The Governance Podcast

What are the dangers of theory building about property rights in development economics? Are we becoming more ethical in the way we conceptualize property over time? In the latest episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Bart Wilson of Chapman University discusses his book project on the origins and meaning of property. 

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Bart J. Wilson is the Donald P. Kennedy Endowed Chair in Economics and Law at Chapman University. He is a founding member of the Economic Science Institute and founding member and Director of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. His research uses experimental economics to explore the foundations of exchange and specialization and the origins of property. Another of his research programs compares decision making in humans, apes, and monkeys. Bart has published papers in the American Economic Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Nature Human Behaviour. His research has been supported with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Federal Trade Commission. Bart has co-authored with Vernon Smith a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book entitled, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century.

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01:05: What is property?

07:10: How using tools gave primates a sense of ownership

08:30: Tools as extensions of ourselves

11:50: What's the difference between property 'in,' 'on' and 'of'?

15:54: An original experiment exploring what property means

26:40: Does this experiment tell us something new about the way we treat the concept of property in economics?

30:07: Where do property 'rights' come from?

36:20: Is the language of 'rights' morally and conceptually meaningful in domains other than property?

40:30: Are human beings becoming more ethical in the way they conceptualize property over time?

42:30:  How can the humanities and social sciences find a common language to theorize property?

43:07: Does interdisciplinarity make our work better or noisier? 

On our latest episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Mark Pennington interviews Professor Frans Berkhout of King's College London on his latest book about climate governance. Tune in for a rich discussion on the limits of international coordination and how local experimentation can solve global commons dilemmas.

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Frans Berkhout is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Environment, Society and Climate at King’s College London. He joined the Department of Geography at King’s in 2013.

From 2013-2015 he was Director of the Future Earth programme, based at the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris. Before that, Prof Berkhout directed the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the VU University Amsterdam in The Netherlands and led the Amsterdam Global Change Institute.

He has also held posts at SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, and was Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Global Environmental Change and Sustainable Technologies programmes.

Among other advisory roles, Professor Berkhout was a lead author in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (2014) and a member of the Social Science Panel of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He sits on the editorial boards of Research Policy, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions and The Anthropocene Review.

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 00:45: What was the motivation for your latest book?

5:15: What is experimentation in your framework? Is climate governance experimentation different from scientific experimentation?

10:15: Can you combine top down and bottom up approaches to climate governance?

15:25: Why do people at the local level take action on climate change?

19:35: How do local networks of experimentation get off the ground and get connected globally?

21:30: Some say that focusing on an experimental approach can serve as an excuse for a lack of coordination on climate change policy at the global scale. Others say global coordination is too slow and cumbersome. Can we reconcile this tension?

27:25: Do we always want local experiments to ripple out to a broader scale? Would they stop having contextual relevance?

31:45: What evidence do we have that local experiments are having a broader, more global effect?

35:00: Are we abandoning global coordination? Is there still a role for international policy?

39:17: What role does interdisciplinarity play in the study of climate change governance?

42:18: Do we have examples of networks of academic actors that experiment in social science approaches to climate governance?

45:03: What are the next research avenues for climate governance?

45:45: Are social scientists equipped to oversee the experiments? Are academics themselves complex enough to understand governance?

Tune in to a special conversation on the governance podcast between Professor Jeremy Jennings of King’s College London and Professor Quentin Skinner of Queen Mary University. Professor Skinner discusses the meaning of intellectual history, key insights about republicanism and political representation, and the perennial lessons we stand to learn from the humanities about our political present.

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Professor Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London. Previously the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, he is known as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. His most recent book is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics.

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1:05: What do intellectual historians do, and what are the defining features of the Cambridge school?

6:34: Is there a reason intellectual historians are so drawn to the early modern period?

8:08: What is Hobbes’ legacy? Why is he important?

10:38: What was so original about the Hobbesian conception of the state?

16:00: Why did Britain fail to adopt the Hobbesian view of the state?

19:41: What is republicanism, and why is it important?

25:00: What does the Irish case teach us about republicanism?

28:00: Your new book is about teaching the humanities. Why is that so important?

33:10: What is the meaning of laughter?

37:15: What is Hobbes’ theory of political representation?

40:45: How do classical debates about representation bear upon the present?

43:50: How much can we learn from the past?

49:02: How do you see yourself entering public debate as a moralist?

Tune in to the Governance Podcast with Professor Peter John of King’s College London, who discusses the history of behavioral economics, the limits of “nudge,” and how citizens can be empowered to “nudge” their political authorities back.  Learn more about how to enhance democratic accountability in the policy-making process from a key voice in the field.

Peter John is Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He was previously Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University College London. He is known for his work on agenda-setting, local politics, behavioral interventions, and randomized controlled trials.

He is author of Analyzing Public Policy (2012), which reviews the main theories of public policy and the policy process. He has carried out empirical work on agenda-setting to find out why governments focus on particular policies, which is represented in the book, Policy Agendas in British Politics (Palgrave, 2013), co-authored with Anthony Bertelli, William Jennings, and Shaun Bevan. With Anthony Bertelli, he developed public policy investment as an approach to understanding decision-making, which was published as Public Policy Investment: Priority-Setting and Conditional Representation in British Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2013).

He is interested in how best to involve citizens in public policy and management, often deploying behavioural interventions. He tests many of these interventions with randomized controlled trials. Some of these trials appeared in Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour (Bloomsbury, 2011). Practical issues with the design of experiments are covered in Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017). Experiments are also used to examine the impact of social media and politics in Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2015), with Helen Margetts, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri.

His current book, to be published in 2018, is a critical review of the use of behavioral public policies, called How Far to Nudge: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy (Edward Elgar).

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00:50: What is the concept of “nudge” and where did it come from?

5:05: What has your personal journey in public policy been like? Where did it start and where is it now?

10:00: How do you propose including citizens in the policy-making process?

20:00: What’s the cost of nudge plus?

30:18: How do you measure the impact of a behavioral public policy study?

31:12: How do I complain to the NHS about its services?

39:40: Is ‘nudge plus’ the best way to connect citizens with good public policy outcomes? After all, people have very little incentive to complain about government services.

44:50: Are you over-relying on the goodwill of the nudgers to create good public policy? What happens when a corporation or authoritarian government uses behavioral insights for nefarious purposes?

50:17: Can the private sector use ‘nudge plus’ to build trust with customers?

53:03: What is the future of behavioral economics as a field?

57:02: How has being interdisciplinary influenced your work?

Can blockchain put an end to election fraud? Can it help us rebuild trust in distant institutions and companies that handle our data? How does blockchain actually work? Join us for this podcast on the inner workings and implications of blockchain for governance and society.

Dr. Grammateia (Matoula) Kotsialou and Dr. Luke Riley are postdoctoral research associates at King’s College London working on the applications of blockchain in voting and collective decision-making domains. As computer scientists with expertise in game theory and artificial intelligence, they are here to answer all of your questions about blockchain and its future in society. For more information about their work, check out the Volt Project.

Send us your blockchain questions for our follow-up podcast with Matoula and Luke by May 31, 2018 at [email protected], or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

0:40 What is blockchain?

1:07 How does bitcoin work?

7:38 How does blockchain help us secure our transactions with others?

8:49 How vulnerable is blockchain to hacking?

9:54 What’s stopping blockchain from taking over the world right now?

11:50 Why did the stock price of bitcoin drop?

13:52 Is blockchain just an ideology or is it the next great disruptive technology of our time?

15:07 How does blockchain voting work?

18:58 Can blockchain prevent election hacking by third parties?

20:27 What security issues do modern electronic voting systems face?

24:38 How can technology help us improve democracy?

28:14 Can we use blockchain to build trust with companies that use our data?

31:29  Can I sell rights to my data on a blockchain social media account?

Tune in to the Governance Podcast with Dr Adam Tebble on the philosophical case for open borders, the role of experimentation in poverty alleviation, the line between academics and activism, and whether the state can improve governance outcomes. A unique discussion at the intersection of philosophy, policy and development economics.

Dr. Adam Tebble is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College London. He conducts research broadly within contemporary liberal political theory and specifically in classical liberalism, social justice and the politics of culture and identity. He is the author of Hayek (Bloomsbury) and Epistemic Liberalism, a Defence (Routledge).

Prior to joining King’s in 2011, Dr Tebble taught at the School of Public Policy, UCL. In the United States he has taught at Brown University, where he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow (2004-2006) and Lecturer (2006-2007) at the Department of Political Science.

Send us your questions for our follow-up blog interview with Adam by June  15, 2018 at [email protected], or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl).

00:50: What’s new about your case for open borders?

2:23: How are people who don’t immigrate benefited by those who do?

6:10: How does the theory of knowledge behind your argument challenge our understanding of evidence and bureaucratic expertise?

10:05: You argue that people can make governance in their home countries better off when they leave. What are the empirics on this?

14:20: How do the benefits of immigration outweigh the costs of brain drain?

17:00: Advocates of open borders will react favorably to your message, but some people in power will not. Who is your audience?

22:18: What do you advise a leader who puts the interests of their electorate first but still claims they have obligations to the global poor?

26:20: Are open borders only theoretically a good idea? In practice, don’t we have good reason to close borders on the basis of national security or economic interests?

30:51: If you have an authoritarian populist who refuses to have obligations to the global poor, how can you convince them to  open borders?

34:45: Is it okay for an academic to toe the line between the academy and activism?

36:22: Are you saying that there are no hard and fast rules about how to craft immigration policy or making a bolder proposal?

38:55: How have liberal thinkers from the 20th century shaped your thinking about migration policy?

49:40: It takes a long time for “experiments of living” to play out. What if we need the state to address more urgent social challenges here and now? What role does the state play in improving governance?

How can we produce effective regulations when governments can no longer cope with the demands of an increasingly complex and digitised world? Professor Gillian Hadfield of the University of Southern California discusses novel institutional mechanisms that can make the law more agile, inclusive and effective. Join us at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London for the first episode of the Governance Podcast.

Gillian K. Hadfield is the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland professor of law and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. She holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. She has served as a clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values, and Policy, among other leading organisations in the field of law and economics. Her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy was published by Oxford University Press in November 2016.