Recent research: The micro-politics of deliberation: Case studies in public participation

The contemporary emphasis on public participation in policy making derives both from concerns to increase the legitimacy of public decision making and to develop more dialogic forms of governance, and from more 'bottom-up' action intended to ensure that the voices of those excluded from policy making are heard. This has resulted in diverse forms of participative practice, including forums in which social movement organizations meet officials, and forums initiated by officials to which 'the public' are invited. This article examines four case studies of participation, studied as part of research conducted in the ESRC Democracy and Participation programme. It focuses on a micro-level analysis of the dynamics of exchanges within such forums to question the capacity of such forums to generate alternative discourses within which policy problems can be defined and addressed.     

Short notes on some books received

This article challenges the thesis that local‐level bureaucrats need be part of any ‘dominant coalition’ at the village level. Based on a case study of Egyptian agricultural officials, the paper argues that local bureaucrats may well be more useless than dominant in any political or economic sense. In rural areas in which local officials lack the resources (supplies, funds) to do their jobs, they may well be quite inconsequential. In such situations their position as ‘public servants’ may be appropriated by members of the rich peasantry, who have no particular need to work closely with resource‐poor local government staff.     

Neoliberal governing through social enterprise: Exploring the neglected roles of deviance and ignorance in public value creation

This article makes a case for paying greater attention to how informal relationships between government officials and civil society practitioners impact processes of public value creation. Drawing on data from a five‐year qualitative longitudinal study, we illuminate how civil society practitioners deviate from the formal objectives of social enterprise policies in order to create what they see as having public value. Through a process of theory elaboration, we demonstrate how government officials’ wilful ignorance of, or informal collaboration in, such deviance, precipitates forms of public value that are consistent with wider political objectives. Our analysis adds nuance and granularity to the debate on public value by drawing attention to the arcane ways it may be informally negotiated and created outside of the public sphere. This opens up new empirical and theoretical opportunities for understanding how deviance and ignorance might be symbiotically related in processes of public value creation.”     

Overcoming the Desire for Misunderstanding through Dialogue

The emotional and psychological aspects of joint working are examined in this article, providing a powerful explanation for the continuing difficulties in achieving joined-up government. Drawing on the sociology of community, psycho-dynamics of inter-group behaviour and theories of identity and difference, the author argues that New Labour's vision of an inclusive, consensual, community is inherently flawed; that conflict is a necessary and fundamental aspect of social relations. Indeed, ‘splitting’ and ‘exclusion’ are features of geographical, professional and occupational communities. And concepts such as ‘relationships-in-the-mind’ are valuable in understanding how identities are formed and maintained, and how patterns of conflict, hostility, misunderstanding and non-cooperation develop. Splitting and exclusion are important processes in building group identity, but they can also significantly undermine attempts to develop collaboration between agencies. The answer is for groups to engage in ‘conflictual dialogue’, addressing openly the misunderstandings created by group identities.     

Spin Control and Freedom of Information: Lessons for the United Kingdom from Canada

The United Kingdom's new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is intended to empower citizens by granting a right to government documents. However, the law will be implemented by a government that has developed highly centralized structures for controlling the communications activity of its departments. How will the revolutionary potential of the FOIA be squared with government's concern for ‘message discipline’? Experience in implementing Canada's Access to Information Act may provide an answer. The Canadian law was intended to constrain executive authority, but officials developed internal routines and technologies to minimize its disruptive potential. These practices restrict the right to information for certain types of stakeholders, such as journalists or representatives of political parties. The conflict between public expectations of transparency and elite concerns about governability may not be adequately accounted for during implementation of the UK Freedom of Information Act.     

Wither the ‘development contract’? Historical conjunctures in Naomi Hossain’s The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success

This paper examines methodological avenues for a historical sociology of development through a close reading of Naomi Hossain’s recent book, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success (2017). Hossain’s conjunctural perspective, the formative moment of Bangladesh in environmental catastrophe, war and famine in the 1970s, establishes a novel account of the country’s development trajectory. Contingencies of the moment and consequent political uncertainties committed an emergent national elite to a largely informal but substantive social compact against future crises of subsistence. The result was a specific, transnational power configuration rendering Bangladesh a test case for developmental interventions and the production of knowledge regarding them. Debates in critical development studies have often posited that such ‘elite commitment’ is a consequence and not so much a precondition for social improvement, brought about through struggles from ‘below.’ How might these positions be reconciled by shifting the temporal frames of reference? By rendering historical processes legible as conflicting and complementary interactions between different social forces and actors? How can such actors be envisaged without presuming their identities and interests as fixed or given, but rather, as shaping and being shaped by such processes? These questions motivate the immanent critique and reappraisal of Hossain’s timely work, highlighting its significance for dynamic analyses of historical capitalism today through the ‘universal particularities’ of the national case.     

Decolonising International Relations?

How do we ‘decolonise’ the field of International Relations? The aim to decolonise has become a widely discussed and mentioned subject across the social sciences and humanities. The article aims to discuss what 'decolonisation' might mean in the context of the field of International Relations.     

Navigating the dichotomy: The top public servant's craft

How in their day‐to‐day practices do top public servants straddle the politics–administration dichotomy (PAD), which tells them to serve and yet influence their ministers at the same time? To examine this, we discuss how three informal ‘rules of the game’ govern day‐to‐day political–administrative interactions in the Dutch core executive: mutual respect, discretionary space, and reciprocal loyalty. Drawing from 31 hours of elite‐interviews with one particular (authoritative) top public servant, who served multiple prime ministers, and supplementary interviews with his (former) ministers and co‐workers, we illustrate the top public servants’ craft of responsively and yet astutely straddling the ambiguous boundaries between ‘politics’ and ‘administration’. We argue that if PAD‐driven scholarship on elite administrative work is to remain relevant, it has to come to terms with the boundary‐blurring impacts of temporal interactions, the emergence of ‘hybrid’ ministerial advisers, and the ‘thickening’ of accountability regimes that affects both politicians and public servants.     

WILL THE PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC ENTERPRISES SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF CONTROL?

The Government's privatization programme has acquired such momentum that hardly any public enterprise is exempt from action or proposals. Evaluation of the programme must recognize the diversity of privatization policies, and the tensions inherent within their objectives. Ideological motivation has been supported by the inability of policymakers to design a viable framework of economic and financial control over public enterprises. This has led to a view that it is impossible to manage business efficiently within the public sector, the constraints of which can only be escaped by ‘setting the enterprise free’. However, decisions now will close future options, only be escaped and may be prohibitive to reverse. A list of unanswered questions remain about future relationships between hybrids and governments, the costs and benefits of the regulatory systems which will replace public ownership, and the balance between public policy and private interests. Can the market succeed where the state has been judged to have failed?     

The oppression/emancipation nexus in ongoing power struggles: Village—Power dynamics in Western Nepal 1

Abstract

How can we gain a more nuanced understanding of power struggles than is assumed under the ‘power as domination’ perception that attributes power to dominant actors who exercise control over others, and thus dichotomises domination and emancipation? This article addresses this question by exploring the power dynamics underlying ‘participatory’ public works in a village in western Nepal. Drawing on an alternative analytical framework that brings together Giddens' ‘structuration’ perspective and the Foucauldian notion of power, the case study illustrates that dominance and resistance are interwoven in day-to-day social interactions, and that the existing social order is continually being readjusted. The article concludes by discussing this study's implications for proponents of empowerment, namely the need to ascertain the emancipatory potentials that are immanent in daily power contestation, and then to develop strategies that compensate for the limitations of everyday struggles.     

Discretion drift in primary care commissioning in England: Towards a conceptualization of hybrid accountability obligations

In the context of welfare delivery, hybrid organizations mix public and ‘new’ market, social, and professional types of mechanisms and rationales. This article contributes to our understanding of accountability within hybrid organizations by highlighting how accountability obligations can become hybrid, simultaneously formal and informal. Instead of seeing accountability as hybrid only in the sense of the coexistence of types of organizational mechanisms and structures (i.e., the prevalence of both state and market types), we examine accountability arrangements governing a hybrid model—primary care commissioning in England—and interrogate the relationships between accountability actors and their accountability forums. We conceptualize ‘hybrid accountability obligations’ as a state whereby the nature of obligation underpinning accountability relationships is both formal-informal and vertical-horizontal concurrently. The article concludes by highlighting the consequences of this kind of hybridity, namely how it extended discretion from welfare delivery to the domain of welfare governance.     

Customer Satisfaction Theory in Public Administration Education: Revisiting Student Evaluation of Teaching

How has the current austerity changed the public welfare organizations’ performance landscape in modern welfare states? Can public managers make their organizations adapt to the new performance landscape shaped by the austerity? These questions are answered on the basis of the Danish case of the provision of the services to the citizens with disabilities and/or social disadvantages. The result has implications, especially for public management in praxis. The case study shows that the managers’ most important managerial tool to make their organizations adapt to the new landscape is the challenging and decision-oriented dialogue.     

Une nation pluraliste? Les limites du dialogue interconfessionnel chez les jeunes militants religieux à Ouagadougou

Abstract

This article evaluates the importance of inter-religious dialogue within young people’s religious associations in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso is frequently extolled for its harmonious relations in terms of religion. However, inter-confessional dialogue, demanded by the country’s elites, is appropriated in a different way by the core religious actors, notably the young. If some of them adhere to the objectives of dialogue and argue in favour of this, a large portion of the young are more ambivalent, whilst the dynamics of the ruptures and withdrawals are reinforced by social, family and school dynamics.     

‘Pedagogies of resistance’ and critical peace education praxis

This paper explores ‘pedagogies of resistance’ – or critical and democratic educational models utilized by social movements – and how global examples of engaged educational praxis may inform peace education. The central inquiry of this article is ‘How can educational projects that resist larger social, political and economic inequalities offer understandings about how we learn, teach, and act for peace in diverse settings?’ Drawing upon literature from various fields, ideas and insights are offered about how the field of peace education can better respond to multiple and diverse realities, particularly those facing marginalized communities. The article provides an overview of key tenets of peace education and ideas central to ‘critical peace education;’ offers a framing of ‘pedagogies of resistance;’ and, lastly, details what directions emerge by putting these two educational forms in conversation.     

Co-Investment and Clientelism as Informal Institutions: Beyond ‘Good Enough’ Property Rights Protection

How do we explain high rates of investment in the production of oil palm in Indonesia under conditions of legal uncertainty and uneven protection of property rights? This article argues that what are commonly seen as deficiencies in the formal institutional environment actually enabled investment, but only when informal institutions were able to provide investor assurances. Although the finding that informal institutions provide investor assurances is not new, this study addresses outstanding questions about how such informal institutions work. An examination of the micro-level details of informal institutions in the oil palm industry shows that informal institutions frequently grouped under umbrella terms such as ‘patronage’ or ‘relational ties’ are not uniform. Rather, two types of informal relational tie operate to provide investor assurances: clientelistic and co-investment. Although they serve similar purposes, clientelistic ties work well only under restrictive conditions and are vulnerable to decay. Co-investment, in contrast, is a more robust informal institution, especially when political power is fragmented. Although co-investment provides investor assurances under conditions of legal uncertainty, it remains a particularistic solution and does not guarantee generalized public interest protections.     

T. H. GREEN AND THE ETHICS OF SENIOR OFFICIALS IN BRITISH CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

This article is an attempt to move away from microeconomics in the study of administration and to concentrate on British administrative ethics from a philosophical perspective. Thus, ethics is used here not in the sense of the ethics of managers dealing with accounts but as the ‘science’ of ranking moral values. The intention of the article is to examine how political theory can be used to help illustrate the dilemmas of public servants working in a climate which is distinctly hostile to disinterested ideals. The ideas of T. H. Green, the English Idealist philosopher who contributed so much to our understanding of public service, form the basis of the theoretical discussion, and the work of senior officials in Whitehall is the material used for illustrative purposes. Where do the loyalties of civil servants lie? What are their duties and responsibilities to ministers? To whom, for what, and how are civil servants accountable?     

Dangerous collusion: corruption as a collective venture in contemporary China

Echoing changing social environments, corruption has grown in sophistication and complexity. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of collective corruption. Collective corruption, a distinctive form of social interaction among people dominated by individual calculations and unorganized interests, takes place when collaboration becomes a powerful, necessary weapon in pursuing private gains. The danger of collusion in corrupt ventures is that as corruption gets well planned and skillfully coordinated in its collective form, it may become less forthright and therefore more difficult to detect, or more overt and increasingly legitimized as an appropriate form of economic intercourse.The term corruption tends to carry with it an image of secrecy and furtiveness that entails the involvement of the least possible number of individuals. Corruption, on the whole, is a clandestine exchange due to its illegal nature. Corruption takes place, for example, when a financial officer embezzles public funds for personal use, a school principal arranges “back-door” admissions for his relatives or friends, or a government official accepts bribes from his subordinates in exchange for favourable treatment. These practices are either conducted by a single person who seeks to enrich him/herself in an individualized manner or occur between two parties where a patron (usually an official) grants his/her client (whoever is willing and able to pay for it) desired preferential treatment in exchange for goods or services.Corruption, in reality, is more complex than its heuristically useful definition. Echoing changing social environments, corruption grows in sophistication and complexity in terms of causes, forms and characteristics. This paper studies the phenomenon of “collective corruption”, a concept derived from the author’s research in China where recent corruption cases show an alarming tendency for party and government officials to collude with each other, as well as with people outside the government, on a massively corrupt scale. The following are just a few examples of this kind of “dangerous collusion”:

• •In Hebei province, a collective embezzlement case involved at least seven high-ranking government officials, including the province’s executive deputy governor, bureau chief of transportation, director of the taxation department, and the party secretary of a major city.¹
• •A startling bribery case concerning the Minjiang Engineering Bureau of Fujian Province implicated 70% of its bureau-level officials, including the two most senior ones—the bureau director and the party chief.²
• •More than twenty bureau and departmental chiefs were involved in a case of land leasing fraud. Each of them accepted bribes of at least hundreds of thousands RMB.³
• •When a major corruption case of the East China Aviation Management Bureau was disclosed, seven section directors and one deputy bureau chief were found involved.⁴
• •More than a dozen officials at the Public Security Bureau in Qinghai Province were found guilty of corruption, including the bureau chief, deputy chief, deputy director of the province’s legal affairs office, and deputy general manager of a company affiliated with the bureau.⁵

These cases, and many more like them, testify to the fact that corruption in many instances takes the form of a collective undertaking. Why do people act collectively rather than singly in what is supposedly a secret exchange? How do they come to transcend or bypass institutional and legal boundaries in their collusion? To what extent does the collectivization of corruption alter the forms and characteristics of corruption, if not its very nature? What impact does collective corruption have on the overall efforts to curb corruption? This article tries to provide answers to these questions. It treats collective corruption as a distinctive form of social interaction among people dominated by individual calculations and a pursuit of personal interests. It extends the analysis of collective behavior to corruption and argues that an aggregation of individual pursuits of self-interest can yield similar claims and behavior patterns. Collective corruption serves as a good case to study how unorganized interests generate collective behavior and how collaboration becomes a powerful weapon in seeking private gains.This article opens with a definition of collective corruption. It then discusses the socio-economic and psychological roots of collective corruption and offers interpretative remarks on how and why collective corruption rapidly spreads in China. In so doing, it portrays the characteristics of collective corruption as a distinctive form of collective behavior. The findings of this article illustrate how corruption is evolving as its actors, forms, and characteristics actively respond to social and economic changes, especially under the construct of a hybrid of state socialism and capitalism in today’s China.     

Need,justice and central–local relations: The case of social assistance in China

Social assistance is increasingly promoted as a means of tackling poverty. However, in established democracies stable delivery has often proved difficult because of tensions between national and local government, the former desiring comprehensiveness and uniformity, the latter requiring flexibility to meet local needs. These issues are explored in the context of China and Dibao, the world's largest social assistance system, with three questions posed: Do similar tensions exist in China as in the Western world? How are they resolved and what is the nature of the political compromise? How do recipients fare? Policy analysis in a village in south‐central China reveals similar tensions. A regime in which local government employed discretion to prioritize social stability over poverty alleviation has been replaced by an inherently unstable system based on surveillance of officials and local cadres who now prioritize their personal security over the needs of applicants.     

A Cooperative Approach to Accountability: Manitoba's Family Violence Prevention Program

Abstract

Can government's need for nonprofit accountability be accomplished without diminishing nonprofit organizations’ ability to pursue their goals of responsiveness and flexibility? The conventional view argues that governments’ accountability objectives conflict with nonprofits’ objectives, implying that there must be some tradeoff. This article adopts the emerging alternative view in which the two parties’ objectives are jointly pursued through a cooperative process. The analysis of a provincial funding program in Manitoba, Canada, presented here, provides evidence that such an approach is not only possible but also efficient. The program analyzed rests on a sustained cooperative process in which government officials and nonprofit managers jointly define goals and establish constraints.     

Poland,Germany and the EU: Reimagining Central Europe

Abstract

In this article, we look at the fissures in United Europe from both sides of the region where a post-Cold War ‘Middle/Central Europe’ should have been forged. How do leading German and Polish newspapers treat the categories of ‘Central’ or ‘Middle’ Europe relative to the concept of the Eastern–Western European divide and what are the discourses associated with these perspectives? At the time of a looming redefinition of the entire European project, what can media reports from Germany and Poland tell us about its future? We conclude that the media narratives in these two countries portend further tensions for European unity, since the new divisions now overlap the old ones. Our findings have implications for the future of democracy in the newly democratic countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland.