Das Projekt "Long-Term Policy Problems (LoPo)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung e.V. durchgeführt. Will the European countries be able to pursue long-term policies? The debates on managing climate change, pension plans, public health insurance plans, and public sector debt spring to mind. Many of these problems share the characteristics that they will impact large segments of society, and cumulative changes will not allow a reversal to the present state if changes are substantially delayed. Long-term policy (LoPo) issues are likely to fall prey to the intergenerational fallacy: Governments are interested in re-election, but this may create the danger of repeatedly deferring substantive policy change until a later point in time. Fortunately, select countries have been able to demonstrate that they attempt to address select long-term policy challenges.
Das Projekt "F 3.2: Development intervention, state administration and local society: conditions for political participation in the highlands of Northern Thailand and Northern Vietnam" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Universität Hohenheim, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften des Agrarbereichs durchgeführt. During the first phase the focus of the F 3 research project has been on the interface between local institutions and foreign-sponsored development assistance programs. One major finding was that local groups (local villagers, development workers and agencies, NGO) had different interests in their involvement to set up or facilitate hill-tribe networks, defining the agendas, establishing administrative structures and translating objectives into operations. The outcome represents a compromise between the various groups involved, shaped by cultural relations between the ethnic groups and their respective advantages, as well as the administrative and political cultures of development organisations and their linkages to economic and political structures beyond the local level. Another important finding was that the interface has effects on the local groups towards formalization, by which a better compatibility with the local administration was achieved, on the expense of integration of the group-members into local community. Phase two of project F3 uses the results from the interface analysis for the examination of encounters within newly established administrative bodies (in Thailand: TOA and TCC) between local organisations, local administration and local government service agencies. These bodies set up in the context of decentralization policies, are supposed to link local organizations as representatives of local society with the regional and national political and administrative system, to enhance development opportunities more suited to local interests. An important question is, whether these new bodies develop the interface towards a public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) or are forms of bureaucratization. This has far reaching effects on political participation of local groups, representation of local interests, organisational pattern, and thus legitimacy of the new institutions. The aim of the F3.2. project is to develop interface analysis further by taking into account these processes of formalization and their consequences. The focus of F3.2. is thus on political participation in the sense of articulation of local demands through representation. Interests as well as the ability to articulate these as demands, i.e. political participation depend on acting possibilities (agency), based on the vertical and horizontal position of an individual or group within a social structure. Consequently, public representation and political participation should be examined with the question what different social strata can participate and are represented. This requires an actors oriented social structure analysis. The policies of administrative reform towards decentralization in Vietnam and Thailand, by which the degree of political participation is to be increased, result from national political changes and how these are locally implemented. (abridged text)