CEGE Reflections – Dr. James Barker

October 28, 2022 denisehinds Leave a Comment

“Public policy is very important to us because it creates the conditions that enable broad and collective efforts to address the public issues that we all face. As a civil society, we must address those issues successfully and sustainably.”

-Dr. James Barker – Founding Fellow, MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance –

Dr. James Barker
Professor; Herbert S. Lamb Chair in Business Education; Research Lead Dalhousie Safe Assured; Founding Fellow, MacEachen Institute for Public Policy & Governance

Read Dr. Barker’s full article here

Dr. James Barker: Founding Fellow MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

November 12, 2019 rbudd Leave a Comment

“Policy must create the conditions that enable broad collaborative efforts to address public issues successfully and sustainably. The policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation process must deliver policies that work, that move our society forward in a positive and useful way.”

Dr. James Barker

Founding Fellow, MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

Dr. James Barker
Founding Fellow, MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

Dr. James Barker has been appointed a Founding Fellow of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, for the term 2019 – 2021. The Founding Fellows play an important role in shaping the Institute’s agenda and profile, and ensuring it becomes the ‘go-to’ place for policy discussion and analysis regionally and nationally.

CEGE Connection reached out to Dr. Barker for his thoughts as he begins his tenure as a Founding Fellow.

Dr. James Barker:

I am very deeply honoured to be named a Founding Fellow of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance here at Dalhousie University, Halifax. I am especially honoured to be the first faculty member from the Rowe School of Business to receive one of these Fellowships.

First off, what exactly is the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance? As an Institute here at Dalhousie, MacEachen is a think tank that seeks a diverse public engagement on public policy decisions. How do we get public involvement into the discourse around public policy? We create conditions for public engagement in a beneficial way within our society so that we can energize and inform public policy, education, ideas, and debate. That is the broad vision and mission for the MacEachen Institute. As a Founding Fellow, my role is to do that energizing, informing and moving forward debates about public policy in a useful direction.

What roles do the Founding Fellows play?

I am not the only Founding Fellow. Right now, there are nine Founding Fellows from across Dalhousie University, coming from Health, Law, Arts, Medicine and Engineering. As Fellows, we work to shape the agenda for the Institute and to ensure that it becomes a go-to place for public policy debate, not just regionally but across Canada.

Why does policy matter? This question is the lead-in to what I want to discuss.

Public policy is very important to us because it creates the conditions that enable broad and collective efforts to address the public issues that we all face. As a civil society, we must address those issues successfully and sustainably.

Right now, the big issue we first think of is climate change. We know we must address climate change sustainably and successfully to ensure everyone’s (and everything’s) future. Public policy, then, in its formulation, implementation and evaluation, must deliver new climate policies that work and move our collective action forward in a positive and useful way.

My focus, as a Founding Fellow, will be on public health care policy, and I will be working to help the MacEachen Institute become a ‘hub’ for public health debate. My specialty area is community pharmacy safety, and I work to facilitate the ability of community pharmacies to deliver their business work in a safe and effective manner. For the next two years, I will be shifting this work more toward public and regulatory policy. I want to move forward public engagement with the community pharmacy practice that will contribute toward the sustainability of our health care system and help foster the development of governance, of operational mechanisms that community pharmacists can use to support the sustainability of health care. Much of our current discussions about health care in Canada involve pharmacies and pharmacists particularly, with the notion that pharmacists will expand their scope of practice to take on more of the health care work as a way of making our health care systems more sustainable. I am involved in ensuring that pharmacists can take on expanded roles in a productive and safe way.

That brings me to the next point I want to make.

Why is a business professor involved in this endeavour? A few months ago, I sat down for an interview with a local TV station to discuss our pharmacy safety research. I was expecting the first question to be about the work on safety, but instead I was asked: “What’s a business professor doing involved in public safety and public health?” The answer to that is quite simple and straightforward and very important.

Think about our health care delivery system, especially the role of community pharmacies in that delivery system. We have made a conscious decision, in our society, that the delivery of pharmacy products to the public via the community pharmacies is a business. As a society, we have conducted ourselves in that manner. For the business of community pharmacy to work well, we have to ensure the safe delivery of that health care in the community pharmacies via the dispensing of medications, the counseling about medications, the enhanced services that are offered by community pharmacies, the giving of flu shots, or other kinds of inoculations. To make the complex delivery of community pharmacy services to work requires an integration between the health policies of the Federal and Provincial Ministries on one hand, and the business practices of those pharmacies on the other, whether it be corporate or a small family-owned pharmacy. Said another way, for the delivery of pharmacy products to be safe, the pharmacist must be able to incorporate those safety practices in a sustainable way by integrating those practices into their business activities. That is where my role comes in, as a business professor. It is a pivotal role.

There is yet another reason for a business perspective – partnerships.

I first saw this in action when I lived and worked in New Zealand several years ago. One thing that impressed me about New Zealand was the strong partnership between the government, the universities and the business organizations to develop effective business models, government policy and plans and strategies for the good of the country. Much of the country’s success was due to the very tight and mutually supportive partnership between those three entities. Now, it is easier to do this in a small country like New Zealand, and much more difficult in a larger country such as Canada. But my New Zealand experience and seeing how that type of partnership worked – the policy partnership, the university partnership, the business partnership, taught me the importance of that tripartite partnership to a country’s economic success. My experience with such work in New Zealand made a big impression upon me and I brought that knowledge of partnering for policy to my work here with community pharmacy safety. The pivotal relationship between government, industry, and universities is why a business professor to be involved in public policy.

Things to look for in the next two years as I’m working with this fellowship:

I am going to be organizing a number of events around community pharmacy safety and general public health policy under the auspices of the MacEachen Institute to help foster that engagement that I was talking about before. I will also be steering a good bit of my writing in terms of my articles and the other works I do towards policy and how we can create better policies that give our community pharmacists the kinds of conditions they need to be able to incorporate new safety practices while still achieving their business outcomes that they must achieve.

I am very excited about what lies ahead. This is important work. For me personally, I enjoy this area of exploration and feel it is my contribution to society. It is also important for the Rowe School of Business to be deeply involved in the MacEachen Institute and in this essential dialogue.

Dr. James Barker

James R. Barker is the Herbert S. Lamb Chair of Business Education in the Rowe School of Business and leads the Safe Assured Pharmacy Safety Research Consortium.

Founding Fellows, MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

MacEachen Institute Announces 2019 Speakers Series

September 5, 2019 rbudd Leave a Comment

“The MacEachen Institute’s purpose is to engage with the community – public sector, private sector, not-for-profit, students, academics – bringing people together to work on the big policy problems of our time and providing sensible, empirically based research in a non-partisan environment”

Dr. Kevin Quigley, Scholarly Director

2019 Policy Mattes Speakers

The MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University is a nationally focused, non-partisan, interdisciplinary institute designed to support the development of progressive public policy and to encourage greater citizen engagement. The Institute is supported by three faculties at Dalhousie University: Faculty of Law, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Faculty of Management.

About the series

Policy Matters is a weekly panel discussion on major policy issues presented by the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance. Each discussion features thought leaders from civil society and focuses on one of the Institute’s four research themes – Civic Engagement, Atlantic Canada and the World, Health Systems and Governance and Smart Infrastructure. Held each Tuesday from September 10 to November 19, the discussions take place in room 1020 of the Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building at Dalhousie, from 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm. The events are designed to encourage public engagement with local, national and international policy issues and are open to the public.

PDF File: Policy Matters Schedule 2019 Final

Atlantic Canadian Policy Conversations is a new podcast by the MacEachen Institute on major policy issues of concern to Atlantic Canadians. Podcasts will include highlights from Policy Matters panel discussions, and conversations with thought leaders about important policy topics. We will release a podcast for each of the next five weeks in anticipation of our fall Policy Matters speaker series.

Click here to listen to the latest episodes.

We invite you to sign up for the Institute’s email list to learn about upcoming events, new research and announcements.

Join the discussion on Twitter

#PolicyMatters2019

#DalMIPP

Rethinking Canada’s climate policy from the ground up

February 21, 2019 rbudd Leave a Comment

Rethinking Canada’s climate policy from the ground up

File 20190103 32124 1wl8f2a.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1 — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks about the federal government’s newly imposed carbon tax at an event in Toronto in October 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Adebayo Majekolagbe, Dalhousie University

The latter half of 2018 saw the release of a flurry of climate change reports, from the special report on global warming of 1.5℃ to the Emissions Gap Report (EGR). The conclusions are the same: current global commitments under the Paris Agreement fall far short of the 1.5℃ target, and a 2℃ (or more) increase in temperature will trigger adverse consequences for humans and nature.

The EGR also reaffirmed Canada’s front seat in the laggards’ zone. It confirmed that Canada is neither on track to meet its Cancun pledge for 2020 to achieve a 17 per cent decrease in emissions, nor its unconditional commitment under the Paris Agreement to reduce its emissions by 30 per cent relative to 2005 levels by 2030.

Canada has generally taken a top-down approach in the design of its climate policy. This approach is not only detached from the political reality of the Canadian federal system, it also fails to capture the communicative demand of climate policy making.

But it is possible to reboot Canada’s climate policy by taking into account local peculiarities and making it more resilient to government turnover.

The state of play

One might contend that Canada’s current backwardness is not for want of trying.

In December 2016, shortly after Canada made its Paris commitments, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau corralled premiers to create the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change (PCF). The framework, which centres on carbon pricing, is designed to help Canada meet its commitment under the Paris Agreement. With the exception of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the provinces and territories endorsed the PCF.

But within two years of signing the historic agreement, the newly elected governments in Ontario and New Brunswick also rejected the PCF, and the United Conservative Party in Alberta has indicated that it will renege, if elected in the province’s 2019 general election.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford (centre), Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe (right) and New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs (left), seen here in this December 2018 photo, have rejected the federal government’s carbon tax plan.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

The PCF is dogged by questions of effectiveness, equity and flexibility. Saskatchewan and Ontario, for instance, argue that carbon tax would not significantly reduce emissions, will kill jobs and make it difficult to play to the comparative advantages of the provinces.

Two central sub-themes of these questions are burden sharing, through which climate burdens can be allocated by identifying the peculiarities of provinces, and political acceptability, which speaks to the electoral phobia of political office holders.

Burden sharing

At the First Ministers’ meeting in Vancouver in 2016, the idea of assigning specific climate obligations for each province and territory was considered to be too sensitive a subject. Rather, a working group did a nationwide sectoral scan of specific mitigation opportunities.

The caution was not without justification. The issue, in part, had sounded the death knell of the previous National Climate Change Process (NCCP) negotiation, when the provinces and territories had failed to agree on a formula to allocate climate burden. But falling once is no reason not to walk again.

It is often assumed that Canada’s 30 per cent emission reduction target simply translates into a 30 per cent emission reduction obligation for each province. This presumption and the commitments it induces, however, leads to an aggregate that is less than Canada’s national goal under the Paris Agreement. Yet the flaw can be addressed by a burden sharing approach.

The 2016 Vancouver meeting was a missed opportunity to design a burden-sharing formula for Canada. Burden sharing is not just a tool for allocation, nor does it impose implementation pathways. Rather, it is an instrument of reassurance of the possible and the equitable distribution of costs.

This lesson is powerfully taught by the European Triptych burden-sharing approach developed in 1997. The approach identified emissions-intensive sectors in each European Union member state, calculated the emission allowances for each sector considering particular circumstances and derived state-by-state targets by adding up the sectoral allowances.

An offshore wind farm in Sweden.
Tomasz Sienicki/Wikimedia, CC BY

This gave a clear picture to each state of how their obligations were reached, and their capacity to achieve such targets. It also made provisions for states that will incur the highest cost or those without the capacity to implement prescribed responsibilities.

Cohesion fund countries like Portugal, Greece and Croatia, for example, with GDPs less than 75 per cent of the EU GDP average, were allowed to grow their electricity consumption by 1.9 per cent, compared to 0.9 per cent growth allowance for more developed EU states. Triptych even led to emissions-reduction targets that were higher than what the states had been prepared to accept.

To be clear, designing a Canadian burden-sharing formula will not be easy. It will be fought by some provinces, while others will embrace it. But, as the PCF has shown, any Canada-wide climate policy will be contentious. Taking the burden-sharing route is a worthwhile fight that will not only put Canada on a path to meeting immediate climate commitments, but can also help provinces forge an enduring cooperation based on the principles of equity and flexibility.

Direct engagement

The provinces protesting the PCF refer to its adverse effects on their constituents. If the people are central to the opposition of provinces, one wonders if this is not a natural place to begin the design of a pan-Canadian climate policy. To what extent were residents of emissions-intensive provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan directly engaged prior to creating the PCF?

We can learn from German thinker Jürgen Habermas on the importance of communicative action for the legitimacy of policies. Regardless the “inherent good” of a policy, its effectiveness boils down to acceptance, and acceptance is a function of communication.

But the PCF — both in the lead up and the aftermath — falls short of this requirement, and the research proves it. For instance, a 2018 study found that less than half of Canadians understand what carbon pricing is, despite this being at the core of the PCF. And most people in Québec and British Columbia don’t know that those two provinces have had a carbon tax for at least a decade.

As important as market mechanisms might be, behavioural change is central to fighting climate change, and this lies with individuals. It is, therefore, imperative that the climate change conversation in Canada leaves the realm of governmental institutions and centralized policies. The conversation must be strategically deregulated.

It is about time we agreed that there are real, even if at times misguided, concerns in carbon-intensive provinces. People fear that they will spend more, lose jobs and their provinces will become unviable. It is not enough to reach these people through their political representatives. Governments must develop a mechanism that allows them to directly engage with individuals. Nothing is more important.

Adebayo Majekolagbe, Junior Fellow, MacEachen Institute of Public Policy and Governance; Doctoral Candidate, Marine and Environmental Law Institute, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MacEachen Institute: Scientific evidence may not always be the right backing for a policy decision

January 31, 2019 rbudd Leave a Comment

The MacEachen Institute for Public Policy

The MacEachen Institute for Public Policy’s 2019 event schedule promises dynamic discussions. CEGE Connection reached out to Warren McDougald, Communications Officer and member of the dedicated team at the MacEachen Institute, for a virtual interview.

The MacEachen Institute for Public Policy

Warren McDougald:

The MacEachen Institute had a stellar 2018 line-up of events, with more coming in 2019 that will encourage active involvement.

January 31, 2019 the MacEachen Institute will host a grad student round table on “The Canadian Climate Policy and the Turnover problem.” Award winning historian, Dr. Jerry Bannister will moderate the event, which will offer the opportunity for a cross-disciplinary platform for ‘graduate climate researchers’ to collaborate, pool ideas and resources, and engage with knotty climate change issues.

This grad student round table builds on the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy’s October panel discussion, Science and Policy: Should Scientific Information Have Pre-eminence in Public Decision-making?

When politicians debate big issues like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting marine environments, or granting permits for clearcutting, should scientific evidence always take priority in the decision-making? Not always, according to speakers at October panel discussion.

Former MP Megan Leslie joined a panel alongside UK journalist Daniel Cressey, St. FX professor Richard Isnor, and Dalhousie Professor Jeffery Hutchings, at the MacEachen Institute for a discussion about the importance of scientific evidence for government policy. The talk was a part of the MacEachen Institute’s Policy Matters speaker series, a weekly fall series that is open to the public and aims to encourage public engagement with local, national and international policy issues.

The central question up for discussion at this talk was “if evidence supports development of a policy, shouldn’t the evidence be given priority in policy decisions?” In practice, however, the model faces many challenges. Even though governments broadly state that their decisions will be based on research evidence, researchers frequently wonder why evidence seems to be ignored. Evidence to resolve serious environmental and societal problems is available, but solutions seem to be elusive.

“Scientific evidence is one kind of evidence and there are lots of different kinds of evidence,” says Megan Leslie, “Policy making is messy business . . . people are involved, economies are involved, communities are involved, countries are involved, and I do think science is just one factor.”

Leslie’s opinion was at odds with some of the scientists in the room, who spoke about the need to use academic research as a basis for finding solutions to policy problems. UK science journalist Daniel Cressey emphasized the demand for “evidence-based policy” in government but acknowledged that it’s difficult to present complex academic findings to politicians.

“Academic evidence is not cutting through to parliamentary decision-making and that’s because it arrives late, if it arrives at all, it comes laden with technical jargon, and it’s massively long,” says Daniel Cressey, Deputy Editor of Research Fortnight, London.

If you’re interested in learning more about whether scientific evidence should have pre-eminence in public decision making, a video of the full talk is on the MacEachen Institute’s website and their YouTube Channel.

The MacEachen Institute for Public Policy

Dr. Kevin Quigley: MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

November 27, 2018 rbudd Leave a Comment

MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

We invite you to listen to Dr. Kevin Quigley’s “welcome video” which highlights the vision and mission of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance.

Policy Matters is a weekly panel discussion on major policy issues presented by the MacEachen Institute. These robust dialogues speak to a wide range of topics from the impact of fake news to Provincial perspectives on Federal Pharmacare. We encourage you to subscribe to the MacEachen Institute’s mailing list to receive invitations, activities and updates.

Policy Matters Speaker Series 2018

Dr. Kevin Quigley: The importance of accountability after deadly disasters

May 22, 2018 rbudd Leave a Comment

The importance of accountability after deadly disasters

File 20180507 46335 1el66dl.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1 — A hand touches the monument that honours the 26 coal miners who perished in the Westray mine disaster at the Westray Miners Memorial Park in New Glasgow, N.S. On the 26th anniversary of the disaster, are we doing enough to ensure those responsible for such disasters are accountable?
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

Kevin Quigley, Dalhousie University

This week marks the 26th anniversary of the explosion at the Westray mine in the Nova Scotia community of Plymouth. Sparks in the mine combined with methane gas to cause an explosion that killed 26 men on May 9, 1992.

In the inquiry that followed, many people and organizations were singled out as contributing to the event, but no criminal convictions resulted.

Today, the people of Lac-Megantic in Quebec share a similar tragic fate as the people of Plymouth. The July 2013 train derailment in Lac-Megantic killed 47 and wiped out the town’s downtown core. Despite the trials and investigations, we are left wondering who is responsible.

After the failure of complex systems that result in deadly disasters, we struggle to hold people to account.

Organizational anthropologists refer to four types of accountability: Market, bureaucratic, community and randomness. Each type characterizes accountability differently; all have strengths and important limitations.

Markets and the law

Markets punish organizations after disasters; share values tumble and lawsuits mount. Many companies do not survive. Low-probability/high-consequence events like these, however, cannot be left to markets alone to address.

Markets encourage people to take chances and cut costs; they incentivize organizations to offload costs on others and not disclose information about vulnerabilities. The highly integrated nature of supply chains means that one small failure can sometimes have a massive cascading effect.

The concept of insurance — a common social response to managing risk — is also limited because these events involve so many organizations, are expensive and occur so rarely that there is a dearth of reliable predictive data. As American economist J. David Cummins emphasizes: “Catastrophic events, and particularly mega-catastrophes such as Katrina and the WTC terrorist attack, violate to some degree nearly all of the standard conditions for insurability.”

Legal mechanisms have similar challenges; it is very difficult to find one smoking gun. Last year, Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Gareau found Robert Wood not guilty of criminal charges stemming from the Algo Centre mall collapse in Elliot Lake, Ont., that killed two people and injured more than 20, partly because there were too many people involved to hold one person to account.

The judge, troubled by his own verdict, declared Wood had to accept moral responsibility for the event, a vague and unenforceable concept.

Other legal mechanisms are also limited. Non-disclosure agreements, as we saw in Lac-Mégantic, can be an efficient way to compensate victims, but they also shelter those who are responsible.

After Westray, the so-called Westray bill amended Canada’s Criminal Code to extend the criminal liability of corporations in the field of health and safety. Only five employers have served time for fatality-related incidents since it was enacted in 2004.

Public bureaucracies

We value public bureaucracies because of their specialization, stability and clarity of accountability; they can also manage big projects for the public good.

But big projects can also result in big failures, and as projects become larger and more complex, it makes it harder for bureaucracies to identify who is responsible. That in turn facilitates blame-shifting and the practice of sweeping indiscretions under the carpet.

Senior public officials don’t want to take responsibility for failures that they did not create themselves. They do not want to be blamed for policy decisions taken by politicians, or for underfunding.

Yet the “behind the curtain” tendencies of public servants in times of disaster erodes trust in governance. When asked in 2015 whether any public servants lost their jobs because of the events in Lac-Mégantic, then-federal transport minister Lisa Raitt could not give a straight answer.

Inquiries are crucial for understanding the circumstances surrounding disasters. Westminster-style governments have a tendency to establish inquiries.

Still, governments, which are often in a conflict of interest in these matters, don’t always call them. When they do, it’s sometimes simply to ease short-term political pressure. But inquiries are limited by their mandates, can only make recommendations and are only as good as our willingness to learn from and act on them.

Community accountability

Community accountability occurs when a community is held accountable to itself. Here, the concept of “community” is malleable; it refers to a group with a shared identity.

A five-year-old girl is taken to an evacuation helicopter at the South Grey Bruce Health Centre in Walkerton, Ont., in May 2000. Officials in charge of the contaminated water supply that claimed the lives of six people did not realize the potential danger of E. coli when they failed to warn residents not to drink the water.
(CP PHOTO/Kevin Frayer)

Restorative justice embodies aspects of community accountability; some call it “face-to-face” accountability. Unlike a bureaucratic approach, a community approach can be deeply personal.

Following the deaths of six people due to water contamination in 2000, Ontario’s Walkerton inquiry demonstrated shades of a community approach when Justice Dennis O’Connor chose to hold the inquiry in the town of Walkerton itself and allowed residents to provide personal accounts of the impact of the tragedy.

But there are challenges. Community accountability is oriented inward to the community, not outward to broader society, which also needs to learn about the systemic failures. Communities can fragment under this pressure; if the finger-pointing gets too intense, the community breaks down.

Communities can also feel anger towards outside organizations that they distrust. Following the Cave Creek disaster in New Zealand in which 13 youth and one adult died after a poorly constructed lookout point collapsed in a national park — and no one was ever convicted of a crime — the lawyer representing the government claimed that some people were simply out for revenge.

A random world

A new dynamic is emerging from our networked society: Randomness. In a random world, bad things happen; the world is a chaotic place, unworthy of trust or rational risk assessment.

Social media typifies this chaotic universe. As European scholar Pieter Rutsaert and his colleagues emphasize, social media “has the potential to develop a seemingly small-scale risk into a full-blown … crisis.”

Accountability can also be random, underpinned by the fickle finger of fate.

Following the recent school shooting in Parkland, Fla., an online campaign emerged demanding that Mountain Equipment Co-op drop any products related to Vista Outdoor because it was a manufacturer of guns; other organizations managed to avoid the online scrutiny.

Media amplifies some tragedies and plays down others. Events that happen on the weekend, for example, get more coverage.

In this context, the prominence of an event is driven by visuals and by the emotional weight of the story, which can be light on facts.

This dynamic results in people developing defensive posturing, adaptive capacity and brand management.

How we hold people to account after disasters is deeply embedded in social context; it is a legal question and a moral one.

When catastrophic events occur, we must consider the social and technological pressures that shape our behaviours and inform our accountability systems. We must emphasize learning, transparency and ethical conduct, and maintain public confidence in our overall system of governance. Recent events suggest there is much work to do.

Kevin Quigley, Scholarly Director of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, Dalhousie University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Archives for MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance

Rethinking Canada’s climate policy from the ground up

The state of play

Burden sharing

Direct engagement

The importance of accountability after deadly disasters

Markets and the law

Public bureaucracies

Community accountability

A random world