This chapter clarifies the difference between changes in levels of cost versus growth of cost and focuses on the latter. This is because increases in spending may be good if we are getting something for that growth; it all depends whether it is going toward “waste” or if we are obtaining value for that spending in the form of health outcomes – a return on investment. Four targets of cost containment are outlined: administrative costs, competition, state-based spending targets, and value-based payment. It is acknowledged that administrative costs are high in the US in part because consumers have choice over plans, benefits, providers, and networks (as opposed to once centralized system); with this choice comes coordination, information, and standardization costs. Excessive market power due to consolidation may also lead to the extraction of high prices from consumers beyond what would be possible with improved market-level competition. The chapter concludes by addressing the recent flattening in medical spending growth and what might happen in the future.

As soon as one comes to terms with Origen’s historiographically and literarily sensitive criteria for how to read and understand the Gospel narratives, one may realize that the Gospels have simultaneously formed his vision of what history itself is by presenting this life to us “under the form of history” and “in figures” they reveal that history is itself a “sign of something.” Thus, for Origen, when one finally reaches into the “depths of the evangelical mind” and discerns “the naked truth of the figures therein,” one discovers a “spiritual Gospel,” yes, but one breaks through the “shell” of these historical narratives only to find history anew, even one’s very own, transfigured and “taken up into the Gospel” – the eternal Gospel – whose sacrament is the glorified Son of Man.

Chapter 6 transitions to the case of the Philippines to provide a comparative analysis of regime complex effectiveness. The chapter begins with a political economy analysis of the domestic actors and interests involved in the energy sector in the Philippines, then delves into the history of geothermal development with an analysis of the impacts of the clean energy regime complex actors on barriers to geothermal development over time. The major findings of this chapter indicate that early domestic political support for geothermal development under the Marcos and Ramos regimes was a response to the exogenous shocks of energy crises. This response to exogenous shocks opened pathways of change that were key in catalyzing geothermal development in the country that later placed the Philippines as the world’s second largest producer for several decades. In the Philippines, an embrace of the energy transition enabled the positive impact of the clean energy regime complex on geothermal development. In Indonesia, domestic political resistance to the energy transition limited regime complex effectiveness.

The book concludes in Chapter 8 with a summary of the major theoretical and empirical findings on the clean energy regime complex’s emergence and effectiveness across Indonesia and the Philippines, and a discussion of the theory’s broader generalizability, further research opportunities, and policy implications and recommendations for fostering energy transitions in a world of complex governance.

This chapter brings together the threads of Chapters 8 and 9 to advance an alternative theoretical foundation for international organizations. First, it explains why we should understand the state as an artificial rather than as a natural construct, even for the purposes of international law. It traces states’ emergence back to a national community’s capacity for self-description through socially grounded rules of transformative re-description. Doing so, this chapter unveils the inherent openness of international law to admitting any other institutions that can also be traced back to this capacity. Thus, it recasts the state as just one institution among a family of such entities. All these entities, including international organizations, are equally admissible by default in international law without the need for any legislative intervention to that effect.

A closer look at changes in women’s education, age of marriage, employment, and the reasons for the enduring value of women’s skilled domestic work. Women’s postrevolutionary legal position as second-class citizens exists in tandem with gains in women’s social status indicators: improvements in women’s literacy, later and more egalitarian age of marriage, lower fertility rates, and improved indicators of basic household consumption. Women’s stubbornly low contemporary participation rate in formal employment is complicated by the prerevolutionary prevalence of child labor, and postrevolutionary improvements in girls’ school attendance. Low rates of formal employment also mask women’s crucial contributions to household economies through social labor. Local food culture and the premium attached to women’s skilled home cooking provide the basis for social and economic networks that bypass state control. The common value of local food culture provides a foundation for social identity and a recognizable form of capital that offsets the frustrations associated with limited the opportunities of the formal market.

This chapter analyses the failure of numerous ‘popish mortgage bills’ in late eighteenth-century Ireland. It contextualizes these legislative efforts not only within the histories of the penal laws and Catholic emancipation, but also within the histories of mortgage law in Ireland, England, and other parts of the British Empire. The bills demonstrated Irish lawmakers’ interest in guaranteeing sources of credit for landowners, and indicated at least some confidence in the protections that would be afforded Protestant debtors by the core doctrine of the equity of redemption. The widespread testing of that doctrine, however, raised new questions about creditor power that informed fears about Catholic power, and these became central to legal and political debate. The failure of these bills reflected common concerns about predation and fraud in credit relations, and particular unease about the ways in which mortgage law might contribute to constitutional change, undermining Ireland’s Protestant ascendancy.

In 1796, as Britain fought endless wars within Europe and overseas, one of the three leading theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, contemplated the ideal relationship between landscapes and visual arts:

Living through the French Revolution and its aftermath, Price here suggests that the only semblance of stability could be found in the vindication of the established order. This is evident in his advocacy of the preservation and heightening of the features of a given landscape. The result is a blend of politics and aesthetic choices that necessitates framing one correctly in order to truly appreciate the other.

We review relevant concepts from and properties of the categories of sets and of endofunctors on the category of sets relevant to our work. We discuss representable functors on the category of sets, introducing our exponential notation for them, and we state and prove the Yoneda lemma for these with the help of an exercise. We then examine sums (or coproducts) and products of sets and functions through the language of indexed families of sets. In particular, we characterize products of sets in terms of dependent functions, generalizing functions by allowing their codomains to vary depending on their inputs. We study nested sums and products of sets, explaining how distributivity allows us to expand products of sums of sets. By lifting all of this material to endofunctors on the category of sets, and using the fact that its limits and colimits are computed pointwise, we set ourselves up to introduce polynomial functors as sums of representable functors in the next chapter. Throughout the chapter, we emphasize key categorical principles and provide detailed explanations to ensure solid comprehension of these fundamental ideas.

As ethnic competition gained momentum on the local level, similar developments occurred at the regional level. Decolonization in the postwar period involved constitutional reform and the slow development of African political parties. The British government used constitutional reform to ensure its political and economic interest to maintain the status quo, while emerging African political parties engaged constitutional reform to make various claims for self-determination. The British government insisted African political parties operate at the regional level and discouraged any efforts to form broad, multi-ethnic, cross-regional nationalist parties, such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had aimed for. By 1952, broad nationalist sentiments had distilled into a regionally focused politics. In this context, ethnic majorities within each region had more power than their minority counterparts. The emerging regionalist politics informed the development of a minority consciousness among Niger Delta elites in the 1950s, and they engaged the constitutional reform process through their positions as minorities to claim the right to self-determination.

7.1 [472] His Excellency Julian has not only denounced the holy scriptures; he furthermore speaks so impudently and has gone so far in his love of casting blame as to reach a point where nothing we do escapes his slander. Perhaps he thought doing so would bring him a good reputation. But some might well say about people opting for this mindset, “their glory is in their shame,”1 as well, I would suggest, as that statement made in the voice of David, “Why do you, who are powerful in lawlessness, boast in wickedness? Your tongue has planned injustice all day long; […] you loved all the words of your deluge, your treacherous tongue.”2

What Trajectory for the Regulation of Transnational Corporate Responsibility?

The framework for transnational corporate responsibility along global value chains (GVCs) is in flux. While the legal mechanisms have generally become tighter in recent years, the development follows no uniform trajectory. With scattered, disparate, and overlapping initiatives and regulatory regimes currently coexisting, it seems an open political question which regulatory paradigm will prevail in the medium and longer term. This chapter zooms in on specific transitional moments in the regulatory evolution of corporate responsibility. The dominant narrative portrays this evolution as roughly two decades of linear progress from ‘voluntary’ (deemed ‘ineffective’) corporate social responsibility to ‘mandatory’ (and hence deemed more ‘effective’) instruments, with each stage reacting to deficits of the previous one by imposing tighter standards, leaving fewer gaps, and allowing stricter enforcement. While this sequential understanding of corporate responsibility with each stage implementing selective improvements indeed captures an important dynamic within corporate responsibility, it paints an incomplete picture. First, it stresses rupture over continuity and thereby distracts attention from shared and structural deficits of the regulation of corporate responsibility across its different ‘stages’. Second, it assumes regulatory discourses of corporate responsibility to be largely self-referential and isolated from broader regulatory developments in other fields. These two limitations have deflected the debate from exposing certain structural difficulties in regulating complex value chains, as well as the deeper political dynamics at play in framing regulatory ‘innovations’.

Against this background, this chapter examines the example of reporting regulation as deployed to address different dimensions of corporate responsibility, including modern slavery. Among the substantive goals on the agenda of corporate responsibility, curbing modern slavery is arguably the most intricate. Intrinsically linked to and sustained by the business model of offshore capitalism, modern slavery forms a ‘viable management practice for many enterprises’ (Crane, 2013: 49).

As many have warned, the expansionism or ‘exploitation creep’ (Chuang, 2014) that characterizes discourses around ‘modern slavery’ has only succeeded in clouding the issue, both legally and politically, rather than rendering it more visible (see also Miers, 2003; O’Connell-Davidson, 2015; Quirk, 2018). As Chuang (2014: 611) explains, this ‘exploitation creep’ has entailed the consideration of an ever-broadening range of practices as falling under the ‘modern slavery’ umbrella term. Chuang centres her attention on two related paradigmatic shifts that have allowed this to happen: the reframing of all forced labour as trafficking and the labelling of trafficking as, by definition, slavery (2014: 611). ‘Modern slavery’ has therefore become a catch-all and highly malleable term, which can include practices as disparate as selling sexual services online, generational bonded labour in India, low-level drug distribution in the UK, and forced marriage.

This ‘exploitation creep’ has produced two broad policy responses. On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of a hegemonic position referred to in the literature as ‘modern slavery abolitionism’ (Chuang, 2014; O’Connell-Davidson, 2015). This locates the source of these ostensibly exploitative labour practices in deviant/criminal entities (organized crime groups and/or rogue multinational corporations). Under the abolitionism paradigm, preventative policies have included the banning or restriction of migration for ‘vulnerable’ populations, often women from the Global South (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2002; Kapur, 2005; Andrijasevic, 2007; Agustín, 2007); the ‘rescue, protection and rehabilitation’ of individual victims identified in contexts of destination; and the prosecution of perpetrators. Abolitionism invests in moral crusades along an axis of evil, presenting ‘modern slavery’ as an exceptional problem to be driven-out (Bunting and Quirk, 2014) and characterized by methodological individualism (LeBaron and Ayers, 2013: 874). Conceptualizing ‘modern slavery’ as the result of evil criminals or rogue companies, abolitionist policies thus invisibilize the very conditions in which such exploitative and unfree relations thrive. This unnuanced, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach fails to consider historically determined systems and relations of power that underpin exploitative and unfree labour.

Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.