Deserai Anderson Crow, along with Elizabeth A. Albright, received the 2015 Sabatier Award for Best Conference Paper in Science, Technology & Environmental Politics. Crow and Albright were rewarded for their work in their 2014 paper, “Learning Processes, Public and Stakeholder Engagement: Analyzing Responses to Colorado’s Extreme Flood Events of 2013”, as well as in their substantiation through data.
USA Today
June 8, 2015
by Rachel Axon
For the past two weeks, FIFA has been mired in the biggest, and latest, scandal — unsurprising given a history that’s tied soccer with corruption since the organization’s early years.
Faced with expansion in the late 1920s, FIFA looked to move its offices to Switzerland and appoint a permanent secretary there. Before the organization could establish itself in Zurich in 1932, though, it was discovered that then-general secretary Cornelis August Wilhelm Hirschman had embezzled or lost FIFA’s money in financial speculation.
That story — told in FIFA: The Men, the Myths, and the Money by Alan Tomlinson — might not compete with FIFA’s current scandal, in which 14 soccer and sports marketing executives have been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies that enriched themselves by corrupting the world’s most popular sport for more than two decades.
In 1931, when Hirschman resigned, FIFA was a small organization. Some of the world’s biggest soccer federations wouldn’t exist for at least two more decades. But with little oversight, the Dutch banker was able to steal from the organization. After his resignation, the Netherlands’ national association, which he represented, covered the losses and FIFA gave Hirschman a lifelong pension, Tomlinson writes.
Today, the multi-million dollar stakes are higher for FIFA — and far more complicated to address.
“It’s a world monopoly and it just happens to produce the world’s most popular sport,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and author of Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup. “You put those three characteristics together — no regulation, monopoly and most popular sport in the world — and you have an organization that’s going to be enormously powerful.
“This is not going to turn overnight a corrupt organization into a well-functioning, responsive and open democratic organization. It’s just not going to happen.”
Following the surprising resignation of controversial president Sepp Blatter last week — one that came only four days after he was re-elected for a fifth term — FIFA is faced with the biggest opportunity for change in its history, experts said. Whether or how that happens will develop over the coming months and years, but the unprecedented investigation by the IRS and FBI has given rise to cautious optimism that a culture of corruption can change.
“That’s the multi-billion dollar question because FIFA’s got statutes,” says Tomlinson, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Brighton in London. “You would need a root and branch restructuring of FIFA itself.”
ANY CHANGES POSSIBLE
FIFA’s expansion and Blatter’s rise took root as sports became more commercialized. The organization boasted $5.7 billion in revenues from 2011-14, according to the indictment. With so much money to be made and virtually no oversight, corruption was inevitable, experts say.
The difference now is the weight of the U.S. government, something that has ignited hope that further investigation could help clean up the sport. U.S. officials have said the indictment, which includes 25 unnamed co-conspirators, marks the beginning of the efforts.
“A lot of countries have been hurt by the buying of votes from FIFA, and I think each and every one of those countries is going to be pursuing in their own way this matter,” says Zimbalist.
Changes loom for FIFA, but there is a wide range as to how deep they may reach and when they will be implemented. Blatter will stay on until later this year at the earliest, when an extraordinary session of the FIFA Congress is arranged.
In announcing his resignation last week, he promised “far-reaching, fundamental reforms that transcend our previous efforts” and said the organization needed “deep-rooted structural change.” Experts dismissed the possibility that Blatter would bring reform in his final months in office.
Whatever comes next for FIFA must be rooted in transparency and oversight, they said. Disclosing financials and having an outside board provide oversight are best practices of governance, which FIFA currently lacks, said Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and professor at the University of Colorado who has researched FIFA.
“Sepp Blatter stepping down isn’t the end of anything, really. It’s the end of his reign, but it’s the beginning of the reform effort,” said Pielke.
Change could involve everything up to reworking the constitution, examining and changing committees, altering the presidential voting process or giving power back to the federations, said Tomlinson.
FIFA’s one-association, one-vote policy could be reexamined, Pielke. The system gives a vote to more members (209) than exist in the United Nations and gives equal weight to votes from small countries and territories — the U.S. Virgin Islands and Montseratt, for instance — as it does to large soccer powers such as Germany or Brazil. Blatter’s focus on winning support from smaller nations and territories helped him marshall power in FIFA.
“It’s not out of bounds by any means, but it does have consequences,” says Pielke. Read more …
Slate Magazine
June 5, 2015
by Eric Holthaus
On Thursday a new study led by the director of the leading U.S. climate data center was the latest to show evidence that global warming is—shocker—continuing. My Slate colleague Phil Plait has more, but the main point is: Talk of a “hiatus” in climate change has gotten blown way out of proportion.
From the study:
The central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a “slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.
The study appeared in Science, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, and was accompanied by a press conference from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—both rare for what was essentially a routine update in a widely used global temperature data set.
A survey of climate scientists unaffiliated with the latest paper suggested that its findings probably aren’t as big of a deal as the paper makes them seem, and furthermore, it probably wasn’t a smart idea to focus on such a relatively short timespan in the first place. Writing on the climate science blog RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (who oversees one of the other primary global temperature data sets), said: “Part of the problem here is simply semantic.”
The fact that we’re even talking about this new study is a sign of the influence of global warming contrarians, according to a separate piece of recent research. That study proposes a psychological phenomenon the authors call “seepage”: Manufactured doubt, funded largely by the fossil fuel industry, has unwittingly entered the minds of well-meaning climate scientists, who then unintentionally reinforce a misleading message. In short, all this talk about a hiatus emboldens the hiatus mongers.
That’s helped “The Pause” or “The Hiatus” become arguably the most successful climate denial meme. It’s been so successful that it even made it into the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the gold standard for climate science.
Before this week’s paper was released, I spoke with a few leading climate scientists (who’ve all authored papers on “The Pause”) for their perspective on whether or not they felt their work was influenced, even unknowingly, by “seepage.”
In general they agreed that there’s been a feedback loop between scientists’ honest investigation of this phenomenon over the past several years and the media’s willingness to indulge in the drama of whether or not a slowdown in warming was occurring.
Max Boykoff, a professor at the University of Colorado who focuses on climate policy, says this exact scenario is part of the reason that false claims about climate change get more attention than they deserve:
The amplification of discussions of a “pause” can also be seen in a more nefarious light, where the inordinate attention devoted to it—particularly through mainstream press accounts—then serves to distract from more productive discussions of diagnoses and action on climate change. Read more …
Colorado Public Radio
Colorado Matters
June 4, 2015
Roger Pielke Jr. speaks with Ryan Warner
More:
Pielke on Sepp Blatter’s resignation announcement
“He’s said similar things before so I think a little dose of cynicism is warranted. We haven’t seen the end of Sepp Blatter yet.”
On whether the resignation announcement is the start of meaningful change
“I’m a bit hesitant, but I think in the past generation this really is the most significant opportunity. It’s one that could be squandered if actions aren’t taken to really help FIFA move its governance into the 21st Century, but there really is a window open for positive change.”
On last year’s World Cup
“During the World Cup last year in Brazil, there were considerable public protests. People in Brazil said that they wanted ‘FIFA-quality schools and FIFA-quality hospitals’ because the government was spending hundreds of millions of dollars building FIFA-quality stadiums, which wound up as white elephants. There were news reports just in the last week of one major stadium being used as a parking lot.”
The Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO) monitors fifty sources across twenty-five countries in seven different regions around the world. MECCO assembles the data by accessing archives through the Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva databases via the University of Colorado libraries. These fifty sources are selected through a decision processes involving weighting of three main factors:
World, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, & United States (Updated through May 2015)
Figure Citations
McAllister, L., Nacu-Schmidt, A., Wang, X., Andrews, K., Boykoff, M., Daly, M., Gifford, L., and Luedecke, G. (2015). World Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming, 2004-2014. Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Web. [Date of access.] http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/media_coverage.
The Guardian
June 2, 2015
by Roger Pielke, Jr.
The past few weeks have seen some remarkable episodes in science.
Through a hoax, evocative of the Sokal Affair of the mid-1990s, John Bohannon showed how trivially easy it is to start a popular meme based on science. Bohannon ginned up a fake study showing that eating chocolate leads to weight loss, got it published and then was able to promote it onto the pages of several newspapers and television news outlets.
Far more significant than the hoax was the unraveling of a major study published in Science by Michael LaCour and Donald Green. LaCour and Green found that a single conversation with activists on the subject of same-sex marriage was “capable of producing a cascade of opinion change.”
The study was celebrated by major media across the United States, just talking to people who were until that point opposed to same-sex marriage was apparently enough to change their minds, leading to political change. The New York Times was quick to generalize the paper: “The findings could have implications for activists and issues across the political spectrum, experts said.”
Unfortunately, LaCour and Green was too good to be true. Last week Science retracted the paper, based on irregularities and false claims. The retraction led to a series of corrections among US media giants, including The New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio, which had trumpeted the paper’s conclusions when it was released.
The Bohannon hoax and LaCour/Green retraction have a lot in common. Scientific research was manufactured, which resulted in claims that appealed to some popular views, and the media broadly and uncritically promoted the results, advocating popular actions in response.
These two episodes highlight a more general problem: a lot of nonsense is published in the name of science. Writing in The Lancet last month, editor Richard Horton argued that as much as half of all scientific papers may simply be “untrue.” He writes: “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world.” The media, journal editors and universities also share blame, he wrote.
The hoax and retraction should help us to understand that a big part of the problem that Horton laments has little to do with research misconduct or fraud, though that is a problem too, but rather science working exactly as it should. Read more …
Newsweek
June 2, 2015
by
With great fanfare, the Justice Department unveiled on May 27 a criminal indictment declaring that the organization responsible for the worldwide regulation and promotion of soccer is a racketeering enterprise, infused with corruption, bribes, kickbacks, fraud and assorted other criminal activities too numerous to list.
Next week, federal prosecutors will charge that the sea is filled with fish.
Not to belittle their accomplishments—the indictment is one of the most comprehensive and detailed imaginable, tracing the alleged criminal activities back decades while providing dates, times, conversations, banking transactions and other activities with a specificity more common to a John Grisham novel than grand jury charges.
And already, missed by some folks amid the noise, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York has obtained six guilty pleas, four from individuals and two from related businesses that had dealings with the soccer organization—the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA. For FIFA officials, or any of the other business executives and politicians familiar with the organization, to react to the charges with surprise, outrage or anything other than “no kidding” means they are either feigning dismay or just waking up from a half-decade nap.
Of course, charges are not proof of guilt, yada, yada. But in this case, FIFA has repeatedly told itself—or at least has hired people who have repeatedly told it—that the organization is corrupt. Books and news articles raising charges have been published as far back as 1998. But the allegations exploded into mass public outrage four years ago, when the British news media discovered evidence of corruption in the granting of the World Cup hosting duties to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Moreover, the English Football Association disclosed before Parliament evidence of wrongdoing relating to FIFA’s rejection of the British bid for the 2012 games.
In 2011, allegations of bribery were raised against Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari who was head of the Asian Football Confederation. In March of that year, he publicly stated he might run for president of FIFA against its longtime leader, Joseph “Sepp” Blatter. Weeks later, FIFA executive committee member Chuck Blazer initiated an investigation of Hammam. Within two months, Hammam was banned for life from all FIFA activities. That was annulled the following year, but the ban was reinstated five months later.
In the course of the 2011 investigations and related proceedings, further revelations of potential wrongdoing emerged that led to the suspension of several members of the FIFA executive committee. Similar allegations then surfaced regarding the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football.
Turning aside grumblings from some FIFA member groups, Blatter championed the adoption of a process that he proclaimed would transform the way FIFA was run by creating an Independent Governance Committee (IGC).
Still, outside reports flowed in, declaring that FIFA must undertake dramatic changes and investigations. An organization called Transparency International, a respected, Berlin-based group established to fight corruption in organizations worldwide, issued an analysis. “Bribery scandals…have made the need for reform urgent,’’ the report said. “While senior FIFA officials have been suspended or forced to resign, the lack of a transparent investigation leaves the root of the problem untouched.’’
If no comprehensive process of change was adopted and no credible investigation undertaken, the report said, the “scandals are likely to recur.”
FIFA acknowledged the report, proudly proclaiming that it had already adopted several of its recommendations. FIFA, its officials declared, was moving toward a system that ensured the organization met the highest ethical standards.
Nice words. But then reality intruded.
Blatter handpicked a widely respected expert on governance, professor Mark Pieth of the Basel Institute on Governance, to head the IGC and prepare a report. Transparency International cooperated—until it was reported by a Swiss newspaper that Pieth had been paid $128,000 by FIFA, plus an additional $5,000 a day. While such payments for investigative and analytical work are standard, Transparency International was troubled by the lack of disclosure and declared it no longer believed FIFA was serious about reform.
The following year, Pieth’s IGC released its report, complete with a series of additional recommendations.
All told—with the Transparency International report, the 2011 Pieth report and the 2012 IGC report—some 59 recommendations for improving the governance of FIFA were proposed. Based on an analysis conducted last year by professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, FIFA failed to implement 42 of those proposals. Only seven were adopted completely. Read more …
Euronews
June 1, 2015
by Chris Harris
International sports bodies like FIFA have “poor governance and are fertile settings for corruption to take root”, according to a report published by Transparency International.
Such organisations lag behind states, businesses and charities in their governance standards, says the paper, issued by the anti-corruption campaigner group a month before last week’s arrests of top FIFA officials, including current vice-president Jack Warner.
The controversy did not stop president Sepp Blatter from winning a fifth term as head of FIFA after seeing off the challenge of Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein.
The report, by Roger Pielke Jr, a professor at the University of Colorado, identified six sports bodies accused of corruption, including the IOC, the International Weightlifting Federation and the International Cycling Union.
He concluded the mix of big money in sport – such as the 2022 World Cup in Qatar which is estimated to cost $200 billion – and under-developed mechanisms of governance were major factors in the controversies.
He said: “Sports organisations have come to resemble corporations and other international institutions, but their governance practices – not only to address issues of corruption but beyond – have not kept pace.
“Although sports bodies play the role of international organisations, they are with very few exceptions neither governmental nor business operations, which helps to explain why their governance practices have developed in a unique fashion.
“As sport has gained in popularity, so too has the amount of money involved in the various games and in building associated infrastructure, especially for events such as the Olympic Games and football World Cup.
“The vast amount of money flowing through these bodies, coupled with the financially significant decisions that they make, often at the highest levels of politics and in the absence of best practices in place for governance, creates settings amenable to corruption.” Read more …
CBC Sports
May 28, 2015
by Andre Mayer
Bribery, match-fixing, fraud — for years now, FIFA has played defence against allegations of corruption.
But on Wednesday, soccer’s governing body was dealt arguably its most damaging blow, when Swiss authorities arrested seven high-ranking executives as part of a larger criminal investigation.
People who have followed the legal action against FIFA in recent years say that the very nature of the organization has allowed it to operate with impunity for so long.
And there’s no simple game plan to change that.
“The problem is [FIFA’s] lack of accountability and that everything is out of the public eye,” says Roger Pielke, a professor at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
On Wednesday, Swiss police, by request from the U.S. Department of Justice, arrested seven FIFA officials at a Zurich hotel.
The executives, who include FIFA vice-presidents Jeffrey Webb and Eugenio Figueredo, are among 14 indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy.
The U.S. investigation alleges that the corruption played out over 24 years. The head of the IRS criminal investigation division called it “the World Cup of fraud.”
Hours later, Swiss federal prosecutors opened criminal proceedings related to the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively. Allegations of bribery have swirled around both bids for years.
One of the reasons there has been so little oversight of FIFA’s activities is that the group falls into an unusual category, says Pielke.
FIFA is technically a non-profit, although one that brought in an estimated $2 billion US in revenue in 2014.
Organizations like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee “are not companies, they’re not truly international organizations, like the World Health Organization, and they’re not governmental,” says Pielke.
Pielke calls FIFA “a Swiss-based members’ club” that sits in a “netherworld of international governance.” As a result, “there aren’t good mechanisms in place to hold them accountable to anything.” Read more …
Vox
May 27, 2015
by Joseph Stromberg
The international soccer governing body FIFA has been plagued by corruption for years — and according to many experts, Wednesday’s arrest of seven officials in connection with a bribery investigation is just the tip of the iceberg.
The US Department of Justice is claiming that FIFA officials took more than $150 million in bribes when awarding broadcast rights to the World Cup and other tournaments. Meanwhile, a parallel Swiss criminal investigation is looking into charges of money laundering involving the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, respectively.
So why is corruption so endemic to FIFA? Roger Pielke Jr. — a researcher at the University of Colorado who’s written extensively on sports governance — says the problem is oversight.
“FIFA falls into a netherworld of governance,” he says. Unlike pro sports leagues, governmental organizations, or NGOs, it’s subject to very few regulations or oversight, which has inevitably led to all sorts of bribery and corruption.
Pielke’s theoretical solution? Convert FIFA into a big business — which would be subject to far greater scrutiny from the government of Switzerland, where it’s headquartered — or link it more tightly to world governments, perhaps as part of the UN. Of course, Pielke admits that it’s unlikely for this sort of comprehensive change to actually ever happen, especially when it’d cost FIFA’s current leadership all sorts of influence and money. Read more …
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