The other resource curse: extractives as development panacea

Since 2010, many African governments have challenged twenty years of extractive sector liberalization that has played a key role in unlocking mineral riches and attracting foreign direct investment. The potential for extractives to drive economic structural transformation is intuitively attractive, the Africa Mining Vision (2009) document providing a primary template. Geological inheritance alone, however, is not a panacea for economic development, industrialization or poverty alleviation. While much attention to the ‘resource curse’ has identified the problem of excessive rent-seeking and the consequent impact on elite consolidation, democracy, governance and macroeconomic distortions, a more fundamental problem, the ‘other resource curse’, may be an overlooked driver: a lingering assumption that mineral resources should straightforwardly provide significant revenue streams for public goods, inputs for industrial transformation, and extensive employment. Geology alone is neither conducive nor antithetical to economic development. Stakeholders require a more comprehensive understanding of the possibilities and limits of extractives in contemporary Africa.     

Gender,Financial Deepening and the Production of Embodied Finance: Towards a Critical Feminist Analysis

This article critically interrogates the ways in which gender equality has been linked to processes of financial deepening, partly via a global coalition of public and private institutions that have come together in recent years to promote an instrumentalist gender equality agenda. Corporations, banks and financial firms are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the contours of the global gender equality agenda and reproducing narratives regarding the need to (1) financially “empower” women, (2) uphold women as the “saviours” of national economies post-2008 and (3) “tap in” to the productive (i.e. profitable) potential of women's bodily capacities. Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, I develop an approach to theorising the inherently embodied and gendered nature of finance that reveals the ways in which these tropes obscure the labour associated with social reproduction, promote the commodification of women's bodily capacities to produce, and support the differential production of bodies while simultaneously masking embodied forms of difference.     

Controlling Internal Controls

Two recent examinations of management practices in three federal departments provide contemporary evidence of the need to incorporate procedures like those of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the public sector. Although each department established what appeared to be well-designed internal controls, all lacked sufficient monitoring and assessment of the efficacy of those controls. By requiring senior management to attest to the strength of their control mechanisms, as required by the newly revised OMB Circular A-123, the quality of this monitoring should improve. Findings from a recent study of private-sector implementation of these reforms are described, along with suggestions for public administration research and practice at all levels of government.     

“Civic discovery” as a rhetorical strategy

Much research in the field of public management is distinguished by its rejection of the politics-administration dichotomy and its emphasis on the public manager's responsibility for political management. By rejecting the dichotomy, however, scholars in public management have reopened debate over an old question: Why is it right for public managers to exercise political power in the policymaking process? It is argued that the dichotomy served as a rhetorical strategy for allaying public concern about bureaucratic power, and that public management scholars must now invent a new strategy to take its place. This article evaluates one strategy, proposed by Moore and Reich, which is premised on the idea that managers may legitimize the exercise of discretion by showing it to be consistent with a mandate that is produced through a fair process of deliberation. It is argued that the new strategy may overestimate the ability to build mandates, the ability to build deliberative processes that are manifestly fair, and the willingness of dissentient citizens to defer to such mandates. The new strategy will also bind public managers to a demonstration of neutrality not unlike that imposed by the politics-administration dichotomy.     

Extent, trends, and perpetrators of prostitution-related homicide in the United States

Prostitute women have the highest homicide victimization rate of any set of women ever studied. We analyzed nine diverse homicide data sets to examine the extent, trends, and perpetrators of prostitution-related homicide in the United States. Most data sources substantially under-ascertained prostitute homicides. As estimated from a conservative capture-recapture analysis, 2.7% of female homicide victims in the United States between 1982 and 2000 were prostitutes. Frequencies of recorded prostitute and client homicides increased substantially in the late 1980s and early 1990s; nearly all of the few observed pimp homicides occurred before the late 1980s. These trends may be linked to the rise of crack cocaine use. Prostitutes were killed primarily by clients, clients were killed mainly by prostitutes, and pimps were killed predominantly by pimps. Another conservative estimate suggests that serial killers accounted for 35% of prostitute homicides. Proactive surveillance of, and evidence collection from, clients and prostitutes might enhance the investigation of prostitution-related homicide.