Suchergebnisse

The Economy of Communion (EoC) movement is one of the most interesting phenomena both in today's Catholicism and in the global field of spiritually oriented entrepreneurship. This model – first elaborated by the founder of the Focolare movement, Chiara Lubich – is focused on a 'culture of giving'; on the development of a relation of 'communion' with employees, customers and even competitors; on transparency and fairness; and on environmental sustainability. Although grounded in the Gospel and the Catholic Church's social doctrine, it is meant as a business model which can be adopted also by people belonging to other religious traditions, and even by non-believers. This paper, based on interviews to people involved in the EoC movement and on other primary and secondary sources, will analyse the movement in Italy, focusing on a side understudied by the literature: the complex web of organizations which provide it with a structure and a governance. Particularly, the paper will show how such organizations try to strike a balance between preserving the movement's identity and Chiara Lubich's message, and spreading the EoC model by trying to make it popular, also outside the Focolare movement.

Food policy councils (FPCs) are an embodiment of food democracy, providing a space for community members, professionals, and government to learn together, deliberate, and collectively devise place-based strategies to address complex food systems issues. These collaborative governance networks can be considered a transitional stage in the democratic process, an intermediary institution that coordinates interests not typically present in food policymaking. In practice, FPCs are complex and varied. Due to this variety, it is not entirely clear how the structure, membership, and relationship to government of an FPC influence its policy priorities. This article will examine the relationship between an FPC's organizational structure, relationship to government, and membership and its policy priorities. Using data from a 2018 survey of FPCs in the United States by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future paired with illustrative cases, we find that an FPC's relationship to government and membership have more bearing on its policy priorities than the organizational structure. Further, the cases illustrate how membership is determined and deliberation occurs, highlighting the difficulty of including underrepresented voices in the process.

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AbstractThis symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi‐level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an 'umbrella concept', encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi‐level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multi‐level governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria—accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness—and points towards substantive institutional reforms.

AbstractOn 17 March 2016 the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (Partîya Yekîtî ya Dêmokrat, PYD) unilaterally proclaimed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria in three cantons, Afrin and Kobane in northern Aleppo province, and Jazira in Hassakeh. The party's ideology claims to endorse the participation of civilians and certain Arab tribes and minorities in its governance councils. However, the PYD and its armed militia, the People's Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG), have been accused of committing human rights violations against civilians and installing one-party rule. Given its stated normative commitments and ideas on democracy, this ideology–practice gap begs the question: what factors facilitated the PYD to conform to its democratic pronouncements on power-sharing and inclusivity under certain conditions and, conversely, what factors permitted their abandonment or violation? By analysing the PYD's governance record and strategies in northern Syria between 2012 and 2018, this article argues that the PYD displayed a mix of democratic adherence and transgression in its governance practices. This has meant that the PYD engaged hybrid mechanisms of democracy-building, coercion, displacement and violence in order to consolidate territorial control and assert ideological hegemony. I argue that complex networks of local, state and third-party interests complicate Kurdish self-rule in Syria, requiring a multilevel approach to understand the interrelated challenges to democratization in the post-war transition. I identify four major types of relations that have influenced the PYD's hybrid governance practices: intra-organizational factionalism; civilian–rebel relations, especially in mixed demographic areas; international sponsors and rivals; and rebel–regime relations.