columbia | The Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia University in New
York is launching a call for proposals by junior researchers on
governing scarce, yet essential goods. Selected proposals shall be
presented at panel sessions at a conference held in New York on 20-21
June 2013. The research project is coordinated by Prof. Katharina
Pistor, the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation, and
Prof. Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the
right to food.
A number of factors have led to dramatically increased pressure on land and the essential resources it harbors: population growth and a corresponding rise in demand for agricultural and other commodities; competing uses of land between different forms of agriculture, resource extraction, large-scale industrial projects and urban sprawl; environmental degradation from climate change and unsustainable practices; and trade and investment liberalization, among others. As a result, water, food and shelter are increasingly considered scarce and subjected to commercial pressures that make them inaccessible to many.
Private property rights regimes have traditionally been considered the most effective institutional arrangement to allocate scarce goods and combat what has been termed the “tragedy of the commons” – the depletion of scarce common resources by actors who disregard the carrying capacity of the land and bear no costs for their actions. Individual property rights regimes lead to allocation of land to the highest bidder, who is presumed to put the land to its most efficient use. But conversion to private property regimes has also resulted in widespread displacement of small holders and indigenous people and the exclusion of many others from access to resources essential to their livelihoods.
Two well-studied alternatives to private property rights are collective governance by local authorities and centralized control. However, neither fully addresses the problems of scarce, essential goods. Collective governance is limited by a community’s ability to manage collective action problems, but the governance issues we are facing are those of a heterogeneous world with high social mobility and rapidly changing social norms. Similarly, centralized control depends on the authority and wisdom of the central decision-maker, who may lack local knowledge and accountability. Political voice might address problems of accountability, but how to organize voice in a global world remains an open question.
Proposals should suggest models for governing essential, scarce resources. They can be qualitative or quantitative; make use of empirical data and field research or suggest a new theoretical approach. They should address if and how the following three normative goals
(the basis of the triangle to which the title refers) for managing scarce, essential goods can be realized:
• equity (universal access to those resources that are essential for human life);
• efficiency (in managing scarce essential goods and minimizing waste); and
• sustainability (arrangements that do not unduly interfere with future productivity or availability of essentials).
13 comments:
The Center on Global Legal Transformation -- Defeating Darwin and Low_Future_Time_Orientation with more government regulation....
I wrote mine 13 years ago.
http://toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html
Good stuff, as far as it went, but not exactly on the same level of the game as what the "liberal" psychopimps at Columbia are on about...,
What do you mean by "level of the game"? Not pseudo-intellectual enough?
lol, that'd be your forte bro.umbra. See, you're always talking about double-entry accounting, depreciation, and various and sundry entirely symbolic manipulations. Me on the other hand, I like to keep it feudally real. In this case, the symposium in question is addressing itself to the final tangible frontier, the frontier of overcoming sovereign and "democratically" elected political regimes - in order to assert seignurial property rights over the global human commons, fresh water, scarce mineral and other resources, and planetary necessities which have here-to-date eluded final, private capture.
po'folk in uhmurka gave up their final freedom when they gave up the rural agrarian self-sufficiency that helped them survive the great depression, and had seen their forbears through preceding periods of great hardship, as well.
...In some jurisdictions, the rain water falling on your roof does not even belong to you....
http://www.naturalnews.com/036615_Oregon_rainwater_permaculture.html
Machines wearing out is not real?
How do you measure it over years and millions of machines?
In exactly the same way I measure spilt milk and water under the bridge - I don't.
When these machines about which you obsess have run their 150 year course, and, when the planned obsolescence engineered into them since ~1942 is no longer in vogue, it will still be the case that these humans require indispensable resources from the commons - simply to live. That the upper reaches of the 1% are still continuously angling on privatizing these remaining resources is profoundly problematic to me. See, I've paid careful attention to the feudal history of the Americas, watch the decline of the feudal hovel that is Haiti, watched as narco-barons have supplanted all other forces and factors in Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, Mexico, and see beyond any shadow of a doubt what that writes on the historical and political wall of our future.
Feudalism has been normative across much of the Americas for centuries, which the barest patina of bourgeois political cover, about as much cover as Dita von Teese has on her southern extremities at any given point in time.
The last semblance of human freedom is what I'm on about here, and the absolute re-establishment of real, legally enforced human peasant serf status.
Ah, yes, the old canard about the tragedy of the commons. Problems is: Hardin, in the original paper, cited ZERO examples of the tragedy of the commons occurring. Instead he presents a mathematical game where rationally self-interested sheep-herders turn a meadow into wasteland. 1) Even if the problem occurred in real life, the problem isn't common ownership of the grass, it is private ownership of the sheep. 2) There is no reason to assume that parceled up private plots would fare any better than the common meadow. Self-regulation isn't any more likely to occur among a collection of rationally self-interested agents than in a communal ownership system. 3) Historical, as in real, examples of communal ownership work quite well, especially when a representative body of regulators is given authority to act. The few examples where it does not work was a failure to enforce regulations. Therefore, as traditional methods such as "open fields" (or "open systems, open anything) ain't broke yet, I suspect this little symposium will end being quite the circle jerk.
How much CO2 did that spilt milk put into the atmosphere? The problem is that our Great Leaders think the solution to our economic problems is more of the same.
Dita von Teese, lol, I was like, "who?" A quick Goggle (sic) shows me that girl surely knows how to work the $20s out of those male ATMs!
Human freedom... human peasant serf status == oxymoron. Oh, I'm sure you're right about the direction we're headed but it sure doesn't strike me as a good place to be except for the feudal lords.
What do you define human freedom as?
I live in Canada, and I consider myself free. I wouldn't actually want pure freedom, personally. Pure freedom to me would be running around naked in a forest trying to stay alive. I would be completely free, but not sure I would be happy. Though, in all honesty, I haven't tried it.
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