Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

The paper presents a new sectoral taxonomy that combines manufacturing and service industries within the same general framework. This exercise is relevant because it\nseeks to achieve a greater integration between the study of sectoral patterns of innovation in manufacturing and services, and to point out the increasing importance of vertical linkages and inter-sectoral knowledge exchanges between these interrelated branches of the economy. The empirical relevance of the new taxonomy is illustrated with reference to the innovative activities and economic performance of manufacturing and service industries in Europe. This empirical evidence, which presents fresh results from the Fourth Community Innovation Survey, supports the relevance of the taxonomy by showing the great variety of sectoral patterns of innovation in European industries.

This paper develops and tests a model of differing trends in international competitiveness and economic growth across countries. The model relates the development of market shares at home and abroad to three sets of factors: the ability to compete in technology, the ability to compete in delivery(capacity) and the ability to compete in price. The test, using data for 15 OECD countries for the period 1961-1983, shows that in the medium and long run, factors related to technology and capacity are very important for market shares and growth, while price- or cost competitiveness plays a more limited role than often assumed. These results are shown to be consistent with earlier findings by Kaldor and others of a "perverse" (positive) relation between export performance and growth in relative prices or costs.

The linguistic turn in the social sciences has been fruitful in directing attention towards the preconditions for action, as well as those actions understood as speech acts. However, to the extent that the linguistic turn comprises only textual approaches, it brackets out the study of other kinds of action, and so cannot account for social life understood as a whole. We should return to seminal theorists such as Wittgenstein and Foucault, who complemented a linguistic turn with a turn towards practices. Drawing on the work of ethnographers such as Michel de Certeau and sociologists such as Ann Swidler, in part one of this article I suggest that this may be done by using a simple model of culture as a mutually conditioned play between discourse and practices. In part two, I use this model to study changing Norwegian diplomatic practices in the High North in the aftermath of the Cold War. The claim is that capital-based diplomatic practices are being complemented by emerging local practices which may only be governed from the capital by indirect means. Diplomacy thus changes from being a centralised to being a multibased practice.

This article reviews the literature on the geopolitics of renewable energy. It finds that while the roots of this literature can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, most of it has been published from 2010 onwards. The following aggregate conclusions are extracted from the literature: renewable energy has many advantages over fossil fuels for international security and peace; however, renewable energy is thought to exacerbate security risks and geopolitical tensions related to critical materials and cybersecurity; former hydrocarbon exporters will likely be the greatest losers from the energy transition. Many of the reviewed publications share some weaknesses: a failure to define “geopolitics”; an unwarranted assumption that very little has been published in the field previously; limited use of established forecasting, scenario-building or foresight methodologies; a lack of recognition of the complexity of the field; a lack of theorisation. Most authors do not distinguish between the geopolitical risks associated with different types of renewable energy, and only a few distinguish clearly between the geopolitics of the transitional phase and the geopolitics of a post-energy transition world. A disproportionately large part of the literature is dedicated to critical materials and cybersecurity, while only a small part concerns the decline of former fossil fuel powers. Among those publications that do discuss the decline of fossil fuels, there is also an over-focus on oil producers and a lack of attention to the countries that rely heavily on coal, for example Australia, China, Germany, Indonesia, Poland and the United States.

Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of ''governmentality.'' In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance-functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self-association and political will-formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society.

This paper addresses the pattern of knowledge flows as indicated by patent citations between European regions. Our findings support the hypothesis that there are important barriers to knowledge flows in Europe. Patent citations occur more often between regions which belong to the same country and which are in geographical proximity. Furthermore, patent citations are industry specific and occur most often between regions that are specialised in industrial sectors with specific technological linkages between them. Patent citations are also more frequent when the citing region belongs to the same linguistic group as the cited region. JEL classification : O 30; O 33; R 19

In disaster science, policy and practice, the transition of resilience from a descriptive concept to a normative agenda provides challenges and opportunities. This paper argues that both are needed to increase resilience. We briefly outline the concept and several recent international resilience-building efforts to elucidate critical questions and less-discussed issues. We highlight the need to move resilience thinking forward by emphasizing structural social-political processes, acknowledging and acting on differences between ecosystems and societies, and looking beyond the quantitative streamlining of resilience into one index. Instead of imposing a technical-reductionist framework, we suggest a starting basis of integrating different knowledge types and experiences to generate scientifically reliable, context-appropriate and socially robust resilience-building activities.

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2011, 268 pp. At the core of Patrick T. Jackson's new book The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations stands the mutual dependency of p...

“Technology” and “competitiveness” are two of the most popular buzz-words of our time. Increasingly policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic link the two. But what do we really mean when we talk about the international competitiveness of a country? And what does technology have to do with it? Is there a theory behind this link? What about the empirical evidence? This paper addresses these questions from a long-run perspective.

The study of identity offers a possibility to theorize on the human collectives of world politics, to give them an ontological status, and to discuss how they are constituted and maintain themselves. The first part discusses social theorizing of collective identity along the ethnographic, the psychological, the Continental philosophical, and particularly, the `Eastern excursion' of theorizing; Bakhtin, Levinas and Kristeva are lauded for jettisoning a dialectical mode of analysis in favour of a dialogical one which respects difference. The second part discusses how Der Derian, Shapiro, Campbell, the `Copenhagen coterie' and Wendt have brought this theorizing into IR, and assesses their work in terms of that discussed in the first part. The study of identity formation should do away with psychologizing conjecture and focus on the drawing on social boundaries and the role played by groups who are ambiguously poised between the self and the others. Collective identities are overlapping and multifaceted phenomena which must not be reified and studied in isolation from one another.

Abstract This article analyses regional growth in the European Union (EU) in the postwar period. We examine the levels and growth of per capita GDP for a sample of 70 regions, covering six of the EU Member States. We find that after a slow, but steady reduction of differences in GDP per capita across European regions during most of the post‐war period, there are now some signs of a reversal in this trend. This does not imply that differences in levels of productivity and income across European regions are now reduced to a negligible level. Rather, the explanation is that other variables, notably R&D effort, investment support from the EU, the structure of GDP and differences in unemployment have had a diverging impact. We also find some support for the idea of a ‘Europe at different speeds’, with at least three different ‘growth clubs’ characterized by different dynamics, productivity and unemployment levels.

This paper puts forward the idea that the dynamics of national innovation systems is driven by the coevolution of two main dimensions: innovative capability and absorptive capacity. The empirical analysis employs a broad set of indicators measuring national innovative capabilities and absorptive capacity for a panel of 98 countries in the period 1980-2008, and makes use of panel cointegration analysis to investigate long-run relationships and coevolution patterns among these variables. The results indicate that the dynamics of national systems of innovation is driven by the coevolution of three innovative capability variables (technological output, scientific output, innovative input), on the one hand, and three absorptive capacity factors (income per capita, infrastructures and international trade), on the other.

International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that are used in teaching future IR scholars. Disciplinary dialogue seems to have failed completely. Based on a detailed reading of the myths and their perpetuation, we discuss the consequences of the discipline’s reliance on mythical origins, why there has been so little incorporation of revisionist insight and what possibilities there are for enhancing the dialogue.

While most hydrogen research focuses on the technical and cost hurdles to a full-scale hydrogen economy, little consideration has been given to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of hydrogen developments. The technologies and infrastructures underpinning a hydrogen economy can take markedly different forms, and the choice over which pathway to take is the object of competition between different stakeholders and countries. Over time, cross-border maritime trade in hydrogen has the potential to fundamentally redraw the geography of global energy trade, create a new class of energy exporters, and reshape geopolitical relations and alliances between countries. International governance and investments to scale up hydrogen value chains could reduce the risk of market fragmentation, carbon lock-in, and intensified geo-economic rivalry.

Adventures in Aidland. The anthropology of professionals in international development David Mosse (ed) New York: Berghahn Books, 2011, 238 pp. In anthropology's long and uneasy relationship with in...

Abstract We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

The window of opportunity for mitigating climate change is narrow. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require rapid and deep alteration of attitudes, norms, incentives, and politics. Some of the key climate-change and energy transition puzzles are therefore in the realm of the social sciences. However, these are precisely the fields that receive least funding for climate-related research. This article analyzes a new dataset of research grants from 333 donors around the world spanning 4.3 million awards with a cumulative value of USD 1.3 trillion from 1950 to 2021. Between 1990 and 2018, the natural and technical sciences received 770% more funding than the social sciences for research on issues related to climate change. Only 0.12% of all research funding was spent on the social science of climate mitigation.

The benefit-cost-ratio (BCR), used in cost-benefit analysis (CBA), is an indicator that attempts to summarize the overall value for money of a project. Disaster costs continue to rise and the demand has increased to demonstrate the economic benefit of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) to policy makers. This study compiles and compares original CBA case studies reporting DRR BCRs, without restrictions as to hazard type, location, scale, or other parameters. Many results were identified supporting the economic effectiveness of DRR, however, key limitations were identified, including a lack of: sensitivity analyses, meta-analyses which critique the literature, consideration of climate change, evaluation of the duration of benefits, broader consideration of the process of vulnerability, and potential disbenefits of DRR measures. The studies demonstrate the importance of context for each BCR result. Recommendations are made regarding minimum criteria to consider when conducting DRR CBAs.

This article seeks to nip in the bud four emerging myths about the geopolitics of the rise of renewable energy and the concomitant increase in electricity usage. The article presents alternative perspectives, arguing that (1) the risk of geopolitical competition over critical materials for renewable energy is limited; (2) the resource curse as we know it from the petroleum sector will not necessarily reappear in many countries in connection with renewable energy; (3) transboundary electricity cut-offs will mostly be unsuitable as a geopolitical weapon; and (4) it is not clear that growing use of renewable energy will exacerbate cyber-security risks. In all four areas, the evolving literature could place more emphasis on uncertainty and risks and less on one-sided scenarios and maximization of threats.

A seminal policy year for development and sustainability occurs in 2015 due to three parallel processes that seek long-term agreements for climate change, the Sustainable Development Goals, and disaster risk reduction. Little reason exists to separate them, since all three examine and aim to deal with many similar processes, including vulnerability and resilience. This article uses vulnerability and resilience to explore the intersections and overlaps amongst climate change, disaster risk reduction, and sustainability. Critiquing concepts such as “return to normal” and “double exposure” demonstrate how separating climate change from wider contexts is counterproductive. Climate change is one contributor to disaster risk and one creeping environmental change amongst many, and not necessarily the most prominent or fundamental contributor. Yet climate change has become politically important, yielding an opportunity to highlight and tackle the deep-rooted vulnerability processes that cause “multiple exposure” to multiple threats. To enhance resilience processes that deal with the challenges, a prudent place for climate change would be as a subset within disaster risk reduction. Climate change adaptation therefore becomes one of many processes within disaster risk reduction. In turn, disaster risk reduction should sit within development and sustainability to avoid isolation from topics wider than disaster risk. Integration of the topics in this way moves beyond expressions of vulnerability and resilience towards a vision of disaster risk reduction’s future that ends tribalism and separation in order to work together to achieve common goals for humanity.