Managing local development: lessons from Spain

This paper analyzes an operational method that regional government agencies can use to enable locally-based firms to compete effectively in their industries. This method, which emerged in southern Spain after the transition to democracy, embodies many precepts found in the contemporary public management literature. The paper begins the task of cumulating the clinical knowledge needed to translate action plan precepts into specific managerial decisions.     

Administration of pastoral development: lessons from three projects in Africa

Administrative problems are a major cause of the poor performance of pastoral development projects in Africa. This study focused on two aspects of project administration: policy development and organizational structure. From the literature, 11 actions in these 2 areas were identified that were supposed to enhance project performance. These 11 propositions were tested against evidence from 3 pastoral development projects in Africa funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Eight of these actions were strongly associated with improved project performance. These results become the basis for guidelines to improve design and implementation. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Small-scale irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa: Sparse lessons,big problems,any solutions?

This paper identifies from studies made of specific schemes the major social and administrative problems confronting the improvement and extension of small-scale irrigation in Africa. The first section reviews the studies and notes the conclusions to be drawn from each separate one. Underlying these separate conclusions six general problems are identified and in the second section of the article each of these six is elaborated and discussed: the relation between the direct producer'S benefit and wider social benefits: problems of control, commitment to hierarchy, the working of production units, and how to learn from farmers in respect of water use; and finally the general problem of how to plan for the further change that follows after irrigation is introduced.     

From simplicity to complexity: The development of theory in the study of judicial behavior

This article assesses the development of theories of judicial behavior in the United States in the past few decades. It is argued that the study of judicial behavior has been relatively balkanized, with some advances within particular theoretical contexts, but with little successful effort at integrating different approaches within a comprehensive theory. Although I develop no such comprehensive theory in this article, I do argue that the predominant frameworks for analyzing judicial behavior—attitude theory, fact pattern theory, role theory, small group theory, organization theory, and environmental theories—are not incompatible and can be at least partially integrated. In order to accomplish the desired integration, there are three desiderata:

• The most general and useful unit of theoretical analysis is the individual decision maker.
• Nonindividual level theories can and should be articulated to include propositions about the underlying microlevel processes.
• Comprehensive theory can best be developed through models that incorporate influences stemming from various levels (e.g., group, institution, environment) but that ultimately focus on the individual.

Thus, theories of judicial behavior must become more complex if they are to achieve a higher level of explanation and prediction.     

Rural development management in Nepal,Part I: Coordination in the Rasuwa-Nuwakot Integrated Rural Development Programme

Rural development management in Nepal has been criticized for more than a decade now on the grounds of the country's weak aid-absorbing capacity, administrative slowness and poor project management. Though several reforms of the rural development planning and management systems have been staged, at present coordination in integrated rural development projects remains weak. The paper reports on the empirical findings of research on mechanisms, procedures, organizational arrangements and problems of coordination. Although the country's environment, and its socioeconomic and cultural constraints, may negatively influence smooth operations in implementing integrated programmes, several policy considerations for improvement may be formulated. Among these, organizational reform with decentralization and reduction of the number of offices involved, strengthening the resource management system, especially budget release and personnel motivation, and a more integrated method of policy, programme and project formulation are the issues considered most important by the government officers themselves. Part II will appear in vol. 7, no. 3 of this journal, and examines the implementation and management of rural development in the Karnali and Bheri districts of the Mid-Western Development Region of Nepal.     

The development of small-scale irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa

The performance of irrigation schemes in sub-Saharan Africa has generally been discouraging. This has been particularly true of large-scale formal smallholder developments. Recently attention has been turning increasingly to small-scale farmer-managed irrigation, generally utilizing simple, low-cost methods of water control. While not yet very prominent in Government planning and policy statements, small-scale irrigation has been espoused enthusiastically by farmers, non-governmental organizations and some international agencies. In this approach to rural development external agencies act as catalysts of change, technical advisors, channels for capital funding and intermediaries between farmer groups and other organizations. Although generally limited in physical size and sophistication of technology, small-scale irrigation nevertheless experiences the complexities inherent in the management of land and water, and of social, political and economic change. Research and development needs are wide-ranging, and attention to them is likely to be fruitful in terms of increasingly effective rural development strategies.     

End user computing in Asian countries: Policy lessons for development administration

End user computing requires policy initiatives very different from those needed for computerization in order to deal with the specific issues of initiation, development and institutionalization. Microcomputers provide a service and not goods or savings and require an emphasis on the dynamics of the system, where both strategic issues and operational priorities have to be set. The process is organizational, rather than a technological or a planning exercise. It requires governments to guide the change through deliberate decision making. The objective has to be to obtain the support of users at different levels. In this paper Asian experiences are compared with Western experiences to determine a framework for looking at the process. The limited set of strategies for success have also been identified.     

Sexual orientation and gender identity in Nepal: Rights promotion through UN development assistance

United Nations (UN) development agencies have been actively working to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights in Nepal, despite having no official mandate to work on these rights. This presents an important example of how such agencies are able to act independently to set their own agenda and illustrates the “open system” approach to international bureaucracies. It also suggests that these agencies have the potential to be important instruments of LGBTI rights promotion outside the traditional human rights machinery such as the Human Rights Council and various committees. Based on extensive interview research as well as documentary evidence, this article traces the origins of the UN's engagement with LGBTI rights. It then discusses the work of UN agencies in South Asia, and Nepal in particular, focusing on the UN Development Programme, the UN Children's Fund, UNAIDS, and UN Women. Political changes in Nepal since 2006 have opened it up for change in its approach to these rights, and UN agencies have worked actively to change both legal norms and social attitudes. The conclusion considers whether these lessons are applicable to other states and whether the UN development machinery must be considered an important ally in pursuing LGBTI rights worldwide.     

Fighting corruption in developing countries: Some aspects of policy from lessons from the field

Corruption persists in developing countries despite the proliferation of legal, institutional, and other measures that have been put in place to fight said corruption. The cancer of corruption has therefore spread exponentially in most developing countries with devastating socioeconomic and governance consequences. This practitioner perspective draws on the author's field experience and backed up by the research literature. It identifies, outlines, and discusses some aspects of policy in 3 areas—institution strengthening, the development and implementation of national anticorruption plans/strategies, and political will and leadership—and the conclusions that can be drawn from them for policy development and implementation in the ongoing quest to fight corruption in developing countries.     

National health insurance: Some lessons from the Canadian experience

In the current American debate over national health insurance an examination of the Canadian governmental experience is very instructive. Canada is enough like the United States to make the effects of Canadian health insurance policies rather like a large natural experiment. The Canadian experience—universal government health insurance administered by the ten provinces with some fiscal and policy variations—can be used to predict the impact in the United States of proposed national health insurance plans on the medical care system, and the reaction of mass publics and national policymakers to these effects.The central purpose of the Canadian national health insurance was to reduce and hopefully eliminate financial barriers to medical care. In this it succeeded. But it also produced results which Canadian policymakers never anticipated: essentially unexpected side-effects on cost, quality, organization, and manpower distribution of the particular national health insurance program adopted. It should be cause for concern, the article concludes, that most of the prominent American national health insurance proposals resemble the Canadian program in failing to provide a single level of government with both the means and incentives to curb the inflationary effects of national health insurance. The lesson from Canada is that unless the system has very strong anti-inflationary mechanisms and incentives built into it, national health insurance will feed the fires of medical inflation despite great formal governmental authority to control it.     

Fighting fiscal corruption: lessons from the Tanzania Revenue Authority

Over the last decade, several African countries have undertaken comprehensive reforms of their tax administrations to increase revenue and curb corruption. This article examines recent experiences in the fight against corruption in the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA). Two lessons of broader relevance are highlighted. Firstly, even with relatively high wages and good working conditions, corruption may continue to thrive. In a situation where there is high demand for corrupt services, it is unrealistic to provide tax officers with pay rates that can compensate for the amount gained through bribery. Without extensive and effective monitoring, wage increases may produce not only a highly paid, but also a highly corrupt tax administration. Secondly, hiring and firing procedures may lead to more corruption. Corrupt tax officers often operate in networks, which also include external actors. These corruption networks seem to have been strengthened because many of those fired were recruited to the private sector as ‘tax experts’. This partly explains why the positive process experienced in the initial phase of the new revenue authority was later reversed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Designing policy resilience: lessons from the Affordable Care Act

Policy Sciences - Public policies are the products of political conflict, constituted by mixes of diverse tools and instruments intended to achieve multiple goals that may change over time and not...     

Technology and rural development strategies in a small farmer organization: lessons from Bolivia for rural policy and practice

At a time when public sector agricultural and rural development administration is changing quite profoundly, and when farmer organizations are being asked to assume more significant roles in rural and agricultural development, in-depth analysis of these organizations is an important input into policy and programmatic discussions. This article is an analysis of one type of small farmer organization, a regional economic organization called El Ceibo in Bolivia. It is one of the most successful cases of small farmer organization around technology generation and product transformation and marketing in the Andes. El Ceibo has been able to open new markets for its products, adapt product transformation techniques appropriate for these markets, and develop technology in support of its marketing strategy. Factors favouring Ceibo's success include long-term financial and technical support from external agencies, isolated location, and a cash/export crop specialization. The impacts of Ceibo are significant, although it is not clear how far Ceibo's activities foster a more broadly based regional development in the Alto Beni area. The article also compares the strategies and impacts of economically based organizations such as El Ceibo with those of more traditional, representative and politically oriented small farmer organizations.     

The planning and management of integrated rural development in Drylands: Early lessons from Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands programmes

In Kenya a new generation of area-based, multisectoral rural development programmes has been started, targetted on the country's extensive arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL). By mid 1983, six such programmes were operational, each supported by a foreign donor and implemented by the Government of Kenya. Six years after the detailed planning of the first programme began, the record looks patchy. District level planning and co-ordination hold promise, and some programme activities are going well. However, problems of slow and cumbersome planning and mobilization, a lack of community involvement in planning, too few technical successes, and remote prospects for institutionalizing the programmes if and when expatriate support is withdrawn are apparent. Behind these problems lie a number of basic obstacles, including the structure and orientation of the government's lack of support for the drylands among politicians, and the technical difficulties of raising dryland production. Faced with these obstacles, the ASAL programmes look set to run into continuing problems. Overcoming them will depend on both the success of recent government moves to deconcentrate, and patient support from both the government and the donors. Historically the prospects for such support are poor.     

Devolution in Uganda: an experiment in local service delivery

The ongoing programme for reform and reduction of the public service in Uganda relies heavily on the devolution of provision and delivery of most major public services to the lowest appropriate levels (primarily the District Councils 1 ), and therefore local government is becoming a key element in the search for new ways of governance. The rationale is that the overriding problem, as in much of Africa, is poverty and that the most effective way of tackling it is by the empowerment of the people to provide the services that they judge necessary and to decide their own local priorities in the allocation of resources. Whether the experiment succeeds will be determined in large measure by the ability and desire of the Government to ensure that local authorities have access to at least the same levels of resources as the previous service providers. Of equal importance is the capacity and ability of local government to meet the challenge, and this begs the question as to whether professional staff have the experience and competence and whether the elected members have the political skills, probity and integrity for the task. The policies have been well thought‐out and the solutions appear to be capable of implementation, but the ‘people factor’ will also be critical to success. The present scenario is guardedly encouraging; the devolution programme will probably meet sufficient of its objectives to justify the changes, given continuing donor support, and performance will improve as local authorities gain experience and self‐confidence. For its part, Government will need to resist the temptation to over‐supervise, and intervene only sparingly.

1 These are large units of administration, with average populations in excess of 500,000.

Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The moral hazards of neo-liberalism: lessons from the private insurance industry

The key tenets of neo-liberalism regarding risk, governance, and responsibility are critically evaluated through an empirical study of the private insurance industry. Recent tendencies in this industry towards increasing segmentation of consumers regarding risk, and towards an expansion of private policing of insurance fraud, are analysed. The definition of moral hazard is broadened to include all parties in the insurance relationship, not just the insured. Moral hazards embedded in the social organization of private insurance lead to various kinds of immoral risky behaviour by insureds, insurance companies, and their employees, and to intensified efforts to regulate this behaviour. The analysis concludes with some critical observations about the neo-liberal emphasis on minimal state, market fundamentalism, risk-taking, individual responsibility, and acceptance of inequality.     

Rural development management in Nepal,Part II: Implementation in the Karnali—Bheri Integrated Rural Development Programme

This paper looks at the implementation of rural development management in Nepal, especially how the implementation of the Karnali—Bheri Integrated Rural Development Programme is managed. The empirical data are provided by the officials themselves, and touch on organizational competence and responsibilities, the role of district line agencies. management mechanisms, inter-organizational cooperation, local leadership and local support of organizations and people. It is concluded that several reorganizations of power relationships, resource allocation and administrative mandates are needed to improve the feasibility of effectively managed implementation in the Karnali—Bheri programme. In a wider context, rural development management in Nepal will only be possible if the development administration reforms itself for greater management and implementation potential.