Whistleblowing: what does it mean in China?

In China, whistleblowing has both political and social functions. For the government, whistleblowing works as a social control mechanism, especially for containing corruption of its officials, while for ordinary citizens, whistleblowing provides then: with a legal weapon to fight against official malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance. This paper examines the causes, processes, and consequences of whistleblowing with an emphasis on the difficulties and dilemmas in blowing the whistle. It argues that given its important functions and implications, whistleblowing should be further legalized, encouraged, and protected to the largest possible extent in China.     

Building and supporting prsps in africa: what has worked well so far? what needs changing?

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (prsp) initiative came out of the 1999 Cologne annual meeting of the G-7 governments, when the leaders of the industrialised countries announced the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (hipc II). 1 1 Report of the G-7 Finance Ministers on the Cologne Debt Initiative to the Cologne Economic Summit, Cologne, 18–20 June 1999, at http://www.g8cologne.de/06/00114/index.html. View all notes The joint Boards of the imf and the World Bank officially approved the prsp in December 1999 as a new approach to the challenge of reducing poverty in low-income countries and as a framework for development assistance. The prsp approach is supposed to represent a major departure from previous development strategies whereby the World Bank and the imf dictated the directions of economic policies in poor countries. Implementation of the prsp approach is now in its sixth year and the purpose of this article is to critically examine the challenges that African governments are confronted with in preparing and implementing credible, nationally owned poverty reduction strategy plans. The article further examines the degree to which the prsp approach has transformed donor–recipient country relations, thus allowing African governments the policy space to develop home-grown policies.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.     

Internal factors of intermunicipal cooperation: what matters most and why?

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the internal aspects of intermunicipal cooperation, providing a new and innovative approach to the cost effectiveness of municipal waste management. We examine a sample of 658 municipalities in the Czech Republic’s South Moravian Region and 205 cooperating municipalities separately during 2012–2014. The results, based on ordinary least-squares regression, show that cost reduction is significantly influenced by the institutional arrangement of intermunicipal cooperation, the participation of municipal representatives in management, and professional managers. The paper shows that a crucial role in cost reduction is played by internal factors that have been investigated only marginally so far. Cost increases are related to municipality sizes larger than 10,000 inhabitants and to profit-oriented behaviours of waste collection companies. The results differ in the size samples of municipalities; only the impact of institutional arrangement is significant in all groups of municipalities.     

So How Do You Feel about That? Talking with Provos about Emotion

Participation in political violence draws on identities and world views that have been shaped and influenced by emotion. This article uses data drawn from interviews conducted with 15 former members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army to highlight some of the ways that emotion is intertwined with decisions to use violence in pursuit of a substate political goal. Six themes emerge that help to demonstrate how participant's emotional lives have helped to build the identities, beliefs, and motivations that have led to violent acts. The study illuminates how the experience, elicitation, and management of emotions played an integral role in the participant's trajectory towards violence.     

Reforming the World Health Organization: what influence do the BRICS wield?

The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently undergoing fundamental reform that is intended to impact its programmes and priority setting and its financial and governing structures. Within the reform debates, new relations of powers are emerging among traditional donors and emerging economies such as the ‘BRICS’: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. These five emerging economies have formally committed ‘to strengthen and legitimise the WHO as the coordinating authority in global health’ through the principle of multilateralism. In this paper, the results of a qualitative study – based on 21 key informant interviews – that seeks to better understand BRICS’ engagement in this organisation and the extent to which their action enables these countries to influence the reform process were presented. The results show that individual BRICS countries found natural pairings with each other on both particular elements of the reform, notably governance and WHO financing, and specific health issues. While numerous examples of individual BRICS countries seeking to raise the profile of specific health issues were found, some evidence of a coordinated effort to influence reform as a bloc was also found. Although this was largely limited to rhetorical announcements of support in formal Declarations and Communiqués, it nevertheless articulates a vision of the WHO as an organisation with a broad mandate delivered with sufficient, predictable funding.     

Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low,learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?†

The paper compares political ideas and acts in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and in Communist Vietnam. It argues that the Gorbachev group, committed to progressive change, concluded that power granted to them by their position in the Soviet system needed to be eliminated, creating a ‘boot strap’ problem. To secure progressive change they had first to destroy their own power base. By contrast, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) attempted, in the two decades after the emergence of a market economy in 1989–1991, to rule an increasingly open society through Soviet political institutions. By the late ‘noughties’ Vietnam faced a crisis of domestic sovereignty, with politics largely a matter of spoils, with policy largely irrelevant and unimplementable, and usually blocked by powerful interests. The paper argues that Hinsley's notion of the sovereignty issue makes this situation far easier to analyse. It argues that the Gorbachev group's analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCP's attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and that they would have been correct. This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a success ? in that it managed to solve a serious political problem, i.e. how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society – and the VCP a failure.     

What's Different about Exporters? Evidence from Colombian Manufacturing

Using a large panel of Colombian manufacturing plants, this paper finds that exporters are significantly larger, more capital intensive, have higher labour productivity, and pay higher wages than nonexporters three years before exporting for the first time. The differential in performance increases in the years leading to entry in the export market. After entry, sales, employment, and the proportion of skilled workers in the labour force keep growing significantly faster for exporters, but the growth of labour productivity and capital intensity is indistinguishable for exporters and nonexporters.