Building institutional capacity for policy analysis: An alternative approach to sustainability

The project approach to development assistance has been criticized for failing to build lasting capacity. The problem lies not in the project approach itself, but in a failure to understand the constraints to capacity development and a consequent misdirection of effort. Policy analysis capacity is developed as an example. Policy analysis requires skills and abilities that public sector institutions in developing countries cannot sustain, owing to a combination of structural and organizational factors, among which personnel constraints are key. These factors inhibit the effectiveness of the standard approach, which seeks to establish analytic capacity within a specialized government unit (‘internal’ capacity). An alternative approach is to build ‘process’ capacity—the ability to get analysis done by other institutions, rather than the ability to do analysis internally. The author concludes that project strategies should be redirected toward a greater emphasis on building process capacity as a useful adjunct to internal capacity.     

Contracting Revisited: Determinants and Consequences of Contracting Out for Public Education Services

The determinants and consequences of contracting are examined in more than 1,000 Texas school districts for 1997–2008. The results largely replicate prior research by O'Toole and Meier, showing that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts’ core instructional functions and that the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal. The present findings, based on data from a longer period, indicate that contracting is positively related to school district performance. This article also finds support for an extended model of contracting determinants involving two environmental shocks: negative budget shocks and enrollment shocks.     

Contracting for Indigenous Health Care: Towards Mutual Accountability

In Australia and other industrialised countries, governments contract with the non‐government sector for the provision of primary health care to indigenous peoples. Australian governments have developed policies and funding programs to support this health sector, but the current arrangements are unduly complex and fragmented. The results of our study show that the complex contractual environment for Aboriginal Community‐Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) and their funders is an unintended but inevitable result of a quasi‐classical approach to contracts applied by multiple funders. The analysis in this article highlights potential policy and program changes that could improve the effectiveness of funding and accountability arrangements, based on the use of an alliance contracting model, better performance indicators and greater clarity in the relative roles of national and jurisdictional governments.     

Ideology and performance: service delivery in a community mental health center

This study examines the relationships between ideology and service delivery performance in an established community mental health center which is beginning major structural changes. Ideological pluralism among several separate and internally-cohesive units within one organization led to diversity in staff productivity. The implications of ideological pluralism for planned organizational change, policy implementation and administration are explored.     

The effects of alternative power-sharing arrangements: Do “moderating” institutions moderate party strategies and government policy outputs?

Advocates of consensual political institutions, i.e. institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties, claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs. To date, however, there exists little research – either theoretical or empirical – that evaluates whether consensual institutions promote moderation in parties' policy declarations. We develop a multiparty spatial model with policy-seeking parties operating under proportional representation, in which we vary the extent to which government policies reflect power-sharing among all parties as opposed to being determined by a single party. We determine parties' optimal (Nash equilibrium) policy positions and conclude that power-sharing does not typically motivate parties to moderate their policy declarations; in fact, policy positioning under power-sharing appears to be similar to or more extreme than under single-party dominance. Consistent with previous research, however, we find that power-sharing does promote moderation in government policy outputs. Our results have implications for parties’ election strategies, for the design of political institutions, and for representative government.     

Administration and service delivery in the SSI program: the first 10 years

This article provides an overview of the administrative structures and processes through which the Social Security Administration delivers its services to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) claimants and recipients. It documents the improvements and adjustments that have been made in the administration of SSI from 1974, when the program began, through 1983, the 10th year of its operation. The first decade of SSI was marked by significant changes that have led to improvements in fiscal responsibility and administrative efficiency for the program. Among the subjects covered are the legislative history of the program, the claims process, posteligibility procedures, underpayments and overpayments, the administrative complexities that have had to be surmounted, and administrative efforts aimed at quality assurance.     

面向世界大学城空间的图书馆管理与服务刍议

世界大学城为高校信息化建设和教学改革提供强有力技术支撑,但在实际应用中也面临一些问题:相对独立的个人空间,学校层面如何加强信息资源管理?如何解决资源分建、共享、共用问题?如何避免版权纠纷,规避法律风险?高校图书馆可以利用自身优势,开展相应的管理与服务,促进世界大学城空间建设与运用。     

Elk management and policy in southern Greater Yellowstone: Assessing the constitutive process

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA, is recognized globally as a model for land and wildlife conservation, management, and policy. A major policy problem in the region is the highly contentious winter feeding of elk (Cervus elaphus) on 23 government feed grounds in western Wyoming through cooperative management under several state and federal agencies. Numerous non-governmental groups and concerned citizens are also affected by elk management or seek to contribute to management policies. The long-term controversy shows that this issue centers on how management and policy should be made and who should be involved in decision-making—the constitutive policy process. This paper examines and appraises the constitutive process in this case, including how competency, authority, and control are allocated. It also looks at how institutions, analytic techniques, procedures, and people are structured, selected, and included or excluded in decision-making processes. Our data come from a multi-method approach over the past decade, including participant-observation, historical literature, interviews, media analysis, and technical reports. Our analysis shows that institutional dynamics severely constrain the scope of deliberations, the production of practical problem definitions, and the search for improvements in elk management. We recommend that participants focus on the constitutive level of policy making, i.e., the underlying structure and functioning of policy processes, learn how these elements function and affect processes and outcomes, and learn to configure them in ways that embody democratic principles, serve common interests, and resolve policy problems.     

Pitfalls of Contracting for Policy Advice: Preparing Performance Budgeting Reform in Estonia

The goal of this article is to analyze the challenges involved in contracting for policy advice with the example of performance budgeting reform in Estonia in 2009–2011. The Estonian Ministry of Finance has sought to prepare a major change in the budgeting system by outsourcing the analytical preparation of different aspects of the reform to various private sector organizations. The case study seeks to identify the challenges and pitfalls involved in contracting for policy and management advice in the area of a major public sector reform. The Estonian experience shows that such a reform strategy can run into serious problems, including fragmented and inconsistent reform plan, limited learning, and high transaction costs. The contractualization of reform preparation has constrained deliberations on the planned changes to the strategic planning and budgeting system among the stakeholders and undermined the democratic legitimacy of the reform.     

Social conflict and alternative mass communications: public art and politics in the service of Spanish-Basque nationalism

Abstract. Mass communication is multi-dimensional. One often overlooked alternative medium of mass communication, when it is systematic and not random, is public art - murals, graffiti, wall painting and posters. The linking of art and politics has precedents in Basque culture. It is the thesis of this article that public art is an important factor in the political communication process in the Basque region, that Basque nationalists, especially radical Basques revolving around the ETA movement, have used public art as one source for increasing visibility, raising consciousness, and building a mass based movement. What is particular about Basque nationalism is that it is a cultural-political movement, a reawakening from a 'culture of silence' induced by the Franco regime. Today, public art is an accepted channel for communicating the gamut of socio-political issues relevant to the social conflict in the Basque homeland.     

Redressing metropolitan imbalances in service delivery: A time-series intervention analysis of a user charge policy

While a quarter of a century of contributions to the literature on central city-suburb relationships indicates that within a metropolitan context suburban exploitation of central cities may not exist, there is no lessening of the desire to reduce imbalances within a particular urban service delivery sector. This paper assesses the impact of an urban administrative policy intervention aimed at shifting the burden of supporting a municipal service to those who actually use and benefit from it. An interrupted time-series quasi-experimental design is merged with a data analysis strategy employing integrated moving average models. The evidence endorses the adoption of user charges for certain urban services as an effective strategy open to urban bureaucracies for redressing urban public finance imbalances.This paper is a revision of a draft originally prepared for presentation in the session, The Sociologist as Evaluator: Policy Direction from Social Science, at the Southwestern Social Science Meetings, April, 1978 in Houston, Texas.     

Regional arrangements for providing liquidity in a financial crisis: developments in East Asia

Abstract

During the last decade three books have had a disproportionate impact on China Studies because of their controversial interpretations: Jenner's The Tyranny of History, which predicts the disintegration of the Chinese state; Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which describes how Chinese sailors circumnavigated the globe well before any Europeans; and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography Mao: The Unknown Story. All are revisionist histories that amongst other (usually controversial) conclusions suggest there has been a conspiracy to keep the information they convey hidden. Considering their arguments and the manner of their enquiry and expression is interesting in more general ways about the construction of narrative and the nature of conspiracy, as well as about the lessons for academic research.     

Goal Displacement: Assessing the Motivation for Organizational Cheating

A major problem in assessing bureaucratic performance is the difficulty in judging the final social outcomes stemming from the work of public agencies. As a result, public agencies are frequently evaluated based on the outputs they produce. Agency outputs (such as, criminal cases solved, inspections) are easier to measure than the actual contributions agencies make to social outcomes (such as, preventing workplace discrimination, protecting the environment). When agency performance is evaluated in terms of numerical outputs, bureaucrats have an incentive to maximize outputs, regardless of whether maximizing outputs is the preferred strategy for achieving desired social outcomes (a form of goal displacement). This incentive to maximize outputs may lead to organizational cheating, in which public agencies purposely manipulate output levels to portray their work in the best light possible.
This study examines the problems of goal displacement and organizational cheating in Texas public schools. Specifically, we examine the degree to which school districts cheat to manipulate student pass rates on standardized exams. School districts "cheat" by liberally exempting certain students from these exams in hopes of raising overall district pass rates. Scarce institutional resources and extreme task demands are associated with cheating. From a management perspective, this study demonstrates the problems in implementing performance standards. From an academic perspective, it provides the first theory about when and why organizations cheat.     

Implementing Title III: Assessing Opportunities for State Activism

A complementary dichotomy has evolved in federal-state relations because of Reagan's "New Federalism." States have become "activists" as they adopt national policies to state objectives. Simultaneously, new constraints on spending have made them "captives" to national priorities.     

Working together: Building capacity for community development

Abstract

Community development partnerships (CDPs)—local intermediaries that gather support from foundations, corporations, and the public sector—are giving increased attention to building the capacity of community development corporations (CDCs). This article evaluates CDPs’ efforts to help nonprofit CDCs increase their capacity to revitalize low‐income communities. We identified five types of capacity and conducted interviews and focus groups with CDPs and CDCs across the nation. The nature of capacity and capacity building among CDCs, the ways partnerships help increase CDC capacity, what the partnerships and CDCs learn from each other, and how they could better gauge the effectiveness of capacity‐building support were discussed.

We learned that CDCs and CDPs have forged an effective alliance and continue to work together: Community organizations require help in building capacity, and local partnerships provide the requisite funding, technical assistance, and other elements to help them grow and serve their neighborhoods.     

Resistance to alternative management in fisheries: economic and cultural considerations of North Carolina's commercial fishers

Research in recent decades has shown that although conventional fisheries management strategies such as fishing seasons, size limits, or gear restrictions can provide sufficient biological protection to fisheries stocks, they do not necessarily lead to satisfactory social or economic outcomes. In their stead, the merits and shortcomings of a variety of alternate management systems, including individual transferable quotas, have been proposed, implemented, and analyzed. Few investigations, however, have examined actual fishers' preferences for different management systems. Integrating results from a mail survey of North Carolina commercial fishers with their individual harvest histories and sociodemographic profiles shows that economic and cultural variables both play a significant role in management system preference. The analysis introduces the use of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a measure of investment diversity, as a measure of diversity in fisheries harvests and demonstrates an association with management preferences. Social and family factors are also notable indicators.