Global and transnational governance

Governance in general describes how complex organizations and especially state structures are managed. Global governance is the management of structural allocation mechanisms between states or by individual states that account for the entire world or a large part of it. Transnational governance goes beyond global governance and refers to governance beyond the boundaries of the national state that can manifest itself also on a small scale.  What forms of efficient governance are possible between the differing priorities of nation states and globalization?  What are the structures in building order that allow governance to (still) take place? And what room for manoeuvre do social and economic actors have in the “new” governance structures.

In focus are processes of change with regard to modes of political control, but also the influence in intra as intergovernmental area.
Mandatory decision-making in formal contexts of hierarchical "government" structures with governments and administrations as dominant players loses in almost all societies importance and is getting replaced or at least supplemented by "Governance":
complex coordination and negotiation proccesses in pluricentric network structures, in which state and private actors participate and where multiple political levels of action are included.

It examines how at various levels and in various policy fields, the challenges are addressed, resulting therefrom for the problem-solving ability and efficienc. It is also about institutionalized forms of conflict, as a key mechanism to regulate the (peaceful) coexistence in societies. Fragile states get particular attention: they are, in opposite to consolidated states, charakterized in that way that the handlung of conflict often takes violent forms. Particular attention is fragile states: they are as opposed to consolidated States characterized in that the handling of conflicts often takes violent forms. Violent conflicts can bring development processes to fail, accompanied by the change of political identities and lead to the fragmentation of states and the dissolution of entire societies. Especially transnational violent conflicts characterize increasingly international politics and provide a new challenge for states, governments and international organizations. Thus in this research field it comes to the point to ask about how you can come to peaceful forms of conflict resolution and how to identify actors and strategies that may affect the transformation of societies and to influence their economic and social development positively.

Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research

The Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21) is one of the youngest of 10 international Centres for Humanities Research, which are funded by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) since 2007. Collaborating institutes are the German Institute for Development (DIE) in Bonn, the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF) in Duisburg and the Institut for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. The central research institute of the University Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is situated in the Inner Habour of Duisburg. The focus of the centre lies in the consistant and steady exchange of international research fellows from around the world. Regular colloquia, workshops, summer schools and conferences provide plattforms for scientific communication and exchange. Beyond that the Käte Hamburger Lectures and Käte Hamburger Dialogues including their exceptional representatives of current research discourses address a wide audience. Publications of the centre are obliged to the open access- idea and can be found on the website of the centre and as downloads on the publications server of the University Duisburg-Essen.

(New) Political Representative Claims: A Global View [France, Germany, Brazil, China, India]

Europe currently experiences a crisis of established forms of political representation, visible for example in increasing political distrust. Various claims to renew political representation are emerging all over the world. However, most contemporary research on representation focuses on electoral/mandate representation within single countries. As a result, we lack a comparative, global analysis of (new) representative claims developed outside the representative political system; and dynamics developing in the Global South, including non-democratic entities, are neglected by Western scholars. Our research intends to...

Projekt management
Prof. Dr. Thomas Heberer, Department of Political Science (Universität Duisburg-Essen)
Prof. Dr. Brigitte Geissel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Prof. Yves Sintomer (Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris (CRESPPA))
Frau Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CNRS-EHESS) Paris)

Nonviolent Resistance and Democratic Consolidation

Nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes has received renewed public and academic interest in recent years. Several studies have confirmed that nonviolent strategies are efficacious in bringing about political change. However, the long-term impact of nonviolent resistance on the consolidation of democracy has not been studies thus far. This project aims to address this lacuna. We were able to show in a preliminary analysis that democracies which were installed after nonviolent resistance had a significantly higher rate of survival over time than other democracies. We wish to investigate the link between nonviolent resistance and democratic consolidation further by using a mixed-method research design.

Responsible Scientist
Dr. Daniel Lambach, Institute of Political Science

Political authority and transnational governance arrangements: Regulation through public and private labor, social and environmental standards in the Asian textile and garment industry

Globalized production chains as a distinctive feature of the textile and garment industry are only partly captured through forms of regulation that are initiated by states, be it on the national or on the international level. Since actors bypass existing legal norms or exploit the fact that there are no legal norms regulating the field of labor, social and environmental protection in manufacturing countries, we can witness a significant rise of standards based on private authority, established in order to fill the regulatory gap. Adding private (or private-public) norms to public regulation leads to a setting in which interrelated and partially conflicting “polycentric governance systems” arise on different regulatory levels. One of the primary objectives of this research project is to empirically identify governance arrangements by conducting a pilot study of labor, social and environmental standards in the Asian textile and garment industry (based on the examples of Bangladesh and Cambodia). Moreover, we want to analyze the interaction between public and private norm setting, and the “meta-governance” of transnational regulation under a common analytical framework.

Involved Scientists
Dr. Cornelia Ulbert, Institute for Development, Universität Duisburg-Essen
Prof. Dr. Markus Kaltenborn, juridical faculty, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Loud politicians, deaf citizens?

The research project of Prof. Andreas Blätte and Prof. Susanne Pickel deals with an empirical examination of the "speech disorder" between citizens and political elites. The focus is on the questions, whether the loss of objective responsiveness leads to a subjective perception of responsiveness and whether changes in the structure of how political information are communicated and an economization of politics reduce the clearance of objective responsiveness for parties and politicians.

Responsible Scientists
Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte, Institute of Political Science
Prof. Dr. Susanne Pickel, Institute of Political Science

Clarin-D

Humanities and Social Sciences work with sources, which are either produced by the projects themselves, or collected, or taken from archives. CLARIN-D is a research infrastructure that helps researchers with accessing, depositing and analysing data. CLARIN-D also offers information on a wide range of topics, including teaching material, help on data management plans and other, discipline-specific support.

Once a researcher has found interesting research data, accessing the data is the next step. If such research data is documented, described and archived, and thus "properly" given to the research community, such data can be easily found, and cited, so that research results can be reproduced, or secondary studies on existing data sets undertaken.

Data that is produced in research projects can be archived for the long-term with the support of the CLARIN-D centres. The data gets its own permanent reference, and therefore, it is possible to cite the data very much like traditional media such as books or scientific articles. This also helps....

Jeopardized Democracies in South East Europe

Jeopardized Democracies in South East Europe is a research project, in which Prof. Susanne Pickel tries to improve the understanding of how political elites and citizens understand democracy and to determine its impact on the congruence between political culture and structure in the south-eastern european EU Member States.

To achieve this goal, the project i) examines the values ​​and standards that citizens and political elites in general connect with the concept of democracy, ii) the compliance of the democracy understanding between citizens and political elites, iii) the congruence between the political culture of citizens and of the political elite as well as iv) the congruence between the political cultures and the political structure of the country. The study tries determine how far the congruence or incongruence of political culture(s) and the structure of the potentially different democratic ideas is dependent from those of citizens and political elites.

Responsible Scientist
Prof. Dr. Susanne Pickel, Institute of Political Science

Governance in China

The Project 'Governance in China' depicts an analysis of China's development by considering the local level of society. The research question, why development on a local level is rapidly increasing, acts as a steady golden thread in this research. Senior Professor Thomas Heberer of the Universität Duisburg-Essen and a network of expertise aim to examine these Local Cadres as Strategic Groups in relation to state and local Governance.

Involved scientist
Senior Professor Thomas Heberer, Institute of Political Science

Global governance - How risky is the weakness of emering markets?

On the 13th and 14th of october 2014, the conference "Exchange Rates, Monetary Policy and Financial Stability in Emerging Markets and Developing Countries", organized by Prof. Ansgar Belke (UDE, Member of the Research Council of the profile center of gravity) and Prof. Gunther Schnabl (University of Leipzig), took place in Leipzig (Germany). Topics of the meeting, which took place at the Leipzig University Library Albertina, were the macroeconomic challenges which especially the economies of emerging and developing countries after years of enormous expansionary monetary policies of the major industrialized countries have to face. On the occasion of the recently published World Economic Outlook, in which the International Monetary Fund has lowered its growth forecasts for the world economy, the conference participants also discussed the impact of weaker growth in countries like China, India and Brazil for the german economy.
The organizers of the conference were able to involve high-level keynote speakers as Jonathan Ostry, a deputy director of the research department of the International Monetary Fund and Prof. Menzie Chinn. Mr. Chinn is a professor at the LaFollete School of Public Affairs of the University of Wisconsin and had held various positions as a researcher and consultant for central banks, the IMF and the US government operates. In addition to other renowned researchers, the conference also gave students from Europe, the US, Japan and South Africa the opportunity to present their research results and to discuss about them. Selected papers of the conference will be published in special issues of international journals "Review of Development Economics" and "Credit and Capital Markets".

Responsible Scientists
Prof. Dr. Ansgar Belke, Faculty of Economics, University of Duisburg-Essen
Prof. Dr. Gunther Schnabl, Faculty of Economics , University of Leipzig

PolMine: Project for corpus-assisted policy research

The emergence of new and overlapping fields of political fields force research to find new ways to analyze the genesis and development of policies. At the same time more extensive data sets are available due to electronic storage and the process of making primary data from political debates and programs increasingly available. Can Methods help at the interface between quantitative and qualitative methods in the management and use of such rich material? With the "PolMine: Project for corpus-assisted policy research", Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte developed jointly with other researchers, new computational methods of discourse analysis.

Involved Scientist
Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte, Institute of Political Science