Generative AI is usually defended in the language of efficiency. Environmental due diligence, however, rests on documents machines can now draft, submit and summarise. This article proposes algorithmic theatre as an explanatory model of a risk in which compliance artefacts keep their legal form and authority while the deliberation they record thins or disappears. Using Dryzek’s criteria of authenticity, inclusiveness and consequentiality, it reads three episodes as plausibility probes (AI pilots under the National Environmental Policy Act, fabricated public comments and false data in carbon credit verification) and specifies three hypothesised mechanisms: de-skilling, decoupling and legitimacy transfer. A comparison of the United States, the European Union and Pakistan suggests that exposure depends less on a jurisdiction’s wealth than on whether its law attends to the provenance of compliance information, and is greatest where participatory infrastructure is already weak. Safeguards follow, including a draft provision for the disasters convention now under negotiation.
El artículo pregunta por qué un marco normativo amplio frente a las violencias basadas en género produce protección desigual en el Chocó, el departamento más pobre de Colombia. El método es jurídico-documental: normas, jurisprudencia constitucional, registros epidemiológicos, alertas territoriales de 2026 e inventario de oferta institucional. El hallazgo central es una paradoja medible: el Chocó registra la tasa de violencia de género más baja del país en el sistema de vigilancia nacional, precisamente donde la pobreza extrema y el riesgo armado son mayores. Esa cifra no mide violencia sino cobertura institucional. El artículo reconstruye la eficacia como una cadena de cinco transiciones y muestra que el Estado falla menos por ausencia física que por incapacidad de conectar competencias sucesivas. De ahí deriva un criterio de digitalización: automatizar la continuidad institucional antes que predecir el riesgo individual.
Development institutions are increasingly interested in the role of social norms. This article asks what that interest means for law’s role in gender equality. Using seven leading examples of social norms measures, I identify i. a tendency to use state law as a proxy for social norm change, despite conceptual confusion about why or how law should function in this way ii. a failure to adequately measure or analyse the role of contentious politics and collective action in fostering law reform and social norm change; and iii. a largely uncritical celebration of the private sector’s progressive role in shifting social norms and laws, even in the face of compelling counter-evidence. I then explore how social norms, governance standards, and laws were framed in a recent investigation into the World Bank International Finance Corporation’s role in child sexual abuse. I argue that social norms have become such a dominant concept in gender and development that they risk crowding out discussion of the governance standards and laws by which development actors can be held accountable. To avoid this, we need to hold on to the key role that law can play in allocating accountability for gendered injustice.
How should law allocate responsibility when an older person's care at home depends on a migrant worker who becomes unavailable? This article compares Singapore's migrant domestic work arrangements with Austria's rotational live-in care market through legislation, contractual requirements, funding rules and published evidence of COVID-19 disruption in 2020–2021. Both systems already connect care needs with labour arrangements. The difficulty concerns what those connections secure. Funding eligibility, contractual information and priority entry procedures do not necessarily identify an actor responsible for procuring timely substitute assistance. The article distinguishes these obligations and examines whether intensive eldercare can adequately be organised as domestic work. It argues for assessed, graduated arrangements combining household support with funded relief and professional services. Continuity should protect the older person's practical choices without restricting a carer's freedom to leave, rest or refuse unsafe work.
Since 2020, political parties across the ideological spectrum in India have embraced unconditional cash transfers for women. Thirteen states dispense cash transfers to 118 million women. My paper assesses this novel development through a feminist lens to ask whether these cash transfers instrumentalise women as voters to secure the welfare of the household at a time of high inflation while reinforcing the gendered division of labour? Alternatively, do they herald the accidental transition to an expansive postcolonial welfare state wherein the unpaid work of millions of Indian women finally finds recognition while also financially empowering them to disrupt the gendered division of labour and improve their labour force participation. The paper will revisit this predicament against the backdrop of feminist efforts to realise the vision of SDG 5.4 and improve the female labour force participation rate including through investments in the purple/care economy.
