Seeking Virtual Presenters for Participation Camp: Changing the Rules, June 27-28

If you, or someone that you know, might be interested in being a virtual presenter at the following event, please let us know.

Participation Camp: CHANGE THE RULES! – seeking virtual presenters and/or collaborators

Democracy is the game where we can change the rules together! How do we make this game more serious, more fair and more fun? Please let us know if you are interested in convening a virtual session at this event on a topic of your choice, or collaborating with us in some way!

Participation Camp, Change the Rules, in New York on June 27-28, will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation and collaboration around this question. Participants may attend a wide range of physical and virtual presentations (or deliver one themselves), compete in a conference wide web participation game called Nomic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic), or roll up their sleeves in a hands on workshop. For preliminary details see: http://participationcamp.org/.

If you might be interested in collaborating with us, please check out our wiki at: http://barcamp.pbworks.com/ParticipationCamp

What Makes Change The Rules Different?

Virtual/Physical Hybrid Structure: One particular feature of this event is that we will be bridging the physical and virtual worlds. We will be opening up virtual spaces in advance of the actual session so as to engage virtual participants in the project. We will also have a room where virtual presenters can connect with those at the conference.

Open Space/Defined Hybrid Structure: We will be using Open Space principles for the creation of some of the sessions, but will also be seeking out the involvement of those that would like to actively
engage participants on a specific topic. If there is an issue or a question that you would like to discuss at this event, please let us know!

Play Game: We will be playing the game, Nomic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic). This is a game that is designed to teach participants, by virtue of their experience, some of the interesting features of governance, democracy, rule making, rule following, collaboration etc.

Pre-Session Dialogue: We will open SkypeChat spaces that enable those that are interested in the PCamp theme(s) to connect with each other, exchange ideas, plan potential sessions etc.

Sustain Dialogue: Due to the fact that virtual environments are accessible from anywhere, it becomes possible for participants to continue their conversations with others after the conclusion of the
session. This makes it possible for them to continue to explore the ideas and projects that they are interested in, as well as to cultivate the relationships with those that they have connected with.
We hate the fact that what happens when events end is that there is little or no follow up!

Questions/Themes

Here are a few questions that we have been thinking about. Are there any such questions that are of interest to you, and around which you might be interested in organizing a virtual session?
• What, generally speaking, is the role that technology can play in fostering citizen engagement?
• What are the best tools for creating the right frameworks for fostering citizen engagement?
• What are the particular challenges of using open, collaborative, platforms?
• What sorts of business models are consistent with ‘open collaboration’? How can organizations that subscribe to these principles also generate revenue?
• How do we utilize technology to mobilize the youth vote?

Process

On June 20th, we will create a chat space/conversation in Skype to which we will invite all those that are interested in participating in an open dialogue on issues relating to open governance. This chat space will allow you the opportunity to:
• Introduce yourself and your project to others that are like minded
• Connect with others that might be interested in your project or might have interesting project ideas.
• Learn, via participation, about how open, collaborative, patterns of interaction work
• Learn, via participation, how groups self organize Virtual Tools

We will be using free online tools that are easily accessible by any participant, such as:

Drop.io: We will utilize drop.io (www.drop.io) in order to organize and share files.
Google Documents: will be used for the joint authoring of documents.
SkypeChat: Will provide a open space where people can start the dialogue, network and keep the discussion going.
Etherpad: for notetaking during sessions.
Twitter: as a channel to the outside to integrate other interested parties.

Stephan Dohrn

IASC Membership Survey

Dear IASC Member,

Inorder to encourage the exchange of knowledge and experience between our members, we have been working for the past year on our membership strategy. To make you membership in the IASC community as useful and enjoyable as possible we need you to provide us with feedback on your personal experience and expectations. Therefore we kindly request that you fill out a survery. Your answers are very valuable for the design of our new membership strategy and the future of the IASC.

You can fill out the survery online by clicking the following link:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=ckJqN0lJajR3bGxvSU9Dem8xVUY3cFE6MA.

We will analyze results by May 19th, so please send use your reply before that.

We appreciate your time and suggestion. If you have additional ideas feel free to share them with us by sending an e-mail to Luz Aliette Hernandez at iasc@iasc-commons.org.

Also, please remember to renew your membership registration for the period of July 2009-June 2010 through the member's link:

https://www.regonline.com/Renewal.aspx?EventId=86527. There you can also check your membership fee record at the link "View my details" that appears after you enter your personal information.

Thank you for your participation,

The IASC Secretariat

Invitation to a Virtual Real-time Collaboration Workshop

What tools and principles do we need to help change to unfold? Social and technological development is a means for better organizations, and a better world.

Please join us for a global of trial using Open Space principles to convene and connect participants from around the world.

When: Saturday, 9 May, 2009
Time: 14.00-17.00 GMT (please check your local time here)

Cost: Free

For more information and to register: http://www.change-management-blog.com/2009/03/real-time-virtual-collaboration.html

International Conference: Towards Knowledge Democracy
25-27 August 2009

I would like to draw you attention to the forthcoming International Conference "Towards Knowledge Democracy", which will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands, on 25-27 August 2009. http://knowledgedemocracy/nl

Background information: "This conference offers you a unique opportunity to share your visions and experiences on how to deal with the challenges and possibilities that occur on the interface between science, politics, society and the media. The ability to handle these boundary issues is essential in our world where knowledge becomes increasingly democratised. An international audience consisting of scientists, politicians, government officials, media professionals, societal organisations and other interested parties will convene in Leiden to exchange ideas. We expect hundreds of visitors and over a hundred keynote and panel speakers to discuss their views during this three-day event."

Call for papers here: http://www.knowledgedemocracy.nl/files_content/CALL_FOR_PAPERS_TKDpdf

Deadline for submission of abstacts 1 May 2009.

Best wishes - and apologies for cross posting.
Sarah Cummings

Context, international cooperation
Cornelis Houtmanstraat 15
3572 LT Utrecht
The Netherlands
mail: sc@developmenttraining.org
www.developmenttraining.org
www.civicdrievenchange.org

www.ikmemergent.net
http://thegiraffe.wordpress.com
www.km4dev.org/journal

Wageningen University (the Netherlands) and the Sadguru Foundation (India) will jointly host a symposium ‘Decentralization, Power and Tenure Rights of Forest-Dependent People’ at Dahod, Gujarat, India on 27-28 October 2009. An optional one-day field visit will be arranged on 29 October 2009.

Objective - The main aim of the symposium is to share local, national and international experiences of decentralization reforms and forest tenure rights in relation to the political position of forestdependent indigenous peoples and pastoralists.

Symposium - Key identified thematic issues for discussions are:

Decentralization Reforms
Decentralized forest management reforms recognize new types of institutions. In practice, what kinds of institutions are chosen and why? Are the local institutions supportive towards marginalized groups? Do marginalized groups have a say in choosing the ‘right’ local institution?

Politics of Power
Different forms of power are devolved to different types of institutions through decentralized forestry. Which kinds of powers are transferred to local authorities? Who are the new authorities? Does devolving power to local authority means empowerment of indigenous peoples and women?


Forest Tenure Rights
Statutory laws are increasingly recognizing forest tenure rights of the indigenous peoples. To what extent do international instruments and institutions influence national and local forest governance? Is the state ‘recognition’ of forest tenure rights conducive to the reduction of rural
poverty?

Abstract - The paper should address one or more of the above identified three thematic issues based on empirical and/or theoretical research.

Abstracts should include title, author(s), institutional affiliation, full contact address, telephone number and a summary (max 250 words) of the paper with four keywords. Please email the abstract as an attachment to Purabi Bose (purabi.bose@wur.nl) before 10 April 2009. Please state “symposium abstract/your last name” in the email subject line. We will notify acceptance of the abstract via email by 30 April 2009.


Participants - We encourage participants from multidisciplinary background including international and national researchers, academics, postgraduate students, policymakers, legal experts, NGO members, government officers.

Language - English is the symposium language.


Programme - Two-day interactive symposium will have keynote lectures, selected paper presentations, panel discussion, and an openforum focussed debate. The confirmed programme will be available by September 2009.

Venue - Sadguru Foundation, Chosala, Dahod district, Gujarat, India.

Being hosted in a semiarid, tribal district bordering Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh states, the symposium presents an opportunity to explore what future holds for some of India's poorest forest-dependent tribal communities.

Dahod is directly connected to Mumbai (540km/9hrs) and Delhi (840km/12hrs) by Indian railways. The nearest airports are in Ahmedabad and Vadodara city of Gujarat. By road: bus service is available from Ahmedabad (200km) and Vadodara (150km).
Check venue details at www.nmsadguru.org/FacilitiesAvailable.html and general information about Dahod at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahod

Important Dates - Abstract submission -- 10 April 2009
Acceptance of abstract -- 30 April 2009
Registration fees and paper submission -- 15 September 2009
Final programme & Keynote speakers -- 30 September 2009
Symposium -- 27-28 October 2009
Fieldtrip (optional) -- 29 October 2009

Registration - A nominal participation fee of Rs.2000 is to be paid by 15 September 2009. To encourage participation of PhD students and women from developing countries, the fee is further relaxed to Rs.1000. The fee includes presymposium proceedings, twinsharing accommodation for one night at the venue, and meals. The fees exclude all other expenses like travel, extra days of lodging/boarding, and field trip. All registrations will be confirmed on the receipt of fees.

Mode of Payment - Indian Participants: Kindly send demand draft in favour of “N. M. Sadguru Water and Development Foundation” together with a covering letter (including full name, institutional affiliation, position, address, telephone, email) to Harnath Jagawat, Director, Sadguru Foundation, Post Box 71, Dahod 389171, Gujarat, India.

International Participants: Through bank transfers, kind contact symposium secretariat.


For any further information, to register your participation, or to cosponsor the symposium, please contact the Symposium Secretariat preferably by email at:

Wageningen University, the Netherlands
Purabi Bose
Email: purabi.bose@wur.nl

Sadguru Foundation, India
Harnath Jagawat
Email: nmsadguru@yahoo.com

Call for Papers

WATER POLICY DYNAMICS IN STATE-CENTRIC REGIMES

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), defined by the Global Water Partnership as “a process which promotes the co-ordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems,” (GWP TAC 2000) is a concept that has gained international attention since water experts and advocates worldwide convened and agreed upon the Dublin Principles in preparation for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio deJaneiro.

The Dublin Principles promote awareness-raising among policy makers and the general public, taking decisions at the lowest appropriate level, full public consultation and involvement of users in planning and implementation of projects, empowering women to participate in water resources programs in self-defined ways, and recognizing the basic right of human beings to have affordable access to clean water and sanitation. The concept of IWRM that came forward from these principles has been understood as having normative and strategic value for providing a framework to achieve sustainable resource management, which in turn can be operationalized through different types of approaches. Nonetheless, at the center of IWRM’s strongly normative global discourse is an emphasis upon distinctly society-centric assumptions of how governance is carried out within a nation-state (Mollinga 2008).

Society-centric theories of the state rely on a number of assumptions: liberal individual-rights and the protection of those rights; the competition of individuals maximizing their self-interest as a driving economic and social force; and the neutral role of the state in regulating the free market to coordinate the allocation of resources, and in arbitrating between competing forces in society to achieve the common good. Given these assumptions concerning the relationship between government and society, any given policy can be traced back to demands placed upon the government by competing interest groups within the national political system – the source of authority for policy formulation inherently comes from within society.

The society-centric assumptions upon which IWRM policies tend to be based can serve as a methodological challenge within states where there is an empirical reality of state-centric processes. In such polities, the state has some level of autonomy from social and economic forces, and it is assumed to not be neutral in its relationships with organized interests. As such, any given policy can be traced to the active role of government officials seeking to maximize their individual economic welfare and power or to the constraining role of the state’s organizational structure. State-centric theories of the state see the state as an independent variable in explaining political and social events.

Since the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, there has been a push for all countries to adopt policies promoting IWRM. Authoritarian countries are obviously state-centric in their approach. A number of new democracies that have arisen since the end of the Cold War to satisfy domestic and donor pressure have established political hybrids, which Ottoway (2003) calls semi-authoritarian states. These regimes have deliberately combined the rhetoric of liberal democracy while allowing for little real political competition for power. Bell et al (1995) also discuss the phenomenon of Asian democratization as being “illiberal” in that these countries have promoted a non-neutral understanding of the state, with a technocracy managing the developing state as a corporate enterprise, while maintaining control over public space and civil society. Zakaria (1997, 2003) built upon this discussion, broadening its application outside of the Asian context by differentiating constitutional liberty (the protection of individual rights through a legal system that cannot be arbitrarily manipulated by government) from democracy (open, free, and fair elections). Many new democracies, he points out, have promoted the latter without developing the former, defining them as “illiberal democracies.”

A number of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian/illiberal-democratic nations have adopted institutional reforms within their water resources sectors. Such countries as China, Cuba, Egypt, Kyrgistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Uganda have been recognized for instituting national policies, strategies, and laws for water resources development and management, but are nonetheless resistant to fully embracing the society-centric aspects of IWRM reforms. In this Call for Papers, we are seeking to make sense of processes involved in authoritarian regimes with respect to water reforms, drawing from a broad set of cases. As such, we seek not to solve the issue, but rather to open up discussion and explore findings to-date for further analytic development. We are interested in historically and geographically contextualized case studies employing the following types of analysis:

• Actor-oriented analyses (Long and Van der Ploeg 1994) exploring the processes of state-centric regimes in adopting and/or implementing water (including IWRM) policies. This can involve an analysis of bureaucracy or leadership to understand how policy ideas are distilled and how decisions are made in a closed policy regime, bringing light to the policy process and structure-agency issues embedded in decision-making. Such an account of how the normative ideas of IWRM arrive, translate, and are carried out in the technocratic engineering-oriented water bureaucracies of closed regimes greatly informs the discussion.

• Given that the state is not a distinctive actor nor an entity in itself, but rather can be considered to be an ideological project (Abrams 1988), accounting for the resources, strategies, and limitations of non-state actors actively interested in promoting society-centric water policy processes (including IWRM), and their respective experiences and responses to the state-centric structures of governance aids in understanding the dynamics of the relationship between state and society in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes.

In discussing a set of such cases and the questions they present, we would like embark on developing a new vocabulary as well as an innovative set of ideas concerning how the analysis of water policy dynamics can be undertaken in state-centric water policy regimes, as frameworks incorporating society-centric assumptions seem to have clear limits.

The timeline for this Call for Papers is as follows:

Timeline

January 20, 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts of papers. Abstracts should be submitted to Anjali Bhat at abhat@uni-bonn.de.

February 1, 2009: Selected authors invited to submit papers

March 24-25, 2009: Workshop on Water Policy, IWRM and Authoritarian Regimes
For enquiries or further details, please contact the Workshop organizers.
Peter P. Mollinga, pmollinga@uni-bonn.de
Anjali Bhat, abhat@uni-bonn.de
ZEF (Center for Development Research)
University of Bonn, Germany

References

Abrams, Philip. 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)” Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1): 58-89.

Belll, Daniel A., David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David M. Jones. 1995. Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Grindle, Merilee S. 1989. “The New Political Economy: Positive Economics and Negative Politics. Policy, Planning and Research Working Papers. WPS 304. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

GWP TAC. 2000. “Integrated Water Resources Management.” Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) Background Papers No. 4. Stockholm, Sweden: Global Water Partnership.

Long, Norman and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. 1994. “Heterogeneity, Actor and Structure: Towards a Reconstitution of the Concept of Structure”, in David Booth, (ed). Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice. Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical.

Mollinga, Peter P. 2008. “Water Policy – Water Politics.” In Waltina Scheumann, Susanne Neubert, and Martin Kipping (eds), Water Politics and Development Cooperation: Local Power Plays and Global Governance. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Pp. 1-29.

Ottoway, Marina. Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment ofr International Peace. 2003

Zakaria, Fareed. 1997. “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” Foreign Affiars. November.

Zakaria, Fareed. 2003. Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.