State–Community Synergies in Community-Driven Development

States can do much to tap community-level energies and resources for development if they seek to interact more synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is the creation of a developmental society and polity. Using case studies from Asia and Latin America, we illustrate how: (1) state efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and expanding non-crop sources of income can broaden the distribution of power in rural communities, laying the basis for more effective community-driven collective action; and (2) higher levels of government can form alliances with communities, putting pressure on local authorities from above and below to improve development outcomes at the local level. These alliances can also be very effective in catalysing collective action at community level, and reducing ‘local capture’ by vested interests. There are several encouraging points that emerge from these case studies. First, powerful institutional changes do not necessarily take long to generate. Second, they can be achieved in a diversity of settings: tightly knit or open communities; war-ravaged or relatively stable; democratic or authoritarian; with land reform or (if carefully managed) even without. Third, there are strong political pay-offs in terms of legitimacy and popular support for those who support such developmental action.     

Community Formation, ‘Ideal’ Villages and Watershed Development in Western India

This paper discusses how the vision of an ‘ideal village’ is used in the construction of feelings of community in a watershed development project in India. What constitutes the notion of idealness and how it emerges in a particular context is determined by a number of factors. The discussion of the working of two aspects of the project – voluntary labour and watershed-plus measures – brings out the usefulness of such a vision in community-formation, even though different actors involved in these aspects are also motivated by factors other than idealness. Further, the successful working of these aspects also indirectly re-enforces the notion of idealness, although critical engagement with it is sometimes limited by the focus on community-making.     

Between Euroscepticism and Eurosupport: The Attitudes of Urban and Rural Populations in Poland 2000–2008

Three main factors explain public support for EU membership: utilitarian expectations, the role of values and ideas, and class partisanship. In the Polish case, public opinion polls and issues more specific to Poland, such as the role of the Catholic Church, populist political parties and profound Euroscepticism among farmers, suggest that although these theoretical explanations overlap, each of them has a different explanatory value. The economic approach remains the best predictor of support for EU membership, and whereas values and identity are closely linked to and dependent upon economic expectations, the impact of national politics appears largely decoupled from Polish Euroscepticism.     

Hybridity in the Public Sector—Comparing Development Features in Municipalities in Japan and Norway

The theme in this article is managerial or administrative changes in municipalities seen from the perceptions of citizens. It is asked what characterize these changes, whether they are showing an interrelated and hybrid pattern, and whether the perceptions are varying depending on individual demographic characteristics or contextual factors related to their communities and the country they are living in. The data used are from surveys in Japan and Norway in 2015–2016. The main results indicate that the change or reform measures are indeed interrelated and hybrid. They do not vary much related to individual characteristics, except for political attitudes but more so related to the size of their municipalities, year of local residency, and local political activities. Japan and Norway have also marked different profiles regarding the main perceptions of the citizens, reflecting major structural and cultural differences.     

The Exceptionalism of Housing in the Ideology and Politics of Early Communist Romania (1945–1965)

The article analyses the exceptionalism of housing during the early communist period in Romania, in particular the extent to which the regime's ambivalent policies regarding housing undermined the overall political and ideological goal of dismantling private property. Focusing on appropriations, restitutions and new construction in the city of Timi¸oara and the surrounding region, the article emphasises conflicting and inconsistent policies regarding housing and the consequences of these policies. Housing's double meaning as home and asset further complicated the overall ideological mission of denaturalising bourgeois private property, and provided a basis for the continuing relevance of pre-communist legal ideologies and consciousness of property rights during this period. The article is based on documentary and archival research conducted in the city of Timi¸oara, Romania, in 2007–2008.     

Exhaustion and Exclusion in the African Village: The Non-State Social Welfare of Informal Reciprocity in Rural Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire

This paper examines the consequences for equity of different patterns of non-state social welfare provision, specifically the informal institutions of reciprocity among families, friends, and village neighbors in rural West Africa. Based on over 18 months of fieldwork in similar regions on either side of the Ghana-Cote d’Ivoire border, this paper challenges many existing assumptions in the literature, revealing that the informal institutions of reciprocity were not only less vibrant overall, but also differed strikingly in terms of who was helping who and how in particular localities. The paper argues that the informal institutions of reciprocity were more exhausted in the Ghanaian villages and more exclusive in the Ivoirian ones. The study highlights that the informal system of non-state social welfare provided by the family, friends, and neighborhood did not simply expand to fill the functional gaps left by the neoliberal retrenchment of the state. The paper concludes that when policies are designed based on an overly romanticized image of kinship and communal reciprocity in Africa, it is the very poor that increasingly fall through the gaps of the state and non-state system of social welfare.     

Piteşti: a project in reeducation and its post-1989 interpretation in Romania

The purpose of this article is twofold: to provide a critical account of the Pite?ti experiment and its significance within the history of Romanian Communism and to examine current public disputes relative to memorializing the Pite?i experiment that concern issues of legitimacy, collective memory, and identity construction. The main argument pursued here is that within the recent postcommunist politics of memory, one major prevailing trend is to reincorporate a nationalist ideology within a postcommunist rhetoric. This leads to the conclusion that such mnemonic practices indicate a strong relationship between collective memory and political culture.     

The Education Gap of China’s Migrant Children and Rural Counterparts

Rural residents in China today face at least two key decisions: a) where to live and work; and b) where to send their children to school. In this paper we study the second decision: should a rural parent send their child to a public rural school or have him or her attend a private migrant school in the city. While there is an existing literature on the impact of this decision on student academic performance, one of the main shortcomings of current studies is that the data that are used to analyse this issue are not fully comparable. To fill the gap, we collected data on the educational performance of both migrant students who were born in and come from specific source communities (prefecture) in rural China and students who are in rural public schools in the same source communities. Specifically, the dataset facilitates our effort to measure and identity the academic gap between the students in private migrant schools in Shanghai and Suzhou and those in the public rural schools in Anhui. We also seek to identify different sources of the gap, including selection effects and observable school quality effects. According to the results of the analysis, there is a large gap. Students in public rural schools outperform students in private migrant schools by more than one standard deviation (SD). We found that selection effects only account for a small part of this gap. Both school facility effects and teacher effects explain the achievement gap of the students from the two types of schools, although these effects occur in opposite directions.     

The Fight Against Government Corruption in Romania: Irreversible Results or Sisyphean Challenge?

The fight against political, especially government, corruption has dominated Romanian political discourse for many years. However, the vast majority of the political elite have continuously opposed the prosecution and conviction of defendants of corruption crimes. After a long constitutional conflict that seriously inhibited the fight against government corruption between 2006 and 2009, law enforcement agencies finally began to experience some success. Nevertheless, the extent of government corruption has remained consistently high. This article analyses the struggles that have occurred between 2004 and 2013 in the fight against government corruption in Romania and particularly examines the interplay between formal and informal factors in this field.     

The EU,the United States and Partnership in Development Cooperation: Bridging the Gap?

This paper investigates the degree to which EU and United States development policies reflect partnership, meaning that aid is based on negotiations on an equal basis. It finds that, while the EU has traditionally been more focused on partnership than the United States, in recent years the gap is narrowing. The EU is increasingly providing aid based on a security rationale and has become reluctant to give budget support, while the United States is starting to work more with local actors. Changes in public support for aid, the EU’s growing role as a security provider and institutional changes can explain this trend.     

Rock 'n' roll nation: counterculture and dissent in Romania, 1965–1975

A vibrant countercultural and dissident movement developed in Romania between 1965 and 1975. Young Romanians combined elements of the global youth movement with local cultural and political practices. Thus, Romanian counterculture and dissent shared the era's hippie aesthetic and anti-authoritarianism, but was highly isolationist, vehemently antisocialist and heavily couched in the language of the nation and nationalism. Furthermore, during this early Ceau?escu period, the socialist regime attracted some level of nonconformist support through a program of reform, opposition to Soviet interference, and nationalist rhetoric. These conclusions demonstrate that the rubric of 1960s counterculture needs to be extended to include a variety of ideological and cultural positions beyond the New Left that scholars generally emphasize. Furthermore, scholarly avoidance of Ceau?escu's early period has obscured the existence of an alternative culture, and has led to an un-nuanced interpretation of Romania's postwar history.     

Transnational networks and kin states: the Turkish minority in Bulgaria, 1878–1940

This paper focuses on the development of national identity and the formation of political organizations in the Turkish minority in the early years of the formation of the Bulgarian state from 1878 to the 1940s. It studies transnational aspects of nationalism, which is usually considered territorially bounded, by studying the impact of connections between the Turkish minority and the Ottoman Empire and later with Turkey. In addition to studying inter-state relations and their reflection in the legal and political sphere, this paper studies the flow of ideas across borders, transnational networks among political activists, and the resulting cleavage formation. Findings show that transnational connections and actors played dual roles. The circulation of political activists, contributed to the formation of national organizations which played a crucial role in (re)formulating national identity. Transnational connections increased political activity in the name of the Turkish minority. Through these organizations the community was able to make collective demands from the Bulgarian state. However, transnational connections carried debates and divisions in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. By dividing the community, they decreased the capacity for collective action.