Abstract Twentieth century, citizen “revolts” against highway projects have influenced thinking about public transport (Toronto, Vancouver, New York), governance (Portland), and cycling (The Netherlands) to this day. Less is known about how these emerge in developing countries, and what they can tell us about citizens’ role in innovation to achieve more socially just, good and livable cities.  Using a complexity-based approach, this dissertation explores lessons from an anti-highway movement in Santiago, Chile (1997), which challenged authoritarian planning paradigms inherited from the Pinochet regime (1973-1990). In 2000, these leaders of diverse communities founded a citizen institution, Living City (Ciudad Viva), which today is a prize-winning, citizen-led planning institution.  Participation is recognized as important to community development, health and urban planning. Nonetheless, a rich literature notes many limitations. Is improving participation just a matter of “getting the process right”? Or does it require re-formulating frameworks to redistribute power, fostering self-generating civil society organizations, and treating democratization as ongoing rather than a “steady state”?  Re-formulating frameworks has far-reaching implications. It requires acting consistently with the premise that the local is central to change in human living systems, and the need to create the civic “infrastructure” conducive to citizen learning and the emergence of multiscalar citizen organizations, able to mobilize ecology of actors for innovation. To effectively address the challenges of climate change, loss of biodiversity, the social determinants of health, the “obesity epidemic” and other issues, the answers lie in city neighbourhoods and human settlements.  If we aspire to good, just and livable cities, uncertain futures require planning for change. This research suggests that we can identify dynamics likely to leverage significant change and activate capacities throughout a system. This requires moving to an inclusive planning paradigm that fully integrates citizen planners.

The transition from an industrial to a global knowledge-based economy has put universities in the spotlight of public policies as the new drivers of innovation and sustained economic growth. Consequently, societal expectations towards the academic community have changed and so has, under the influence of neo-liberal ideas, the public governance of higher education. This is particularly true in federalist systems, such as Germany, Australia and the European Union, where the roles of each government level in governing the higher education sector had to be renegotiated and clarified. In Canada, however, despite repeated recommendations by policymakers, scholars and international organisations, the respective responsibilities have not yet been clarified and, to date, there are still no mechanisms to coordinate the post-secondary education policies of the federal and provincial governments. This paper inquires into the reasons for this exception. In the academic literature, this has generally been explained in terms of Canada’s uniqueness with respect to its federalist system and the decentralized higher education sector. We attempt to go beyond this traditional federalism, state-centered approach, which is predominant in the Canadian higher education literature. Instead, based on interviews and official documents and inspired by the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), we shall be looking at the belief systems of the major actors in the policy process and the degree of coordination among them. Our analysis comes to the conclusion that, on the one hand, proponents of a pan-Canadian approach are divided over their fundamental beliefs regarding the compatibility of inclusiveness and excellence. Some argue that the federal government must legislate common standards to ensure equal opportunities for all Canadians. Others propose a New Governance-inspired approach to create a differentiated and competitive university sector that meets the demands of the global knowledge-based economy more efficiently. On the other hand, even though the provinces differ in their beliefs regarding the equal opportunity versus economic efficiency debate, they share the same strong belief with respect to the role of the federal government. According to this view, post-secondary education is exclusively a provincial responsibility and the role of the federal government is solely to help them ‘fix the problems’. Moreover, contrary to the proponents of more intergovernmental collaboration, the provinces have successfully strengthened the coordination among themselves to block further perceived federal intrusions into provincial jurisdiction. We come to the conclusion that the absence of intergovernmental mechanisms to govern post-secondary education is a consequence of the diverging belief systems and the establishment of formal coordination structures among the provinces to block – as they perceive - further federal intrusions. Also, there is less of a sense of urgency to act compared to, say, health care. Finally, remembering the near-separation of Quebec in 1995, there is very little appetite to reopen the constitutional debates. Therefore, based on our analysis, we argue that contrary to suggestions by some higher education scholars, the establishment of intergovernmental coordinating mechanisms appears unlikely in the near future.

Cette thèse tentera de démontrer, dans un premier temps, si les idéologies religieuses conservent une grande importance aux États-Unis, et ce, malgré la sécularisation apparente de la société. Une analyse du processus politique qui est à l’œuvre dans la mobilisation et l’action du Christian Coalition – organisation de la nouvelle droite chrétienne – permet de cerner la place qu’a le religieux dans la sphère publique, et plus particulièrement, dans la sphère politique. Plus spécifiquement, nous observerons les stratégies et les actions que le C.C. entreprend dans le but d’exercer des pressions et d’influencer les débats et le pouvoir politique, tout en déterminant la nature des enjeux qui motivent une mobilisation pour ce groupe protestant conservateur. Une évaluation basée sur le courant des mouvements sociaux illustrera la mesure dans laquelle la nouvelle droite chrétienne détient une partie du pouvoir social et jouit du rôle d’acteur politique par son institutionnalisation dans la sphère politique.

Coalitions in Northern Ireland have been organizing across the ethno-nationalist divide for decades. Yet, while empirical research has addressed challenges of, and potential for, organizing across ethnonationalism, the ways in which coalition members attend to their complex subjectivites have been overlooked. Using a critical, constructivist approach to qualitative research, this study of Alliance for Choice Belfast sheds light upon the impacts of attending to / overlooking difference and power dynamics. Data was collected through field research, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, and analysed through the lens of radical coalition building, along with theories that address the complexity of identities. The findings suggest that members of the coalition have created a depoliticized coalitional space in order to avoid conflict and unite around their campaign goal. This has had implications in terms of homogenizing womens experiences, overlooking elements of class privilege, and falling back into traditional practices of avoidance around controversial issues. / Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education

This dissertation, which consists of three essays, studies three applications. Each of them emphasizes the microfoundations of economic models. The first essay proposes a nonparametric estimation of structural labor supply and exact welfare change under nonconvex piecewise-linear budget sets. Different from previous literature, my method focuses on a nonparametric specification of an indirect utility function. I find that working with the indirect utility function is very useful in simultaneously addressing the labor supply problems with individual heterogeneity, nonconvex budget sets, labor nonparticipation, and measurement errors in working hours that previous literature was unable to. Further, the estimated indirect utility function proves to be convenient and efficient in calculating exact welfare change and deadweight loss under general piecewise-linear budget sets. In the second essay, I solve the equity premium, risk-free rate, and capital structure puzzles by laying a more solid microfoundation for consumption-based asset pricing models. I argue that the above two asset pricing puzzles arise from the aggregation of hump-shaped life-cycle consumption into per capita consumption, which accounts for the unanimous rejections of Euler equations in the literature. As for the third puzzle, I show that a firm's capital structure can be determined by heterogenous investors maximizing life-time utility even though the capital structure is irrelevant on the firm side. The endogenously determined leverage generates an even larger equity premium than a fixed one. The third essay studies the solution concepts of coalition equilibrium. Traditional solution concepts such as Strong Nash Equilibrium, Coalition-proof Nash Equilibrium, Largest Consistent Set, and Coalition Equilibrium violate the fundamental principles of individual rationality. I define a new solution concept, Weak Coalition Equilibrium, which requires each coalitional deviation to be within-coalition self-enforceable and cross-coalition self-enforceable. The cross-coalition self-enforceability endows coalitions with farsightedness. Weak Coalition Equilibrium is a generalization of Coalition-proof Nash Equilibrium and a re nement of the concept Nash Equilibrium. It exists under a weak condition. Most importantly, it is in line with the principle of individual rationality.

This study assesses the value of two analytical models explaining particular contemporary political events. This is undertaken through the comparative evaluation of two international models: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Rhodes’s model of Governance. These approaches are evaluated against an single case study: the censorship of computer network (“online”) content in Australia. Through comparison evaluation, criticism, and reformulation, these approaches are presented as useful tools of policy analysis in Australia. / The first part of the thesis presents the theoretical basis of the research and the methodologies employed to apply them. It begins by examining how the disciplines of political science and public policy have focused on the role of politically-active “interest”, groups in the process of policy development and implementation. This focus has lead to ideas about the role of the state actors in policy making, and attempts to describe and explain the interface between public and private groups in developing and implementing public policies. These, largely British and American, theories have impacted upon Australian researchers who have applied these ideas to local conditions. The majority of this part, however, is spent introducing the two research approaches: Paul Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalitions Framework and Rod Rhodes’s theory of Governance. Stemming from dissatisfaction with research into implementation, Sabatier’s framework attempts to show how competing clusters of groups and individuals compete for policy “wins” in a discrete subsystem by using political strategies to effect favourable decisions and information to change the views of other groups. Governance, on the other hand, attempts to apply Rhodes’s observations to the changing nature of the British state (and by implication other liberal democracies) to show the importance of self-organising networks of organisations who monopolise power and insulate the processes of decision making and implementation from the wider community and state organs. Finally, the methodologies of the thesis are presented, based on the preferred research methods of the two authors. / The second part introduces the case serving as the basis for evaluating the models, namely, censorship of the content of computer networks in Australia between 1987 and 2000. This case arises in the late 1980s with the computerisation of society and technological developments leading to the introduction of, first publicly-accessible computer bulletin boards, and then the technology of the Internet. From a small hobbyists’ concern, the uptake of this technology combined with wider censorship issues leads to the consideration of online content by Australian Governments, seeking a system of regulation to apply to this technology. As the emerging Internet becomes popularised, and in the face of adverse media attention on, especially pornographic, online content, during the mid to late 1990s two Federal governments establish a series of policy processes that eventually lead to the introduction of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999, a policy decision bringing online content into Australia’s intergovernmental censorship system. / The final part analyses the case study using the two theoretical approaches. What this shows is that, from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, debate over online content does not form a substantive policy subsystem until 1995, and within this three, relatively stable, competing coalitions emerge, each pressuring for different levels of action and intervention (from no regulation, to a strong regulatory model). While conflict within the subsystem varied, overall the framework’s analysis shows the dominance of a coalition consisting largely of professional and business interests favouring a light, co-regulatory approach to online content. From the perspective of Governance, the issue of online content is subject to a range of intra- and inter-governmental conflict in the period 1995-7, finally settling into a negotiated position where a complex policy community emerges based largely on structurally-determined resource dependencies. What this means is that policy making in the case was not autonomous of state institutions, but highly dependent on institutional power relations. Overall, in comparing the findings it becomes apparent that the approaches lack the capacity to fully explain the role of key sovereigns, defined here as those individuals with legal authority over decision making in the policy process, because of their methodological and normative assumptions about the policy process. By showing these individuals as part of wider networks of power-dependencies, and exploring the complex bundle of real, pseudo, symbolic, and nonsense elements that make up a policy, the role of Ministers as “semi-sovereign sovereigns” can be accommodated in the two approaches.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Department of Philanthropic Studies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Dwight F. Burlingame, Leslie Lenkowsky, Martha I. Pallante. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-69).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2008. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (p. 445-468). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Tübingen. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-148).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of British Columbia, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 397-446).