Decentralisation and forest management in Latin America: towards a working model

The particular characteristics of natural resources make the decentralisation of their management to elected local governments even more complex than the decentralisation of services and infrastructure. Nevertheless, natural resources are equally important to rural development concerns in the Third World. Numerous countries have begun to implement policies for some form of decentralisation involving natural resources and the environment, and many local governments are already making decisions that affect the future of local resources. This article reviews experiences with decentralisation of forest management in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Based on those experiences, it proposes a working model for more effective decentralisation strategies. The model addresses the legal structure for decentralised forest management and relevant variables that define the local decision‐making sphere, as well as key mediating factors that also affect outcomes. Most of these variables, even in the local sphere, offer important sites for policy and aid intervention. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INSTABILITY IN COSTA RICA: PRE-CONDITIONS FOR MILITARIZATION?

Controversy continues to surround the issue of militarization in Costa Rica. On one side, claims are made that external forces such as the Reagan administration or other foreign powers have created the recent period of social and economic instability in order to militarize Costa Rica and extend military influence in Central America. On the other hand, it has been argued that some of these external agents are simply offering aid to their Costa Rican friends during a period of social and economic instability. Similar contentions suggest that Costa Rica is only protecting itself from its neighbor to the north, Nicaragua, or that the present move toward militarization is only the professionalization of the police force. This paper examines some of the conditions that promote militarization in Costa Rica and explores moral, economic, and political issues related to the militarization of a country that has pursued a "no army" policy for almost forty years.     

The dictators’ domino theory: a Caribbean Basin anti-communist network, 1947–1952

This article uncovers a Caribbean Basin anti-communist intelligence network independent of the U.S. government and the international Cold War. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, Honduran dictator Tiburcio Carías, and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo characterized local democratic developments as communist threats to their regimes’ national security. With the 1947 Cayo Confites expedition and the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War, the military dictators coalesced into an informal network that increasingly shared intelligence. Joined by the Venezuelan military junta and Fulgencio Batista’s Cuban dictatorship, members nurtured a Caribbean Basin anti-communist domino theory characterising threats to one regime as a transnational danger to regional stability.     

Making economic adjustment work: The politics of policy implementation

This article identifies tentative lessons about successful political management of stabilization and structural adjustment policies in developing countries. It addresses three basic questions: 1) What is the purpose of stabilization and structural adjustment policies and what specific measures are usually undertaken? 2) Who, in theory, is supposed to benefit or lose from such policies and who, in actual practice, supports or opposes them? 3) How have governments in developing countries successfully managed the supporters and opponents of adjustment policies? The article concentrates in detail on how the governments of Panama, Costa Rica and Guatemala managed the actual supporters and opponents of these policies between 1982 and 1987, based on interviews with policy makers, official documents and content analysis of media sources, with the aim of determining what measures were implemented, who protested or supported them, and what the government did to build support or minimize opposition. The lessons from these three experiences are tied to the more general literature on successful political management of stabilization and structural adjustment.     

Impacts of China's Rural Land Policy and Administration on Rural Economy and Grain Production

The distinctive changes in China's rural land policy and administration have exerted significant impacts on China's rural socioeconomic development and grain production, either positively or negatively. This article reviews the changes of China's rural land policy and administration in the recent 5 decades. After the land reform accomplished in 1952 and the people's commune system implemented during 1952–1978, China adopted a house responsibility system, which was proven to be effective for increasing grain output and peasants’ income. Yet, it preserved the urban–rural dichotomous economy, formed in the people's commune era, which placed agriculture in a secondary position. The low efficiency in agricultural production and the small‐scale household management, under the current rural land policy and administration, stimulated the transfers of agricultural laborers to the nonagricultural sectors and cultivated land to urban land. Grain production and cultivated land protection in China are conducted most times under the political mandates rather than the economic guidance. Although the previous rural land policies and the strict residence registration helped China to avoid problems prevailing in prime cities of other developing countries, compulsorily asking peasants to grow more grain and to stay in their native land resulted in outstanding social injustice, vulnerable grain production systems, and poverty in rural areas. There are also outstanding conflicts among the interests of central government, local governments, collectives, and peasant households. More flexible rural land policies and more strict cultivated land administrations could be solutions for improving the profitability of grain production and protecting the rapidly declining cultivated land. Compensations for the low profitability in grain production are also needed to encourage an increase in grain output and rural economy.     

Public finance management reforms in Somalia: a case study on Somalia's finance professionals

There is an unprecedented and pressing need for a major legislative public financial management reform in Somalia to bolster the technical and professional efforts of implementing a modern system of public financial management across the country. Currently, there is no independent auditing authority to enable citizens to access information on the use of public resources. However, the success of any reform depends on establishing strong public budgeting systems as well as developing strong public finance training programs and policy linkage on financial management policies and procedures.     

COUNTERVAILING POWER AND A GOVERNMENT PURCHASING COMMISSION: AN OPPORTUNITY TO PROMOTE INCREASED COMPETITION IN AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRIES.

Abstract: Recent moves by both Labor and Liberal Governments in Australia indicate increased awareness of the possibilities that a centralized government purchasing body may be able to secure economies in purchasing large quantities of a wide range of goods used by government departments, agencies and commissions, and also that such a purchasing authority can be used as an instrument with which to put into effect government policies concerned with supporting a particular industry or geographic area. The argument in this paper elaborates on this theme. It is suggested that a centralized purchasing authority should act, using its countervailing power, to secure cost savings which would not only provide benefits to government departments, but which could also be passed on to the general public. For these savings to be achieved, significant changes would have to occur in the relatively passive system of tendering which characterizes most government purchases. The government purchasing body would need actively to induce some real competition between rival tenderers, if need be playing one bid against the other. A government contract would be awarded only on the condition that the lower price offered the government was, in fact, also passed on to the general public. Thus both the public and the firm would benefit; the public by paying lower prices and the firm by the extra demand likely to be generated for its product, as well as the security of the government contract. Of course, such a purchasing policy could only be followed against firms with significant market power and excess profits. Even if such a policy were followed for a small number of products, the result could be greater efficiency and lower prices for all consumers of these products.     

USING PRODUCER INCENTIVES TO ACHIEVE SOCIAL OBJECTIVES: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE MARKETPLACE AND PUBLIC POLICIES

The purpose of this paper is to recast the light in which we have come to evaluate public policy initiatives and open the door for a more careful examination o f the effects markets have on the course of public policies employing producer incentives to achieve policy goals. Specifically, the paper will review the past experience of urban renewal to show the relationship between policy objectives and outcomes when policy is designed to work through the marketplace. By arguing that market incentives cons train policy outcomes, it is maintained that policies which are judged to have failed in its goals may in reality have succeeded when viewed in terms of normal market operations.     

Differences Between State and Federal Public Forest Management: The Importance of Rules

In United States federalism, public policy responsibilitiesbelong to multiple jurisdictions. This article compares statewith federal public forest management. Data come from four cases,each comprising two forests sharing similar physical characteristicsbut under the authority of different governments. Systematiccomparisons suggest that officials in the national forest agencyface greater statutory, regulatory, and planning constraintsthan do state agency officials. These constraints require morepublic input and higher levels of environmental protection.Outcomes reflect these differences: federal officials provideless limber, at lower net profit, than do state officials, andthey transfer less revenue to local governments. Concurrently,federal officials make greater environmental protection efforts.     

Personnel practices in careers of women at the top in government and business in Nicaragua and Costa Rica

This article, which is the first empirical study of upper-level female managers in Central America, extends the exploration of similarities and differences between public and private sectors in human resource management to the context of developing countries. A comparison of work hours, recruitment and selection practices, mentoring, political pressure, gender discrimination and sexual harassment, reported by female managers in public and private organizations in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, yielded no sector-based differences and few country-based differences. We conclude, therefore, that the public sector is not a more supportive or more fair employer for women in management than the private sector in these two countries, contrary to the assumption in the women-in-management literature that the public sector is a more hospitable environment. Improvements in human resources practices are appropriate in both sectors.     

The Greening of the Americas

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates global capital’s ecological management and extends the assessment to the “green economy,” as developed in the first “green” neoliberal project, in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has been an important “laboratory” for experimentation in environmental governance mechanisms using debt-for-nature financial exchanges and other instruments of the Kyoto Protocol. I explore how “greening” can be understood as a new phase of capital accumulation, as I go into its five main aspects.     

Legitimacy and the Privatization of Environmental Governance: How Non–State Market–Driven (NSMD) Governance Systems Gain Rule–Making Authority

In recent years, transnational and domestic nongovernmental organizations have created non–state market–driven (NSMD) governance systems whose purpose is to develop and implement environmentally and socially responsible management practices. Eschewing traditional state authority, these systems and their supporters have turned to the market's supply chain to create incentives and force companies to comply.
This paper develops an analytical framework designed to understand better the emergence of NSMD governance systems and the conditions under which they may gain authority to create policy. Its theoretical roots draw on pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy granting distinctions made within organizational sociology, while its empirical focus is on the case of sustainable forestry certification, arguably the most advanced case of NSMD governance globally. The paper argues that such a framework is needed to assess whether these new private governance systems might ultimately challenge existing state–centered authority and public policy–making processes, and in so doing reshape power relations within domestic and global environmental governance.     

Disaggregating public-private governance interactions: European Union interventions in transnational private sustainability governance

Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco-certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may intervene in private governance for various reasons, including to improve private governance's efficient functioning or to assert public regulatory primacy. This article argues that to properly understand the nature of public-private governance interactions—whether more competitive or complementary—we need to disaggregate a public authority's intervention. The article distinguishes between four features of private governance in which a public authority can intervene: standard setting, procedural aspects, supply chain signaling, and compliance incentives. Using the cases of the European Union's policies on organic agriculture and biofuels production, the article shows that public-private governance interaction dynamics vary across these private governance features as well as over time. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the importance of active lobbying by private governance actors in influencing these dynamics and the resulting policy outputs.     

A NEW DEFENSE POLICY FOR COSTA RICA: CONSTRUCTING REALITY AND THE POLICY AGENDA

This paper examine5 the policymaking progress in Costa Rica, specifically the creation of a new item for the governmental agenda. This new agenda challenges the traditional Itno army" policy of Costa Kica. Following a brief historical overview of the traditional policy, the paper considers the role of specific factors that promote structural conduciveness for the new "defense" policy and the attendant transformation of political symbols and definitions. The impact of the definitional and organizational changes on the implementation stage of policy is explored. This article suggests the importance of studying the role of hegemony in the construction and transformation of political and cultural definitions, an explication of deci- sionmaking as well as nondecisionmaking processes, and the influence of external and internal threats on nation-state dependency.     

Assessing a voluntary environmental initiative in the developing world: The Costa Rican Certification for Sustainable Tourism

The public policy literature has paid little attention to evaluating the ability of voluntary environmental programs to generate economic benefits for firms. Yet, given their voluntary nature, provision of economic benefits to firms is a necessary condition for these programs to become effective environmental policy instruments. Additionally, little is known about why firms operating in developing countries would participate in these initiatives.This paper provides some of the first cross-sectional empirical evidence about voluntary environmental programs established in developing countries. Specifically, the paper focuses on studying hotel participation in the Costa Rican Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST program). The CST program is probably the first performance-based voluntary environmental program created by a developing country government. Results indicate that hotels with certified superior environmental performance show a positive relationship with differentiation advantages that yield price premiums. Participation in the CST program alone is not significantly related to higher prices and higher sales. The evidence also indicates that participation in the CST program was significantly related to government monitoring, trade association membership and hotels focus on green consumers.     

A challenge for environmental governance: institutional change in a traditional common-property forest system

This article examines how the Miskito peoples of Río Plátano, Honduras have responded to agricultural expansion by migrant farmers and ranchers onto their ancestral forest lands, and considers the policy options for supporting the common-property system of the Miskito and the forests they have historically conserved. The analysis compares institutional changes in the common-property systems of three Miskito communities, each with a different history of colonization. The findings illustrate that the Miskito response to the colonists has been multifaceted, and that while the Miskito leaders have made institutional changes to strengthen their common-property system, these changes are not necessarily reflected in the daily decisions of the Miskito people. The findings suggest that policies that support indigenous rulemaking abilities, specifically policies that legitimize indigenous rights to their lands and provide the resources to apply those rights, may be vital to maintain robust common-property systems and the frontier forests in the region.     

Land tenurial dynamics and participatory forestry management in Bangladesh

Of late, participatory forestry management, more popularly known as ‘social forestry’ (SF), has acquired great significance in Bangladesh as a strategy for both forest resource management and rural development. However, research on the contextual factors such as social relations, institutional structures, forest policies and land tenurial arrangements which regulate SF's performance in the field has been limited. Land ownership and tenurial arrangement is one crucial factor which has remained virtually unexplored in the context of Bangladesh SF. This article examines the land use and tenure arrangements in selected SF projects in Bangladesh. It focuses on the perceptions and choice of the SF farmers regarding land ownership, tenure and use; implications of central land tenurial policy on farm productivity and farmers' motivation; and also on the difference between farmers' land use choice and the assumptions of the SF planners. It shows that land tenure is a complex issue for SF. Although tenurial security is a major motivating force for farmers, providing permanent land ownership alone has little impact on farm productivity or on the growth of collective effort among SF farmers. Farmers need institutional assurance and support (especially from the government) to fully utilize the potential rights and benefits associated with such ownership. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

公民政策参与的功能分析

公民政策参与是指公民参与和影响公共政策过程的行为和活动。公民政策参与对于实现民主价值、保障公民权利,维护和增强政府合法性,保证政策的科学制定和顺利执行,保证政策的公共价值和提高公共服务的品质和效能等方面都有重要的积极意义。但公民政策参与并不必然对所有方面的政策问题解决都带来积极的效果,它也可能会使政策的质量、成本、利益取向以及政府效率和权威方面产生问题。重要的是要把握好“度”,尽可能地因势利导,使其扬长避短。     

Once Upon a Time in Volcán, Costa Rica: Integrating Values into Watershed Management and Poverty Alleviation

The purposes of this article are twofold. One is to make recommendations on a possible course of action for a small town in Costa Rica. The other is to examine the relationship between policy and values, in search of a method of integrating values into policy decisions that can be more broadly applied. The method uses narratives to define common values and science and economics to apply these values most efficiently. The process of defining values through narratives uses a relation‐based organizing framework through which trust can be built and empowerment attained.     

The Decline of Federalism and the Rise of Morality-Policy Conflict in the United States

Morality policies-such as those pertaining to abortion, capitalpunishment, gambling, gay rights, pornography, and sex education—generateconflict over core values. These policies tend to be technicallysimple, potentially salient to the general public, and involvehigher than normal levels of citizen participation. They are,therefore, highly susceptible to being thrust into the activephase of policymaking when an incongruity develops between publicopinion and public policy. The reservation of authority to thestates on these issues embodied in the Tenth Amendment to theU.S. Constitution allows for closer policy-opinion congruence,therefore stabilizing morality policy politics. However, recentfederal actions on a range of morality policies have thrustthese issues onto the active political agenda of the states.