Democratization Through Contention? Regional and Local Governance Conflict in Peru

Social conflict in Peru has increased dramatically since 2004. The economic origins of these disputes, which result mostly from the growth of mining operations, have received considerable scholarly attention. The emergence of collective action directed at the performance of regional and local government, however, has received little notice. This essay examines Peru's regional and local governance conflicts on the basis of hundreds of reported cases. It investigates the nature of these episodes and the strategies adopted by community organizations to get their complaints addressed. It finds that the political opportunity of the posttransition period, dissatisfaction with government performance, and new participatory rights have helped to give rise to such collective action. Community protagonists choose between institutional and noninstitutional strategies but often combine them to help ensure success. Maintaining legitimacy proves essential to both sides. This article argues that these events represent both constraints and favorable developments for subnational democracy in Peru.     

Central-local state contestations and urban management in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

Most scholars agree that the character of the urban governance system in Zimbabwe is a reflection of the dominance of one political party, namely, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). However, the increasingly prominent role of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in urban governance has heralded, since the early 2000s, a period marked by change, contestation and confusion. Simultaneously, the destabilising effect of contested urban governance politics on urban management in Zimbabwe has become entrenched. This article focuses on the interface between urban governance politics and urban management in Zimbabwe in the post-2000 era. It analyses how central government, through the local government ministry, local government statutes and appointed officials, structures, and even destabilises, the administration of urban affairs. The article concludes that urban governance is not merely a site of political contestation, as it has also profoundly influenced and altered the functioning of urban administration in Zimbabwe.     

“Hybrid Governance” and the Politics of Legitimacy in the Myanmar Peace Process

This article examines competing claims to political legitimacy and sovereignty in Myanmar’s conflict-affected areas of “limited statehood.” In the context of ceasefires and an emerging peace process since 2012, non-state-controlled “liberated zones” and areas of mixed insurgent and government authority constitute new political spaces, where multiple state and para-state actors demonstrate governance authority, extract resources and provide services to local communities. This article explores the dynamics and implications of these developments with reference to the emerging literatures on “rebel rulers” and “hybrid governance,” and examines the practices of donors and aid agencies operating in these areas. I argue that external actors seeking to “think and work politically” should move beyond standard peace-building and development packages based on strengthening the state, and adopt more conflict and context-sensitive approaches. Effective state building should take account of governance structures and service delivery functions established by ethnic armed organisations, which although under-resourced enjoy significant political legitimacy.     

Good Governance and Bermuda’s Public Access to Information Act

Abstract

This paper examines the context surrounding, and debates concerning, freedom of information-type legislation in the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda. It situates the law within a wider push by the British Government for good governance in the British Overseas Territories. It explores the expectation for more ‘open and transparent’ government held by international government organisations, the British Government, and the Bermudian electorate. It analyses the resultant political debates, which are framed by traditions of governance that encouraged secrecy and legacies of distrust between political parties formed soon after universal suffrage was introduced in the 1960s. It investigates the implementation of the Act in response to global, metropolitan and local pressures.     

The EU and the international socialization of gender equality: a case study of Tunisia’s AFTURD and Women and Citizenship (WAC)

The paper explores the impact of EU democracy promotion in the area of gender in Tunisia. It corroborates and adds nuance to the claim found in previous literature that the EU finances those CSOs whose leadership already embraces gender equality. It shows that members of these CSOs are socialized to different degrees and the internalization of gender equality differs depending on age, gender and location. Already socialized members increased their levels of attachment and investment. New CSO members differed in their socialization outcomes. Some undergo a full internalization process, others develop attachment to some features, while they reject those ideas that do not resonate in their value system. Findings also show that the EU successfully fosters local ownership in project management.     

日本地方治理中的公民社会组织参与模式——以自治会为例

公民社会组织的参与是治理体系的重要构成部分。其中地方治理强调地方分权和地方居民自治背景下的治理体系,地方居民为主体的公民组织是其重要参与者。日本的自治会作为地方社区的基层公民组织,无论从数量上还是分布规模来看都是日本最大的公民组织,是日本地方治理中的重要参与者。同时自治会又具有辅助行政功能的色彩,与市区町村的地方政府保持良好的合作、协调关系是其特色。因此自治会在参与地方治理中表现出了"行政媒介型公民参与模式"的特征。自治会一方面发动地方居民的力量参与地方治理,实现地方居民的主体性参与;另一方面通过参与协助地方政府的行政,和地方政府保持良好的合作关系进而达到影响地方政府的目的。     

Can Civil Society Organizations Solve the Crisis of Partisan Representation in Latin America?

This article takes up the question of whether civil society organizations (CSOs) can and do act as mechanisms of representation in times of party crisis. It looks at recent representation practices in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, three countries where political parties have experienced sharp crises after several decades of mixed reviews for their party systems. At such moments, any replacement of parties by CSOs should be especially apparent. This study concludes that the degree of crisis determines the extent that CSOs' representative functions replace partisan representation, at least in the short term. Where systems show signs of re‐equilibration, CSOs offer alternative mechanisms through which citizens can influence political outcomes without seeking to replace parties. Where crisis is profound, CSOs claim some of the basic party functions but do not necessarily solve the problems of partisan representation.     

De-Europeanisation of Civil Society and Public Debates in Turkey: The Kurdish Question Revisited

Abstract

This study discusses the dynamics of de-Europeanisation and the changing impact of Europe on the politically mobilised civil society involved in the public debates concerning Turkey’s Kurdish question. The article first critically assesses how and in what ways the legal and constitutional reforms on the freedom of assembly required by the European Union (EU) changed the political structure in which civil society organisations (CSOs) operate in Turkey. It then examines the views of CSOs on the potential roles and limitations of the EU in the Kurdish question and the peace process which lasted between March 2013 and July 2015. It also delineates the reasons why the political context of Europeanisation is not seen as instrumental by these CSOs to framing and justifying their arguments.     

Rights and obligations in civil society organizations: learning active citizenship in Turkey

This is a comparative analysis of whether and how participation in different types of civil society organizations (CSOs) enable an environment for the learning of active citizenship practices. Active citizenship is conceptualized and defined around three dimensions: civic action, social cohesion and self-actualization. The potential to transform citizenship practices is critical to the Turkish context where, rooted in its strong state tradition, citizenship has been conceptualized and practiced in a passive manner. CSOs in Turkey have burgeoned over the past two decades and provide an important space to pursue a wide range of interests and provide services. This study is an in depth analysis of participant experiences in six CSOs in Istanbul. The study distinguishes between CSOs based on indicators that are expected to create variation in how the participant is engaged. CSOs are classified as either rights or obligations based, membership or volunteer based, and finally based on their types of activities. This article presents results on the effect of participation in rights vs. obligations-based CSOs on the development of active citizenship practices.     

Forest Governance in a Changing World: Reconciling Local and Global Values

Abstract

There has been intense international debate on the governance of forests, in particular tropical forests. This has been driven by contrasting pressures from conservation and human rights groups, respectively calling for global values to prevail so as to protect biodiversity and reduce climate change, or for freedom of choice that empowers local people with the right to manage their own forests. Both sides have condemned irresponsible behaviour by forest officials and political actors, and highlighted the harmful impacts of disregard for the law. However, these normative approaches to forest governance have coincided with a fundamental re-examination of the objectives that societies have for their forest resources. The debate is not only about legality, but also about the legitimacy of forest laws and institutions. This review explores the divergence of views on long-term goals for forests and the implications for their governance. It emphasises that the real challenge is to reconcile the management of forests for values that accrue at different spatial and temporal scales. Forest governance needs to adapt, moving away from a framework based upon the neatly defined boundaries beloved of international organisations and treaties, and submitting to a constant process of adaptation and improvisation at a more local scale. The challenge is to find ways to aggregate such approaches into something that recognisably addresses the global values of forests and forest landscapes. Commonwealth countries have a wide range of forest conditions and are innovating with a range of governance options that provide lessons of potentially wide application.     

From Machine Politics to the Politics of Technocracy: Charting Changes in Governance in the Mexican Municipality1

Abstract — A typology comprising technocratic rationality versus political partisanship helps to identify several local government structures found in contemporary Mexico: political machines; autonomous-indigenous; technocratic; and modernising party governments. Case study research in over a dozen municipalities for three principal parties suggest a trend towards increasing technocratic and more administratively efficient municipal government and changing patterns of partisanship. This arises from new pressures associated with electoral opening, political alternation, new government actors, growing urban development complexity, and from federal reforms offering greater local government autonomy. However, while improved administration and technocratic governance often leads to positive outcomes, they do not necessarily imply ‘good government’.     

Bringing the Citizen Back In: Democratic Dimensions of Local Reforms in Germany and Japan

Since the 1990s, local governments in many countries have responded to the crisis of public finances, legitimacy, and a low level of performance with a combination of territorial and functional reforms, and the introduction of management and political reforms. This article focuses on the latter by analyzing new modes of citizen participation in Germany and Japan. It will employ theoretical assumptions from the local governance debate in order to explore the democratic dimensions of local government reforms. The question considered is concerned with the political context for new modes of participation and whether they can offer opportunities for an improvement of local democracy in terms of an increase in legitimacy and political capacity building for citizens. The conclusion will be reached that while we would expect more favorable preconditions in Germany with regard to a positive impact on local democracy, the opposite is the case: a relatively weak tradition of local autonomy and low resources of civil society actors in Japan explains their focus on co-production of services with local governments but at the same time offers greater opportunities for an improvement in local democracy.     

‘The backbone of the village’: gender,development, and traditional authority in rural Zanzibar

Recent processes of political decentralisation and the parallel movements asserting indigenous identity and autochthony have led to a resurgence of academic interest in ‘traditional’ and local forms of leadership and authority. Based on ethnographic research on the hirimu age-set system and related forms of traditional authority in the Zanzibari village of Jongowe, this article explores how these systems rooted in local history and identity are mitigated by contemporary national and international political circumstances. By examining how ‘traditional’ systems both create and circumscribe space for gendered expressions of power and how they work with the emerging forms of non-governmental organisation characteristic of contemporary development, the article considers how these dynamic local systems of governance maintain their legitimacy through both association with the past and engagement with contemporary politics. It argues for an understanding of ‘traditional authority’ that expands beyond hereditary leadership positions, and suggests that such forms of power, though embedded in historical collective identity, are expressions of contemporary forms of governance.     

新时代背景下地方政府智慧政务建设路径研究——以云南省为例

党的十九届四中全会为地方政府加强和创新社会治理、推进社会治理现代化、提高社会治理效能和水平提供了行动遵循。我国地方政府应从强化资源整合、设立协作平台、优化第三方合作等方面进行路径探索,推动我国地方政府在新时代背景下的智慧政务建设,营造发展新格局。     

大数据与服务型政府建设理念的共振:开放、共享与前瞻

随着21世纪移动互联网、物联网、人工智能等新技术的发展,人类进入了一个全新的发展阶段,即大数据时代。开放、共享与前瞻构成了大数据的基本发展理念。服务型政府作为与时俱进的政府,是以资源开放为前提,以公众参与为基础的开放性政府。它的开放性决定了它是一个共享性的政府,它会主动地搭建信息共享平台,引导其他治理主体合理地分享信息...     

The Politics of Counter-Expertise on Aerial Spraying: Social Movements Denouncing Pesticide Risk Governance in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

In various places in the world, aerial spraying of pesticides has met with resistance from local communities potentially endangered by toxic pesticide drift. Social movements, and the counter-expertise that they mobilise, often trigger changes in state regulations of the practice. This article describes such struggles over risk regulation in the Philippines, where aerial spraying is common in large monoculture banana plantations. It has provoked local activism contesting the socio-economic power of landed and business elites and has challenged the government’s approach to managing pesticide risks. This article develops the argument that different types of counter-expertise must be recognised. The case shows that it can be difficult for movements to articulate these different types of counter-expertise. Furthermore, the weak state characteristics of the Philippine state has shaped the ambiguous responses of risk governance to multiple actors’ divergent knowledge claims. The result is a legal impasse in which civil society has successfully pushed the issue of aerial spraying onto the national political arena, but the state has as yet been unable to develop a comprehensive pesticide risk regulation independent of powerful business interests.     

Insecure peace: understanding citizen and local government relations in a Maoist-affected region in India

This paper examines emerging citizen and local government relations in a village in the Junglemahal region of the state of West Bengal, once a major bastion of the Maoist insurgency in India. Since 2014, Junglemahal has not experienced a single Maoist-related incident. This has been widely attributed to the West Bengal government’s “model” handling of the insurgency, which rests on the rapid mobilization of public services through the non-elected arms of local governments, bypassing elected officials. How have Junglemahal’s residents experienced this particular form of post-conflict governance? Drawing on the culture-centered approach that ethnographically observes the processes of identifying development problems and developing community-grounded solutions to these problems, our findings indicate that the hyper-developmental state was paradoxically experienced by our respondents as a very distant entity. A recurrent theme in our interviews is the absence of a locally embedded party leadership that could be approached regarding issues of distributive justice. We argue that this desire for party mediation in public service delivery is an expression of a powerful social norm that has survived the conflict and ought to be integrated into post-conflict governance structures if the current peace is to endure.     

从组织行为模式看印尼大规模社交限制政策中的中央与地方关系

面对新冠肺炎疫情,印尼政府推出了大规模社交限制政策,其显著特点是中央和地方政府共同参与防疫.印尼地方政府在这项政策的出台与实施阶段扮演着怎样的角色?中央政府与地方政府间存在怎样的联动关系?这些都可以运用艾利森提出的政府决策组织行为模式进行分析.在大规模社交限制政策的出台与实施过程中,印尼中央政府各部门、中央政府与地方政府组织的行动均相互关联,各部门间存在显著的联动关系.这种联动关系的存在以及印尼的地方自治制度使地方政府可以通过变通执行、制定特殊政策、进行反馈等方式影响中央政府的政策内容及最终实施效果.随着地方自治制度下地方政府职能的加强,作为中央政府的基层组织,地方政府不再只是机械地执行中央政府政策的工具,而是所在地区社会服务的主要提供者.     

Civic Participation and Citizenship in Turkey: A Comparative Study of Five Cities

This study explores whether and how participation in civil society organisations (CSOs) has transformed citizenship attitudes in different cities in Turkey, and how civic participation and citizenship attitudes are affected by local politico-cultural dynamics. The analysis is based on interviews conducted with representatives of 36 CSOs in five Turkish cities: Konya, Edirne, Diyarbakir, Trabzon, and Izmir. Our comparative analysis of the five cities reveals that civic life is more active in cities marked by high levels of religiosity (Konya) and politicised by conflict (Diyarbakir). On the other hand, politicisation of civic life through party dominance and clientelism, as in Edirne and Trabzon, undermines trust and discourages participation.     

Mitigating the Risk to Primitive Accumulation: State-building and the Logging Boom in Solomon Islands

Abstract

In recent years, various forms of inter/transnational state-building have become increasingly common as a way of managing the perceived risk posed by dysfunctional governance in so-called fragile states to Western security. In Solomon Islands, the Australian government has led a robust and expansive regional intervention, designed to build the capacity of the Solomon Islands government and bureaucracy to provide more effective governance. Dominant approaches to state-building link state failure with a failure of development and typically involve considerable efforts to promote economic development through the establishing of institutional structures seen to be supportive of liberal markets. Though economic activity has expanded considerably in Solomon Islands following the initial 2003 intervention, much of this has occurred in the unsustainable logging industry, whose expansion is reliant upon primitive accumulation. Therefore, to the extent that the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands' (RAMSI) state-building programmes have supported market-led growth, they have unwittingly acted to mitigate the risk to primitive accumulation. However, the logging boom occurring on RAMSI's watch is likely to lead to future social and political instability, either as a result of resource-depletion or due to bottom-up forms of social conflict around the destruction of local habitats.