Feedback given week 4

Feedback given week 4

Review of Thodoris Spathas

Hi there,

I really enjoyed reading your post as I had no idea that they are experiencing a similar situation as in Berlin with the Tempelhof. Interesting to see also that where in Berlin basically they seem to continue the status quo whereas in Athens they try to move forward. The way in which this happens in terms of process can be debated of course.

Some very practical comments are that it is recommendable to read your blog once more you would pick out several type-o’s where the’s became they’s and those sort of things. Furthermore I would recommend shortening a few very large sentences in order to make these easier to read.

In terms of content I would suggest you to take the Ostrom framework and use it to structure the text. I can now see the different elements, but it nonetheless could be sharper cut out so the reader gets less confused. I think all the information is there, it just needs some shuffling up into the shape of the framework provided by Ostrom.

Well that was it, sorry I was late with providing feedback, but better late than never I hope.

Keep blogging,

                 

Review of Chloë Lejeune

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Feedback given week 3

Feedback given week 3

Review of Jeroen Huisman

Hi there,

I think you chose an excellent subject to apply theory to. I do miss a link to a news article to introduce the case (however I myself also didn’t do that yet in my blog), but I think it would be helpful to link to an article. I got a bit confused myself with the use of –[[ as sometimes it referred to a source, whilst in other cases a comment on the side was made. There didn’t seem to be a standard convention on the use of these symbols. Sometimes they also had a great deal of text within them so it sort of distracted or confused me somehow. Also there are some small, but confusing type errors “how me make choice” (WE), “between different decision makers in taken into account” (IS), etc.

Please do connect “emotions don’t necessarily play a role” with the previous section as now I first thought it was the start of the bounded rational explanation, but it seems to below to the RAM model.

For the rest the article is nice. First theory is explained and then applied to the case. It is a textbook example of how to write the blog. You could perhaps use the same terms again in the text as you have used in the graph. Most optimal way in the RAM model and not only emotion as you now used well, but also interaction, information and lack of time (although the latter you do mention specifically).

All in all you have done a pretty good job. 

Review of
Imme Groet
Unfortunately the link didn't work

Connecting people; East meets West

Connecting People

Legitimacy

In the video A Decent Factory Nokia is trying to achieve legitimacy by sending a team to do an audit of their suppliers. They do so in order to try to get a better picture of the working conditions of their suppliers in order to get a better grip on how they do things by setting minimum requirements that they have to fulfil. By regular visits for new audits they slowly can work towards the desired situation.

The supplier tries to be a legitimate operation by complying to the rules set by the Chinese government, however in some areas they apply creative administration skills. For instance in terms of minimum wage they do not pay the minimum wage, but by letting their employers work overtime structurally they do reach the minimum wage. On top of this all employers live on the complex and because of this have to pay 1/3 rd of their total wage, which puts them well below the minimum wage level.

Diffusing criteria

The way in which Nokia tries to diffuse their sustainability criteria shows that they take their responsibility, be it risk driven, as they do not want their image of a correct Nordic company to be stained by working with suppliers that do not meet legal standards. As Nokia says, you cannot change the world in one day, and with time things will improve if you just keep pushing them in the right direction. As an audience of the documentary a judgemental feeling can easily overcome you, thinking that it is inhuman to live with 8 people in one room, or to be cutting cables for the whole day 6 days a week, but it is important to keep these considerations in perspective. Once I was in China for instance on a University where the dorm rooms were very similar. When asked if they didn't miss privacy, they didn't understand my question as they just did not have that concept. Similar puzzled faces were seen when asking people in a factory if they liked their jobs, what was there to like? It provided them with food, a house and money to take care of the son or daughter. Local laws are in place that supposed to fit local circumstances. It is Nokia's job to check if they comply to these laws or not.

Other mechamisms to improve

However as they also noted within the factory they also make products for their competitors for which different rules apply. For instance Nokia increased the wages on their product line, but when they are producing for say Samsung they get paid less again. Therefore it is necessary to organize a collective industry wide platform which coordinates and sets these minimum standards so that they all operate as one actor that has one and the same legal demands. This would for one be a positive development that could diffuse sustainability criteria within the Chinese high tech industries.

Fishy business

As a consumer of various products you are automatically part of many Social Ecological Systems. We all buy food, drinks, furniture, etc. and therefore all can be linked to these SESs. In this blog I will focus on fish as it is a subject that worries me. Furthermore during the course Sustainable Innovation and Social Change me and my team took The Blackfish as the main actor of our study and from there on studied illegal fishing practices in the Mediterranean. This really gave me some valuable insights into the seriousness and complexity of the problem at hand.

Ostrom developed a framework which helps to identify relevant variable of an individual SES. Below one can see the different aspects of which the framework consists; resource units, resource systems, governance systems and the users and they are all linked through interactions back and forth.  

Applying this framework to fish the following picture can be drawn up.

First of all the resource units, or fish, are mobile and therefore can swim in and out of the Mediterranean sea, or in and outside EU borders (towards the African countries). This creates a problem later on when we come to the resource system and governance system. But coming back to the RU, the Med is one of the most overfished seas and due to the influence of Calabrian Mafia a lot of illegal fishing is going on by deploying forbidden drift nets. Drift nets were forbidden in the nineties as they indiscriminately catch everything that swims in it, from turtles to shark, from small fish to baby fish, and therefore is a huge threat to marine life and in particular the endangered species. 

When we move on to the Resource system, the Mediterranean Sea, as stated before the fish do not necessarily stay in it. Tuna for instance is a very mobile fish and swims to the Americas. So perhaps the RS should be bigger and extend to all the oceans and seas in the world? But how can you govern that? As the EU through their Common Fisheries Policies try to guard the European waters, they can do little to things that happen outside their borders. For instance tuna is protected in Europe, but not outside of Europe and therefor fisherman were moving out alive tuna in huge enclosures and reporting their catch outside Europe. 

When moving further into the area of Governance Systems a big obstacle is that individual member states are responsible for keeping check of their quota. However due to outdated paper monitoring systems and corruption (catch that is not reported, etc.) official figures are highly unreliable on the actual catch. Also reporting more catch than was actually caught was a popular way to falsify data in order to guarantee a higher quota for the next year as high catch seems to indicate a healthy fish stock. Another issue is that member states do not want to or have no money to spend on patrol boats etc. in order to spot violations of regulation. So all in all one of the biggest problems lies in the GS as a central organisation is missing that monitors everything digitally. 

Finally the users, like myself, want to buy fish in a sustainable way, but sometimes get lost in all sorts of labels. Also for instance when going to a market where fish is freshest it often is unclear how a fish is caught, where it is caught, etc. so how can you then make an informed choice?

In my opinion more has to be done to keep fish stocks healthy and we all have our responsibilities. A global governing body should be set up that sets fishing quota, monitors everything, gathers further scientific insights, etc. to which all nations commit in the same way as the United Nations.

When we come back to our “friend” Friedman and his principles and how these could be put to good use here I am a bit puzzled. As he propagates a free market where the government sets the rules, but preferably not too many of them, I think in the current situation he would be a happy man. However this does not lead to a solution of the current problems we are facing, but a continuation of business as usual. The thing I was proposing of the global governing body would be a nightmare for Friedman as he states that concentrated power threatens individual freedom and that is exactly what we want to achieve in a way. I would like that there is no more choice for sustainably caught fish and unsustainable caught fish and the only way to achieve this is by binding everybody by the same set of rules and quota to revive the fish stocks. In the short term this will lead to unemployment in the fishing industries and higher fish prices as demand will continue to rise, whilst there will be less fish on sale. On the long term however this will secure the future of the fishing industry as otherwise they will behave like lemmings and will all commit economic suicide by depleting the seas and ending their business.

Feedback given week 2

Review of Marco Meloni
First of all I really like the way you made the parallel between neighborhood problems of broken windows to a variety of different bigger scale problems, from river pollution to the ozone layer depletion. Of course as you also stated there are some key differences that complicate applying similar mechanisms on more complex concepts.
This part “One could think of many reasons why this correlation occurs, for example that people who break windows tend to live in the same places whereas window preservers live in other places” could be better formulated as currently it sounds a bit funny, like there are groups of people that is continuously occupying themselves with breaker or preserving windows like a profession. Of course I do get the point as you mean that it has to do with social class etc.
I personally would have preferred to first have a very short summary of the theory of Kelling and Wilson without practice as now the theory is explained by using an example immediately. Also in the last section your reasoning is correct, but rather brief as it is supposed to be the climax or learning point and I have the feeling that it is a bit rushed. More elaboration would be welcome here explaining the differences separately instead of mixing them all in one sentence.
When coming to the second part of the assignment on making profit it is bound to lead to some interesting discussions. However I found it difficult to judge as it is all rather personal and subjective. I personally find it a bit too easy to put the responsibility in governments’ hands as in my opinion we all have responsibilities and should co-create laws etc. on the subject. So not just top down measures, but also bottom up. Besides due to the global nature of many businesses, western companies relocate their production facilities to low wage countries, due to the wages, but also due to limited regulations. Basically those companies measure with two different standards in my view and they can’t place responsibility at local governments. But then again, this is all rather personal and subjective on which there is no wrong or right.
Overall I would say it is a very interesting first blogpost that with some tweaking here and there could be even better.

Review of Laurens Boelens 

First of all it is all very enthusiastically written so that is nice and gets you involved easily, however this also leads to many unnecessary type-o’s such as i (I), continues use (continued use), explination (explanation), etc., it would be nice to get them all out.

The last section on your bachelor thesis is rather technical and I miss the necessary background to understand the first part, I do however the overall picture that GMO could save lives on the short term whereas conventional methods would mean decades or work for something that might in the end not even lead to the desired outcome. However this explains your personal connection, but does not relate to food as it is more in line with penicillin, etc. to which people do not object as you have stated earlier on.

Currently the blog is slightly unbalanced as it focusses a lot on the mechanisms, which is explains very nicely, but does little justice to why GMO’s should be embraced as there is only one sentence that says we rely heavily on it. Here you could elaborate a bit more I would say in terms of yield increase, population growth, climate change, etc.

Overall nice work, very passionately penned down, which for sure, also due to the topic, will lead to interesting internal discussions in the readers mind. Your style makes sure to keep this discussion going.

You did the blog already last year, but the assignment is a bit different this year. For this one I miss the part on your position relating the statement “the business of business is to create profit”.

Time for rational news

News item: Huge fire at Chemie-Pack

Where: Moerdijk

When: 5 January 2011

The Rational Actor Models states that actors make optimal decisions based on their beliefs about the world. Those beliefs are supported as well as possible by evidence and this evidence must be gained by an optimal investment in information gathering. Rational action as such does not lead to a specific goal as it is irrelevant if it is successful or not.  So let us look at the case at hand to see if this RAM can be applied.

For those of you who never heard of the massive incident that took place at Chemie-Pack I will give you a brief summary of events. In short the name of Chemie-pack covers it all as it was a Dutch company that mixed and packed chemicals. Since 1982 they have been present in Moerdijk, but in 2008 they were warned that they were violating rules as the employees were insufficiently trained to deal with chemical substances and furthermore Chemie Pack wasn’t working in a very structured way. In 2009 however they seemed to have solved these problems and the municipal government issued a new permit in 2010. On the 5^th of January 2011 a fire broke out, caused by an employee that was trying to unfreeze a pump next to dangerous chemicals with a gas burner, which had multiple disastrous consequences. Several storage tanks that were outdoor with substances that were not allowed to be stored in such a way outdoor, also caught fire and started leaking hazardous chemical substances and even exploded. This lead to an enormous fire and smoke development that moved over big parts of South Holland. Total damage was around 71 million euro of which big part was made up by cleaning the soil, but there were also additional costs as agricultural crops were lost, etc. As the fire department was unaware what sort of substances were stored on the terrain of Chemie-Pack they tried to extinguish the fire with water in order to reduce the risk of more explosions, but by doing so also polluting all the canals around the terrain. Critics said that a foam blanket would have been the better option, but in the first hours the fire was just too big and dangerous and more explosion were avoided by cooling tanks with water. The foam blanket was deployed in a later stage and proved successful. Later a long lawsuit followed between the state and Chemie-Pack as the second did not want to pay for excessive soil and water pollution caused by, according to them, wrongly fighting the fire. Another problem was that Moerdijk is a small municipality with a corresponding small fire department, however having such a large scale industrial area within their borders they should have had received more attention and finances from the so called Security Region (State and Provincial level). Court in the end ruled that the CEO of Chemie-Pack was responsible for the fire as they created the culture in which safety was not respected causing the employee to not follow up on safety standards by deploying a gas burner close to chemical substances. However final verdicts were lower than demanded by Public Ministry as the controlling bodies were not alert enough in noticing violation and announced their visits beforehand so the company could comply. 

So many things went wrong, but how can this all be rationally explained as in hindsight it all seems 

so obvious. First of all let’s go to Chemie-Pack breaking the rules by violating their permit. On many points they violated their permits multiple times, but each time after a check by the local government they reacted and conformed to the rules. However in 2010 no check was done, whilst this should have taken place. Also building and safety permits in some areas were contradicting each other leading to unclear situation.  Dangerous substances can be stored outdoor according to the building permit, whilst safety reports say this is not allowed. Building and environmental permits also contradict as it states that 60% of the terrain can consist of build-up area, but demands on the buildings and their fire resistance for instance contradict. So Chemie-Pack bought the ground and kept on expanding until they had no more space to expand. Each time they broke a permit and it gets uncovered by a control, they comply to the rules so that they get a new permit, but as this happens very often there are only short intervals during which the company actually operates in compliance with all the permits. As the different sets of rules and permits contradict each other in several areas, it creates uncertainty that was usually interpreted in the most convenient way for the company leading to dangerous situations. In some way it is like a kid who only obeys to the parents when they are watching and as soon as they take their eyes of him he takes more space than he was allowed to until he is corrected again. This leads to the government each time correcting the company and if the company complies a new permit cannot be rejected and is thus granted.

How does this fit in the RAM theory? There are three main actors, the municipality, Chemie-Pack and the Firefighting department of Moerdijk (which is also municipal).
Chemie-pack acted on their belief of how one should safely work with chemicals, but above all on how to create a workable situation in a forest of rules. Their business is not to be legal experts, but chemical packaging experts with economic survival (and gain) as their guiding principle and belief. The municipality is the actor who wants them to comply to the rules they set so they should instruct them is their belief. In order to do so one has to have a permit and follow its rules, which would be their optimal decision. If the permit is threatened to not be extended or renounced due to non-compliance of rules this situation has to be solved in order to comply again and this is exactly what Chemie-Pack did each time.
The municipality of Moerdijk principal beliefs are to provide a optimal conditions on various fronts for the inhabitants and companies within their borders. I will focus mainly on the fronts that are relevant in this case, so safety, jobs and homes. Chemie-Pack for them provided jobs that were harbour related and thus made use of the unique geographical quality of being located along one of the rivers of main economic importance. However safety is also of key importance and therefore permits are there in order to guarantee safety is covered. However as a small municipality with a big industrial sector there is a mismatch in size leading to capacity issues. The high complexity of combining building, safety and environmental rules into a harmonious framework goes beyond the legal capacity of the municipality. The optimal decision is to just put make companies comply to each set of rules separately. That these are sometimes contradicting is something that in the course of the process of granting and extending permits will be picked up and ironed out saving costs and time upfront and spreading them over a longer period of time as relevant issues will be selected along the route. That these relevant issues could come up in a disastrous way as it did in Chemie-Pack was not foreseen, but could have been as no check was done by the local government in 2010 for unknown reasons, therefore shifting some of the responsibility for the disaster to the municipality of Moerdijk in my opinion.
The fire fighting department of Moerdijk has a very simply goal and belief, to fight a fire in the best way possible with the least risks for its personal within a given budget. Their optimal decision would therefore be to comply with their belief, which they did as no fire fighters were injured in fighting the fire. They could however themselves either have asked for a bigger budget, but I have no documentation on if they did) or strengthened ties with the Security Region to assure themselves of sufficient knowledge and backup capacity if needed. 

Relating to the relatively small fire department, this can be justified by the small amount of inhabitants, but due its geographic locations along the river close to Rotterdam harbour area it is so tightly linked to Rotterdam leading to similar industrial activities on a large scale that you would not expect in such a small municipality. Therefore based on administrative data everything was good, but based on actual activities and scale it should have been judged differently and have a much bigger fire department or be much more closely linked to Rotterdam and the Security Region (financially, experience, etc.).

Concluding one could say that with hindsight a three strikes out policy could have avoided the whole situation combined with a set of streamlined rules that do not contradict each other and thus leaving no room for uncertainty and creative interpretation of these rules. If a disaster however does happen, as it can never be fully excluded, the damage it does has to be minimized by having a fire department that is actually capable of fighting the fire in the best way possible. This can only be done if they either fall under the responsibility of the Security Region of Rotterdam or if they get enough money to sustain a bigger fire fighter corpse with very close relations with the security region to exchange experience, etc.

Friedman’s proposition: The business of business is to increase its profits.

I always thought that Friedman had some very icily scary economic ideas that took out all things that make up humanity and only focused purely on the financial gain aspect. As my wife is Chilean and grew up under the regime of Pinochet and his Chicago Boys, of which Friedman was one of them, I always resented anything to do with them. Someone who supports a dictator and uses him in order to experiment the deployment of his own economic model in a such an extreme way that would ordinary never have happened in society, can only be seen as immoral in my view. Naomi Klein in her Shock Doctrine also writes about the Chilean case and describes that the initial shock of violently overthrowing a democratically elected socialist president was used to impliment its shock program of of "sweeping reforms including privatization of state-owned industries, elimination of trade barriers, and cuts to government spending". All those opposing these changes were subject to torture or just were made to disappear by the military regime.
Naomi Klein however was just one of the books I read on the case and I also saw several documentaries and spoke to many Chileans on Pinochet times and never once thought “wow because of them Chile now is where it is” as Friedman followers always like to think. Friedman is a fundamentalist and fundamentalist should always be avoided and steered clear of as their ideas are radical and dangerous. Unfortunately they are of all times, so I think we will always have to keep on the watch for new threats to a more balanced comprehensive vision in which economy, environmental and social aspects all get their fair share of attention. However the most fundamental reason why I do not agree with Friedman is that forcing his model upon a country in an undemocratic way can never be justified.