Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaluating Energy Security Performance From 1990 To 2010 For Eighteen Countries, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Ishani Mukherjee, Ira Martina Drupady, Anthony L. D' Agostino

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study provides an index for evaluating national energy security policies and performance among the United States, European Union, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the ten countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Drawn from research interviews, a survey instrument, and a focused workshop, the article first argues that energy security ought to be comprised of five dimensions related to availability, affordability, technology development, sustain-ability, and regulation. The article then breaks these dimensions down into 20 components and correlates them with 20 metrics that constitute a comprehensive energy security index. We find that the …

Application Of An Agent-Based System As A Virtual Environment For The Formulation Of Policies, Araz Taeihagh, René Bañares-Alcántara, Moshe Givoni

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The growth in the interdependence and complexity of socio-economic systems requires the development of tools and techniques to aid us in the formulation of better policies. Our efforts focus towards developing methodologies and support tools for better policy design and formulation. In this paper, we focus on the development of an agent-based approach to create a virtual environment for the exploration and analysis of different configurations of policy measures in order to build policy packages and test the effects of changes and uncertainties while formulating policies. By developing systematic approaches for the formulation andanalysis of policies it is possible to …

Introduction To The Special Issue: Governing Energy In A Fragmented World, Ann Florini, Navroz K. Dubash

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This special issue brings together leading experts from Asia, Europe and North America to examine the international institutions, national governance mechanisms and financing systems that together will determine the future of the energy sector. The enormous environmental externalities imposed by fossil fuel extraction and consumption, the devastating corruption and human rights abuses that have accompanied this energy system, and the geopolitical vulnerabilities that have arisen because of the uneven natural distribution of these resources, have occasioned enormous handwringing - but not, yet, a shift to a more rational system of providing energy services. Although national governments play the dominant role …

Better Ways To Run The World, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Wherever government ministers and international bureaucrats gather to debate and shape the global economy, hordes of protesters converge. And now some of the groups involved in the coordinated protests plan to diversify their targets to include multinational corporations. The protests themselves are merely the visible tip of a vast iceberg of transnational networks tying together people from all parts of the world who share grievances about the current rules governing global economic integration. Transnational civil society networks should not and will not end up making the rules themselves: the final decisions must rest with governments. But the protest movement has …

Information Disclosure In Global Energy Governance, Ann Florini, Saleena Saleem

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The lack of global consensus on how to deal with complex energy governance challenges has led to the emergence of information disclosure initiatives as governance tools in and of themselves. This article assesses the effectiveness of disclosure mechanisms as tools of energy governance by looking at the motivations and desired outcomes behind a series of disclosure-based initiatives in the energy sector, namely: making energy markets work more efficiently; inducing corporations to internalize their climate change externalities; and improving democratic processes that lead to better energy governance outcomes. The disclosure initiatives assessed in this article adopt different strategies to achieve their …

The International Energy Agency In Global Energy Governance, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the organization that, despite its constrained membership, is as close as the world currently comes to a global focal point on the key energy governance arenas. Although when the IEA was established in the 1970s it had the specific and limited purpose of enabling the world's leading oil consumers to undertake collective action in response to oil supply shocks, it now finds itself at the center of many of the key developments in global energy governance. Its evolution and current challenges reflect the key themes of this special issue: the competition between state and …

Mapping Global Energy Governance, Navroz K. Dubash, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The challenges inherent in energy policy form an increasingly large proportion of the great issues of global governance. These energy challenges reflect numerous transnational market or governance failures, and their solutions are likely to require a number of global components that can support or constrain national energy policy. Governing energy globally requires approaches that can simultaneously cope with three realities: the highly fragmented and conflictual nature of the current inter-state system's efforts to govern energy; the diversity of institutions and actors relevant to energy; and the dominance of national processes of energy decision making that are not effectively integrated into …

Conceptualizing And Measuring Energy Security: A Synthesized Approach, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Ishani Mukherjee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article provides a synthesized, workable framework for analyzing national energy security policies and performance. Drawn from research interviews, survey results, a focused workshop, and an extensive literature review, this article proposes that energy security ought to be comprised of five dimensions related to availability, affordability, technology development, sustainability, and regulation. We then break these five dimensions down into 20 components related to security of supply and production, dependency, and diversification for availability; price stability, access and equity, decentralization, and low prices for affordability; innovation and research, safety and reliability, resilience, energy efficiency, and investment for technology development; land use, …

Rethinking The Rural-Urban Divide In China’S New Stratification Order, Qian Forrest Zhang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I use a Marxist framework centred on the mode of production to conceptually analyze the changing stratification structure in today’s China with a focus on the changing nature of rural-urban inequality. As the state-managed tributary mode of production, once dominant under socialism, is being gradually eclipsed by the reviving petty-commodity mode of production and the newly emerged capitalist mode of production, both of which are market-based and enable the transfer of surplus from labour to capital, a new set of mechanisms are creating and sustaining rural-urban inequality in China. Rural-urban inequality – although still significant in its magnitude – is …

A Road To Smarter Infrastructure In Asia, Curtis S. Chin, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

China's infrastructure building program used to be the envy of the world, and in some respects it still is. Yet economists, investors and now China's own citizens are worried about diminishing returns, while incidents such as last month's Wenzhou high-speed rail crash raise questions about the durability of China's investments.

Multiparty Democracies And Rapid Economic Growth: A Twenty-First Century Breakthrough?, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This essay examines whether developing countries with competitive multiparty democracies may be just as capable of sustaining rapid economic growth as single-party states. It begins with a literature review identifying political stability and the ability to mobilize labor and capital production inputs as key factors behind sustained rapid growth. It then develops the hypothesis that under certain conditions, multiparty democracies may be strong in these dimensions, but ceteris paribus, single-party states are likely to have an advantage. I test this hypothesis by exploring historical trends in rapid growth over the last five decades. Statistical regression analysis confirms that most sustained …

From Precarious Labor To Precarious Economy? Planning For Precarity In Singapore's Creative Economy, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The important place of the oftentimes "hidden" independent worker, or freelancer, has been acknowledged in developed countries where the creative economy has grown. These creative workers do not belong to the traditional employment set-up organized around firms. Instead, they move from portfolio to portfolio, assignment to assignment, interspersing corporation-based jobs with periods of self employment. Their work offers freedom, independence and creative space, but has also been characterized as precarious, because the securities of old working patterns no longer hold. While governments in many countries and cities have become attracted to the potential of the creative economy, those that have …

Cosmopolitan Nation-Building: The Institutional Contradiction And Politics Of Postwar Japanese Education, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The education system has been a quintessential state apparatus of nation-building since the emergence of the modern nation-state; however, recent comparative studies demonstrate the growing presence of cosmopolitanism in education policies and school curricula around the world. This trend indicates that the education system now operates according to two different institutional logics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To understand how the education system negotiates the potential contradiction between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in this paper, I analyze the case of postwar Japanese education. Theoretically, I synthesize studies of institutional logics and social movements: while the former shed light on a contradiction between different …

Impact Of Sanctions And Isolation Measurement With North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Iran And Zimbabwe As Case Studies, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The present study explores how the introduction of targeted sanctions has transformed the practice of international organisations, looking at the examples of North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Iran and Zimbabwe.

Although the ultimate effectiveness of the individual sanctions measures can hardly be ascertained, not least due to their co-existence with unilateral sanctions proactively enforced by the US, the analysis demonstrates that the character of sanctions measures, and the changing nature of the international system, has put the use of sanctions and isolation measures in different terms than was the case just a couple of decades ago.

While it is beyond the scope …

Europäische Verteidigungsintegration Und Die Atomwaffenfrage, Clara Portela, Ursula Jasper

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

As it strives to develop a fully integrated security and defence policy, the European Union faces a dilemma. While integration is proceeding apace and now embraces a number of key areas of national security policy, the Union still shies away from holding a serious debate about the future of European - that is British and French - nuclear weapons. These two European states have sought to justify their continued ownership of nuclear weapons by citing their own (and Europe's) benevolent intentions and the fact that their actions are guided by an awareness of their responsibility. Instead, Europe must begin to …

Bridging The Gaps In Global Energy Governance, Ann Florini, Benjamin Sovacool

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Energy constitutes a rich, but underexplored, arena for global governance scholars and policymakers. The world is currently on an unsustainable and conflict-prone track of volatile and unreliable supply of energy fuels, vulnerable infrastructure, massive environmental degradation, and failure to deliver energy services to an enormous proportion of the global population. Changing to a different path will be a monumental global governance endeavor that will require bridging multiple issue areas, regimes, and policy silos. Meeting that challenge will require a greatly expanded research agenda aimed at understanding the institutions, interests, and concerns that do and could shape global energy governance. In …

Making And Unmaking Of Transnational Environmental Cooperation, Yooil Bae, Dong-Ae Shin, Yong-Wook Lee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There has been an ongoing debate about how (or through what mechanisms) global environmental norms have influenced domestic political debates that give rise to green policy choices. In particular, effective international environmental cooperation between transnational and domestic NGOs has been recognized as a key to successful environmental movements. In this regard, the central question guiding research on the politics of environmental norms is, under what condition(s) transnational cooperation among NGOs would be more likely to be sustained so as to achieve its goals. This article proposes that one of the mechanisms missing from the debate is a bottom-up approach through …