This chapter uses the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to illustrate and advance the idea of the expert knowledge commons. The IPCC was established in 1988 as an intergovernmental body of the United Nations, charged with advancing scientific knowledge about climate change in order to inform public policy decision-making. As an institution and instrument of authority grounded in scientific expertise, the IPCC has come to play a critical role in advancing political, cultural, and economic awareness of the character of climate change. The IPCC has been the subject of a great deal of research, none of which has focused directly on the manner in which its authoritative status rests both formally and informally on multiple layers of shared knowledge, information, and data. This chapter uses the IPCC’s governance of that shared knowledge to motivate and illustrate a model of expert knowledge commons.

Our natural environment constitutes a complex and dynamic global ecosystem that provides essential resources for well-being and survival. Yet the environment is also subject to unprecedented threats from human activities, such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, biodiversity decline, and the overexploitation of natural resources. This volume argues that such complex, multidimensional challenges demand equally complex, multidimensional solutions and calls for coordinated multistakeholder action at all scales, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and individuals. To meet the moment effectively, such interventions require both scientific knowledge about how the environment functions and social and institutional knowledge about the actors involved in environmental governance and management. Chapters include case studies of environmental knowledge collection, management, and sharing to explore how data and knowledge sharing can inform effective multistakeholder action to combat global threats to our environment. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Our natural environment constitutes a complex and dynamic global ecosystem that provides essential resources for well-being and survival. Yet the environment is also subject to unprecedented threats from human activities, such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, biodiversity decline, and the overexploitation of natural resources. This volume argues that such complex, multidimensional challenges demand equally complex, multidimensional solutions and calls for coordinated multistakeholder action at all scales, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and individuals. To meet the moment effectively, such interventions require both scientific knowledge about how the environment functions and social and institutional knowledge about the actors involved in environmental governance and management. Chapters include case studies of environmental knowledge collection, management, and sharing to explore how data and knowledge sharing can inform effective multistakeholder action to combat global threats to our environment. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

8.1 Motivations and Objectives

As we have contended in Chapter 1, like inequality and polarization, deprivation is also a social bad. Runciman (1966) argued that the magnitude of deprivation perceived by a person for not being promoted is an increasing function of the number of persons who have been promoted. Yitzhaki (1979) considered deprivation with respect to income in the Runciman framework and showed that one credible index of deprivation in a society is the absolute Gini index for the society. Earlier, Sen (1973) argued that in any pair-wise comparison, the income shortfall of the worse-off person from the better-off person may be taken as a size of the degree of depression suffered by the worse off when he compares his position with that of the better off on the income scale. These depression sizes, when averaged across individuals in the society, generate the absolute Gini measure of inequality as a measure of social depression. A similar interpretation holds for the recently revived absolute Bonferroni standard of inequality (Chakravarty, 2007). Thus, when appropriately formulated, a tax policy desiring reduction of the Gini/Bonferroni measure of social deprivation effectively requires a curtailment in the inequality magnitude of before-tax incomes, as measured by the Gini/Bonferroni index.

In this chapter we examine the incidence of taxation on deprivation. More precisely, our objectives in the chapter are to design tax strategies that are intended to reduce social deprivation.

5.1 Motivations and Objectives

In the earlier chapter we were concerned with income-by-income progressivity of a tax schedule. But very often it becomes necessary to get a concrete idea about the extent of overall progressivity of the schedule. For instance, a policy maker may be required to know whether the current system of taxation is sufficiently progressive. Another important issue that arises in this context is the problem of ranking between two or more tax schemes in terms of progressivity. A taxpayer in India may be interested in knowing whether the new tax system is more progressive than the earlier one.

A global or overall indicator of progressivity is a scalar representation of the degree of progressivity implicit under a tax program taken as a whole. In this chapter we make a detailed analytical treatment of tax progressivity on an all-inclusive footing and several related issues.

For checking global progressivity of a tax program, it is natural to expect that it is locally progressive everywhere. The two highly innovative propositions of Jakobsson (1976) suggest that this inquiry can be made along two lines: looking at the equalizing effect of taxation on the income distribution (redistributive effect) and checking to what extent the distribution of tax burdens is more unequally distributed than the incomes from which taxes are collected (departure from proportionality effect). The corresponding families of progressivity indicators are, therefore, consistent respectively with the local metrics “residual income progression” (RIP) and “tax liability progression” (TLP).

This chapter focuses on the idea of 'change' in several dimensions. The organisational changes in size, scale and structure reflect wider changes going on in the banking and financial sectors, which in turn are conditioned by wider national and global political economies. The chapter begins with some ethnographic examples of how change was being articulated and wrestled with in some of the staff training courses. It then offers an 'interlude' of more theoretical reflections on the concept of social change and its relevance to the material. The chapter then returns to look more closely at aspects of how change was being represented in everyday talk and experienced by bank staff. It explains how people responded to the call to act in highly uncertain circumstances, and some of the patterns of thought and language they drew on to help do that.

The culture concept has been central to anthropology and has become increasingly prominent in sociology in recent years. It has also become a key concept in the subfield of organisational studies, where the idea of 'organisational cultures' has become very influential. In short, culture is evidence of power and its organisation. The conception of culture author have proffered implies that there are genuine cultural differences, or at least gradations of difference, between organisations and between nations. For some, the integration of the subsidiary Capital Bank was seen as a significant step to weakening the old Bank of Scotland (BoS) culture, prior to the formation of HBOS. Generally, the 1990s were understood as a period when BoS was aware of the increasing competitive pressures of the banking industry and trying to cautiously innovate and modernize.