Taking NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as a key example, this chapter explores new enclosure strategies in digital art contexts in which computationally enforceable and socially enacted access restrictions are emphasised over the legal concept of exclusive ownership. Early perspectives on NFT technology insisted that the economic value of digital artefacts can only be realised when such artefacts are treated as private property. Now, the initial focus on exclusive ownership of digital art objects is shifting away from traditional concerns with intellectual property, and towards the establishing of what is here discussed as âzones of exclusivity.â Such zones take the form of restricted-access domains of online interaction within which the economic value of digital art objects is meant to be constituted, negotiated, and captured even while digital artefacts are permitted to be copied and freely circulated. The chapter explores and critiques several examples of new, computationally enforceable, socially enacted, and gamified enclosure strategies such as token-gating and white-listing.
Jun 24, 2019·Leveraging Urbanization to Promote a New Growth Model While Reducing Territorial Disparities in Morocco: Urban and Regional Development Policy Note
Examines specific policy areas where reforms can help harness the external benefits of urbanization in Morocco, including (1) institutions for land, decentralized service provision, and finance; (2) infrastructure (spatial connectivity); and (3) interventions (spatial targeting). Morocco needs to clarify land rights and management systems to facilitate investment and help city planning in order to deal with fragmented urban expansion. Strengthening decentralized institutions to improve service provision can help build local capacity to manage urbanization, increase the municipal financial capacity, and improve the return on taxes administered by the government on behalf of the municipalities, as well as leverage increased net saving and creditworthiness for increased and sustainable borrowing. Investing in smart urban mass transport to lower urban congestion costs and link people to jobs remains a key challenge, as does strengthening logistics management to reduce regional market fragmentation. And labor market interventions to increase opportunities for young women and men remains critical for economic growth.
This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into how democratic municipalities in Dakar, Senegal are formed and reformed. The municipal scale of government has long been both a modern norm and a central object of governmental reform throughout the Francophone world. Established in the late 19th century as a colony of France, Dakar is one of the oldest local democracies in Africa and remains today a model of democratic reform for municipal governments across the continent. In 2013, the Senegalese legislature passed what is known colloquially as Act III of decentralization. This national reform legally delegated political and fiscal authority to Senegalâs lowest level of territorial administrationâthe communeâinaugurating what the law itself referred to as the âcomplete communalization of the national territoryâ. Yet far from resolving the problem of communal form, the Act III incited a novel set of experiments in communal authority. This dissertation reveals a broader terrain of democratic politics and reform that is beyond the more familiar domains of law and public debate. I examine the novel set of experimental techniques that have emerged out of critical reflections on the problem of communal form in Dakar. Posing the communal form as contested problem-space, I follow a range of experiments through which diverse actors make sense of how public authority should be distributed across Dakarâs urban terrain. To analyze the politics of this distribution, I develop the concept of municipal state formation: the set of techniques through which sub-national governments take on functions of the sovereign nation and exercise legitimate authority over citizens, populations, publics, and territory. Yet this dissertation does not demonstrate how communes have arrived, once and for all, fully formedâor, as the Senegalese laws describe it, âfully empoweredâ. Municipal state formation is never complete; it is an ongoing process of experimentation, disagreement, and piecemeal reform. In the wake of Act III, most communal officials articulated a commonly held critique: the laws had devolved new responsibilities, but without the necessary revenues to match. There was, in other words, a persistent mismatch between political and fiscal decentralization. For this reason, I examine fiscal administration as a particularly consequential political terrain in which the problem of communal form took shape in Dakar.This dissertation is organized into five substantive chapters and a conclusion. After introducing the concept of municipal state formation, the second chapter reveals how a French colonial policy of assimilation provided the political conditions for the legal constitution communes in Senegal. But these laws were also formed in relation to a longstanding dispute over the fiscal administration of the communes. The third chapter turns to one such dispute over Dakarâs municipal bond program. Although the program was ultimately sabotaged by the central state, it introduced a novel political terrain into this long-standing dispute over fiscal administration: public financial evaluation. I argue that such evaluations made an appeal to an audience beyond the courtsâwhat I term, a financial publicâto assert the Cityâs claim to municipal authority. The fourth chapter examines a similarly unsuccessful experiment to re-distribute public authority in Dakar. In partnership with a private firm, municipal authorities constructed a commercial center in which to relocate thousands of Dakarâs walking street vendors. The program introduced a familiar form of a neoliberal fiscal contract: the user-fee. However, vendors disagreed with the poor location and high cost of the building, and unequivocally refused to relocate. In this chapter, I argue that this failed neoliberal program provided the conditions under which vendorsâ refusal became a possible and effective political act, successfully delimiting when and where municipal authority was legitimately exercised in Dakar.The final chapter returns to a more traditional aspect of public authority: the right to tax. Although Act III supposedly delegated several new local taxes, bureaucrats and officials nevertheless had to experiment with novel techniques of rule to exercise communal authority on the ground. One local commune pushed the limits of communal rights to enforce tax collection by drawing on the mayorâs public reputation for violence. The Mayorâs reputation as an armed murderer with a âflare for the aggressiveâ shaped how and where street-level bureaucrats collected taxes. Tax collection thus became more than an accounting of the physical landscape: it was a technique of territorial control grounded in a reputation for unlawful violence.This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how the concept of municipal state formation may be extended to cities far from Dakar. To make this comparative case, I briefly analyze the problem of metropolitan fragmentation in St. Louis, Missouri.
In France, the local planning of sports facilities originates from successive public policies carried out at various territorial levels, from national to local. Changes in the stock of sports facilities in four towns, including low-income areas, are analyzed based on the different national facilities plans of the 1960s, the effects of decentralization since the 1980s, and the evolution of urban policies since the 1990s. The uneven impact of these various periods of public policies can be observed at a local level. In addition, the authors study the different approaches to financing adopted by municipalities with distinct profiles but with characteristics which can be transposed to medium-sized towns. While it is usually assumed that national policies in this field have a homogeneous impact nationwide, a cartographic study that accounts for the local context clearly shows the opposite. This study evidences the fact that national policies can have meaningful results only when there is considerable financial assistance provided and when the local authorities are involved. Municipalities remain key actors in the development of infrastructures, which is why there are so many discrepancies between them.
Concerning urban services, the decentralized techniques have known a growing interest partly due to the increasing environmental concern. These new techniques with recognized benefits are favorably considered by public authorities even though their ability to last may occasionally be questioned. These local techniques are also part of a broader and complex existing framework which it is important to understand. From a historical point of view in Western countries, the foundations of the model of the urban servicesâ contribution rest upon two prevailing principles: an awareness of the reality of public service and of anability to be part of a network. The study of these characteristics in the light of the feedback from the Urban Community of Nantes has brought up a number of questions as to the ways to integrate such decentralized techniques into an already existing system. Now, the action of the public services is not limited to ensuring that the network is operational: the role of public authority, separate from the management organization, appears to be the essential center that ensures the necessary knowledge and global consistency of the system. Many potential structures of management and financing can be set on foot and the tools available for taking decisions have started being adapted by renewed actors and issues.
Although academic and practical interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has continuously increased over the last few years, there is still a need to better understand their social acceptability. The aim of the study was to explore the double edge of NFT legitimacy for NFTs by unveiling the role of sustainability and by adopting technology legitimacy and the field of sustainability transition studies as a theoretical lens. Specifically, this research investigates the role of sustainability in securing and maintaining technology legitimacy within NFT projects. We interviewed 12 experts through exploratory qualitative research. The findings highlight three main ways in which sustainability participates in the legitimation of NFT projects. While sustainability can be inherent in the NFT project itself, this legitimation can also be derived from the perceived sustainability of the NFT technology or be part of innovative business models. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are then discussed. JEL CODES: O33, O35, O50
Abstract In France, like in other Western European countries, the third sector has been on a steady increase during the last decades. Similar to the situation in Germany, the French Third Sector is predominately financed by public money that is concentrated on those subsections which form the core of the welfare state: education, health and social services. However, public funding is currently being reduced and against this background, government and nonprofit-organizations are looking for new ways of cooperation. In other words, in France the partnership of the Third Sector with government is changing as well as its position and role in the French welfare mix. Introduction In the following the results of the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Sector Comparative Project for France will be presented, thus outlining: * the overall size of the Third Sector in France in 1995, * its composition, * its revenue sources, and * its recent evolution. Thereafter, the Third Sector's central role in labour market policies will be discussed. In France, many new jobs, new markets and new skills have initially been explored by volunteer work. Combined with a trend towards professionalisation this knowledge served as a blueprint for paid labour. Moreover, the changing role of the nonprofit organizations as partners in a new welfare mix will be analysed. The recent Assises de la Vie Associative - a major event which gathered in February 1999 more than 2,500 nonprofit leaders, many government representatives and eight ministers including the Prime Minister was a kind of celebration of the government nonprofit sector partnership. But beyond this temporary event the relationship is not so clearly defined and in some subfields it includes a newcomer: the for-profit sector. I. Dimension of the French Nonprofit Sector As stated elsewhere (Archambault 1997 a, 1997 b), the French nonprofit sector developed only quite recently, associations - the generic form for most nonprofit organizations - being illegal during the whole 19th Century until a nearly centenarian act legalized them. During the 1960s and the 1970s the French Nonprofit Sector slowly grew in a context of state-provided welfare. More recently the decentralization of 1982 broke with a millenary Jacobin tradition which was a major incentive for the Third Sector to contract with local authorities. Graph 1 shows this recent growth: today between 60,000 and 70,000 associations are created per year, more than three times the average of the 1960s. [GRAPH OMITTED] A. Overall Size of the French Third Sector In 1995 full-time-equivalent employment was 975,000 including religion and 960,000 excluding religion - that is 5 per cent of the total employment or the total agricultural employment or the total employment of all consumption-goods-manufacturing industries in 1995. In addition to this paid employment, millions of volunteers are working in the Third Sector. One French individual out of four declare to be a volunteer. The total operating expenditures of the Third Sector in 1995 was FF 290 billion (44.2 billion Euro), which is the equivalent of the turnover of the public utilities industry or the mechanical engineering industry. These figures do not include the estimated monetary value of volunteering which would raise the sum by some 70 per cent. Therefore, the economic activity of the French Third Sector - which is frequently a by-product of its social role - is significant and sizeable. In a comparative perspective France is a middle weight - graph 2 shows the nonprofit share of total employment by country. The French third sector ranks exactly at the average level among the 22 countries which were included in the statistical part of the project. Germany is in a similar position. Graph 2: Nonprofit share of total employment by country, 1995 Netherlands 12. âŠ
Economic evaluation and the funding of infrastructure projects We study the meaning of the economic evaluation of public infrastructure projects. We point out the difficulties that arise when we try to assess the costs and the benefits. We deal also with the impact of the level of decision (centralized, decentralized) on the nature of the evaluation process.
Private businesses and local authorities (cities, districts, regions) are linked by many interests. Firms, a source of income for local collectivities have been in ever increasing demand by the local authorities to finance their investment since the new modality of corporation tax in 1980. But with fewer businesses and jobs, companies are an important issue for these local powers and are becoming more important now with new economic responsability given in 1980 by decentralization laws.