Subnational Lobbying and Structural Funds: A French–Scottish Comparison

This article examines subnational actors’ engagement with the European Union's structural funds, and whether these actors are significant in this policy sector. It examines this question by comparing one French regional council with one set of Scottish local authorities. It concludes that there are considerable similarities between the subnational actors studied, in spite of differences in their location and the constitutional structure within which they are located. The subnational actors have unilaterally developed a capacity for engaging in the policy sector. In both cases, however, this engagement is not evidence of a ‘by-passing’ of the central government. Instead, the subnational authorities have worked alongside central government departments to achieve their goals.     

Transnational religious actors and international politics

This article generally examines the phenomenon of transnational religious actors and seeks to assess the claim that their activities can undermine state sovereignty. It starts from the premise that globalisation facilitates the growth of transnational networks of religious actors. Feeding off each other's ideas and perhaps aiding each other with funds, they are bodies whose main priority is the well-being and advance of their transnational religious community. The article focuses upon two specific transnational religious actors: the Roman Catholic Church and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. It concludes by noting that, like Islamic radicals, the Catholic Church has been influential in some national contexts in helping undermine the hegemony of authoritarian governments, but that this should not be seen as a more general threat to state sovereignty.     

Comparing the autonomy of international public administrations: An ideal‐type approach

International Public Administrations (IPAs), that is, the secretariats of international organizations, are important actors in global governance. This article develops a new typology of IPAs that captures the potential influence of these bureaucratic bodies on international policy‐making. The main argument is that when conceptualizing the varying roles and potential policy impact of IPAs, it is useful to distinguish between their ability to develop autonomous preferences (autonomy of will) on the one hand, and their capacity to transform these preferences into action (autonomy of action) on the other. Based on this premise, the article introduces four distinct ideal‐types of international bureaucracies and suggests indicators to locate a diverse sample of 20 administrations within the four‐fold typology. The results reveal the empirical diversity of IPA autonomy and allow for a first empirical assessment of the factors behind this pattern.     

Friends or Foes? Nonstate Public Goods Providers and Local State Authorities in Nondemocratic and Transitional Systems

Ordinary citizens often welcome nonstate provision of public goods and social welfare, but government officials, particularly in nondemocratic and transitional systems, may view nonstate actors as political competitors. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from rural China, this paper finds that some kinds of nonstate participation in public goods and social welfare provision can actually make local officials more optimistic about their ability to implement state policies and elicit citizen compliance. Local officials often believe that coproduction of public goods and services with community groups in particular, often with community actors taking the lead, can build trust and social capital that can spill over into increased citizen compliance with state demands, a central element of state capacity. Simply increasing levels of public goods provision, however, is not associated positively with optimistic perceptions of local state authority and capacity. Moreover, other forms of nonstate participation such as coproduction between private businesses and local officials or substitutive provision by nonstate actors have less potential for building trust between officials and citizens and are not seen by officials as beneficial for increasing citizen compliance.     

Indigenous Local Governments for Palestine: A Roadmap for Replacing Imposed Institutions to Build Stability and Confidence

Occupying empires and states and expatriates have imposed structures of local government in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, Palestinians have little confidence in the existing units of local government. That lack of confidence inhibits the development of a civil society. Proposed reforms must understand the history and actions that minimized opportunities for participation and the professionalism of bureaucracies that could produce and deliver the public services needed to sustain economic and social development. Establishing a stable civil state will require bureaucratic reforms anchored in theory and an understanding of the unique past that has left more than four million residents of Palestine without the public services needed for economic and social development. All parties to a resolution of the conflicts between Israel and Palestine and between Palestinians must help build new local structures of local government; the recommended steps presented here are grounded in theroy and histroy and also based on empirical research.     

Political Change and Adaptation in Yorubaland in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the role played by strongmen in Côte d'Ivoire's post-conflict reconstruction. While many acknowledge the unhindered or even the enhanced political influence these actors often enjoy as a result of their relationship to the state in post-conflict contexts, existing debates in Côte d'Ivoire, as well as elsewhere, often remain couched in terms of the implications of these kinds of relationships. Does working with rural strongmen tied to former insurgencies enhance the authority of the central state? Or do such alliances wither state institutions capable of providing long-term political order in peripheral areas? This article downplays these questions. Instead, it examines the alliances which form between strongmen and other actors amidst conflicts over local authority during post-conflict reconstruction. It suggests that the specific configuration of these alliances matter in determining the utility of allying with local strongmen during war to peace transitions. This article examines these struggles through the case of Morou Ouattara and the local Forces Nouvelles (FN) administration in Bouna, Northeastern Côte d'Ivoire.     

The Politics of Urban Violence: Challenges for Development in the Global South

At the start of the twenty-first century, urban violence represents one of the most significant challenges for development across much of the Global South. This essay introduces a new framework for analyzing the politics of urban violence that combines a subnational comparative perspective with multi-method and multi-level approaches. The empirical contributions to this special issue analyze the politics of urban violence and its consequences for development in major cities across Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. First, the contributors show how variation in the nature of relations between states and local armed actors poses distinct implications for several outcomes, including patterns of violence, associational life, and economic markets. Second, the volume unpacks how the integration of developing world cities into both licit and illicit global economic flows impacts local patterns of and political responses to violence. And, third, the contributions identify how actors and interests that operate at multiple territorial and institutional scales influence the local dynamics and consequences of urban violence.     

The Impacts of Differential Armed Dominance of Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Across the Americas, from Northern Mexico to Colombia’s mountain valleys and Brazil’s shantytowns, escalating armed violence and the growing power of criminal organizations has generated immense public concern about the breakdown of the rule of law. While some policy makers and journalists write about state failure and the emergence of ungoverned spaces, the evidence presented in this article will show that far from a lack of governance or a failure of the state, criminal organizations often collaborate with a variety of state actors to create varied systems of localized order that perpetuate criminal power and undermine most policy efforts to control crime and violence. In contrast to past scholarship’s reliance on single case studies to analyze the efforts of armed actors to build localized orders, this article offers a systematic comparative analysis of a police-connected protection racket and a drug gang operating in two Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods under similar political conditions. Analysis of the evidence shows that variation in the organizational structures of the armed actors and, in particular, their proximity to state officials, poses varied consequences for local development, including the dynamics of politics and policymaking, associational life, and violence and security.     

Making Citizen Participation Work: The Challenging Search for New Forms of Local Democracy in The Netherlands

Governance theory shows that governments no longer operate as actors that take unilateral decisions but instead have to share power and influence with various other actors. There is also a large body of literature that shows a growing discontent with (local) democracy. These two trends lead various local governments to either reaffirm representative democracy, or to introduce elements of direct participatory democracy. In practice the combination of the two – representative and direct participatory democracy – can be problematic. This paper describes the experiences of Hoogeveen, a medium-sized municipality in the Netherlands with a far-reaching programme of direct participatory democracy. In Hoogeveen, local residents can decide on yearly budgets for their neighbourhood and become involved in the long-term planning of its development. The Hoogeveen case shows that direct participatory and representative democracy can be balanced with the help of (1) connecting arrangements, (2) professional connectors and (3) steady political support.     

From Competition to Collaboration: Intergovernmental Economic Development Policy Networks

This study investigates the strategic collaboration among local jurisdictions in the competitive environment: how fragmented jurisdictions in a metropolitan area perceive each other as cooperative partners and what factors influence the establishment of collaborative relationships between them. To answer the research questions, we applied the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework, which assumes that institutional actors behave in ways such that their economic benefits are maximised and risks and costs of collaboration are minimised, and employed the exponential random graph (ERG) model, one of the statistical social network analyses. The results indicate that the physical, political and geographical similarities among municipalities positively influence collaboration among local jurisdictions. In addition, municipalities are more likely to prefer to establish the closed network relationship such as triad–triplet. This study allows to understand the mechanism to establish collaborative behaviour among local jurisdictions for their regional economic development in a metropolitan area.     

Peace building and the depoliticisation of civil society: Sierra Leone 2002–13

Over the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in funds for local civil society actors in fragile states. Current peace-building and development efforts strive for the recreation of a vibrant, active and ‘liberal’ civil society. In the case of Sierra Leone, paradoxically, this growing support has not strengthened civil society actors based on that liberal idea(l). Instead of experiencing enhanced proactive participation stemming from the civil sphere, Sierra Leone’s civil society appears to be largely depoliticised. Drawing on empirical data gathered over the past four years, this article offers three interrelated causal explanations of why this phenomenon occurred during the country’s peace-building phase from 2002 to 2013. First, Sierra Leone’s civil society landscape has become instrumentalised to serve a broader liberal peace-building and development agenda in several ways. Second, Western idea(l)s of participatory approaches and democracy are repeatedly challenged by the legacies of colonial rule and socially entrenched forms of neo-patrimonialism. Third, abject poverty and the lack of education affect activism and agency from below.     

Administrative Reform and Regional Development Discourses in Hungary. Europeanisation Going NUTS?

Starting from the empirical observation of high levels of absorption of EU cohesion funds but strikingly low levels of substantive change in regional cohesion, this essay offers a contextual analysis of regional development policies in Hungary. Based on theoretical frameworks dealing with Europeanisation, new regionalism and participative development, it explores the reasons for this observation by analysing the role of administrative and planning structures and of development discourses. The essay shows that the Europeanisation of regional development policy triggered several changes in the planning process and led to the partial inclusion of new actors. However, the main effect of this was a growing centralisation of development policy making. The essay explains this by pointing to the domestic political context and the historical foundations of regional development discourses of the conservative and leftist liberal parties. While there are overlaps between the discourses on both sides of the ideological divide, they are perceived as incompatible by political actors. Thus, it is argued that considerations of political power, rather than ideological nature, shape Hungarian regional and development policy and explain the incremental reform process.     

POLITICAL RECRUITMENT BEYOND ELECTIONS: AN EXPLORATION OF THE LINKAGE BETWEEN PATRONAGE,DEMOCRACY, AND DIVERSITY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Flowing out of wider debates regarding representative democracy, the diversity of political institutions has gained salience. Normatively, it is suggested that it is simply unfair for white, middle‐aged males to dominate decision‐making structures. Instead it has been argued that representative diversity can enhance the legitimacy of political institutions and processes, whilst improving the quality and inclusivity of policy‐making. Although most of these arguments have been applied to elected institutions and their bureaucracies, they are also germane in the context of appointments to the boards of public bodies, as the work of these bodies and the decisions made by their board members impacts upon the everyday lives of citizens. Drawing upon original research conducted in the UK, this article argues that the capacity of political actors to make appointments to public boards offers an as yet unrealized democratic potential by offering more opportunities for social engagement and participation in public governance.     

Business priorities and the relative importance of state and local economic-development incentives

State and local governments commonly use a variety of incentives to encourage economic development and business retention. Policies which include economic development incentives are commonly criticized as being ineffective and wasteful uses of public funds. This paper addresses the issue of wastefulness through a business community's assessment of the relative value of eighteen incentives commonly used for business retention and development. Results are based on survey responses from nearly 700 businesses located in Wichita, Kansas. This study illuminates differences in value assigned to incentives by different types of business. Findings indicate that state and local governments that offer incentives without consideration of business type are in many cases delivering “windfalls” to the private sector. Even such highly touted incentives as property tax abatements are not valued equally by all types of businesses. This paper provides state and local governments with an improved understanding of business investment motivation and the relative value of different incentives to effective economic development policy.     

LOCAL AUTHORITY BUREAUCRACIES: RESPONSIBLE,REPRESENTATIVE, OR DIVERGENT? EVIDENCE FROM SMALL POLITICAL SYSTEMS IN NORWAY

The political power of modern bureaucracies may be viewed as a democratic challenge. In fact, many reforms in the public sector aim to strengthen control over these bureaucracies, either by politicians or by citizens. This article argues that the need for control will depend on the degree of interest divergence between bureaucracy on the one hand, and politicians and citizens on the other. Still, attitudes in the three groups are seldom compared directly. Here, the attitudes towards different issues in the three groups are compared, within four small Norwegian municipalities. The results indicate that attitudes of local bureaucrats only to a limited degree diverge from those of politicians and the public, with one exception: attitudes towards so‐called ‘New Public Management' reforms. Implications for control over bureaucracies are discussed.     

Humanitarian aid and host state capacity: the challenges of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Colombia

How can humanitarian actors operate in a host state with significant subnational variations in willingness and capacity to meet its obligations? This is an issue of pressing importance, given the expansion of humanitarian aid to middle-income countries with growing state capacity, but with persistent infrastructural weakness in their periphery. The article illustrates the challenges and potentialities of engaging these states through the case study of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Colombia. It describes the way the NRC has located its offices in peripheral areas, and how its activities have fostered the rule of law, successfully using rights-based approaches to strengthen subnational state institutions, activate and mobilise citizen demands and bridge national and subnational administrations. The article concludes that these activities, operated by officers with extensive practical knowledge and local trust networks, can open the way for durable solutions for humanitarian crisis, but can also provoke backlash from subnational actors.     

Democratization of the State: A Global Perspective and South African Case Study

ABSTRACT

This essay provides a global perspective on the democratic transformation of the state in societies undergoing democratization. Comparative research indicates that the development and effective performance of democratic political systems require the establishment of honest and competent public bureaucracies that avoid political partisanship and demonstrate respect for the diverse values and interests of the populations they serve. Especially important in democratizing the state is the development and practice of the norms of secondary democracy. The practice of these norms of mutual respect, fairness, and collaboration create the essential culture or modus vivendi of democracy. The Republic of South Africa is analyzed as an important case study of a contemporary state that is attempting to create a democratic and corruption-free public service in a country with an extremely racist, authoritarian, and corruption-ridden past. This case study reveals that the democratization of the state in South Africa, as in the case of other countries around the world, requires the members of the state bureaucracy to practice the norms of secondary democracy in their daily relations with one another and in their relations with the citizenry.     

Centred discourse,decentred practice: the relational production of Russian and Chinese ‘rising’ power in Central Asia

Abstract

This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but rather are led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units that concentrate power in their executives, fetishise territorial sovereignty, recruit client states, contest regional hegemony and explicitly oppose the post-1945 international order. In contrast, we demonstrate that the centred discourse of Eurasian integration promoted by Russian and Chinese leaders is decentred by networks of business and political elites, especially with regard to capital accumulation. Adopting Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (subversion, hybridity) and J. C. Scott’s conception of mētis (local knowledge, agency), and using examples of Russian and Chinese investments and infrastructure projects in Central Asia, we argue that in order to understand centring discourse we must look to decentring practices at the periphery; that is, rising power is produced through ongoing interactions between actors at the margins of the state’s hegemonic reach.     

Participatory Development and Reconstruction: a literature review

In the past decade researchers and development experts have been preoccupied by participatory development and reconstruction. Despite criticisms of its potential, it has been at the centre of development practices. This review of both published and unpublished literature aims to assess the importance of participatory development and reconstruction, especially its positive and negative characteristics. The paper shows that, despite its potentially transformative role, its main drawback rests in the power relations between elites and non-elites and that creating comprehensible ways through which non-elites can deal with these relations is one issue that needs additional research. Other issues that need more research are related to how to sustain the participatory development and reconstruction outcomes by increasing local ownership, and how to better involve existing structures and institutions (both state and non-state actors) in development and reconstruction efforts for poverty alleviation.     

Citizens versus Parties: Explaining Institutional Change in German Local Government, 1989–2008

Abstract

From 1989 to 2008, local governments in Germany have experienced ‘massive’ institutional change. Local constitutions have been altered in all German states giving citizens more say in local politics, while at the same time reducing local parties' influence. The paper first describes the changes according to two analytical models of local democracy. It then tries to explain the institutional change as a process of diffusion in a federal state. Three questions are answered in the explanatory part: Why did some forerunner states start with the reforms at the beginning of the 1990s and not earlier? Why did the reforms continue in other states although there was no general pressure from above? And why did some states continue with the reforms while others did not? In the first part of the paper the changes are described quantitatively while a qualitative approach is used in the explanatory part. The analyses show that the beginning of the reforms is related to ‘massive political failure’ while further reforms are a result of rational learning by different actors (large parties, small parties, non-governmental actors) depending on different means of reform. Based on these results we forecast a continuation of the reforms in the next years leading to a convergence of citizen-oriented local government all over Germany.