Raul P Lejano
Biographic Data
| ID | 376122 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raul P Lejano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raul P |
| FAMILY NAME | Lejano |
| SIGNATURE | LEJANO R P |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6949-7252 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 311 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Conjectures on a relational turn in policy studies
We explore emerging work around the relational dimensions of public policy. What constitutes a relational frame of analysis is a broad terrain, but some general tenets characterize these approaches, including the foregrounding of relationships between policy actors along with the idea that these relationships are, at least in part, constitutive of the role and identity of these actors. In fact, relationality has long been a feature of studies on …
Social work-led case management in Hong Kong
Interdisciplinary case management for aging-in-place, as a model, is meant to reduce institutionalization, avoid fragmented care, and address the complex dynamics of aging. However, translation into practice in a local context can be problematic. In Hong Kong, there is an emerging practice around interdisciplinary professional teams with social workers acting as centralized coordinators. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 52 service users a…
On Theories and Practices of Collective Action and Sustained Cooperation
ContentsIntroduction Viewpoints from Law, Economics, Religious Studies, Public Administration, and Everyday Practices of CareAtul Pokharel and John ForesterThe Relational Dimensions of Collective A
Social Ecological Systems in Flux
A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collective action. Part of this impasse stems from a gap between the multidimensional nature of contemporary…
Relationality
Previous work has focused on the role of social capital on resilience. However, this research tends to search for civic and other organizations, often formal institutionalized groups which, when they are not found, leads to questions about how social networks are possibly governed. Without formal organizational structures to govern these networks, how is pro-environmental/pro-social behavior sustained. In this article, we focus on a diffused mech…
Building Resilience from the Grassroots
As Bangladesh's Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP) celebrates its 50th anniversary, we reflect on its legacy, the gains made, and progress that still lies ahead. The CPP is unique among disaster risk-management agencies, as more than 90% of its staff consists of community volunteers. This unique institutional design influences its functioning. An important part of its growth has included the expansion of the involvement and leadership of women …
Design and implementation of a relational model of risk communication
Purpose The intent of the work is to go beyond the conventional model of disaster risk prevention, where community residents are objects of risk communication initiatives, and develop and implement a relational model of risk communication wherein they are active agents of knowledge transfer. Design/methodology/approach The relational model of risk communication translates risk knowledge into narrative forms that community members can share. The a…
IPCC and the City
The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released. In it, several sections address climate change, mitigation, and adaptation in cities, with discussions of the crucial role of planning and governance in the same. This article offers a reflection on the urban elements of AR6, pointing to the prevalence of ideological elements in it, typologizing form over critical assessments of real condi…
Co-production of risk knowledge and improvement of risk communication
Relationality and resilience
In this article, we take up the overlapping nature of crises, and reflect on the knowledge we have gained vis-a-vis learning in a time of pandemic. COVID-19 and climate change have both, in overlapping ways, changed our understanding of what constitutes just and empowering approaches to crisis risk communication. In both areas of concern, the public has had to appropriate and interpret technical knowledge, and apply the same to risk situations. A…
Relationality
Policy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working a…
Teaching to the nth
The Power of Narrative
Narrative is the stuff of community. The Power of Narrative embarks on a quest to understand how narrative works in taking an inchoate group of individuals and turning it into a powerful social movement. To understand the force of narrative, the authors examine the particular phenomenon of climate skepticism. Somehow, the narrative of climate skepticism has been able to forge a movement and stake a challenge to the hegemony of the larger communit…
Sustainability and incommensurability
Climate change and the relational city
Weather, Climate, and Narrative
There is growing evidence that the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events may be increasing in conjunction with climate change. This means that many communities will encounter phenomena, such as extreme storm surge events, never before experienced by local residents. The tragic effects of Typhoon Haiyan on the city of Tacloban, Philippines, in November 2013 were attributed, in part, to the inability of routine technical bulletins to co…
Analytics for local knowledge
In privileging expert risk assessments, we may be failing to recognize the authenticity of a community’s actual experience of risk. We should remind ourselves that expert measures are always only partial, often surrogate, estimates of such experience and, at times, may fail to capture the actual nature of risk. There is a need for modes of analysis that allow better description of risk as experienced by community. We develop and test the methods …
The logic of informality
Collective action as narrativity and praxis
Policy scholars need to better describe the diversity of actors and interests that forge collective political action through nonformal social networks. The authors find extant theories of collective action to only partially explain such heterogeneity, which is exemplified by the urban protest movements in Hong Kong. A new concept, that of the narrative-network, appears better able to describe movements chiefly characterized by heterogeneity. Inst…
Relational Perspectives on Environmental Justice
Spatial injustices, especially the disproportionate exposure of disadvantaged communities to environmental risks, stem from an inability to appreciate the lived experience of risk and, instead, a reliance on technical frameworks for regulating it. We review Noddings’ ideas about the caring attitude, in particular, that of caring for and, to some degree, caring about, and apply this to the issue of knowing about the experience of vulnerability and…
Assemblage and relationality in social-ecological systems
How does one begin to construct lasting solutions to environmental problems, the lived experiences of which exceed and defy their framing as environmental (or even as problematic)? Situations exhibit an irreducible autonomy often not amenable to strategic intervention. An emerging concept, proposed as an analytical framework for complex systems, is that of the response assemblage, which is the phenomenal convergence of autonomous elements into pr…
The narrative properties of ideology
A Textual Processing Model of Risk Communication
As the world’s urban poor increase in numbers, they become acutely vulnerable to hazards from extreme weather events. On 8 November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan struck the province of Leyte, Philippines, with casualties numbering in the thousands, largely because of the ensuing storm surge that swept the coastal communities. This study investigates the role and dynamics of risk communication in these events, specifically examining the organizational proc…
Sorting through Differences
Communities are sorted through differencing, the social construction of distinction. This, in turn, enables what we term social rendering: erasure of existing community and reimagination of an alternative one. This practice is founded upon an evolutionary notion of development as ecological succession, involving the intersectionality of race, class, and other markers. Such social genotyping leads to a genitocracy built around systems of differenc…
Mapping the industrial archeology of Boston
In a pilot project initiated in September of 2001, the Boston Public Health Commission, in collaboration with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed a methodology for super-imposing historical and present-day industrial land use data layers with demographic information and public health data. The goal was to identify and to possibly define a historical relationship between present-day …
Collaborative networks and new ways of knowing
A Hermeneutic Approach to Explaining and Understanding Public Controversies
Notwithstanding the growing use of interpretive analysis in public administration and policy research, its fullest potential for evaluating intractable public conflict has yet to be tapped. We develop a mode of narrative analysis, partly based upon Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, that shows promise for analyzing public disputes. We illustrate this with a case study in Los Angeles involving a contentious proposal to inject recycled wastewater into th…
Tales From the Crypt
Policy design is an area of study in the field of public policy with a curious intellectual history. It engendered a large literature in the 1980s and 1990s oriented to understanding design as both a process and an outcome with prominent figures in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia such as Lester Salamon, Patricia Ingraham, Malcolm Goggin, John Dryzek, Hans Bressers, Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider, G. B. Doern, Stephen Linder and …
The contextualist turn and schematics of institutional fit
The policy literature has long recognized the inherent need for a program to fit the unique conditions found in a certain context. We present a theory of institutional contextualism that focuses on the mechanisms by which actors adapt a policy design to fit a situation. We conceptualize institutions as phenomena that are constituted by a constant dialectic between text (the general blueprint) and context (the particular setting). The first half o…
Narrating Resilience
How can communities enhance social-ecological resilience within complex urban systems? Drawing on a new urbanist proposal in Orange County, California, it is suggested that planning that ignores diverse ways of knowing undermines the experience and shared meaning of those living in a city. The paper then describes how narratives lay at the core of efforts to reintegrate the Los Angeles River into the life of the city and the US Fire Learning Netw…
Norm, network, and commons
Climate and narrative
The Importance of Context
This article focuses on the manner by which resource management regimes, often conceived far away from their areas of application, are integrated into the local institutions, practices, and social structures of a place. This process of contextualization may be especially critical where, for reasons of resource scarcity, remoteness, or system complexity, the state cannot engage in effective program management. The thesis of the article is that if …
Interpreting Institutional Fit
Relationality
Policy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working a…
Enhancing the Resilience of Human-Environment Systems
Stokols, D., R. Perez Lejano, and J. Hipp. 2013. Enhancing the resilience of human–environment systems: a social–ecological perspective. Ecology and Society 18(1): 7. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05301-180107
Participatory Action Research for Environmental Health
The community-based approach to health research and intervention is a model of inquiry rooted in Freire’s participatory action research (PAR). We need to show, in concept and practice, what it is about PAR that may be well suited for the types of health issues we encounter in inner-city environments. What type of learning results, how does this respond to particular health issues in the urban context, and what are the particular challenges faced …
The logic of informality
The Phenomenon of Collective Action
This essay develops a theory of how institutions can work through the web of social relationships that exist in a place rather than through formal, bureaucratic lines of authority. In contrast to models that characterize institutions as organizational structures, roles, and patterns of exchange, this model depicts institutions as constituted primarily through the active working and reworking of relationships. Rather than adopt the network literat…
New Urbanism and the Barrio
The last decade has seen a growing turn toward New Urbanism in the redevelopment of urban neighborhoods. In October 2007 the City of Santa Ana released a draft Renaissance Plan to revitalize a transit-oriented district and government center supported by two neighborhoods. The plan exemplifies New Urbanist design principles which promote mixed income residential neighborhoods and respect local culture. Using a case study in two Mexican and working…
The narrative properties of ideology
Assemblage and relationality in social-ecological systems
How does one begin to construct lasting solutions to environmental problems, the lived experiences of which exceed and defy their framing as environmental (or even as problematic)? Situations exhibit an irreducible autonomy often not amenable to strategic intervention. An emerging concept, proposed as an analytical framework for complex systems, is that of the response assemblage, which is the phenomenal convergence of autonomous elements into pr…
Sorting through Differences
Communities are sorted through differencing, the social construction of distinction. This, in turn, enables what we term social rendering: erasure of existing community and reimagination of an alternative one. This practice is founded upon an evolutionary notion of development as ecological succession, involving the intersectionality of race, class, and other markers. Such social genotyping leads to a genitocracy built around systems of differenc…
Thick narratives and the persistence of institutions
Geographies of Risk, the Regulatory State, and the Ethic of Care
We examine the role of the regulatory state in the inequitable distribution of social advantages and disadvantages. To illustrate this, we examine the spatial distribution of exposures to air toxics from noxious land uses (commonly referred to as the environmental justice problem) and inquire into the nature of state action that would allow such inequity. Findings from our inquiry lead us to focus more closely on the administrative functions of t…
Narrative disenchantment
What's the story? Creating and sustaining environmental networks
Networks have been embraced as appropriate means for environmental governance because of their potential inclusivity, flexibility, resilience, and ability to comprehend multiple values and ways of knowing. Analysis of networks, however, falls short of accounting for the emergence and persistence of these innovative and complex modes of governance, as well as their failures. We offer a framework for using narrative to understand and evaluate netwo…
Community and Economic Development
As communities evolve greater capacities for mobilisation and political action, local issues are finding new entry-points into development and land use planning. In this regard, two strong discourses emerge: that of economic development and community. What are the synergies, antagonisms, or other relationships between these two frameworks? Do policy actors reconcile the differing discourses by appealing to a metanarrative, engaging in a pluralist…
Theorizing Peace Parks
In a reversal of the historical role of territory in intergroup conflict, the article focuses on an emergent notion of territory as an instrument for peace. In this article, the author begins to theorize about the mechanisms by which so-called peace parks might act in resolving conflict and ushering in regional stability. Two models are utilized that differ in their portrayal of how these parks might work. The first model, built on a game-theoret…
Social ecology, sustainability, and economics
What mode of analysis might be employed, that captures the confluent action of material and social systems acting together? The framework of Social Ecology, which first emerged as a rejoinder to the Chicago School of Human Ecology of the early 1900s, evolved over subsequent decades as an attempt at such integration. We revisit social ecology's historical origins and foundational assumptions. We propose that the social ecological framework can off…
Testing the assumptions behind emissions trading in non-market goods
The Design of Environmental Regimes
Community and Economic Development
As communities evolve greater capacities for mobilisation and political action, local issues are finding new entry-points into development and land use planning. In this regard, two strong discourses emerge: that of economic development and community. What are the synergies, antagonisms, or other relationships between these two frameworks? Do policy actors reconcile the differing discourses by appealing to a metanarrative, engaging in a pluralist…
Theorizing Peace Parks
In a reversal of the historical role of territory in intergroup conflict, the article focuses on an emergent notion of territory as an instrument for peace. In this article, the author begins to theorize about the mechanisms by which so-called peace parks might act in resolving conflict and ushering in regional stability. Two models are utilized that differ in their portrayal of how these parks might work. The first model, built on a game-theoret…
The Importance of Context
This article focuses on the manner by which resource management regimes, often conceived far away from their areas of application, are integrated into the local institutions, practices, and social structures of a place. This process of contextualization may be especially critical where, for reasons of resource scarcity, remoteness, or system complexity, the state cannot engage in effective program management. The thesis of the article is that if …
Participatory Action Research for Environmental Health
The community-based approach to health research and intervention is a model of inquiry rooted in Freire’s participatory action research (PAR). We need to show, in concept and practice, what it is about PAR that may be well suited for the types of health issues we encounter in inner-city environments. What type of learning results, how does this respond to particular health issues in the urban context, and what are the particular challenges faced …
Collaborative networks and new ways of knowing
The Phenomenon of Collective Action
This essay develops a theory of how institutions can work through the web of social relationships that exist in a place rather than through formal, bureaucratic lines of authority. In contrast to models that characterize institutions as organizational structures, roles, and patterns of exchange, this model depicts institutions as constituted primarily through the active working and reworking of relationships. Rather than adopt the network literat…
Technology and Institutions
GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has captured planning practice to an unprecedented degree, and this article on how it reconfigures and is configured by institutional context. The author inquires into GIS as a technology for incorporating knowledge into institutional use and includes five propositions: (1) GIS's efficiencies in data processing allows it unprecedented facility and scope of analysis, (2) its use increases alienation, (3) its mi…
New Urbanism and the Barrio
The last decade has seen a growing turn toward New Urbanism in the redevelopment of urban neighborhoods. In October 2007 the City of Santa Ana released a draft Renaissance Plan to revitalize a transit-oriented district and government center supported by two neighborhoods. The plan exemplifies New Urbanist design principles which promote mixed income residential neighborhoods and respect local culture. Using a case study in two Mexican and working…
The contextualist turn and schematics of institutional fit
The policy literature has long recognized the inherent need for a program to fit the unique conditions found in a certain context. We present a theory of institutional contextualism that focuses on the mechanisms by which actors adapt a policy design to fit a situation. We conceptualize institutions as phenomena that are constituted by a constant dialectic between text (the general blueprint) and context (the particular setting). The first half o…
Modeling the commons as a game with vector payoffs
Since Hardin first formulated the tragedy of the commons, researchers have described various ways that commons problems are solved, all based on the model of individual rationality. Invariably, these institutional solutions involve creating some system of property rights. We formulate an alternative model, one not founded on property rights but on decision-making around so-called vector payoffs. The model is formalized and an existence proof prov…
A Hermeneutic Approach to Explaining and Understanding Public Controversies
Notwithstanding the growing use of interpretive analysis in public administration and policy research, its fullest potential for evaluating intractable public conflict has yet to be tapped. We develop a mode of narrative analysis, partly based upon Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, that shows promise for analyzing public disputes. We illustrate this with a case study in Los Angeles involving a contentious proposal to inject recycled wastewater into th…
The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks
Theory and case studies demonstrate the analytic potential of mutually constitutive “narrative networks” in environmental governance. For as long has humans have lived in communities, storytelling has bound people to each other and to their environments. In recent times, scholars have noted how social networks arise around issues of resource and ecological management. In this book, Raul Lejano, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram argue that stories, o…
Climate and narrative
Interrogating the Commons
Norm, network, and commons
Social ecology, sustainability, and economics
What mode of analysis might be employed, that captures the confluent action of material and social systems acting together? The framework of Social Ecology, which first emerged as a rejoinder to the Chicago School of Human Ecology of the early 1900s, evolved over subsequent decades as an attempt at such integration. We revisit social ecology's historical origins and foundational assumptions. We propose that the social ecological framework can off…
Tales From the Crypt
Policy design is an area of study in the field of public policy with a curious intellectual history. It engendered a large literature in the 1980s and 1990s oriented to understanding design as both a process and an outcome with prominent figures in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia such as Lester Salamon, Patricia Ingraham, Malcolm Goggin, John Dryzek, Hans Bressers, Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider, G. B. Doern, Stephen Linder and …
Regulation‐by‐information in areas of limited statehood
This research examines conditions under which environmental regulatory disclosure is more versus less likely to work, with focus on the case of thePhilippines. Two major findings arise out of a case study. First, we observe a mismatch between the nature of information and the main addressees of the disclosed information, which led the operation of the subject disclosure program to deviate from its targets. Second, this institutional deficiency ha…
Enhancing the Resilience of Human-Environment Systems
Stokols, D., R. Perez Lejano, and J. Hipp. 2013. Enhancing the resilience of human–environment systems: a social–ecological perspective. Ecology and Society 18(1): 7. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05301-180107
Interpreting Institutional Fit
What's the story? Creating and sustaining environmental networks
Networks have been embraced as appropriate means for environmental governance because of their potential inclusivity, flexibility, resilience, and ability to comprehend multiple values and ways of knowing. Analysis of networks, however, falls short of accounting for the emergence and persistence of these innovative and complex modes of governance, as well as their failures. We offer a framework for using narrative to understand and evaluate netwo…
Narrative disenchantment
Narrating Resilience
How can communities enhance social-ecological resilience within complex urban systems? Drawing on a new urbanist proposal in Orange County, California, it is suggested that planning that ignores diverse ways of knowing undermines the experience and shared meaning of those living in a city. The paper then describes how narratives lay at the core of efforts to reintegrate the Los Angeles River into the life of the city and the US Fire Learning Netw…
Political science (39 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Law (22 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Economics (20 works) · Narrative (19 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Geography (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Psychology (16 works)