A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Monthly Archive: June 2024

Climate / Environment / General / International / Social justice

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Is This Climate Justice? The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union

Michael Coghlan, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This is a guest post by Virginia De Biasio

In November 2023, Australia and Tuvalu, a small island country in the Pacific Ocean extremely vulnerable to climate change, signed the “Falepili Union” treaty. The treaty’s alleged purpose is to help Tuvalu to face the increasingly ravaging effects of climate change.

“Falepili” is a Tuvaluan word for giving to neighbours without expecting anything in return, as if they were family. It stands for the values of good neighbourliness, care and mutual respect. Not very surprisingly, the Falepili Union is a lot more than a friendly and mutually respectful treaty. Framed as climate justice, the treaty is underpinned by Australia’s geopolitical interests and a – not so respectful after all – form of neo-colonialism.

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Democracy / General

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3 Points for a Win and Constitutional Design

Critics of the “first past the post” electoral rule often complain that it is unfair. It seems unfair that (for example) in the 2019 UK general election the Scottish National Party won 7% of parliamentary seats with only 4% of votes cast across the country, while the Liberal Democrats won 2% of seats with 4% of votes.

So, which electoral system is the fairest of them all?

I submit that there is really no answer to this question, and we would do better to discard it.

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General

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Why Not Remote Voting?

Source: https://www.ledgerinsights.com/japans-tsukuba-city-to-use-blockchain-based-electronic-voting/

With about half of the world’s population living in countries that have held or will hold nationwide elections this year, 2024 has been called a “super election year”, and the “biggest election year in history”. In the past two weeks alone, elections were held in all 27 EU countries (with some also holding local or parliamentary elections aside from those for the European Parliament), as well as in India, Mexico, South Africa, Madagascar, Iceland, or Serbia, with others scheduled in the second half of this year, most notably in the United States and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, extensive empirical analyses show that in the last five decades electoral participation rates have gradually but consistently declined, with averages of about 10% lower turnout in the 2010s than in the 1960s. One possible solution to this problem, especially advocated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and currently implemented in about a quarter of EU countries as well as most US states, the UK, Iceland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, and others, is to allow all citizens the option of not voting in-person at the polling station on the day of the election, but to cast a ballot beforehand via postal voting or, less widespread, through e-voting systems. While such mechanisms – often labelled remote or convenience voting – are often praised, I will attempt to sketch some countervailing reasons that we should, I believe, consider when assessing their overall desirability.

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Academia / Distribution

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An alternative procedure for allocating research grants

This is a guest post by Louis Larue, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Aalborg University.

Applying for external funding is an integral part of academic life. Universities dedicate huge amounts of resources, and often have entire teams of administrators and advisors, to help researchers obtain external grants and manage the immense load of paperwork required to administrate successful applications. Researchers and teachers, at all stages of their careers, spend considerable time and resources to write, read, revise, and submit applications. If successful, they will then have to write various reports and will be required to master the complex and often obscure language of funding agencies. At a more advanced stage of their careers, they will also dedicate a significant share of their time to reviewing and evaluating applications submitted by others and to sit in various selection committees.

In general, the evaluation procedure involves (in one or several steps) the evaluation of the scientific quality of the submitted application, by one or several peers. When all evaluations have been gathered, a selection committee usually selects successful applicants. The ideal behind this procedure (which I have only sketched here and which varies across countries and institutions) is to select, impartially, the “best” applications, that is, those with the highest level of scientific quality, properly defined.

I do not deny the value of this ideal, but it is far from realized in practice. The reform proposal that I defend below is meant to reinvigorate this ideal and salvage it from several threats.

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