Global warming, like many other environmental controversies, mixes pervasive uncertainty with the certainties of expert (but contradictory) opinion. How can we know who is right about global warming, if the only things we have to work with are the scientists’ competing scenarios, the truth‐value of which has yet to be established? One approach is to rely on narrative policy analysis to identify the non‐scientific, but policy‐relevant role played by the global warming controversy. This approach shows that the controversy signals a (...) wider “analytic tip” taking place in the examination of major public policy problems, a tip toward the notion that issues which can still be effectively dealt with locally, regionally or nationally must now first be addressed globally. The policy implications of analytic tip and the narrative features of the global warming scenario are profound for both environmentalists and their ideological opponents. (shrink)

A plateau has been reached in how to analyze people's use of their common property resources. We require fresh ways of thinking about the issue. Four new and very different approaches are sketched in the article.

Jon Elster's notion of 'local justice systems' helps recon ceive sustainable development in several fresh ways. Keeping options open for the future use of resources turns out to be a justice/injustice cycle: the more sustainable development becomes a global phenom enon, the more locally unjust its uniform application would necess arily be. The more uniform the application, the greater the local pressure for suitably varied alternatives. But the more varied the applications, the greater the chance of global injustice arising from (...) the decentralization and lack of coordination on the ground. In this way, sustainable development must be seen as not ending when unjust global systems become more just, but rather as continuing through a set of iterations whose moments include a rejection of an overly globalized sustainable development. Key Words: Jon Elster • local justice systems • sustainable development. (shrink)

Animal rights and experimentation have become the focus of a major controversy in the United States, with acute implications for animal-related research in the laboratories and veterinary schools of many American universities. To date, efforts to reduce fundamental disagreements between animal researchers and animal welfare groups or to redefine their differences in ways that satisfy all concerned have by and large not been successful. In such situations where it is not possible to identify a middle ground between conflicting positions, the (...) best a policy analyst may be able to do is to accentuate the issue's manifest topsy-turviness and uncertainties. No one can afford or risk having an issue of such high uncertainty, inconsistency, and stakes defined in terms so stark that they feel compelled to choose between those who say they know that the future shall hold us accountable for our wholesale slaughter of animals and those who would blame us for the human deaths they say will surely follow when we do not allow that slaughter. (shrink)