Seeing eye to eye: organizational behaviour,brokering and building trust in Tanzania

The focus of this article is organizational behaviour in and around the private sector in Tanzania at a time of transition through liberalization and the promotion of private sector activity; how the private sector has re‐emerged in the very recent past; how it operates as a group or, more accurately, as a set of groups, and the relationships between its component parts and with other development organizations (notably public actors: the state and aid donors). Within this framework our interest is in how organizational behaviour is mediated and trust is built through the brokering of relations between different organizations which intersect the public and private (and what this means for the public sphere). The article assesses the usefulness of a three‐level framework for analysing organizational and institutional transformation, shows that some tentative but modest change is occurring, and that a range of incomplete but positive political processes are happening. We show that institutional development is the weak link in these processes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Governing beyond the Centre: A Critique of the Anglo-Governance School

One of the more intriguing theoretical discussions of recent years involves the concept of governance. There is now a substantial body of work concerning the way governance has affected the contribution of central government to the policy process. Possibly the most prominent and influential account of governance theory in British political science is offered by Rod Rhodes. His most recent writings have employed governance theory to explore the institutions, actors and processes of change within the core executive. His 'Anglo-governance' model has emerged as a prevalent and authoritative account of how new methods of governing have emerged in society. Significantly, it is maintained that a distinct shift has taken place in government, from a hierarchical organisation to a fragmented and decentralised entity that is heavily reliant on a range of complex and independent policy networks. There is undoubted evidence that government is a fractured institution that is dependent on state and non-state actors beyond the centre. This paper questions whether such features entail the emergence of a new form of governance. Central government is still highly resourced and has, at its disposal, a range of powers with which to retain influence over public sector agencies. Historical evidence also shows that the British polity has long been decentralised. Thus, it is difficult to see how recent developments have in any way transformed the capacities of the core executive. It seems that alternative ways of conceptualising the institutions, actors and processes of change in government are required. Recent efforts to develop 'organising perspectives', within the intellectual parameters of governance theory, offer a more 'conceptually cautious' treatment of the central state.     

Sustainable governance of natural resources and institutional change–an analytical framework

This article presents a conceptual framework for analysing the governance of natural resource use, as governance is often the primary issue when natural resources are overexploited and degraded. It addresses both spontaneous and active governance, including institutional change induced by development co‐operation. Drawing on existing frameworks of institutional analysis, fundamental modifications are presented to adapt the concept to the context of international co‐operation, and to include dynamic aspects of institutional change as well as multiple actor interactions. Tested in several case studies, the framework was found suitable and relevant for use in project planning and evaluation, as well as for comparing governance issues across cases in a conceptually rigorous way. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance

The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.     

The successful use of consultancies in aid‐financed public sector management reform: a consultant's eye view of some things which matter

Independent consultants, often contracted through consultancy firms, are important players in donor attempts to trigger and guide institutional change processes in recipient government structures and practices. However, little is known about the efficacy or ‘success’ of such consultancies. This article explores some of the issues involved. Following a discussion of the problems of defining ‘success’, we present an analytical framework which can be used in all kinds of contexts to generate information relevant to institutional change programmes, and to the design of consultancies to help carry the change processes along. Such information can be used to predict the likely success of intervening at all, for designing the elements of an intervention, and for ongoing monitoring of implementation. We apply the framework to eight consultancies which were undertaken in three different change contexts: post‐communist regimes in the early transitional period; aid‐dependent regimes committed to ‘politics‐as‐usual’ and the longer‐term highjacking of donor funds by patron – clientelist structures. We summarize the main lessons which emerge from our case studies in the form of criteria for judging whether and how (responsible) donors and/or consultants should get involved in change projects. Donors, consultancy companies and consultants should all be thinking of ways to exclude irresponsible parties and behaviour from aid‐financed institutional transformation processes. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning from the Philippine occupation: nation‐building and institutional development in Iraq and other high security risk nations

Outcomes of armed conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq indicate that the U.S. has been unprepared to fully address problems related to establishing social and economic stability, security and governance in the aftermath of war. This is unfortunate, given that U.S. policy makers' nation‐building efforts to achieve stability, security and good governance in these nations do not reflect what they should already have learnt about organisational and institutional development from past experiences providing significant development assistance to highly unstable nations. Based on the analysis rendered in this article, ‘smart practice’ development administration in such nations comprises the following key points that link nation building to institutional/organisational development:

• Nation building (creating new national sovereignty) is different from, and harder than, building government capacity (creating or strengthening institutions and organisations).
• Given that building government capacity typically requires years of patient assistance and financing, it is better to build on existing indigenous institutions like the civil service and military.
• The time and expense of development assistance to high security risk nations means that it is advisable to establish a multi‐lateral development assistance plan and a multi‐national, multi‐institutional framework for financing development to pay for all that is necessary over a long period of time (i.e. 20–50 years).
• Policy makers should emphasise social stability and stable economic growth under self‐governance to prevent actual or perceived economic exploitation.
• Policy makers' diplomatic efforts should secure accommodation of various stakeholders sufficient to permit compromise leading to formation of an independent government.
• Where occupation appears necessary to achieve security and stability, policy makers should allocate enough troops and money to do the job, and accurately assess and report all costs of military occupation and nation building.
• Once occupation has occurred, policy makers should not withdraw military support in a way that would increase the likelihood of civil war.
• Premature withdrawal of security, economic and political support prior to the point where high security risk nations are capable of governing themselves will cause a power vacuum, and may result in fragmented regional leadership by warlords. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

     

THE TYPOLOGY OF FISCAL DECENTRALISATION SYSTEM: A CLUSTER ANALYSIS APPROACH

The article suggests a novel theoretical framework for empirical measurement of fiscal decentralisation by taking the viewpoint that fiscal decentralisation should be regarded as a system. Then, we review in detail several institutional arrangements regarding fiscally decentralised systems including the following: federal versus unitary state, numbers of tiers of governments, taxing power, borrowing power and independence of local officials. After identifying these institutional arrangements, we can group different countries with similar institutionally fiscal decentralisation systems together in broad categories by using cluster analysis. This analysis reveals a typology of fiscally decentralised systems (FDS): high expenditure/revenue assignment FDS, low expenditure/revenue assignment FDS, revenue transfer FDS, most complete FDS, politically centralised FDS and unitary state FDS. We then employ regression analysis to examine the performance for each type of fiscal decentralisation system. Our empirical findings suggest that most complete FDS is positively associated with selective economic performance as well as various public governance indicators. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Who Owns Education? Cleavage Structures in the Partisan Competition over Educational Expansion

This article addresses the issue of how to explain institutional change in national political economies. Within an actor-centred institutionalist theoretical framework, it explores the utility of a coalitional explanation for changes in the financial and corporate governance systems of Italy. Finance and corporate governance are useful foci for understanding change and the evolutionary direction of national political economies as a whole because, first, national and European reformers have focused a great deal of their energy on transforming financial market structures and corporate governance and, second, the regulation of finance and corporate governance is increasingly important as a means for states to exert influence over their economies. The paper finds considerable change in Italian capitalism as a result of successful elite reformers, party system changes, and the emergence of a reform coalition. However, change is limited and Italy retains a distinctive model of capitalism.     

Why Bureaucratic Stability Matters for the Implementation of Democratic Governance Programs

The theoretical framework developed in this article suggests that high turnover rates in the public administrations of aid‐recipient countries present a challenge to the implementation of democratic governance (DG) aid. If high turnover rates are due to individuals' search for better opportunities, it will affect the implementation primarily through lack of experience and shorter time horizons among civil servants. However, if high turnover rates are due to political appointment of personnel, there is an additional negative factor that will affect the implementation: the reluctance to engage in old projects. Hence, high turnover rates affect the implementation of DG programs negatively, especially if caused by political appointment. These mechanisms are shown to be at work in interviews with donors and recipients of a broad range of DG programs in Peru and Bolivia.     

Mozambique and Zimbabwe: potentially converging paths

Mozambique, long favoured by Western donors, to their disapproval has recently shown signs of corruption, instability and poor governance and looked to China for help that may not be forthcoming. Zimbabwe, long disfavoured by Western donors, is cooling to China's commercial and political involvement in its national affairs. Both southern African countries may eventually need to reinvigorate appeals for assistance from Western donors, which would come with relatively stringent governance and economic conditions.     

Gender,actors, and institutions at the local level: Explaining variation in policies to address violence against women and girls

Research on gender equality policy has generally focused on actors and institutions at the national and international levels. This article considers the role of local‐level actors and institutions in explaining different policy responses to violence against women and girls (VAWG). The literature on gender policy trajectories identifies the particular importance of executive actors in influencing “status policies” like VAWG. Quantitative data are analyzed to show how local Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales have responded to demands for policy action. The focus is on the interaction between the 41 elected commissioners and the new institutional arrangements for police governance introduced in 2012. The article shows that variation in policy outcomes is related (a) to the gender of executive actors and (b) to the way in which actors interpret elements of the institutional framework, regardless of their own gender.     

Who is responsible for what? Clarity of responsibilities in multilevel states: The case of Spain

There is a theoretical disagreement between the classical normative positive view on decentralisation, which states that the fragmentation of power shifts policy more closely into line with citizens' preferences, and a more recent critical view that states that decentralisation blurs attribution of responsibility. This disagreement can only be resolved by refining the understanding of specific institutional designs. The theoretical claim in this article is that the relation between multilevel governance and clarity of responsibilities is contingent upon the type of decentralisation in place. To test this proposition, individual data from an asymmetrically decentralised system – the Spanish State of Autonomies – are used. Results show that the relationship between decentralisation and clarity of responsibility has a u‐shape. Responsibility attribution is clearer in regions with high and low levels of decentralisation, where one level of government clearly predominates over the other, than in regions with a more intertwined distribution of powers.     

‘New spaces’ for change?: Diamond governance reforms and the micro‐politics of participation in post‐war Sierra Leone

While the majority of research carried out on diamonds and development in Sierra Leone has focused on debates concerning the role that diamonds played in the country's civil war of the 1990s, little attention has been directed towards understanding how the emergence and consequences of ‘new spaces’ for citizen engagement in diamond governance are shaping relationships between mining and political economic change in the post‐war period. Recent fieldwork carried out in two communities in Kono District illustrates how the emergence of such spaces—although much celebrated by government, donors and development practitioners—may not necessarily be creating the ‘room for manoeuvre’ necessary to open up meaningful public engagement in resource governance. The analysis focuses on one recent governance initiative in the diamond sector—the Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF)—which aims to strengthen citizen participation in decision‐making within the industry, but has frequently been at the centre of controversy. In framing and articulating socio‐environmental struggles over resource access and control in Sierra Leone's post‐war period of transition, the article highlights how the emerging geographies of participation continue to be shaped by unequal power relationships, in turn having an impact on livelihood options, decision‐making abilities and development outcomes in the country's diamondiferous communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Limits of Regulation: Indirect Party Access to State Resources in Australia and the United Kingdom

The way in which political parties use state resources indirectly (e.g., parliamentary expenses) receives substantial attention in public debate, particularly when surrounded by perceptions of misuse. However, scholarly studies of resources indirectly available to parties through their functions in the state, how they are used and regulated, are rare. This article presents an analytical framework that identifies and categorizes the range of indirect resources linked to parties' institutional roles. It locates these resources within a four‐fold matrix of regulation, distinguishing regimes that vary in their detail and whether compliance is externally monitored. Undertaking comparative case studies of parliamentary resource use in the United Kingdom and Australia, we argue that the blurring of party‐political and parliamentary roles can impede the effectiveness of regulatory regimes that democracies adopt, regardless of detail and external enforcement. These findings have important implications for regulatory reforms that seek to constrain parties' behavior to depoliticize democratic governance.     

The limits and variety of risk‐based governance: The case of flood management in Germany and England

Risk‐based governance is argued by many to hold the promise of a more rational and efficient state, by making explicit the limitations of state interventions and focusing finite resources on those targets where probable damage is greatest. This paper challenges the assumption that risk‐based governance has the potential for universal and uniform application, by comparing contemporary flood management in Germany and England. On first inspection, flooding appears to be a paradigmatic case of risk colonizing European policy discourses, with the traditional notion of flood defense giving way to flood risk management in the context of climate change, increasingly frequent flood disasters, political and cost pressures on flood protection, and publicly available European‐wide flood assessments. Drawing on in‐depth empirical research, this paper shows how the role, and even the definition, of “risk” is institutionally shaped, and how the respective institutional environments of German and English flood management practices impede and promote risk colonization. In particular, the use and conceptualizations of risk in governance are variously promoted, filtered, or constrained by the administrative procedures, structures, and political expectations embedded within flood management and wider polities of each country. The findings of this research are important for the design and implementation of supranational policies and regulations that endorse risk‐based approaches, such as the recent EU Flood Directive, as well as scholarly debate as to how to legitimately define the limits of governance in the face of uncertainty and accountability pressures.     

The Evolution and Continuing Challenges of E‐Governance

E‐governance comprises the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support public services, government administration, democratic processes, and relationships among citizens, civil society, the private sector, and the state. Developed over more than two decades of technology innovation and policy response, the evolution of e‐governance is examined in terms of five interrelated objectives: a policy framework, enhanced public services, high‐quality and cost‐effective government operations, citizen engagement in democratic processes, and administrative and institutional reform. This summary assessment of e‐governance in U.S. states and local governments shows that the greatest investment and progress have been made in enhanced public services and improved government operations. Policy development has moved forward on several fronts, but new policy issues continually add to an increasingly complex set of concerns. The least progress appears to have occurred in enhancing democracy and exploring the implications of e‐governance for administrative and institutional reform. ICT‐enabled governance will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future providing a dynamic environment for ongoing learning and action.     

Intermediary roles in regulatory programs: Toward a role‐based framework

This paper develops a role‐based framework of intermediaries in regulatory programs. In examining the types of roles that organizations adopt in regulation and governance, we argue that roles have important implications for understanding organizational and program level dynamism and outcomes. We use the Regulator–Intermediary–rule‐Taker framework to describe how organizational roles can be adopted through assignment, appropriation, or promotion. We then go deeper into how intermediaries adopt a variety of different roles in key regulatory programs. We examine generic intermediary roles across programs that involve four main groups of activities: creating and/or organizing, coordinating between programs, supporting implementation, and voicing an opinion. All in all, our role‐based framework allows for a novel relational way to understand interorganizational and institutional dynamism in complex, interactive, and ever‐changing regulatory regimes.     

When do governments trade domestic reforms for external rewards? Explaining policy responses to the Millennium Challenge Corporation's eligibility standards

Journalistic reports and case study evidence suggest that governments have made policy and institutional reforms to achieve or maintain eligibility for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). However, the empirical scope of the “MCC Effect”—across countries, policy domains, and time—remains a subject of speculation and debate. There is also little rigorous evidence about the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards have influenced the reform efforts of developing country governments. To address this challenge, we construct an original data set that measures whether, when, and how governments in low‐income and lower‐middle‐income countries responded to the eligibility requirements for MCC assistance between 2004 and 2010. Our econometric analysis of the data set calls attention to an underappreciated factor that shapes the adoption and implementation of externally influenced reforms: the presence of a technocratic reform team with executive authority to introduce disruptive changes to the status quo.     

Governing Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction: The Case of Pennsylvania

Over the past decade, directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing enabled an unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) boom in many regions of the United States, including parts of Pennsylvania. This revolution has created serious concerns about the capability of existing institutions to govern important societal outcomes associated with UOGE. We present a conceptual framework for assessing key societal outcomes influenced by UOGE governance. In applying this framework to Pennsylvania, we discern certain institutional strengths that have allowed the Commonwealth to reap appreciable short‐term economic growth from rich resource endowments. We also find, however, that several institutional weaknesses have allowed costs externalized to the environment, public health, and community integrity to offset some proportion of those economic benefits. Likewise, we find that governance of UOGE in Pennsylvania has contributed to a bifurcated sociopolitical landscape wherein adversarial coalitions dispute the legitimacy of the industry and its governance.     

Democracy or Good Governance? Globalization,Transnational Capital,and Georgia's Neo-liberal Revolution

Western aid donors merge democracy and good governance in theory and practice. Yet, since the 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia's governance indicators have soared while its democracy scores have plummeted. The good governance–democracy merger constitutes an attempt by the transnational capitalist class to cultivate consent for its hegemonic project of neo-liberal globalization. This article highlights the personal and institutional networks connecting Georgian elites with the organizations involved in globalizing governance and democracy. It shows how these organizations are dominated by the representatives of transnational capital. Finally, it shows that Georgia, as an undemocratic but effective ‘governance state’, is not an exception.