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Distinguishing between description and analysis in academic writing

When I switched from chemical engineering (my undergraduate degree) to political science and human geography (my doctoral degree), I went through economics of technical change and international marketing (my Masters). But the chemical engineering component was still very strong during my Masters. I remember reading comments from a professor’s marker (yes, my professor didn’t even grade my essay!) saying “lacks analysis“.

Multiple laptops and desktop computer for #AcWri

WHAT THE HELL IS ANALYSIS IF NOT WHAT I AM WRITING THEN?!

Now, when I read student essays, or Masters/PhD theses, I find myself writing similar comments: “this is a very good description, but lacks real analysis“. I asked both the Political Scientists Facebook group (of which I’m proud of being part of) and the Research Companion Facebook group (a fantastic resource created by Dr. Petra Boynton, author of the book “The Research Companion”).

I received A LOT of really good feedback on both groups (who said that Facebook was only good for posting photos of your kids?) which I am detailing here (I’ve asked for permission to attribute whoever recommended a particular book or reading).

Political Scientists

  • The Craft of Research.(by Booth et al) Shane Gunderson, Cheryl Van Den Handel, and Jay De Sart recommended this book, which I have read and own. This is a book on how to undertake social science research, and it’s one I definitely recommend too.
  • They Say, I Say. Omar Wasow recommended this book, seconded by Jackie Gehring. Erin Ackerman, author of the “Analyze This: Writing in the Social Sciences” chapter of “They Say, I Say” book, mentioned that her chapter Chapter 13 is focused on social sciences’ writing and a few political science examples.
  • Empirical Research in Political Science (by Leanne Powner). I had heard of Leanne’s work before and I *thought* I had a copy of this book, but I think it’s one of the ones I lost at MPSA 2016 (don’t ask). So, I’ve requested an examination copy and will report back once I’ve read it.
  • Writing a Research Paper in Political Science: A Practical Guide to Inquiry, Structure, and Method (by Lisa Baglioni). Recommended by Mirya Holman, Mary Anne Mendoza, and Jay De Sart. I don’t own this book either, but the comments I read were that the book walks the student through the process of writing a research paper quite clearly. I’ve also requested an examination copy, and will report back once I’ve read it
  • Matthew Parent recommended a handout by John Gerring et al (yes, Gerring from case studies! The excerpt is from Gerring and Dino Christenson’s forthcoming book). I love both Gerring and Christenson’s work so I’m always happy to promote it.

I found through Google a few handouts, but these three were the ones that stood out to me, and were also the simplest for me to refer my students for a reading.

Over on The Research Companion Facebook group, I got a few responses.

I then searched my own Mendeley library for examples of good articles I had read that could show my students what analysis looks like, vis-a-vis descriptive text. Here are a few examples I tweeted.

The first one is from a World Development 2014 article by Alison Post and Veronica Herrera on public service delivery in Latin America (focusing on water and wastewater). Here, I wanted the reader to see how Herrera and Post set up a comparison between what the literature says versus what their own analysis shows.

This example comes from Kathryn Harrison’s 2002 Governance article comparing US/Canada/Sweden and dioxins control policy. This paper investigates the role of ideas, interests and institutions on policy change. In this example, I wanted to show how Harrison weighs evidence from each one of the three case studies and evaluates the differential impact that ideas, interests and institutions had on policy evolution.

I then used Josh Cousins and Josh Newell’s article on political-industrial ecology in Los Angeles’ water supply infrastructure to show the reader how Cousins and Newell present descriptive text on Los Angeles and its water supply and then connect it to the literature through analysis.

I used Megan Hatch and Elizabeth Rigby’s article on state-level governments as laboratories of democracy and their study of state-level inequality to show how you can use data (quantitative, in this case) to create an argument and dispel previously held beliefs/preconceived ideas/previous theoretical and empirical findings with their own.

I also used a paper by Melissa Merry on tweeting and the framing of gun policy using the Narrative Policy Framework. In this example I wanted to show how Merry mobilizes her empirical findings to construct a new measure and to explain the theoretical and empirical implications of her findings.

From David Carter and Chris Weible’s study of smoking bans in Colorado in 1977 and 2006, I drew an example where I show how Carter and Weible set up an empirical question (a hypothesis) and then use their data to explain differences between both smoking bans.

Another way in which researchers show they’ve done analysis is in case study selection. In this paper by Rob de Leo and Donnelly, they do a study of policy transfer and the adoption of the Affordable Care Act in Massachusetts. De Leo and Donnelly clearly outline the various reasons why choosing this particular case makes sense.

I am thankful to everyone who provided me with links to books, handouts, etc. And I hope this blog post will be useful to anybody who needs to teach analysis vs. description. I certainly will be using it with my own students and research assistants!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 7, 2017

Moving forward and Will H. Moore-ing it forward

These past couple of weeks have been extraordinarily bizarre. On Wednesday April 19th, 2017, I found out that Will H. Moore had taken his own life. This pained me beyond what I imagined it would. I wasn’t Will’s closest friend by any measure. We had talked at several ISA’s, he had always been incredibly sweet and kind to me, and he asked me tough questions, both in person at ISA and online on Twitter, which made me reflect and rethink the way in which I approached my research. But more than anything, I saw Will H. Moore use his privilege to protect younger, up-and-coming, and vulnerable scholars. This made me admire him quite a lot, and I regret that I never actually told Will to his face how much I valued him and appreciated his contributions to political science, international relations, and the global community.

Others have written beautiful tributes to Will which you should read (here’s a sampler on the Duck of Minerva), and I stand in solidarity with all of those who were his students, family, friends, colleagues, coauthors. I was simply yet another member of the IR community he knew, and yet he made me feel like I was somehow a friend of his.

I felt a huge amount of “survivor guilt” this past week, and early this week. I had been enjoying my research, I had been really feeling like my work was moving forward, and then all of a sudden I also felt a huge amount of guilt. I, like many others who were much closer to Will, was mourning. Did I have a right to feel happy about my work and how my research was going? I felt that it was inappropriate. I almost felt guilty about being happy about my work, given that it hadn’t been that long since Will had passed away.

From the moment I found out about Will’s passing, I was unable to work well for a week. I was really discombobulated. I had JUST seen Will, and talked to him, in February of 2017 at the International Studies Association conference. I did some work, but it was limited, and I felt a terrible sense of loss. I was very angry. I have been very angry. Angry at the fact that academia puts an inordinate amount of pressure on professors and students. Angry at the fact that we are incredibly ill-equipped to help those dealing with mental health issues. Angry at the fact that I never got to tell Will how much I admired him. Angry at the fact that a mentor to many, someone who used his privilege to protect others, was no longer with us.

Now that a few days have passed and that I’ve had a chance to process my emotions, I feel that I should do something that I think Will would have liked. I’m going to describe how I plan to live my life moving forward. I had already been an advocate for destigmatization of mental illness, and a champion for a more human, humane academia. Will’s passing reignited my passion for this advocacy. So below, in tweets, is my manifesto for how I plan to Will H. Moore-it forward.

Rest in peace, Will.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 3, 2017

Writing synthetic notes of journal articles and book chapters

Earlier this week I shared Dr. Katrina Firth’s modified version of the Cornell Method’s Notes Pages. I used the Cornell Notes method in 2013 and really didn’t click with me, so I simply moved on. Had I discovered Katrina’s modified version earlier I probably would have “clicked” with the methodology much faster. Though her modification is basically shifting columns and text around, it really makes the page a lot more appealing and therefore, it’s really much easier to take notes.

Reading and #AcWri on the plane

Dr. Firth uses this modified Cornell Notes’ template to take notes off of her readings (journal articles, book chapters, etc.) She then uses those notes as prompts to help her write. I have a different but at the same time, kind of similar method. My strategy is different because I don’t take notes in the same format or template she does. HOWEVER. I do take notes off of my readings, and I use them as writing prompts.

The method I use to write my synthetic notes is very similar to a shorter memorandum (I’ve written about how to write extensive and detailed memoranda here, but for synthetic notes, I am looking at less than a page, almost like a rhetorical precis). There’s a number of good resources on how to write critiques of journal articles and book chapters, and how to summarize them, but here is my own method.

  • I start by copying the citation (already formatted) from Mendeley on to an empty page (either electronic or in my Everything Notebook).
  • I then proceed with a basic AIC content extraction (Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion). When I extract content using AIC, I don’t overlook the methods nor the data analysis, I simply summarize them, VERY, VERY BRIEFLY. I don’t type the headings “Abstract”, “Introduction”, nor “Conclusion”. I simply write a couple of paragraphs summarizing all the insights I gained from these. Since I’m very analog, I usually highlight those insights, or I scribble on the sides of the printed reading material.
  • I run through the middle of the paper rapidly (this technique is also known as skimming), and if I find something that catches my attention but I don’t have the time to delve in depth, I attach a Post-It adhesive note that protrudes ever so lightly off of the side of the page. That way, I know that I need to go back to that paper.
  • Since I learn better when I transcribe notes, I often copy verbatim my analog (in paper) synthetic notes off of my Everything Notebook into a digital file (usually in Micro$oft Word). I save the file with a brief summary of the article’s title, usually SN which is shorthand for synthetic notes.
  • I save all my synthetic notes into a folder, which is usually different from the folder where I have detailed memorandums. You should note that if you expand your synthetic notes, you may be able to easily create a very detailed memo. I don’t usually overwrite the synthetic note file, but I make a copy and use that document to expand into a memorandum.

Below you can check a synthetic note of an article I recently read on the social construction of water scarcity. This paper, may be deserving of having a memorandum written about it. Nevertheless, I wanted to assume I was doing a broad survey of the literature and therefore, wouldn’t have the time to really delve into the paper.

Below you can see photos of my summarizing (highlighting and scribbling) in each of the AIC headings.

Abstract

Synthetic notes and photos from SEPP seminar May 2017 125

Introduction

Synthetic notes and photos from SEPP seminar May 2017 124

Note that I always search the Introduction for the key claims – how does this paper contribute to our understanding of things? How does it shed new light? What kind of counterclaim to the conventional wisdom is the author providing?

Conclusion

Synthetic notes and photos from SEPP seminar May 2017 127

Synthetic notes and photos from SEPP seminar May 2017 126

I ran the AIC content abstraction, and then quickly skimmed the paper. I found two paragraphs really relevant to the paper, so I highlighted those (see photo below).

Synthetic notes and photos from SEPP seminar May 2017 123

Since I was not doing an in-depth memorandum for this particular journal article (at the moment), I only highlighted those parts that I found were really compelling. I also added a Post-It adhesive note on the margins of the article (I use arrow-shaped ones) to indicate where I found a quotation that should be included be it in a detailed memorandum or in the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump corresponding to the topic (in this particular case, geopolitics of water).

Note that when I am not writing a full-fledged memorandum, I still look for key quotations to copy to my Excel dump.

ARTICLE AIC SUMMARY

I transcribed my highlighting and scribbled notes into a file, which ended up having the following paragraphs:

Mustafa, D. (2007). Social construction of hydropolitics: The geographical scales of water and security in the Indus basin. Geographical Review, 97(4), 484-501

This article links several important interrelated themes: the social construction of water scarcity, the importance of understanding cross-scalar dynamics, issues of water security and the link between water governance and security, beyond the traditional understandings of the securitization of water. Mustafa examines the Indus Basin, in particular conflicts of water supply and sanitation in Karachi and the distribution of irrigation water in Pakistani Punjab. A particularly notable element of this article is that goes beyond traditional discussions of geopolitics and hydropolitics that are usually associated with the transboundary water governance literature, and focuses on the subnational scales. While it would appear to the reader that Mustafa is making yet another case for the water wars literature, instead he specifically focuses on the importance of understanding how water institutions may perform poorly and instead of encouraging peace may exacerbate conflict. Mustafa follows the premise that resource scarcity is socially constructed. He also makes an interesting claim regarding how epistemic communities are more common at subnational scales but they have international ties. Mustafa also challenges traditional engineering-based thinking that focuses on technical solutions to irrigation problems, and instead argues that there is a disconnect between what water users need at the domestic level vis-à-vis water for agriculture (and the construction of mega projects). Mustafa also claims that it is the interconnectedness of water and security what makes it really hard to extricate the role of water in peace building and improving multidimensional views of security. Mustafa draws four main lessons: 1) dissonance between engineering and users’ agendas 2) non-responsive governance threatens human security 3) hydropolitics is basically power politics and 4) water can be a political resource harnessed by politicians to advance their own agenda.

As you can tell, I paraphrased text rather than quote. This is important, because I normally copy and paste quotations with exact page numbers both in the extended, detailed memorandum and in my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. For me, synthetic notes don’t have the details I usually would need to write a paper, or a literature review. However, I could very well copy all my synthetic notes on to a single file and create an annotated bibliography.

Hopefully this description will help others write their own synthetic notes. This method works well if you apply it in the mornings and write synthetic notes of your readings, or if you are able to devote your buffer day to catch up on reading.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 3, 2017

Writing an annotated bibliography

One of the research products I find most useful for an academic, short of openly-accessible datasets and code for replication is the annotated bibliography. As I have noted before, I consider the annotated bibliography an intermediate step between a bank of rhetorical precis, a bank of synthetic notes, and a fully-developed literature review.

iPod March 2017 038

I consider developing annotated bibliographies an important activity. Thus the annotated bibliography is, for me, an actual scholarly product. It may come from “intermediate” materials, such as a set of rhetorical precis, or a group of synthetic notes, but in the end, the annotated bibliography is a scholarly product in and of itself. It should be readable and provide you with insight that you couldn’t get from the full set of articles or book chapters.

Components of a Research Paper Data

Generally speaking, you can see the annotated bibliography as an organized, systematic dump of all your synthetic notes (or rhetorical precis). Each entry starts with the full article, book or book chapter citation, followed by a short summary of the article. Some authors include the article or book chapter abstract, others don’t.

Here are two examples of excellent annotated bibliographies. The first one is on Indigenous water governance in Canada. The second, on community-based water governance, was created by Jingsi Jin with Kelly Sharp under Dr. Crystal Tremblay and Dr. Leila Harris’ supervision.

Literature Road Mapping

One element that links the rhetorical precis and the annotated bibliography is that in the annotation for each entry, you can make a value judgment as to what aspects you find more valuable or important of the article. When I write those judgments, I copy those notes (my synthetic notes) and insert them into my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump for that particular topic.

For example, I am currently writing on timing and sequencing (that is, on how specific events can lead to the creation of specific rules, norms and institutions). I could write an annotated bibliography on the topic (which I am not currently doing as I am writing a full paper, but it would be possible for me to do it as an intermediate step). Previously, I have written on how you can draw several of the most important ideas of a paper by looking at the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion (the AIC method).

The AIC technique DOES NOT substitute for an actual, in-depth read of a paper. But it does provide some basic ideas for an annotated bibliography. You should also be able to write most of the synthetic summary for a paper out of the AIC summary. The AIC also provides you with the foundations of a detailed memorandum.

Following the timing and sequencing example, I am reading Tulia Falleti’s “A Sequential Theory of Decentralization” APSR paper. In this paper, Professor Falleti proposes that the timing and sequencing of decentralization implementation have an impact on how intergovernmental relations result and what the specific outcome in this process will be. While the entire paper is important, I am mostly interested in the timing and sequencing components.

My annotated bibliography entry could very well just include a summary of the main points of Falleti’s paper:

Falleti, Tulia G. “A sequential theory of decentralization: Latin American cases in comparative perspective.” American Political Science Review 99.03 (2005): 327-346.

In this paper, Falleti proposes a sequential theory of decentralization where she defines decentralization as a process, looks at the sequence of events that decentralization processes follow, defines three types of decentralization and takes into account policy feedback effects and the territorial interests of bargaining actors. Falleti applies her analysis to four Latin American countries. Falleti shows that decentralization doesn’t necessary increase the power of governors and mayors, but instead this power is dependent on the sequence of decentralization reforms and the timing of these.

Normally, for papers I am reading at the overview/meso level, I would write a summary that is based on the results of AIC (Abstract, Introduction, Conclusion). However, since I find this article by Tulia Falleti quite important, I will write a detailed memorandum, and I will drop my highlights and scribbles on the margins into my Excel dump (Conceptual Synthesis).

As I have written before, I triage the full set of readings I plan to do, and I am strategic, focusing in more depth on those articles, books and book chapters that I know could very well provide me with key insights for a literature review. Being this strategic isn’t all that relevant if one is doing a very broad annotated bibliography. That’s why doing a citation tracing process around anchor authors is important. You need to make sure that you do in-depth readings when those are written by the key authors that you need to read for your literature review.

Hopefully sharing my processes will help people write their annotated bibliographies and their literature reviews!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 28, 2017

How to undertake a literature review

I have been asked a few times for a blog post on how to conduct a proper literature review. This is hard to do sometimes because a lot of people have different methods to do their reviews of the literature (see examples here, here, here and here). I tweeted a few of the steps I undertake, but I figured the easiest way to do this was to actually write a full blog post with the protocol I follow. I usually teach my students (graduate and undergraduate) and my research assistants how to do each one of the steps, so I will be walking you through my own process, rather than any generally accepted version of a method for reviewing the literature. You can apply much of the research process (citation tracing, concept saturation, finding anchor authors and creating subheadings that are based on questions to be answered) to the process of creating an annotated bibliography.

#AcWri at the Radisson Paraiso Ajusco Hotel

Right now I am doing a review of the literature on online activism for environmental protection purposes. This isn’t a topic that is entirely new to me, because I do know some of the work and a few of the authors who have studied this particular issue, or at least online activism. Among these I can count Dr. Melissa K. Merry (University of Louisville), Dr. Dave Karpf (George Washington University), Dr. Deen Freelon (American University) and Dr. Meredith Clark (University of North Texas). Melissa’s work is specifically on how environmental advocacy organizations have used Twitter, so citations to her work, and the papers she cites are the backbone of the literature review. Deen, Dave and Meredith have researched online activism, so their publications should be part of the contextual components.

An element of undertaking a literature review that almost nobody tells you about is the serendipitous nature of finding a specific author. For example, while I have tweeted quite a lot, and I knew of the work of Dave Karpf on online activism because I followed him on Twitter, I didn’t know about the work of Melissa until she became my discussant at this year’s Midwest Political Science Association conference and I Googled her work, which is COMPLETELY relevant to what I am studying right now. I knew of Deen and Meredith’s work and their study of #BlackLivesMatter because I had followed it on Twitter. But it took me a citation tracing process based on Dave’s 2010 piece to find Heather Hodges and Galen Stocking’s article on Twitter activism against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is VERY much specific to what I am researching now. So much of what I come across is actually rather serendipitous. Heather and Galen’s paper then became also part of the list of the anchor authors.

1. Identify the main topic and the anchor authors.

The first stage of undertaking a literature review is identifying the main topic for the review, and a few key authors, what I called in the previous paragraph, the anchor authors. For example, for this review I’m doing on online environmental activism I identified three articles by Melissa, one by Dave, as my foundation ones.

AcWri and literature reviews 018

2. Undertake a citation tracing process to check who is citing whom and whether you’ve reached conceptual saturation

As I mentioned in the prevous paragraph, from reading and summarizing Melissa and Dave’s articles, I found other authors who have done relevant and similar work, like Heather Hodges and Galen Stocking. I used citation tracing both in the case of Melissa and in that of Dave, and that’s how I converged on the Hodges and Stocking article (both Melissa and Dave were cited in their piece).

citation tracing online activism

3. Read, summarise, synthesise, WRITE.

Once I found more relevant articles, I started reading and summarizing them, and creating my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. As I have mentioned before, while I create one for each research project I undertake, I don’t believe the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump should be submitted as part of a project report, but it IS an important component. That is, your Excel dump should exist, and it should encompass all the literature you have reviewed, but it’s not a product that a funding agency might be interested in publishing or even posting online.

Tweeting for environmental NGOs Excel dump

4. Generate the main themes for your Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump and headings for your literature review, based on specific topics you’re researching.

The Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump will help you create headings for your literature review, provide you with accurate quotations for your paper, and give you a snapshot, bird’s-eye view of where your paper is situated and the gaps in the literature, but it is NOT an actual scholarly output. Annotated bibliographies, banks of synthetic notes and literature reviews are actual research products.

5. Repeat the process until reaching conceptual saturation.

Depending on how in-depth I want to go, I write rhetorical precis or synthetic summaries of each article, and then dump them into my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump for that specific topic. I may also want to create an annotated bibliography. But sometimes I am so busy that I simply go from the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump to writing the literature review.

Most people I know write first an annotated bibliography and THEN, based on the results of their annotations, start writing their literature review. Since I am usually reviewing a body of works for a specific paper I am writing, I rarely have the time to write an annotated bibliography. However, something I may do is ask my research assistants to write an annotated bibliography on a broader topic and, based on that one, choose specific citations I may want to use for the literature review section of the paper I am writing.

6. Write the literature review as though you were answering questions about each subheading.

I usually break down the literature review, if it is a research product in and of itself (like the one we generated for the UC MEXUS CONACYT project) in headings and summarize how each one of the papers, book chapters and books I reviewed relates to each other within the literature, within each heading. So for example, if I were doing this literature review as a product itself, I probably would use a list of topics and headings like this:

  1. Introduction.
  2. The role of activism in policy change.
  3. Activist strategies’ repertoire: online and offline.
  4. Experiences of online activists’ in influencing domestic policy change.
  5. Environmental activists’ repertoires: online and offline.
  6. How do environmental activists use online strategies to influence policy change.
  7. Gaps in the literature.
  8. Conclusions.

Some authors, like Dr. Eduardo Araral, publish their literature reviews as scholarly pieces in international journals. This coauthored piece on Water Governance 2.0 is a really solid literature review with a critical component that provides additional insight than just summarizing the works published so far on the topic.

This paper by Benson et al is another good literature review published as a journal article (on water governance and integrated water resources management).

These pieces (by Miranda et al 2011 and by Batchelor) on water governance are not published as journal articles, but remain solid literature reviews.

This literature review by the Pacific Institute on voluntary standards in environmental regulation is also quite solid.

Overall, the exercise of undertaking a literature review is an important and necessary one for students both at the undergraduate and at the graduate level, and that’s why it is fundamental that we teach our students how to do them properly. Hopefully my post will answer some questions on how to conduct literature reviews!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 28, 2017

#GetYourManuscriptOut #SendOutFortNight (April 15-30th, 2017)

Almost three years ago, Dr. Steve Shaw (McGill University), Dr. Mireya Marquez (Universidad Iberoamericana Santa Fe) and I founded the hashtag #GetYourManuscriptOut. I was frustrated that I had SEVERAL papers whose conversion-rate-from-conference-paper-to-journal-article had been basically ZERO. So, I decided to look at my dormant papers and JUST GET THE MANUSCRIPT OUT. Throughout the years, since July 2014, I have been joined by many researchers who have found #GetYourManuscriptOut a supportive community for academic writing.

But, as I have previously written, I can very easily feel writer’s block. And yes, the reason why I wake up at 4am and start writing and write every single day is because I know that social media is addictive, and even with my own guidelines and tricks to avoid spending all day in social media, I can get easily distracted. That’s also why I have written about the hacks I use to trick myself into regaining focus.

So when Madeleine suggested that we commit to writing 500 words BEFORE starting social media, I was delighted. It’s hard for me to ALWAYS generate text, which is why I wrote about prompts I use to start writing.

But around the same time, I wanted to commit to submitting all the dormant papers I had to send out right about now. Let me explain: theoretically, my campus has two weeks of holidays right about now. I would LOVE to take these holidays. But I am way too busy as I am about to deploy fieldwork for four case studies. So, I moved my holidays towards the end of the summer and early December. And I will be working for the next two weeks. This means, while my campus will be empty, I can focus entirely on writing and research without having to worry about being interrupted by meetings and administrative stuff.

TWO COMPLETE, UNINTERRUPTED RESEARCH AND WRITING WEEKS.

So, I invited my Twitter colleagues to join me in a #GetYourManuscriptOut #500words #FortNight. For the next two weeks, I will be focusing on getting manuscripts out.

I thought about creating a Google Spreadsheet to allow others to insert their own pledges, but in the interest of privacy, I decided against it. What I have done is to create my own Google Spreadsheets to track my own progress. Hopefully many of you will join!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 13, 2017

Upcoming talk “Writing YOUR Way to your PhD (and Tenure): Doing Academic Work without Selling Your Soul”

you should be writingLike many political scientists, I will be descending on Chicago this week to present two papers at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA). I was invited by Dr. Kelly LeRoux (University of Chicago at Illinois) to give a talk to her PhD students, and we decided to make it a public lecture. I have titled it “Writing YOUR Way to your PhD (and Tenure): Doing Academic Work without Selling Your Soul”.

Here is the abstract:

We read it on Sh!t Academics Says, on PhDComics.com, we hear it from our advisors, colleagues and fellow students: “YOU SHOULD BE WRITING!”. Alas, getting words on paper (or on the screen) isn’t always as easy as people would want to make you believe. Writing is hard, and academic writing often times feels harder. In this talk, I will walk you through some of the hacks I have implemented to enable me to consistently produce scholarly research all the while maintaining some semblance of a personal and social life. From morning routines to daily naps, to achieving Quick Wins, to writing your to-do lists on the Everything Notebook™, I will share with you a few ideas that you may be able to implement in your everyday life.

Talk will be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 400 South Peoria St., Wednesday, April 5th, 15:00hrs (3pm). If you are in Chicago, feel free to drop by! This talk will be the basic backbone of my forthcoming book on my life as an academic.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 3, 2017

World Water Day 2017: Finally, the UN realized wastewater governance is important

This week, on March 22nd, we celebrated World Water Day. The theme for 2017 (and also the topic for the 2017 World Water Assessment Report) was the sudden realization that water that we use to flush toilets, wash dishes and produce goods and services is a waste unless we recover it (Wastewater: The Untapped Resource). All of a sudden, in 2017, the UN and its allied water agencies realized “Why Waste Water?”

Well, I would be a lot more impressed if I hadn’t been saying the same since, well, 2002. FIFTEEN YEARS.

One of the things that amazes me the most about studying water governance is the lack of interdisciplinary thought. To anybody who studies civil or environmental or chemical engineering, using water to wash waste is stupid. Using the basic mass balance equation, if you pollute clean water, you get wastewater and if you dispose of it, you’re losing it. Most water scholars I know who look at domestic (national-level) issues are concerned with access to clean water (and in Mexico, a large number of them are preoccupied with agricultural-use water). But I rarely hear anyone discuss the realities of how much wastewater we generate, how little treatment we provide and how few functioning sewage treatment plants we have. Social scientists seem to care very little about wastewater.

We ARE wasting water.

In my own research, I found that almost 60% of the wastewater treatment plants that were supposed to be operating in the Lerma-Chapala river basin in Mexico are actually functioning below capacity and suffering from poor infrastructure maintenance and lack of funding. Wastewater treatment is a function of local governments and yet, their water utilities are chronically underfunded and lacking in robust infrastructure and human capital.

THIS IS NOT OK.

You would have thought the world would have woken up to the fact that wastewater is an untapped resource decades ago. Heck, 2008 was the International Year of Sanitation. And yet, we still are just starting to focus, 9 years later, on how we can better treat and govern wastewater.

The other thing that bothers me is the lack of in-depth research on the topic of wastewater governance. I have read the WWAP report and it cites a lot of UN publications, but not the mainstream research I’ve found (or I’ve written) on wastewater and its governance. Given that my research on wastewater governance has been published since 2004, I am also slightly taken aback that the WWAP report didn’t cite me, not even on urban wastewater governance in Latin America, where I recently published a chapter on the topic. And it’s not like they didn’t cite publications in Spanish (they did, and I’ve published in that language too).

Anyway, I’m glad UN Water and the WWAP are appearing to be taking wastewater governance more seriously now, hopefully they’ll do something about it in the next few years, and I also hope it won’t be only lip service to the serious needs for wastewater treatment in developing countries.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 25, 2017

Addressing the alleged ahistoricity of Elinor Ostroms’ commons theory

At a seminar last December, I was told that Professor Elinor Ostrom’s commons theory (mostly outlined in her 1990 “Governing the Commons“, but also well deployed in her 2005 “Understanding Institutional Diversity” and 2010 coauthored book with Marco Janssen and Amy Poteete “Working Together“) was “ahistorical”. Obviously, I was totally taken aback. As someone who was trained by the Ostroms, and who learned from them directly, it was very clear to me that the scholars who were telling me this were not very aware of how institutional analysis from the Ostromian perspective works.

IASC 2013 Panels 1, 2 and lunch poster sessions

There are two main issues I have with this assertion of alleged ahistoricity of Ostrom’s commons theory. The first one is that the mere definition of institution (seen as the set of rules and norms that govern interactions across agents), implies that the creation of this set of rules and norms takes time. Institutions are created through the routinization and repetition of norms. This process takes place through history. Therefore, by definition, institutionalism (and in particular historical institutionalism) IS historical. Learning how institutions evolve (as seen through the work of Kathleen Thelen, for example) requires us to understand the historical processes that take place to get from where we have been to where we are right now(***).

The second issue is that the actual temporal timeline within which the Ostromian perspective has been applied (from the 1960s through the 1990s all the way to the mid 2010s) is relatively recent. This doesn’t mean that you can’ t apply current theories to historical commons (see, for example, the work of Tine De Moor and Chris Short, as well as Jose Miguel Lana Berasain et al). I think there is a badly misunderstood idea among some Mexican social scientists that the Mexican agrarian reform and land tenure patterns were so unique that they could not possibly be analyzed through the relatively recent theoretical perspectives of a commons.

Gibsons (Gibsons Landing, Sunshine Coast)

I think that most scholars who aren’t really familiar with IAD or SES argue that it provides a snapshot of a social and ecological system, where this “instant picture” is devoid of any historical context. I actually disagree, simply because of how institutions are crafted and created through time. Moreover, within the system’s characteristics’ boxes you need to provide as much context about the system as possible. This context IS historical, and thus it’s important that we remember that this automatically implies that the framework in and of itself can be used through time and in a rather dynamic form.

I think it is important to clear up the alleged ahistoricity of commons theory because not doing so leaves a lot of room for misunderstandings. In this post, I tried to make this point in a very brief form, but I would strongly recommend that those interested in commons and history look at the works I’ve linked to above.
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(***) – I am grateful to Dr. Dan Cole, from Indiana University, for making this point over an email exchange we had.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 16, 2017

Studying policy change vs policy creation – policy cycle theories vs policy regime framework

Whenever anybody asks me what does a double-major in political science and human geography do in a public administration department, I tell them that I study comparative public policy and use cases of environment and resource governance to explore differences across national jurisdictions.

I am also interested in the governance of non-traditional common-pool resources (CPRs) and in the spatial, political and human dimensions of public service delivery. Potable water supply, wastewater treatment and solid waste management are all public services that need to be provided, which are regularly the responsibility of local governments and therefore an integral part of the public administration literature. But at the core, I have always studied policy change, more so than policy creation.

My first really important, empirical paper (Pacheco-Vega, 2005, “Democracy by Proxy”) examines the role of non-state actors and their coalition-building in influencing and changing domestic toxics policy. I showed how environmental non-governmental organizations, forming transnational coalitions of activists, changed the voluntary nature of the Mexican toxics release inventory from voluntary to mandatory. This was a contribution to the policy change literature.

But even before then, I had explained (with Peter Nemetz, 2001) the role of information-based voluntary programs in designing effective pollution control strategies. Voluntary or suasive policy instruments such as the toxics release inventory are considered some of the least effective, but gained a lot of prominence in the early 2000s as an alternative to regulatory, command-and-control instruments. This is a contribution to the policy creation (policy cycle) body of scholarship. These works were, as Dr. Debora VanNijnatten, what positioned me as “the policy instruments guy”. Further work I did with Dr. Kathryn Harrison and Dr. Mark Winfield looked at the role of policy transfer in disseminating ideas on how toxic release inventories should work, which is more again, on the policy cycle/policy instruments realm.

My doctoral work looked at industry responses to environmental regulatory pressure, which is also part of the policy change field (e.g. Pacheco-Vega and Dowlatabadi 2005, Pacheco-Vega 2008). And my wastewater governance research has examined and evaluated water and wastewater policies, so these contributions are definitely part of the policy cycle body of works. But even my transnational environmental activism in North America analyses (Pacheco-Vega 2015) focus on the role of policy change. I think overall my research trajectory is primarily focused on policy change.

I really love the versatility of doing interdisciplinary work, but if anybody asked me what is my specialty and wanted to peg me, I think I’d say that I am a specialist in the study of factors that drive policy changes. The policy regime literature (particularly those works which examine the impact of ideas, interests and institutions on how policies are adopted or shift goals/strategies/implementation) is particularly useful in understanding change in policies.

I’d rather be known as someone who understands how policies evolve, shift, and can fail, than someone who is an expert on agenda-setting or implementation (even though I’ve done work on both). A conversation with a current student of mine on Twitter reminded me that, to me, teaching policy analysis is relevant because it allows my students to learn how policies change, how they can fail, and what factors can be used to prevent failure. I don’t diss the policy cycle literature, I still love agenda-setting theory, and I am definitely keen on furthering my work on policy implementation (in particular, for example, what I am currently doing with the human right to water literature).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 13, 2017