Public Perceptions of Privatization in Ethiopia: A Case for Public Good or Private Gain?

Ethiopia is one of the many countries in sub-Saharan Africa attempting to privatize various state-owned enterprises since 1994. This study examined public perceptions about Ethiopia's privatization policy and procedures. Results support the concerns over the public's inability to know about, be involved in and comment upon public policies affecting Ethiopia's future. Findings also support the literature that a privatization policy is effective only when institutional and technical capacities for proper implementation are in place. Further, findings raise questions about the efficacy of privatization in a national context where interests may be misrepresented.     

Innovation in Public Management: Is Public E-Procurement a Wave of the Future? A Theoretical and Exploratory Analysis

Project management has become an answer to many traditional organizational structuration and performance shortcomings, while gaining currency in business and public sector organizations. Public procurement systems have evolved into public electronic procurement systems with variations and distinctions in the age of globalization and digitalized complexities. This article examines the development of public e-procurement as an innovation in public management in the contexts of project management, public procurement management, and e-governance. It also links practice to theory—through a fourfold theoretical perspective—with contributions to the knowledge in public procurement, governance, and public administration.     

Has Public Administration Grown Up? A Case for Class-Related Education and Research

Abstract

This article contends that public administration has not grown up because the discipline has yet to address adequately the issue of social class. To this end, public administration education programs and research programs must be refocused. A number of concrete proposals are made along these lines. It is pointed out that affirmative action was never intended to address discrimination and injustice associated with social class, and now the field has an opportunity to lay the basis for filling this void.     

Russian Central Government Budgeting and Public Sector Reform Discourses: Paradigms,Hybrids, and a “Third Way”

ABSTRACT

This study explores how public sector reform discourses are reflected in Russian central government budgeting. Through the lenses of institutional logics, Russian central government budgeting is considered to be a social institution that is influenced by rivaling reform paradigms: Public Administration, New Public Management (NPM), the Neo-Weberian State, and New Public Governance. Although NPM has dominated the agenda during the last decade, all four have been presented in “talks” and “decisions” regarding government budgeting. The empirical evidence illustrates that the implementation of management accounting techniques in the Russian public sector has coincided with and contradicted the construction of the Russian version of bureaucratic governance, which is referred to as the vertical of power. Having been accompanied by participatory mechanisms and a re-evaluation of the Soviet legacy, the reforms have created prerequisites for various outcomes at the level of budgeting practices: conflicts, as in the UK, and hybridization, as in Finland.     

Making a Difference? NGOs and Civil Society Development in Russia

The role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the development of Russia's civil society has been the focus of academic study since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In light of this literature, this article aims to assess the impact of the movement that has most often been seen as very promising for Russia's future civil society development—the environmental movement—by utilising research undertaken in Samara Oblast’ of the Russian Federation. While the results do reveal some positive contributions to civil society development in Russia, they also exhibit many similarities with other studies in the extant literature, illustrating the relative weakness of Russia's social movements in the area of civil society development.     

Representative Bureaucracy in the Public Service? A Critical Analysis of the Challenges Confronting Women in the Civil Service of Ghana

In the public administration literature, the debate concerning the representation of minorities in the public bureaucracy continues to attract attention. The idea is that passive representation may lead to active representation with the later helping to develop policies and programs that will benefit minorities. Consequently, a number of governments have been implementing policies to enhance the involvement of minorities in public services. The Ghana government has not been left out in this endeavor. Since 1957, it has continued to institute measures to ensure a fair gender representation in the bureaucracy. This notwithstanding, the upper echelons of the bureaucracy continue to be dominated by males despite the over representation of women at the lower levels. What are the challenges confronting women in the public sector that make it difficult to achieve active representation? In this article, we examine the challenges confronting women to achieve active representation from a representative bureaucracy perspective.     

Discourse in Bosnia and Macedonia on the Independence of Kosovo: When and What is a Precedent?

Bosnia and Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992, and subsequent referenda legitimised these declarations, but unitary state actors did not emerge. Rather, Bosnia and Macedonia each contain groups with divisive views regarding the nature of the state in which they live. Kosovo is regularly invoked as an example in their contentious discussions. In this essay, I present a framework for understanding this discursive contention in which Kosovo provides the focus for disputes between extremists and moderates of different groups. Within the two states, groups differ over the recognition of Kosovo's declaration of independence and the question of whether this might constitute a precedent. A political, rather than simply a legal, view on these discussions helps us to better understand not only these dynamics, but similar contestations unfolding elsewhere.     

Political Bases for the Dissolution of a Public Corporation: A Nigérian Case

All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse how the concept of institutions has been used in scholarship on land tenure in Sudan. We then suggest, using a case study, that increased attention to the different ways in which actors validate or challenge institutions helps to examine the precariousness of institutional orders in the Sudans. This can move Sudan Studies beyond some of the limitations of previous scholarship, such as a tendency towards interpretations that reiterate institutions as timeless, discrete and immutable units such as “traditional” or “modern”.     

Toward Disorganized Governance in Public Service Provision? The Case of German Sickness Funds

Over many years now, the concept of “network” or “new governance” pervades the literature on public administration. It suggests a growing role for network-based governance downgrading both command-and-control bureaucracy and, if more implicitly, New Public Management (NPM). Challenging this reading, the article explores the relationship between network-based and (quasi-)market governance by investigating the policies of German health care insurance organizations, the so-called sickness funds, epitomizing the international movement towards focal agencies run at arm's length of Government. These policies reflect new forms of hybrid coordination in public service provision, leading into what can be coined disorganized governance and be characterized as a regime of hybrid coordination shaped by a nervous interplay of partnership-building and disruptive segregation, with important repercussions on the overall outcomes in the provision of health care.     

Religious Intellectuals, the “Woman Question,” and the Struggle for the Creation of a Democratic Public Sphere in Iran

The ideas of the new generation of religious intellectuals in Iran have been the main engine for the call for reform. These intellectuals have attempted to locate their views about the way women are and should be treated in Islamic societies in their much broader—and to them more significant—attempt to offer a modernist religious understanding and a more democratic reading of the role of religion in modern polity. Iranian feminists, on the other hand, have begun to insist that the particular situation of women in Iran is in need of more attention. Religious intellectuals have responded by engaging in reluctant analysis of the way the woman question poses itself in the Iranian context. So far, their analyses fail to take into account the gender implications of the struggle against absolutism and traditional authority. However, the dynamic interaction of the reform project with demands and aspirations of various sectors of Iranian public life will not allow the issue to rest here. Religious intellectuals, in their attempt to recreate essential religious truth in the form of new intellectual concepts and systems, will increasingly have to deal with systemic gender inequalities in a more systematic manner.     

Is Democracy a Cure for Terrorism? A Review of Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror 1

This article examines the claim by Natan Sharansky that the establishment of democracy in countries that are currently under an autocratic or tyrannical regime will result in an end terror. Sharansky sees a direct link between the promotion of human rights and democracy on the one hand and peace and security on the other. The review article argues that the establishment of democracy alone will not be sufficient to end terror. The pursuit of justice, including tackling poverty and solving the Israel–Palestine problem, and the promotion of religious tolerance are necessary additional components.     

Comprehensive Performance Assessment and Public Services Improvement in England? A Case Study of the Benefits Administration Service in Local Government

The purpose of this paper is to independently evaluate the impact of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment regime on one particular public service, namely the provision of council tax and housing benefits distributed by local authorities throughout the course of the regime. This service was assessed in every iteration of the CPA methodologies and it included one of the few key performance indicators (KPIs) where the definition of the performance indicator, the means of collection and the public reporting of its results, remained the same throughout the CPA period between 2002 and 2008.

The findings show that there were considerable and consistent improvements in benefits administration nationally within England and across all of its regions. The paper then investigates a series of propositions. Whether there was any significant variations in the performance of larger as opposed to smaller authorities, or between predominantly rural authority areas and urban authorities or between authorities with different party political control. Finding no significant differences the research suggests implementation of the CPA regime itself appears to have had a catalytic effect upon the performance of the benefit administration services within local authorities throughout this period. The paper therefore concludes with a brief discussion as to whether the findings support the theoretical position of proponents of neo-institutionalism isomorphism or more traditional rational actor theories of public choice.     

Power in Global Trade Governance: Is the EU a Unitary Actor,a Tool for Dominance,or a Site of Contestation? GATS and the TTIP Negotiations

The European Union (EU) plays multiple roles within global trade governance as a unitary actor with particular interests to promote, a tool for dominance by powerful interests, and a site of contestation facilitating civil society mobilization. Identifying these roles is key to analyzing the role of the EU particularly in times of crisis in global trade governance where new forms of politics are most likely to emerge. This is investigated through considering two cases of politically sensitive trade negotiation in which the EU played, and continues to play, an active role: the GATS 2000 negotiations and the EU-US TTIP.     

How Stable and Reasonable is Postcommunist Public Opinion? The Case of the Czech Republic

The quality of democracy depends on both politicians and citizens. While most attention has focused on politicians, this paper looks at citizens. There has been some scepticism about whether the postcommunist public is prepared to rule their countries. The legacies of communism and the rigours of the transition may have produced citizens whose opinions are unstable and ill-informed and therefore a poor basis for democratic policy making. This paper tests this proposition by considering the nature of public opinion in the Czech Republic. Its main conclusion is that postcommunist public opinion is more reasonable than conventional wisdom suggests. Opinions on most policies change slowly if at all and when they do change the changes are prompted more by gradual shifts in mores than by political manipulation. This suggests that citizens in the region are prepared to have a significant voice in policy making.