefore, my answer to my colleague, who was wondering what to do if you suspect your interviewees aren't telling the truth is: Triangulate. Always suspect your sources, and always look to other, independent sources for confirmation or contradiction. This becomes particularly important when your interviewees are power holders who, as Jerry Krase points out in a comment below, may control some of the "independent" sources you are using to check on their stories.

It is a reality of political research that it often impinges on power holders, who invariably have definite ideas about what they want you to say in your report of their activities. The realities of power pose a host of problems for researchers, and for the ethics of politics research, as I point out in another blog entry.

But come what may, it's a rare half-truth or lie that survives a determined search for independent sources.

•••••••••••••••••

Want to find out more? Various parts of my Kenya story are documented in detail in:

Christopher Leo, Land and Class in Kenya. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984.

Christopher Leo, Land and Class in Kenya (Southern African Edition). Harare, Zimbabwe: Nehanda 1989.

Christopher Leo, "Failure of the 'Progressive Farmer' in Kenya's Million-Acre Settlement Scheme". Journal of Modern African Studies 16 (4) 1978, 619-38.

Christopher Leo, "Who Benefited from the Million-Acre Scheme? Toward a Class Analysis of Kenya's Transition to Independence." Canadian Journal of African Studies. 15 (2) 1981, 201-22.

Here are some useful sources on research methodology, including interviews:

Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003.

Robert E. Stake, The Art of Case Study Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995.

Raymond L. Gorden, Interviewing: Strategy, Techniques, and Tactics (Fourth Edition). Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1987.

Another source, pitched especially to ethnographic research, is:

John and Lyn H Lofland, Analysing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis (Third Edition). London: Wadsworth, 1995.

Posted by leo-c at 10:49 AM | Comments (1)

January 27, 2008

DO WE INFANTILIZE OUR STUDENTS? GIVING OUR RESEARCH ASSISTANTS MORE AND GETTING MORE FROM THEM

I was a professional journalist when I was 22 years old. Some of us probably have great-grandparents who were married, had children and were managing a farm before they were 20 years old.

Today, students bound for academic careers are very likely not to do any original research as undergraduates and then, in graduate school, may spend years gathering data for their supervisors' research before they undertake their own project. Some time ago, it occurred to me to ask myself whether my students might not benefit from taking on a bigger challenge.

Since then, I've evolved methods that, as far as I know, are unconventional, but that I find help my students, both graduate and undergraduate to maximize the contribution they make to our research, while serving as an excellent teaching tool, and boosting their career prospects.

My method involves subdividing my research into free-standing sub-projects, assigning each student one or more sub-projects, and instructing them to do the whole project, from literature review, through document collection and interviews, to the production of a final draft. I tell them that I expect them to produce a draft that is as close to a publishable article as they can make it. In a number of cases, this procedure has enabled me to send one of my senior undergraduates to graduate school with a cv that already includes a co-authored academic publication.

In my experience, however, it's not possible to achieve this result simply by delegating the research and writing. Rather, I find it necessary to track their work through the entire process and offer input throughout. In the process, my research work becomes a teaching job as well, and I experience the satisfaction of passing my research skills on to someone else.

The details of how I work with any given research assistant varies with the particular project, the employee and the time-frame. The most typical case is one in which I am working with two to four students while they spend 12 to 14 summer weeks working full-time on one of my projects each. Following is the typical sequence of events in such a summer project.

ORIENTATION

On their first day of work I invite my assistants to a breakfast meeting in the Faculty and Staff Club at our university and spend the morning with them, orienting them to every aspect of their research job, and setting up a work schedule for them. Each student is assigned a project, with a set of research questions and an analytical framework within which to pursue them.

WEEKLY E-MAILS

I require them, by 5 pm every Friday, to submit an e-mail describing what they’ve accomplished in the previous week. I also require them to do electronic transcripts of all their interviews, and send those to me. I read through all that material on Sunday and respond to their e-mails and interview transcripts with suggestions and corrections.

ROUNDTABLE

At about the end of Week Four, I book a room for a roundtable session, in which each of the research assistants describes what she has been doing and raises any problems encountered. We talk it over.

SEMINAR

At around Week Eight, I schedule a seminar session, at which each assistant is required to do a presentation of his main findings as well as a tentative enumeration of the likely conclusions of the research. Each presentation is followed by a critical discussion. After the session, the assistants are expected to go to work on their drafts.

ONE-ON-ONE MEETING

Two weeks before the deadline I schedule one-on-one meetings with each of the assistants, to hear from them how they’re doing with their drafts and to offer suggestions.

BENEFITS

Given the amount of my work that goes into the students’ research, as well as the amount, described below, in the writing, I doubt that I put any less work into a publishable paper the way I do it than I would if I simply asked the students to collect data and then used it to do my writing. If anything, my approach may be more labour-intensive.

But there is an important educational benefit for the student in being led, step by step, through the entire process of professional research and writing. The benefit to my research comes from the fact that nothing is more motivating than knowing that one has responsibility for a final product. I believe my approach makes my employees think harder, feel more invested in their work and work harder than they would if their function were limited to data collection.

PRODUCTION OF THE FINAL DRAFT

What I get at deadline time varies in quality. Generally, the papers are a lot better than the work the students would produce in an honours or graduate seminar, but they are usually not anywhere nearly ready for publication. I start by reading through the papers I’ve received, making note of the findings and then considering what there is in the findings that is likely to attract the interest of a journal.

I then consider the various possible venues for publication. As anyone with experience in academic publication knows, each journal has an at least partly unspoken set of expectations regarding the kinds of articles that will be considered for publication. Part of my job is to match findings with possible theoretical frameworks and put both of those elements together with journal expectations.

Next, I go through the publishable material with a fine-toothed comb, to fix up any mistakes, check facts, do any needed additional research, and restructure the organization and emphasis of the paper so that the elements of the paper work together to produce an argument of the kind that my chosen journal will consider interesting. In the best case, the end result is a genuine co-authorship, an article that starts from ideas I've put forward, but that, when it is complete, embodies the best research and the best ideas we jointly are capable of producing.

Some people are better at research and writing than others, but my experience suggests that, if you can start a Ph.D. thesis at age 26, you can take on a fully-fledged research challenge at age 20 or 21. We need to trust our students more and expect more of them.

Posted by leo-c at 9:08 AM | Comments (1)

December 18, 2007

MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE, RESCALING, AND GLOBALIZATION: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE

In a globalizing world, we have to reconsider, not only the way we govern our communities, but also how their governance interacts with the governance of regions and nations, as well as global governance.

By chance or otherwise, I became interested in this topic - and researched and wrote about it - quite awhile before anyone thought of such felicitous terms as rescaling or multi-level governance. As a result a lot of useful data are buried away in publications today's researchers are unlikely to identify as relevant sources. Therefore, I offer the following bibliographic note, listing the publications in question, together with a brief note for each, explaining its relevance to rescaling, multi-level governance, or the evolving place of cities in a globalizing world. Some of these articles were published as journal articles, others as book chapters, but all are based on original research.

This annotated bibliography does not include my recent publications, such as “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy”, which is in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, 39:3 (September 2006) 481–506. In that article, and others recently published or in press, it is clear that the topic has something to do with rescaling.

MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE (RESCALING)

Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton. "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.

Made the case that the government of Canada, already in the 1980s, was finding ways of developing different federal government programs for different cities, a key characteristic of multi-level governance. The article explores the political calculations that motivate the federal government to provide unique programs for each city, instead of continuing its long-standing practice of making the same programs available to all cities.

Christopher Leo. "The State in the City: A Political Economy Perspective on Growth and Decay." In James Lightbody, ed. Canadian Metropolitics. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1995, ch 2.

As recently as the mid-1990s, the study of Canadian city politics was synonymous with the study of local government. Much of that literature left readers with the impression that the federal government had little to do with cities. This article makes the case that the way cities have grown has been absolutely central to the evolution of our national life, and that the national government has played a central role in shaping city growth.

Christopher Leo. "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

This article finds that the strong national state presence in urban politics that is evident in continental Europe is associated, on one hand, with a political environment that tends to be unreceptive to grass-roots participation in urban development decisions and, on the other, with more state control and less clout for developers in urban development decisions. In the United States, it finds the opposite situation: a more receptive environment for grass-roots participation and developers who are better-placed to exert direct influence upon urban development. In Britain and Canada, the study finds a more complex, "mid-Atlantic" state of affairs.

Christopher Leo. “Regional Growth Management Regime: the Case of Portland, Oregon.” Journal of Urban Affairs 20 (4), 1998, 363-394.

Much of the study of urban regimes sees urban politics as a purely local matter. This article shows that the regime in Portland that was responsible for the city's growth management included interest groups with a state-wide base of support as well as the government of Oregon. In other words, local regimes may well include elements from outside the locality. It might be useful to think of this phenomenon as rescaling from below.

CITIES AND GLOBALIZATION

Christopher Leo. “The Urban Economy and the Power of the Local State: The Politics of Planning in Edmonton and Vancouver." In Frances Frisken, ed, The Changing Canadian Metropolis: Contemporary Perspectives, vol 2. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, 1994, 657-98.

A comparison of land use planning controls in Vancouver with those in Edmonton, making the case that stricter controls are easier to achieve in cities that have more clout in the global economy.

Christopher Leo. "City Politics in an Era of Globalization." In Mickey Lauria, ed. Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory: Regulating Local Government in a Global Economy. Sage, 1997, 77-98.

On the basis of a European-North American comparison, this article makes the case that global economic, technological and administrative pressures work in the direction of making cities around the world more similar to each other, but that a careful cross-national comparison of political practices reveals ongoing tendencies toward the preservation of national differences. In a similar vein, Paul Doremus and colleagues argue that national corporate cultures, and the regulatory apparatus that supports them, are highly resistant to global economic pressures for homogenization. This argument is convincingly set out in Paul N. Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis W. Pauly, and Simon Reich, The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

RECENT WORK

Following is a list of some more recent articles on this topic that I wrote with help from my friends:

Christopher Leo. 2006. Deep federalism: Respecting community difference in national policy. Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3): 481-506.

Christopher Leo and Martine August. 2006. National policy and community initiative: Mismanaging homelessness in a slow growth city. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15, no. 1, (supplement).

Christopher Leo and Mike Pyl. 2007. Multi-level governance: Getting the job done and respecting community difference – Three Winnipeg cases. Canadian Political Science Review 1 (2). Accessible at: http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/issue/view/2/showToc.

Christopher Leo and Todd Andres. 2008. Deep federalism through local initiative: Unbundling sovereignty in Winnipeg. Canadian Journal of Political Science 41 (1) 2008, pp. 93-117.

Christopher Leo and Jeremy Enns. 2007. Multi-level governance and ideological rigidity: The failure of deep federalism. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.

Christopher Leo with Martine August, Mike Pyl and Matthew D. Rogers. Multi-level governance without municipal government. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.

Christopher Leo and Martine August. 2007. The multi-level governance of immigration and settlement: A Winnipeg case study. As yet unpublished. Click here to see a draft.

Posted by leo-c at 7:43 PM

October 21, 2007

HOW IS GLOBAL POLITICAL ACTION ORGANIZED? A LIST FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

In the age of globalization, there are two distinct ways of giving voice to, and putting a push behind, your political views. One is through the time-honoured rules of national politics - elections, polls, and petitions to government. Many of us have become disillusioned with that way of doing politics, at least in part because corporations don't play by those rules unless it suits their convenience.

Thanks to a plethora of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, and to the ease of communication in the 21st Century, corporations, or anyone that wields serious financial power, can circumvent the old rules, by moving their activities or their money to countries more favourably inclined toward them. However, as I've argued in previous posts, the rest of us can play the same game.

We've watched as the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) failed in the face of massive demonstrations. In Europe, after storms of angry public reaction, Shell Oil backed away from plans to sink an oil storage facility into the sea and Monsanto re-thought its venture into genetically modified seeds. Noreena Hertz (cited at the end of an earlier entry) sees this kind of consumer power as a major weapon for ordinary people in countering the excesses of globally mobile corporate and financial power. I have my doubts.

The past experiences of labour and other social movements suggests that politics is not quite that easy. It seems likely that the main long-term benefit of such highly public events as the anti-MAI demonstrations will be to shape public opinion - and not necessarily always in favour of protesters. Genuine, lasting improvement in stewardship of the environment, protection of human rights, improvement of labour standards and reduction of poverty will probably require a great deal of research, networking, education, and long-term commitment.

For my money, the most likely vehicles for such political action are globally networked non-government organizations (NGOs), labour organizations, cities and communities, each pursuing a well-defined set of issues, and working out carefully-considered political strategies. Their success or failure will will turn on the quality of their research, the shrewdness of their strategies, and their ability to mobilize broad public support.

Those of us who study politics have generally looked at the work of these NGOs in a fragmented way, by issue area - environmental groups, human rights organizations, and the like - or as factors in the politics of particular countries. We need to start thinking of them collectively as components of what Ulrich Beck (cited at the end of an earlier entry) calls the second modernity, as a political force in their own right, one that operates in whole or in large part outside the arena of the nation-state.

I don't know how many such organizations there are, but I've started to make a collection of the web sites of any I can think of or find out about for a course I'm teaching next term. The list is reproduced below, and this blog entry is open to comments. In the first couple of weeks, the response, both in the comments section, and by e-mail to me, has been substantial and encouraging, and has helped me to improve the list. Warm thanks to everyone who took the trouble to write.

ENVIRONMENT

David Suzuki Foundation
Climate Action Network
Diversitas
Forests without Borders
Ocean Conservancy
Natural Resources Defense Council
Slow Food International
Gene Campaign
Global Commons Institute
Basel Action Network (BAN)
Rainforest Action Network
Rainforest Rescue
World Wide Fund for Nature (World Wildlife Fund)
Care for the Wild
ChevronToxico: Campaign to hold Chevron Texaco accountable for toxic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon/
Sierra Club
Wildlife Direct
Navdanya
Équiterre
Greenpeace
Sea Shepherd Society
The Nature Conservancy
Global Response
Worldwatch Institute
Friends of the Earth
IUCN (World Conservation Union)
ETC (Research and political action on biotechnology and nanotechnology issues)
Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society

POVERTY

Oxfam
Medecins sans frontieres (Apologies to my Francophone readers for the absence of accents. Apparently the World Wide Web objects to them, at least in lower case.)
Farm Radio International
Mennonite Central Committee
American Jewish World Service
Christian Aid
Help Lesotho
Partners in Health
Free the Children
BRAC: Alleviation of Poverty and Empowerment of the Poor
Care Canada (Care has different web sites for different countries that, curiously, aren't linked together. For example Care USA, which represents itself as being beyond nationality; Care UK, and Care International Deutschland.)
Grameen Foundation
CGAP: Advancing Financial Access for the World's Poor
Micro-credit Summit Campaign
Results
Mennonite Economic Development Associates
Central Asia Institute
Turquoise Mountain
Development and Peace
Inter Pares
World Vision
Save the Children
Concern Worldwide (US)
American Refugee Committee
Habitat for Humanity
Practical Action

WOMEN'S ISSUES

Women for Women
DAWN
SAFER: Social Aid for the Elimination of Rape
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-International
Central Asia Institute

LABOUR ISSUES

Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights
Workers Uniting
International Trade Union Confederation
Global Unions
Alta Gracia: A global company that supports fair wages and working conditions
LabourStart
Education International
Building and Wood Workers' International
International Federation of Journalists
International Metalworkers' Federation
International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers' Federation
International Transport Workers' Federation
IUF (Food, farm and hotel workers)
Public Services International
Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD
UNI (Global union for skills and services)
Workers' Rights Consortium
National Labor Committee
Clean Clothes Campaign

HUMAN RIGHTS

International Crisis Group
Amnesty International
Reporters Without Borders
Under the Same Sun: Support for people with albinism
Human Rights Watch
Inuit Circumpolar Council
International Lesbian and Gay Association
ECPAT International (Action against child sexual exploitation)
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
Disability Rights Promotion International
Project Ploughshares
Anti-Slavery International

HEALTH

Stephen Lewis Foundation: Turning the Tide of AIDS in Africa

GOOD GOVERNMENT/GOVERNANCE

Open Society Institute
Avaaz
City Mayors
Oilwatch
CorpWatch
Transparency International
International Union of Local Authorities

COMMUNITY ACTION

New Rules Project
The Urban Conservancy
Spot.Us: Community-based journalism
E-Democracy
Community Problem Solving
Working Smarter in Community Development
The Citizens' Handbook

CONSUMER ADVOCACY

NCRC Global Fair Banking Initiative
Consumer Action

FREE/FAIR TRADE

Attac
The Fairtrade Foundation
International Network for Cultural Diversity
Bristol Fairtrade Network
Integrate This!
WTO Public Forum 2007

INTEGRATIVE (Dealing with a range of issues)

Change.org
Women for Women
La Via Campesina
Greenpeace Energy Revolution Now
Global Witness
Global Development Research Centre
Policy Innovations
World Social Forum
Aga Khan Development Network
Slow Food International
American Friends Service Committee
Future Generations Canada

•••••••••••••••••••••••
Notes: The main criterion for inclusion in the list is that the organization pursue social or political (as opposed to corporate or personal) objectives as a primary focus. A second criterion is that the objectives in question must include a quest for social or political change. (For example, food banks or organizations engaging in disaster relief - however worthy - would not qualify for the list unless their activities included attempts to address the causes of the distress they worked to relieve.) Inclusion in the list doesn't imply my endorsement. The list obviously represents a variety of points on the political spectrum, and part of its potential instructional value is that it can open discussion regarding these differences.

My list includes some faith-based NGOs, and I may have missed some of these. I would like to include any organization whose primary focus is social or political, rather than religious, regardless of whether it is backed by a religious organization. For example, I've included the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee, as well as Development and Peace - which is sponsored by the Canadian Catholic Church - because I know they focus on social and political issues in a manner that is not necessarily tied in with missionary work or other purely religious pursuits. I'm open to advice on other such organizations.

A variety of unsavoury groups, such as racist organizations, also pursue social and political change. I'm not including them in a list that, for the moment, is intended primarily for instructional purposes, but, from an analytical perspective, they need to be considered.

Posted by leo-c at 3:52 PM | Comments (8)

August 13, 2007

DO ETHICS BOARDS AND COMMITTEES POSE A THREAT TO CRITICAL RESEARCH?

In more than 35 years of academic research I've sought information from thousands of people, and done hundreds of interviews. During that time, ethical concerns, regarding both the substance of my research and my dealings with informants and respondents, have always been top-of-mind. The concerns I raise here are not with research ethics as such, but with bureaucracies that have gone awry in well-intentioned but misguided efforts to supervise research in politics and public policy.

In my experience - which antedates ethics bureaucracies by many years - two ethical concerns have stood out. One is my obligation to examine the way power is wielded, and look for ways of addressing shortcomings. For example, I've recently directed six case studies in three Canadian cities to look into how the federal government can fit national policies to the requirements of distinct communities. Some years ago, in studies of urban development in Edmonton and Winnipeg, I identified bad planning practices and looked for the administrative, political and socio-economic causes. All of this is main-line politics and policy research, typical of that being carried out by many of my colleagues.

Generally, I've found the causes of problems I identify in the course of my research to be systemic rather than personal, and I've never found it particularly useful to look for individuals to blame, but my findings do not always reflect well on individual power-holders. However, the primary ethical concern here is not their sensitivities. It is the public interest in good policy. It's a bedrock democratic principle that people in positions of power must be accountable for their actions.

Power-holders sometimes deal harshly with their critics, but that's a risk academic researchers must run, and our risk is limited by the institution of tenure - a guarantee that we may report our findings truthfully without fear of losing our academic appointments. The social purpose of tenure, therefore, is to ensure that the truth can be told despite the possibility of hostile reactions. Few things are more important to a democratic society than access to truthful accounts of how power is wielded. It follows that the ethical obligation of academics is to report truthfully and fearlessly. If we don't do that, there isn't a scintilla of justification for tenure.

My research, however, has not limited me to dealings with people in power. Over the years, I have acquired a great deal of valuable data from middle- or lower-level public servants, as well as hundreds of ordinary people. Here my primary ethical concern has been the protection of my informants from any possibility of reprisals. I've always tried my best to ensure that nothing in my publications identifies ordinary individuals who might be subject to reprisals.

Enter the ethics bureaucracies. In Canada, their job is to implement the Tri-Council Policy, so-called because the Canadian system of research ethics is based on a document jointly endorsed by the three funding agencies responsible for social science and humanities, natural science, and medical science research. There is a national supervisory apparatus, but the actual enforcement of the guidelines upon individual researchers is in the hands of departmental and university-wide ethics committees in each university. Individual researchers are required to file an explanation of their research project and tick off a set of assurances regarding their treatment of "research subjects". I'll restrict my comments to the Canadian system, though most, if not all, would apply to similar systems in other countries.

I'm in favour of the formulation of a set of ethics guidelines and a system of sanctions backing them. My concern is with the content of the Tri-Council guidelines, which actually militate against a social science researcher's obligation to look critically at the exercise of power, and, at the same time, deal inadequately with the potential plight of informants who might be subject to reprisals from their superiors. I'm also concerned about the way inappropriate scientific practises are introduced by ethics committees in individual universities, as they exercise their power to interpret the guidelines. I'll deal with each of these concerns separately.

THE RESEARCHER'S OBLIGATION TO ENGAGE IN CRITICAL SCRUTINY

When the Tri-Council guidelines were first introduced, researchers were not required to fill out an ethics application if their topic was limited to an examination of policy, how it works, and how it's implemented. Clearance became necessary only if the researcher initiated a line of enquiry that touched personal matters. I recently re-read the Tri-Council guidelines, and they now appear to require a researcher to file an application for investigation of policy, as well as enquiry into people's personal lives.

Many researchers concerned with politics and policy stay in regular touch with politicians and public servants and, in the process, ask them questions the answers to which may well be used in future publications. That's an essential part of the research process because regular contact with well-informed people makes it possible for researchers to stay abreast of events and identify important issues as they arise.

So when does a query become a research question and a conversation an interview that requires ethics review? The guidelines are little help in answering that question, but, if we take them literally, they would appear to have taken from university researchers a right that every ordinary citizen enjoys, namely that of picking up the phone and talking to a politician or public servant without applying for bureaucratic permission to do so. (See further comment on this point.)

In practice, of course, no one knows whether I'm talking to a politician, and no one cares. The problem is not that I will in fact be prevented from doing so. Rather it is that the existence of such severe strictures on ordinary enquiries sends a message to both researchers and public servants that the process of what was once free inquiry is now subject to bureaucratic control. Researchers are more likely to stick to "safe" topics, and public servants will feel emboldened to try to shut down criticism.

I have personally experienced a case in which a Manitoba public servant thought that the process of ethics review gave her the right to censor a manuscript I was in the process of preparing. I'm a senior professor with tenure and my response was a flat refusal, but were I less experienced, more junior, possibly still vying for tenure, who knows what my reaction might have been?

Ethics guidelines should not be written in such a way as to inhibit enquiry. Rather, they should underline a university researcher's right and obligation to engage in vigourous enquiry and factual, careful, but fearless critique. Rather than forcing researchers to apply for permission to do their work, it would make a great deal more sense to spell out clearly what they must and must not do, and put in place an enforcement mechanism with teeth. Hold us accountable, and make us pay for our mistakes if we fail, but don't stand over us like over-anxious parents and try to control our every move.

FAILURE TO PROTECT SUBORDINATES FROM REPRISALS

Top public servants and politicians are well accustomed to daily cut-and-thrust with newspaper reporters and political and bureaucratic rivals. It's obvious that they understand their rights and know how to protect themselves, yet ethics guidelines require researchers to treat both power-holders and subordinates as if they were vulnerable children. Ethics applications require the researcher to promise to begin all interviews with a reminder to the interviewee that she need not answer questions and may terminate the interview at any time.

In the best of circumstances, such procedures insult the intelligence of power-holders and make the researchers look like fools. But the most serious shortcoming of these regulations is that they make no distinction between superiors and subordinates. Just as researchers should be entirely free to speak to top public servants and politicians without restrictions, as any citizen is, so should they proceed under a strong mandate to protect subordinate informants from reprisals. It is not enough, and not even helpful, to go through the ritual of telling public servants what even the lowest-ranking of them knows perfectly well, namely that they cannot be compelled to answer questions.

Their problem is that they can't be certain which of their statements might prove damaging to them without knowing the details of how those statements will be contextualized in a future publication. The onus of protecting subordinates from reprisals belongs, not to the subordinate, but to the researcher. If an employee in a vulnerable position helps me to get at the truth, it ought to be my obligation, not his, to ensure that my publication doesn't expose him to reprisals. The Tri-Council guidelines appear to have been written in blissful ignorance of the distinction between superiors and subordinates in government offices.

BAD SCIENCE

I have, from time to time, served as an ethics bureaucrat myself. As a sometime member of the Politics Ethics Committee at my university, and a former member of a university-wide ethics committee, I've seen quite a few ethics applications, and those applications have made it clear to me that the strictures placed upon researchers are growing far beyond those in the Tri-Council guidelines, through self-censorship, as applicants impose limits upon themselves in an effort to forestall any possible future repercussions. In the process, concern with proper procedures of scientific investigation are taking a back seat. In particular, I have two concerns about items that I've seen repeatedly in ethics applications.

The first item is a promise to allow respondents to look at drafts of the research and to take their comments on board before doing a final draft. This is quite simply bad science. Scientific findings should be the truth, not a compromise document that offends no one. To be sure, it's reasonable to let people who have helped us with our research take a look at our findings, and correct any factual errors that may have slipped in. But it remains the researcher's responsibility to distinguish between verifiable correction of facts and "cleaning up the record" to make someone look better.

If we're genuinely concerned with scholarly ethics, ethics applications should contain no reference to anyone besides the researcher having a say in the final draft. It's university researchers who enjoy the protection of tenure, and it is they, and they alone, who should bear the responsibility that goes with it. Like Harry Truman, we ought to have a sign on our desk that says, "The buck stops here."

My second concern is an item that appears routinely in applications, though I've seen no reference to it in the Tri-Council guidelines: A promise to destroy data after five years. This is another instance of bad science. A fundamental of the scientific process is verifiability and falsifiability of data. Data that have been destroyed can neither be verified nor falsified.

Records that contain personal information which can be linked to individuals who are not in the public arena should either not be kept in the first place, even for a month, let alone five years, or be kept under lock and key. If records are properly kept, there can be no valid reason for destroying them. On the contrary, they must be kept, so that future researchers will be able to verify them independently of the original data-gatherers.

Nothing is more important to social science research than ethics, but the guidelines that govern Canadian politics and public policy research inadvertently do more to undermine research ethics than to support them.

The Northwestern University Law Review has devoted a special issue (101 [2]) to research ethics and institutional review.

For some other perspectives, go to Zachary M. Schrag's Institutional Review Blog.

I have put this topic up for discussion on the H-Urban e-mail list, under the subject line, "Does ethics review pose a threat to critical research?". For my post and responses to it, go to the H-Urban archive, and view the archives for September 2007.

For a quick overview of what's happening in the United States (a possible foretaste of what's in store for us) take a look at a recent New York Times article.

Posted by leo-c at 11:00 AM

July 23, 2007

WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION ON POLITICS?

What's the impact of globalization on politics? Many commentators pronounce on this complex and multi-faceted topic with great confidence, but an overview of the literature suggests that we are still struggling to understand it. An obvious characteristic of globalization is that money, goods and manufacturing have become far more mobile than they once were, with the result that corporations are freer than ever to move, and finance to invest, wherever they choose.

Therefore, national governments are less able to control the activities of mobile businesses than in the past, while corporations and finance are in a better position to dictate to national governments. They do this by relocating their activities to - and buying the currencies of - states whose policies they approve and abandoning, or threatening to abandon, the rest.

So what are the political implications of this fundamental shift in the balance of power between international business and governments? Susan Strange argues that the state is in retreat. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri invoke a very different conceptual framework to conclude, somewhat similarly, that sovereignty is migrating away from the state. Noreena Hertz and George Monbiot warn of the commanding power of corporations over the state, but Paul Doremus and his colleagues emphasize the continuing importance of the state and political culture. (See citations below.)

Yet another perspective comes from Thomas L. Friedman, who, in the lucid, discursive, but conceptually loose style characteristic of excellent journalism, sees the politics of globalization as consisting of a tension between the struggle for prosperity - which requires an embrace of globalization - and the struggle to preserve community values. Taken together, all of these arguments present us with both direct contradictions between various commentators and important differences among ideological allies.

Globalization is also associated, a bit more loosely, with the "hollowing-out of the state", invoked by Bob Jessop and many imitators and acolytes. In this view of political change, the national state is not so much being subordinated or sidelined as acting on its own, in response to complex stimuli, to reduce the scope of its control over society through privatization, contracting out of government work, creation of semi-independent government agencies, and delegation to other levels of government. Ian Holliday, for his part, denies that these changes add up to an actual reduction in the capacity of the national state. (All the authors I mention in this entry are cited below.)

If we take all these accounts together, we are left with a great deal of puzzlement and little real clarity. Where to turn? In my most recent round of tussles with the politics of globalization - I'm teaching a course entitled Globalization and Community Democracy next year - I've found Ulrich Beck's Power in the Global Age particularly helpful. He deals with the problem of the influence of globalization on politics by setting up a dichotomy between the era preceding the current one, and the one now dawning. He characterizes the first era quite simply as the first modernity, a time in which we all more or less played by the rules of national sovereignty: the writ of national governments ran within their boundaries and there they could do as they pleased. Within those boundaries, corporate and civil society were subject to the authority of the national state.

In the current era, the second modernity, the power represented by national sovereignty can be evaded thanks to the 21st Century's freer flow of money, ideas, goods and people. By this point, you may well be asking, "So, what's new?" The novelty of Beck's argument is that he does not fall into the trap of arguing that the second modernity simply supersedes the first - which would lead to the conclusion that national sovereignty is a thing of the past. Rather, he sees the advent of the second modernity signalling the beginning a "meta-game" of power, in which national power continues to play an important role, and the rules of national sovereignty remain operative, while, at the same time, the players are now able to play by the free-wheeling rules of the second modernity if they choose.

He points out that so far, the primary player in the meta-game has been corporate capital, and notes that capital and its political allies would like us to think that that is all there is to globalization - that globalization puts us all in the position of being forced to accept the hegemony of capital. Or, in his words, "The neo-liberal agenda is an attempt to capture the momentary historical gains of globally and politically mobile capital and fix them institutionally." (p. 5) The notion that national sovereignty is a thing of the past is implicit or explicit in the arguments of such commentators as Strange, Monbiot, Hertz, and Hardt and Negri.

But, in Beck's conceptual universe, anyone - not only capital and finance, but civil society, and even national states themselves - can play the meta-game. At this point, I take leave of Beck's argument, not only because I do not altogether buy it, but also because he may not wish to have my ruminations attributed to him. In my version of Beck's argument - which may not differ greatly from his, at least initially - the first modernity includes, not only national sovereignty, but also a conventional division of powers among levels of government, with municipal government subordinate to senior governments.

The national government is in a position to defend local communities from a variety of economic exigencies through such measures as tariffs to protect local industries from international competition, as well as a more or less unlimited ability to provide regulatory and financial support to industries, regions and communities in the form of such measures as subsidies to agriculture and industry and regional development programs. In turn, industry, communities, and regional governments are severely constrained by the national state's rules. (We must be careful not to overstate this point, because globalization as such is not a new phenomenon. Business and politics have operated at a global scale at least since the beginning of the colonial era, and one could make out a reasonable case that Ghengis Khan was a globalizer. What is new, and has led to the second modernity, is the extent to which and the speed with which goods, people, money and ideas can move.)

In the second modernity, the national state is still a going concern, wields great power and commands vast resources, but the rule book of national sovereignty no longer necessarily governs what the players may and may not do. However, it is not only corporations and finance that can ignore it. Our imaginations are the only limit.

National governments can extend their sovereignty, internationally through such measures as the land mines treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Accord. With sovereignty no longer unbreachable, tyrants can be deprived of a restful sleep, as Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator discovered when he was arrested in London, and as a succession of former leaders learned upon being brought to trial for genocide before the ICC.

As well, national governments have for some time been extending their sovereignty locally. Already in 1990, a colleague, Robert Fenton, and I pointed out that the Canadian government had moved away from programs that were national in scope to such measures as urban development corporations, and tri-level government agreements, in which particular communities were targeted by programs unique to them. This trend has continued, as I have shown in a 2006 article, and the Canadian government has not been alone in promoting it. (Both articles are cited below.)

But the second modernity is not only for corporations and national governments. Speed and ease of communication, together with the growing legitimacy of action that operates outside the nation-state system, opens up new possibilities for municipal governments, labour unions, consumer groups and any number of other grassroots organizations that can benefit from international networking and action.

It is well understood that these possibilities exist, but it seems likely that there are further possibilities for far more effective action than we have seen so far. The global reach of major corporations is their obvious strength, but also a weakness, in that the brands that represent them are highly vulnerable to bad publicity. This opens possibilities for organizations that seek better working conditions for workers or fairer terms of trade for producers. Some work has been done along these lines, for example by the Clean Clothes campaign, but much grassroots anti-globalization activity has amounted to little more than ineffectual railing against big names. Really effective action requires the specific identification of bad employers and other instances of exploitative practices, not just targeting high-profile brand names, like Nike or Starbucks.

If labour unions can break free of old habits of thought and ossified organizational structures, they as well can exploit the vulnerability of global brands and they can also find more effective ways to organize internationally, so that workers in one part of the world can support their more vulnerable fellow workers elsewhere.

Likewise, many municipal governments have developed their own foreign policies, in the form of twinning arrangements with cities around the world to promote mutual economic development, to name only one example. Ease of worldwide communication, and the diminution of cultural barriers that comes from more communication has also opened, literally, a world of new possibilities for the venerable International Association of Local Authorities.

In short, Beck's concept of the meta-game opens the way to a much more satisfactory account of the politics of globalization than we can gain from either panegyrics to the wonders of globalization or conspiratorial accounts of corporate dominance. Beck's formulation tells us that we are witnessing neither the demise of the nation-state, nor its total subordination to international capital. The nation-state is still there, it still wields power, it commands massive resources, and the political games that are played by nation-state rules are still enormously significant.

At the same time, Beck's account of the political arena of the second modernity challenges communities, neighbourhoods, cities, interest groups, labour unions - anyone who can get her hands on a computer with an internet connection - to think about how they might be better represented outside of the state-system rules. The nation-state is no longer the only game in town, as it were, and the sooner the rest of the world catches up with corporations and financial organizations that know how to play the other game, the sooner a measure of balance will be restored to politics.

If we accept Beck's conception, it becomes clear that the meta-game that began with the advent of the second modernity is in its early stages. Small wonder we are still struggling to understand the politics of globalization. We are far from knowing where it will take us.

There is a great deal to read on this subject. Here are a few readings I recommend.

Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. (For a very good, concise summary of Beck's main arguments, take a look at Geoffrey Fox's blog, Literature & Society.)

Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. London: Arrow Books, 2002.

George Monbiot, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. London: Pan, 2001.

Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Paul N. Doremus, William W. Keller, Louis W. Pauly and Simon Reich, The Myth of the Global Corporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

Bob Jessop, “Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist Political Economy.” Studies in Political Economy 40: 7–39 (1993).

Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Ian Holliday, "Is the British State Hollowing Out?" The Political Quarterly 71 (2) (2000), 167–176.

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39 (3) 2006, 481-506.

Christopher Leo and Robert Fenton, "'Mediated Enforcement' and the Evolution of the State: Development Corporations in Canadian City Centres". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 14 (2) 1990, 185-206.

Posted by leo-c at 4:51 PM

June 12, 2007

THINKING A LITTLE HARDER ABOUT URBAN CRIME

Superficial research produces one-dimensional, sterile debate. A case in point is crime in North American cities. Much of the commentary we read and hear focuses on two opposing positions, neither of which resonates with common sense.

One side of the argument is represented by hard-nosed crime fighters. Their argument comes in two parts. First, they advocate cracking down on petty offenders - squeegee kids, panhandlers, vandals and the like - and maintain that the result will be a decrease in major crime. Secondly, they call for computer-assisted rapid response, whereby police descend upon an area where there has been a succession of offences in order to clamp down on the offenders. Winnipeg has lately adopted this strategy, referring to it as CrimeStat.

The crime-fighting approach is often associated with the name of Rudy Guiliani, the former mayor of New York City, who presided over the implementation of such tactics and was able to point to a substantial reduction in crime rates. The figures seem convincing, but common sense raises an antenna. How likely is it actually that cracking down on squeegee kids or scribblers of graffiti will stop future car theft rings, international drug cartels and murderers in their tracks?

As for the rapid response tactic, although speeding to the scene of previous crimes might help in going after neighbourhood-based gangs, one can't help but wonder how likely it is that, as a generality, a particular area of a city will be the scene of a number of attempted crimes in the next hour because it has been the scene of a number of crimes in the past hour. At best, the cause-and-effect connections here seem murky.

Unsatisfactory as that side of the argument seems, the rejoinder is not much better. Here we commonly encounter three lines of argument. The first questions the validity of crime statistics, pointing out, plausibly, that it is difficult to distinguish between changes in actual crime rates and changes in the frequency with which crimes are reported. A second line of argument relies on these allegedly unreliable statistics to argue that overall crime rates are decreasing throughout North America for demographic reasons: an aging population and an accompanying decline in average energy and testosterone levels, leading to a decline in lawlessness in general and violence in particular. In other words, we worry too much.

The third line of argument makes the indisputable point that prisons breed criminals, thus calling the effectiveness of enforcement itself into question. These arguments, like those of the crime-fighters, seem to carry a considerable amount of weight, but at the same time we know that declining crime rates are not quite the same thing as being safe in our homes and in the streets. As for the ineffectiveness of prison: Point taken, but what is the alternative? Are we to do nothing about crime?

In the matter of urban crime, my perspective is that of an informed amateur. I claim no special expertise, but it is part of my job to stay abreast of urban issues, and, after a lifetime of research, I think I can spot the symptoms of superficial research. I don't have better answers than the experts do, but I have suspected for some time that either the experts are not doing their homework, or their homework is not being reflected in the public debate.

The latter suspicion was reinforced by a fascinating and suggestive article in a recent issue of the Urban Affairs Review. The literature review that introduces the article makes it clear that there is quite a lot of good research that has not been reflected in the public debate. The article itself, by John Hagedorn and Brigid Rauch, is underpinned by superb, in-depth research of how crime rates are influenced by less obvious factors than those that are considered in the public debates. The study focuses on how the organization of criminal gangs and local public housing policies has interacted with crime rates.

The article uses these data to try to explain why similar enforcement policies and similar social environments in Chicago and New York in the 1990s produced falling crime rates in New York and rising ones in Chicago. In the process the authors show how imaginative and assiduous research can shed new light on tiresome, one-dimensional old debates.

The first finding is that Chicago's criminal gangs were highly institutionalized, meaning that they had deep ties to the communities they were part of and organizational structures that survived generational change. New York gangs lacked similarly high levels of institutionalization. As a result, when New York police went after the gangs, they actually succeeded in breaking them up and halting many of their activities. In Chicago, the more highly institutionalized gangs, instead of being broken up by police enforcement, were fragmented and fell to fighting amongst themselves. The result was that police enforcement actually resulted in temporary increases in violence, rather than the decreases that occurred in New York.

The second finding has to do with different housing policies in Chicago and New York. In New York, in the wake of the devastating decay of the South Bronx - which, for a time, turned that area into a wasteland - the city chose to respond by pumping an unprecedented $5 billion into the development of 182,000 units of affordable housing. This enabled residents and former residents of the South Bronx to stay in or return to their old neighbourhoods, and presumably to maintain community ties that lent some stability to their lives.

In Chicago, meanwhile, rather than reconstructing housing in previously devastated neighbourhoods, the city "decided to demolish the high-rise housing projects that had been built in the 1960s. Demolishing these projects represented a massive displacement of people." (p. 447) These areas were gentrified, or commercialized, as Chicago's downtown Loop, the city's commercial heart, expanded to occupy the vacant land. Thus, while the residents of 182,000 housing units in New York were enabled to stay put, "in Chicago, demolition of public housing has resulted in the... displacement of more than a hundred thousand African-American public housing residents." (p. 448) For the most part, those displaced had no alternative other than to move to other distressed neighbourhoods. "These neighbourhoods," the authors observe "...are also the areas in Chicago of the highest rates of homicide." (p. 449)

Hagedorn's and Rauch's research not only pushes the investigation of the causes of urban crime into previously unexploited areas, but also shows that the contrast between Chicago and New York is not unique to those two communities. Throughout the article, the authors adduce examples of similar situations in other cities around the world. Their research does not, in any simplistic way, offer solutions to the problems posed by urban crime, but it does suggest that, if researchers put their imaginations to work and dig more deeply, we may well develop strategies far more sophisticated than those suggested by the sterile crime-and-punishment debate that has, up to now, limited our understanding of the problem.

Want to find out more?

The findings summarized in this blog entry are carefully documented in John Hagedorn and Brigid Rauch, "Housing, gangs and homicide: What we can learn from Chicago", Urban Affairs Review 42 (4) (March 2007), pp. 435-56.

Posted by leo-c at 4:07 PM

March 2, 2007

WHAT DOES "RESEARCH-BASED" MEAN?

The sub-title of my blog reads: "Research-based analysis and commentary." What does that mean?

In much of the media and the internet, it's acceptable to to make statements simply to be provocative or to launch a one-sided defence of a particular point of view or interest. In this blog, I will do my best to take full account of the arguments and evidence for opposing viewpoints.

This is not the same as being non-partisan. Some of the best research-based writing mounts strong arguments for a particular viewpoint. But the way those arguments are produced is by thinking about possible objections and addressing them seriously. Accordingly, I'm not going out of my way to avoid provocative arguments, and I will certainly defend my point of view, but I intend to rest my case on the best research findings available and to offer frank acknowledgements of uncertainties and contrary evidence.

Being research-based does not necessarily make my blog different from quality journalism, or any good writing, for that matter. However, although, in the age of the internet, there is plenty of writing available, there is always a need for more good writing.

Much of the research I present in these pages is the product of some 35 years of my own academic research. Most of my research is based on primary documents, secondary materials and unstructured interviews, but I have also done random-sample structured surveys and statistical analysis.

Posted by leo-c at 10:54 AM

January 18, 2007

HOW SHOULD COMMUNITIES BE GOVERNED IN THE WILD WEST OF GLOBALIZATION?

In a previous blog entry, I looked at why, in the 21st Century, national governments are becoming less able to sustain the economies and the social safety nets of local communities, even as cities become more obviously central to the economy. In a related entry, I offered a community perspective on globalization's wild west, and pointed out that globalization is a two-edged sword. Corporations can amass the power and wealth that is achievable by operating on a world scale, but local communities can also operate on a world scale in forging alliances, seeking support and mounting political action.

But politics is not only an arena for conflict among contending forces, it is also a system of organized decision-making and action, a system of governance. If our world is marked by the escalating power of corporate mobility, the declining power the national state, and the growing economic importance of cities, what does that imply for governance? In a world of drastically shifting power relations, should government remain essentially as it was in the 19th Century?

A lot of thought is being given to this question. It is coming to be widely agreed that there are compelling reasons for cities to evolve economic development strategies and social supports specifically designed to deal with their own, unique set of problems and possibilities. But how? Some interesting answers are being proposed, and tried, in Canada. In this article, and a subsequent one, I take a look at them, and consider their significance.

One answer comes from the charter city movement, based in Toronto, Canada's biggest city, and an economic powerhouse that provides an apt illustration of the importance of city economies to national well-being. The charter city movement's position is spelled out in a model framework for a city charter in which the city is declared to be “an autonomous and accountable order of government”. The model charter binds the Province of Ontario, which includes Toronto, to consult the city before taking actions that affect it, allows the city to negotiate directly with the federal government, and sketches out “a dispute resolution process to be used by City and provincial officials if any future disagreements arise over the meaning of the Charter.”

Such provisions would entail an all but unthinkable revocation or voluntary renunciation of the constitutional authority of provinces over municipal affairs, but charter advocates insist, not without justification, that Toronto's wealth, and its importance to the national economy, entitles it to a bigger share of both wealth and power. Clearly, the charter city concept is grounded in a demand for radical change in intergovernmental relations.

If the charter city argument ever approaches the threshold of political viability, it will encounter resistance, not only from provincial governments unwilling to relinquish a substantial share of power, but also from many who will question the democratic bona fides or the competence of municipal councils, and from such commentators as Castells, who argues that “local... autonomy reinforces territorially dominant elites and identities, while depriving those social groups who are either not represented... or else are ghettoized and isolated.”

More significantly, it will become enmeshed in the ongoing debate over the race to the bottom. Critics will point out that if autonomous communities were to be set free to fend for themselves in an unfettered global economy, the casualties might well outnumber the successful contenders. In fact, for every commentator making the case for city charters, there are probably several expressing dismay over the effects of government cutbacks and down-loading on low-income communities and on the integrity of the social safety net, and calling for the federal government to become more involved in the setting of standards and the financing of programs. Greater centralization of power probably has more support than city charters would.

So will it be a stronger central government or greater municipal autonomy? Or is it perhaps not a question of either/or? Thomas Courchene, in a discussion that focuses primarily on federal-provincial relations, rejects the either/or position, which he calls federalism as structure, and argues that the alternative to it, federalism as process, is a Canadian tradition. In his words, instead of focussing on the distribution of formal powers, federalism as process “celebrates the creative and flexible manner in which Canadians historically... have managed their federal system.”

In a wide-ranging and perceptive essay, Courchene argues that Canadians have long practice in the regulation of the relations between federal and provincial governments by means that avoid the rigidities of constitutional provisions, in which powers are assigned irrevocably to particular levels of government, and place a premium on flexible adaptation to changing circumstances. These innovations "were the result of process, not structure, although in many cases they were tantamount to a de facto alteration of the division of powers in the federation."

Courchene's suggestion is that, within the constitutional division of powers, creative avenues of policy-making are being found that involve co-operation between governments and that allow for policies which take account of the differences among different regions of the country. This has been done by means of federal-provincial administrative arrangements that allow for numerous differences in the treatment of different provinces, and do it through negotiation and compromise, unencumbered by the rigidity of constitutional provisions.

One of the examples he cites is Medicare, a federally and provincially funded, provincially-managed, government-financed national health plan. Other examples include an arrangement whereby the federal government manages income and corporate tax collection for some provinces while others see to their own taxation, and an equalization scheme designed to reduce the economic disparities among provinces. All of these arrangements, and other, similar ones, are arrived at through negotiation and mutual agreement.

Courchene argues that these federalism-as-process arrangements have, over time, worked in the direction of growing provincial self-determination. In many ways, his analysis parallels those of commentators who advocate a re-evaluation of the place of cities in national politics. He sees growing provincial self-determination as being related to the advance of globalization. He stresses the enhanced importance of regional economies in a world of global trade and information flows. In short, Canadian federalism offers an array of examples of voluntary arrangements short of constitutional change that can secure national objectives while taking account of regional differences, and that do it without the need to confront the unsatisfactory either/or of local or regional autonomy vs. national power.

Since these arrangements are worked out in a political setting through negotiation and compromise, instead of a constitutional one, they have the added virtue of being flexible, and readily adaptable to changing circumstances. They offer a toolbox of flexible approaches to the accommodation of regional difference within a national framework.

But how does the toolbox help us deal with the relations between national governments and cities in a globalized world? If the differences between provinces justify different arrangements with the federal government for each province, is there a case to be made for similarly differential arrangements for different cities? Canada offers some relevant experience in this area as well, as I show in a later blog entry.

Want to find out more? Look for:

Christopher Leo, “Deep Federalism: Respecting Community Difference in National Policy.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 39:3, 2006, 481-506.

Thomas J. Courchene, Celebrating Flexibility: An Interpretive Essay on the Evolution of Canadian Federalism. Montreal: CD Howe Institute, 1995.

Big City Mayors' Caucus, Model Framework for a City Charter. Toronto: Federation of Canadian Municipalities discussion paper, 30 May 2002. Accessed at: http://www.canadascities.ca/background.htm, 4 July 2005.

Manuel Castells, The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Posted by leo-c at 7:34 PM

October 8, 2006

PERSONAL DANGER IN CITIES: A RESEARCH QUESTION

Which neighbourhoods are dangerous, and which ones offer safe places to walk? I happen to be in possession of a great deal of evidence on this subject, but it is all low-grade evidence - participant observation growing out of the fact that, since I was 15 years old, in 1956, a favourite past-time has been walking the streets of cities wherever I happened to be, and observing whatever there was to see. The evidence I've gathered in these observations, though purely anecdotal, is interesting, because it contradicts almost everything I have ever been told about personal danger in cities, and therefore suggests a question for research.

In order to explain the findings from my observation, I have to provide some personal background. About the time I began to take an interest in city streets, my older sister, who has spent most of her adult life as a professional editor living in New York City, married a young New York lawyer. Because my sister and I are white, and her new husband was an African-American, there were, in 1950s America, very few places where they could expect to live openly and in peace as a racially integrated couple. So they settled in one of the exceptions to that rule, Morningside Gardens, a racially integrated, middle-class co-operative housing development a few blocks from Columbia University on Manhattan's upper west side, and just two blocks from 125th Street, the main drag of Harlem.

Conventional wisdom had it that 125th Street was a prime example of the kind of street where it was not safe for a white person to walk, but from my sister's experience, and soon from my own, I learned that the conventional wisdom was wrong. The rules on 125th Street, as I learned to understand them, were the same as they were in my hometown: Don't make a point of looking at people, but don't avoid their eyes either, don't point fingers, and don't show fear - in other words, "act normal".

Some years later, I was a graduate student doing research on the politics of land in Kenya, a subject that eventually became the topic of a book and a series of articles. Even before I went to Kenya, and many times after I arrived, I was warned, by white people and occasionally by Africans, that danger lurked everywhere, but especially in every place that was frequented by poor Africans. In Nairobi, Kenya's capital, I was first introduced to a phenomenon that has become an increasingly common feature of cities. I call it the tourist bubble, an area of the city marked by fine buildings, well-kept streets and parks and very little evidence of poverty - an area very different from the rest of the city. This, I was given to understand, was the safe part of the city.

My research in Africa was to consist of participant observation, personal interviews and document collection in areas frequented by poor people, so I knew from the outset that I would have to choose between heeding the warnings and doing my research. Thanks in part to my earlier experiences in Harlem, it was an easy choice. In fact, it was a relief, and a wonderful learning experience, to escape the atmosphere of fearfulness that pervaded the expatriate community, to learn Swahili and to learn, once again, that people are just people, and that they do not generally differ fundamentally from each other according to the place where they happen to be located, or even according to their income.

As a result of these experiences, it became my habit to ignore warnings of danger in cities, to walk the streets that are supposed to be off limits. In almost 50 years of doing that, I've learned a great deal about cities that I might not have known otherwise. In all those years, I've never been attacked and, as best I can remember, I've been victimized by thieves six times. That doesn't seem to me to suggest a lifetime of taking foolish risks, but even more significant is the fact that only one of those times did the theft take place in an area inhabited by poor people. (I lost my wallet to a pickpocket in a crowded room in a small town in Kenya.) All the other times, the theft took place, either in Nairobi's tourist bubble, or in the middle-class area where I lived (once in student housing in Syracuse, New York, and twice in the back lane behind my current home in Winnipeg).

In short, my experience suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, city streets are not particularly dangerous places, but that the danger that does exist, exists mainly in affluent areas. Is that experience representative of reality? This is a question that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been researched, but it could be, using crime statistics, surveys, or more detailed ethnographic methods. Such a study could focus, either on a sample of different types of neighbourhoods in particular cities, or on categories of neighbourhoods in a large number of cities. The key would be to separate out random violence from such things as family violence, gang violence and drug-related violence - which would not be targeted at strangers walking streets at random - and to do a count of the incidence of different types of random violence in different neighbourhoods. Such a study would pose a number of methodological problems, but not ones that are likely to be irresolvable.

There is no doubt that many terrible things happen in poor neighbourhoods. Newspapers provide disquietingly graphic accounts every day. It is equally beyond question that a substantial proportion of the crime in low-income neighbourhoods is not random. People are targeted by others who know them, victimized by drug dealers, abusive family members, or ordinary bullies. None of this is likely to affect a stranger passing through the neighbourhood.

If the findings of research that distinguished between random and targeted crime confirmed my purely anecdotal findings, or even showed that the level of danger on the streets of low-income neighbourhoods is lower than we imagine it to be, it might give us all a good reason to be a little less fearful of cities, other people and neighbourhoods we have not seen. If so, it could enrich the life experience of others in the same way mine has been enriched by walking the streets that children of privilege are taught to fear.

Want to find out more? A related article on the issue of street safety is:

Evan Lowenstein, What do we mean by "safe"? Planning Commissioners' Journal 64 (Fall 2006), pp. 14-15. Available at: http://www.plannersweb.com/

Posted by leo-c at 5:14 PM