Urban amenities,demand revelation,and the free-rider problem: A partial solution

This paper suggests a practical mechanism to mitigate problems of demand revelation and free riding that arise when efforts are made to create urban amenities such as parks or nature preserves through voluntary private purchase. Building on the work of earlier writers, the model provides a potential way to increase voluntary donations for local public goods, holding constant the incentive to free ride, while simultaneously introducing a mechanism — the refundable trust — that reduces the incentive to free ride. A case involving implementation of this mechanism is described.     

Putting ‘projectized’ development in perspective

The project approach to development assistance has been attacked for its inability to make results self-sustaining. This has been attributed to a short time horizon, an inability to pick up recurrent costs, and a tendency to either by-pass or fragment local institutions and therefore to neglect the need for local capacity building. At the same time, claims have been made that projects are politically advantageous due to quick high visibility results and they are useful instruments for experimentation, social learning and capacity building. This article examines both arguments and concludes that there is a need for radical changes in project development processes, but that there should not be a rush to abandon the project as an instrument for development.     

The problem of Irish Unionism

The paper is a critique of a recent article by Luke Martell which attempted to set out a new, non-statist and non-coercive socialist agenda. The critique suggests that coercion and repression are probably inherent to the socialist project and that Martell's proposals fail to address this. It also takes issue with Martell's proposals for limiting the role of markets and for developing local forms of corporatist agencies. The assumption that market capitalism is in some way antithetical to communal morality is also challenged on the grounds that genuine communalism is likely to arise out of voluntary co-operation rather than state-sponsored initiatives and programmes.     

Introducing administrative reform through the application of computer-based information systems: A case study in India

Administrative reform in a number of developing countries has recently been directed at achieving decentralization through the diffusion of information technology to local areas. However, despite these efforts, the main objective of improving the effectiveness of development planning and monitoring systems remains unfulfilled because of poor integration between the process of technology adoption and the context within which the technology is implemented. There is a paucity of literature that aims to make explicit the nature of this integration. This paper aims to offer a contribution in this direction by describing the case of the computerized rural information systems project (CRISP) in India. The results show that during the first few years of implementation information technology served to reinforce existing inefficiencies within the bureaucracy. Information technology was later used as a vehicle for promoting change within the administration as local administrators acquired the flexibility to direct the technology towards their own requirements.     

Doing Without State and Civil Society as Universals: ‘Dispositifs’ of Care Beyond the Classic Sector Divide

This article poses questions of power to social services provided by voluntary organizations. In particular, it examines the assumption that voluntary and local organizations represent ‘containers’ for a radically different social work rationality, where the marginalized are met in a more equal and attentive fashion, ‘on their own terms’. Thus, the world of volunteering and ‘friendly amateurism’ has been seen as a source of instructive ethics from which government policies should take their lead. While recognizing that this discourse on voluntary rationality has had a number of positive effects, it has almost completely blocked discussions of the forms of power exercised in voluntary services. It is suggested that questions of power, rationality and organized welfare can be fruitfully re-formulated within a Foucauldian register. Applying Foucault's concept of ‘dispositif’ to services for the homeless, the article demonstrates that social work rationality is not linked to the public/private divide but rather to a specific service domain. The article questions the widespread belief that public social services are always permeated by power, whereas those of civil society provide a more power-free domain where ‘genuine human’ meetings may take place.     

Local government consolidations: The impact of political transaction costs

Local government in Norway comprises a large number of small municipalities. Cost efficiency can be improved by consolidating local authorities, and central government has designed a framework to stimulate voluntary mergers. Existing theories suggest that political transaction costs will impede consolidations. (1) Generous grants compensate diseconomies of scale. Central government has promised small municipalities that grant levels will be maintained, but policy promises may not be credible. (2) Property rights to local revenues are nullified when consolidations have been implemented. High-revenue municipalities will therefore go against merger with a poorer neighbor. (3) A consolidated local council may be composed of different political parties, and it may therefore pursue other policies than an existing council. Expected changes in party strength can lead municipalities to oppose a proposed consolidation. (4) Senior politicians are less likely to support mergers, particularly if they come from small polities. We offer an explicit test of these propositions based on data for Norwegian local government. Elected politicians and administrative leaders are more interested in consolidating when efficiency gains are large. Local revenue disparities and to some extent dissimilar party preferences are significant impediments to voluntary mergers. Additionally, smaller municipalities are often prepared to sacrifice some efficiency gain to remain independent polities.     

Understanding voluntary program performance: Introducing the diffusion network perspective

Voluntary programs have rapidly become a means for the public, private, and third sectors to regulate and govern complex societal problems. Following the rapid and widespread emergence of these programs, scholars have been active in mapping, exploring, and interrogating their design and performance. Considerable advances have been made in describing program design and context conditions, and the actors involved in the voluntary program that relate to program performance. Less is known, however, about how these conditions affect program performance. Starting with one of the dominant theories on voluntary programs, the club theory perspective, this article seeks to understand how different program design conditions interact to affect the performance of 26 voluntary programs for low carbon building and city development in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Applying qualitative comparative analysis, the study finds that the club theory perspective has limited explanatory power for this specific set of cases. Iterative rounds of analysis indicate that a diffusion network perspective is the best complementary perspective for explaining the performance of this set of programs. The article concludes that, in situations of a non‐homogeneous market of voluntary program participants, a focus on the programs’ diffusion networks helps to explain their performance. This has implications for the design and implementation of such programs.     

Community government: voluntary agencies,social justice,and the responsibilization of citizens1

This paper analyzes the ways in which the Canadian voluntary sector has been created as a ‘community of service providers’. Drawing upon a governmentality perspective, we illustrate how governmental interventions have been largely successful in carrying out the voluntary agencies' responsibilization efforts within the sector. We trace this responsibilization project through fiscal policies and programmatic schemes, characteristic of advanced liberalism. Once invested with the task of governing, we argue that voluntary agencies take it upon themselves to train their volunteers to become responsible citizens. As a form of, what we call, community government, these voluntary agencies have therefore become doubly responsible: they provide social services to disadvantaged individuals and simultaneously train community members to assume their moral duties. Overall, this paper contributes to the growing literature on governmentality and citizenship studies by producing new insights into the links between the voluntary sector and ‘responsible citizenship’ under advanced liberalism.     

Love Thy Neighbour: A Social Capital Approach to Local Government Partnerships

While controversy surrounds compulsory consolidation as a means of improving the operational efficiency of local government, the literature suggests that gains can accrue to groups of local councils which form voluntary alliances as platforms for shared service delivery. However, real‐world experience has demonstrated that voluntary alliances in local government are difficult to establish and do not always endure in the longer term. After reviewing the limited extant scholarly literature on shared services and local council voluntary alliances, as well as applications of the social capital approach to inter‐organisational endeavour, such as the Weber and Weber (2010) venture capital model, this article argues that the social capital approach can offer insights into local council cooperative alliance and shared service models.     

Road to Zambales: Impressions of barrio immersion as a training and development technique in the Philippines

The wide range of management training programmes for public servants in the Philippines is closely integrated into career development plans and involves practical work by trainees at village level. Trainees are required to reside in a village for varying periods of time to familiarize themselves with life among the rural poor. The aim is to train local people in self-reliant project management as well as to train civil servants in rural development. Close relations with villagers provides an invaluable experience for city-based officials. However, little effort is made to identify the needs of the rural poor. Client groups are selected at meetings dominated by local officials. Officials tend to be “hosted” by relatively wealthy families. Linkages with government agencies at the local level are not made and there is little organizational development among the rural poor to ensure the continuation of projects after the withdrawal of trainees. Nevertheless, the “barangay immersion” approach to management training for rural development has considerable potential.     

Experience of a financial reforms project in Bangladesh

This article reviews the efforts of the Government of Bangladesh aimed at reforming the public sector financial management system as part of overall public administration reforms through a technical assistance project jointly sponsored by the government and the Department for International Development, Government of the UK. It has evolved through initial setbacks into a highly successful project delivering tangible outputs over the last three years, with prospects for future extension until reforms are internalized and become self‐sustaining. Attempts have been made in this article to analyse and evaluate the underlying reasons for the problems in the first year of implementation as well as the factors that contributed to the recovery of the image of the project and its continuing successes in successive phases. The article highlights the lessons learned from the project in its bad as well as good times and suggests that this experience can be of great value to those undergoing the same type of reform experiment. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The management quest for authentic relationships in voluntary social care

Little research has been devoted to exploring the perspective of volunteer managers and the values guiding them in their effort to manage voluntary social care. The purpose of this article is to begin to provide insight into the content of these values and their impact on the day-to-day practices of managers. The article will proceed through three stages. The first provides a short review of the literature regarding the nature of research in the field of volunteer management. This is followed by a presentation of results from an exploratory study of how managers’ call for authentic relationships has specific consequences for how voluntary social care becomes an object of their management. These questions will be investigated among managers in four different organizational settings in Denmark, which organize voluntary social care in relation to children, the elderly, young people with mental health problems and hospital patients respectively. The article concludes by discussing the kinds of challenges and dilemmas that these values and expectations bring about.     

Building Social Capital in City Politics: Scope and Limitations at the Inter-organisational Level

This article explores the relations between voluntary organisations and the city administration in two British cities through an analysis of the impact of social capital. It provides a corrective to the dominant individual-level approach by offering an organisational-level analysis of social capital. The evidence suggests that inter-organisational social capital is not distributed equitably within cities. Voluntary organisations that regularly engage with a city administration can build networks of trust and information flows that outstrip those available to other voluntary organisations. Although it is easier to build social capital within a sector, such as the voluntary sector, building it in tight networks with voluntary organisations would appear to be an achievable goal for a city administration – but such networks do not guarantee an enhanced overall confidence in the local political system.     

Opus Dei and Mexico: Civil but Sinister?

Are voluntary organizations an essential ingredient of democratization, and if so, does that include the vast number of voluntary organizations, such as the Opus Dei, which appear to be authoritarian in their internal affairs? Do groups whose goals and internal structure have little relationship to the nurturing of democracy nevertheless contribute to a democratic culture? Discussing such questions is one of the main burdens of this article, which on that respect is a contribution to the now‐growing volume of literature about political transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The problems presented by such groups as Opus Dei are an illustrative case in weighing the contributions of Latin American volunteerism to democratization. The Catholic Church has had a more than passing interest in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) would be successful in Mexico and which would not. It has encouraged some NGOs—Opus Dei being, we think, a strong case in point.     

Constraints on sustainable development in Ethiopia: Is there a future for improved wood-stoves?

A fundamental component of resource conservation in Ethiopian development programmes is sought in part through the dissemination of improved stoves. However, as an evaluation of a range of stove programmes reveals, the absence of applied research by government and non-governmental organizations together with fundamental constraints arising out of the wider development context is resulting in programmes that are poorly targeted, inflexibly implemented and largely unable to meet the energy needs of poor rural and urban households. Despite these problems, donors continue to fund such projects, in large part because project evaluations are not made public, because of a policy lacuna, and ultimately because development thinking appears locked into finding a quick technology fix for what are essentially long-term, intractable sociopolitical processes and problems.     

Another white elephant? Youth councils as democratic structures

UK society has probably never witnessed the kind of activism now emerging to tackle the roots of age-based discrimination and inequality. Everyone appears to be consulting and listening to children. The most favoured response by statutory and voluntary agencies for encouraging children and young people's participation has been the setting up of youth councils. This paper considers the extent to which youth councils enable participatory citizenship and democratic participation. In so doing, the commonplace suggestion that young people exhibit a lack of enthusiasm for involvement in ‘political’ matters and issues of local representation is challenged. The concept of active citizenship is mobilised to highlight particular ethical and methodo logical issues that need to be addressed at a local level if successful partner ship working that includes young people is to be achieved.     

The place of local social realities in developmental work

There have long been attempts to humanize the conduct of development by taking into account the mental and cultural constitution of those amongst whom it is to occur. Very largely, these have been unsuccessful owing in part to the conception that has been used of the things of which account has to be taken. In consequence, developmental thought has remained mechanistic and impersonal generally and corresponding problems afflict development practice. Seeing this approach exemplified in the two articles by Rondinelli and Mandel (1981a, 1981b) the author takes issue with it. He argues in the light of experience with health planning and medical practice that fresh attention should be given both to understanding local social realities and to the way in which development work could be related to such realities. In the process the author suggests that the value of the approaches characteristic of social anthropology should be more widely recognized.     

The dilemma between mobilization and control in international aid the case of the Norwegian Sao Hill Sawmill project in Tanzania

How do specific aid projects in Tanzania strike a balance between control and mobilization, between efficient implementation of a well defined project and the mobilization of a local learning and competence building process? Can the same project organization do both efficiently, or does the control-mobilization relation represent a dilemma? And how do specific definitions of the balance between control and mobilization within projects affect state building locally? These questions are investigated in the context of the Sao Hill Sawmill (SHS) in Tanzania. The relationship between Tanzanian and Norwegian authorities is looked at (a) in the planning of the Mill, (b) in the early evaluations of it, and (c) in its first three years of operations. An attempt is made to show that decision models are both personally ‘constructed’ and systematically reproduced by institutions and that the distinction between control- and mobilization-focused models is of importance for how projects affect local institution building. Whether persons were recruited to the project from private or public institutions in Norway influenced their understanding of what the project was about. The data suggest that this simple distinction is significant for understanding how projects relate to local institutions and development processes. The material indicates that experts from Norwegian public institutions supported a more mobilization-oriented definition of the project, with the possibility of integrating it unobtrusively into existing local institutions. However, a surprise finding was that top-level administration in Tanzania supported the private participants more control-oriented definition.     

Institutional Reforms and Voluntary Associations

This article explores the changing relationship between the public and voluntary sectors. In 2007, a local government reform reduced the number of Danish municipalities from 271 to 98 and assigned new tasks to these. Consequently, the reform resulted in major local political and administrative changes, thereby giving a unique opportunity to examine how institutional changes affect the voluntary sector. Based on data from qualitative case studies and two questionnaire surveys (2004 and 2010) the article examines how the local government reform affects the relationship between the two sectors. The findings indicate that the political and administrative changes in the local political system have influenced municipality collaboration, contact and interaction with local associations. While some associations experience a decline in personal contact, there is an increase in formalization of the relationship and an increased degree of collaboration between the voluntary and public sectors.     

民办学校思想政治教育的综述

近几年来,民办学校的思想政治教育的研究取得丰硕的成果,学者从不同的方面强调思想政治教育的重要性,对民办学校轻视思想政治教育的原因做了剖析,并从多方面提出加强民办学校思想政治教育的措施,同时也指出了存在一些不足。