Reflections on mentoring experiences for evidence-informed decision-making in South Africa and Malawi

This article is based on the consensus that the availability and utilisation of research enhances policy discussions. The article reflects on the experiences within one approach: capacity building through mentoring. The UJ-BCURE programme aimed to increase the capacity of decision-makers to use evidence in decision-making via mentoring models. Mentoring is described as an interactive, facilitated process that promotes learning. The features of the models that have contributed to the programme’s success are orientation workshops with mentees combined with participatory, needs-led, and flexible approaches. UJ-BCURE experiences are relevant to the field of evidence-informed decision-making in an African government context.     

A Concurrent Analysis of Three Institutions that Transform Health Technology‐Based Ventures: Economic Policy,Capital Investment,and Market Approval

Drawing on institutional theory, this article articulates qualitative insights from a program of research on Canadian health technology‐based ventures to examine the rules that characterize economic policy, capital investment, and regulatory approval as well as the way these institutions enable and constrain the development of ventures at an early stage. Our findings clarify how economic policy integrates these ventures into the entrepreneurial domain, how capital investment configures them for economic value extraction, and how regulatory approval fully releases their market value. These findings help to revisit current policy modernization initiatives by calling attention to the convergence among the three institutions. Rather than operating solely as a source of constraints, these institutions provide a highly integrated market‐oriented space for health technology‐based entrepreneurial activities to unfold.     

General interest and redistribution with self-interested voters: Social contract revisited

I provide a rational solution to the lasting paradox that citizens be more concerned with “general interest” than most economic agents. I show who that, in the face of fundamental political uncertainty, the social contract, as conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau two centuries ago, provides to self-interested voters an effective mechanism of self-insurance that limits amount of involuntary transfers. My positive theory of voter behavior and general interest has but a formal resemblance with the normative theory of welfare judgments and social justice. Even when the efficiency aspects of redistribution are not considered, there is no way in which the final distribution of incomes could be equal if the initial distribution of incomes were unequal! The role of political parties in this model is to manipulate the distribution of political chances in order to maximize their probability of winning elections. I show for instance that “social instability” and progressive redistribution characterize the equilibrium outcome of a two-class democracy in which the lower class forms a majority.