Aspects of local government and politics in china: 1955–58

This study, based on work in six villages, seeks insights into the likely effect of the introduction of prospective land‐, water‐, and crop‐management technologies, being researched at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi‐Arid Tropics, on the existing village labour‐use patterns in one major relevant region: peninsular India. Explicit attention is given to the similarities and differences between small and large farms and their relevance to the adoption of the prospective new technologies.

Regional variation in labour utilisation reveals a tremendous employment‐creating potential in the existing tank and well irrigation systems in the Alfisols of peninsular India. The prospective technologies should increase employment, compared with existing technologies, by at least 100 per cent in the Alfisols and by over 300per cent in the deep Vertisols— but with some increase in the seasonal variability of labour demand. Given the existing availability of labour, there will be, with the improved watershed technologies, major farm labour bottlenecks. These should eventually generate increased wage rates and employment potentials. However, even temporary adverse effects on the timelessness of operations could be critical to the success of a double‐cropping and/or intercropping technology aiming at greatly increased yields. This would create demands for selective mechanisation, for example, of threshing.     

POLICY IMPLEMENTATION IN AN AFRICAN STATE: AN EXTENSION OF KINGDON'S MULTIPLE‐STREAMS APPROACH

Kingdon's multiple‐streams framework, which emerged in the mid‐1980s, today forms one of the indispensable analytical frameworks for understanding public policy agenda‐setting. However, it is only in the context of wealthy countries that this approach has been validated for setting the agenda of national and international policies. This article reports the results of empirical research in an African state studying the transferability of a threefold theoretical innovation. The question under consideration is whether the multiple‐streams framework is useful for examining public policy implementation at the local level and in the context of a low income country. The research findings confirm the premise that the multiple‐streams framework can be extended and can lead to the formulation of several theoretical propositions.     

Anthropo-Technology

Information in our era of networks and genome maps, according to Sloterdijk, binds man and his tools that transform nature into one operative system. This “post‐metaphysical” condition not only tends to abolish the separation between the subjective person and “objective spirit,” but the distinction between culture and nature as well. For Sloterdijk, one co‐intelligent system now encompasses subject and object, culture and nature. This information ecology gives man a new fused identity with the other, with his world and his tools. He is no longer an identity apart. Such a civilization of co‐intelligent “anthropo‐technology” requires an entirely new perspective on ethics. For Sloterdijk, today's passionate debates over man's domination of nature or technology's domination of man miss the point because they are fearfully rooted in the obsolete master‐slave dichotomy that holds such a hallowed place in Western philosophy. As Sloterdijk sees it, this dichotomy, based as it was on the opposition between subject and object and between culture and nature, needs to be updated: In our time, master and slave are dissolved in the advance of intelligent technologies whose operability is non‐dominating. One can only talk about self‐manipulation, not slavery; not about a master, but about self‐mastery. Unleashing the basic force of nature against the people of Hiroshima may have been possible prior to the information revolution when “allo‐technology” (the division between man and machine) still predominated. But, the anthropo‐technology of the post‐metaphysical 21st century, Sloterdijk contends, holds out a generous promise. In this system bound together by information feedback and artificial intelligence, the preservationist instinct of the co‐beneficiaries of co‐intelligence will limit the destructive acts of anthropo‐technology against itself. Between the lines, Sloterdijk even seems to suggest that the “astraying” fate of alienated Being may at last find its dwelling place rejoined with nature and the world. In May 2000, Sloterdijk gave lectures at the Goethe Institute in Boston and in Los Angeles that covered these topics. Some excerpts appear below. — NATHAN GARDELS , editor     

Navigating the dichotomy: The top public servant's craft

How in their day‐to‐day practices do top public servants straddle the politics–administration dichotomy (PAD), which tells them to serve and yet influence their ministers at the same time? To examine this, we discuss how three informal ‘rules of the game’ govern day‐to‐day political–administrative interactions in the Dutch core executive: mutual respect, discretionary space, and reciprocal loyalty. Drawing from 31 hours of elite‐interviews with one particular (authoritative) top public servant, who served multiple prime ministers, and supplementary interviews with his (former) ministers and co‐workers, we illustrate the top public servants’ craft of responsively and yet astutely straddling the ambiguous boundaries between ‘politics’ and ‘administration’. We argue that if PAD‐driven scholarship on elite administrative work is to remain relevant, it has to come to terms with the boundary‐blurring impacts of temporal interactions, the emergence of ‘hybrid’ ministerial advisers, and the ‘thickening’ of accountability regimes that affects both politicians and public servants.     

President Gloria Macapagal‐Arroyo's anti‐corruption strategy in the Philippines an evaluation

Fighting corruption has been one of the priority issues for President Gloria Macapagal‐Arroyo for the past five years. Faster‐paced and result‐oriented implementation of anti‐corruption projects did bring some tangible results. There are new laws and executive and administrative orders related to anti‐corruption which have been passed. New strategies during her second term such as strengthening anti‐corruption agencies, more social value formation at the national level, and the use of e‐procurement in the government system, show encouraging signs for success. However, despite the effort and achievement, the public perception of corruption and sincerity of the government performance in fighting corruption remains unchanged or has even worsened. Is it due to lack of political will? Does this mean that the government is losing the war on corruption? The answers are complex, but two important reasons are the slow progress to improve the country's economy and the ineffectiveness of the government which has resulted in a negative public perception. The government needs to gain more public confidence so that the anti‐corruption reforms will strengthen good governance and make it accountable.     

Aid for the poorest: Some early lessons of UK experience

The paper presents an interim review of recent attempts to reach the poorest people in developing countries through aid policy from the viewpoint of one donor, the United Kingdom. It concludes that the UK has achieved a modest increase in the proportion of aid aimed at the poorest between 1974 and 1979; that poverty‐focused projects are in general more local‐cost intensive, and have lower rates of return, than others; and that the principal difficulties in the way of successful implementation of poverty‐focused projects are: excessive size, an over‐rapid rate of disbursement, inadequate local cost provisions and failure to specify the target group or the repayment strategy with sufficient precision. It is argued that there are political obstacles to removing the second and third of these obstacles in donor countries, and to removing the fourth in recipient countries also.     

ONE‐STOP SHOPS FOR SOCIAL WELFARE: THE ADAPTATION OF AN ORGANIZATIONAL FORM IN THREE COUNTRIES

In recent years welfare services in Western Europe have been criticized for poor coordination. In response, ‘seamlessness’ has emerged as a vision for public administration with ‘one‐stop shops' viewed as means to reach this. This article conceptualizes the one‐stop shop and presents a three country case study to examine its drivers and its adaptation. In all countries the reforms meant mergers driven by hopes for a single entrance to services as well as proximity to citizens. However, the analysis of task portfolios, participant structure, instruments and autonomy reveal important variations in the adaptations. The specific configurations of one‐stop shops that emerged were partially a product of compromises and negotiations influenced by the political and performance priorities of central government. The classical trade‐off between specialization and coordination persists, but by offering users ICT‐based services one can to some extent maintain specialization behind the frontline and still provide services that are coordinated from a user perspective.     

IMPORTANCE‐PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF CITIZEN SATISFACTION SURVEYS

This paper introduces the method of importance‐performance analysis of citizen surveys, a useful approach to understanding citizen satisfaction with local government services. Using data from a US national online panel, we directly compare two approaches to importance‐performance analysis: one employing an explicitly stated measure of importance, the other using a measure of importance derived from regression analysis. The different results that the two approaches give suggest that local government administrators and policy analysts arrive at distinctly different conclusions depending on which importance measure they use. These differences are illustrated by simulating the change in citizen satisfaction that would result from improvement in the top‐rated services according to each measure. Research and policy implications are discussed.     

WEBER AND KAFKA: THE RATIONAL AND THE ENIGMATIC BUREAUCRACY

Max Weber's and Franz Kafka's respective understandings of bureaucracy are as different as night and day. Yet, Kafka's novel The Castle is best read with Max Weber at hand. In fact, Kafka relates systematically to all the dimensions in Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy and give us a much‐contemplated parody, almost a counter‐punctual ideal type, based on four key observations: bureaucratic excesses unfold in time and space; a ‘no error’ ideology generates inescapable dilemmas; inscrutability is a life condition in bureaucracy; civil servants end up walking on the spot, just like the figures in Escher's painting: Ascending and Descending. Nevertheless, Weber and Kafka can both be right. While Kafka looks at the bureaucratic phenomenon through persons who are marginalized, Weber's perspective is historic‐comparative and top‐down. Are the observations of the one more correct than the other? The question is meaningless. As two opposite poles, Weber and Kafka ‘magnetize’ each other.     

Directed credit and investment in small‐scale industry in India: Evidence from firm‐level data 1965–78

Panel data on 788 modern sector Indian firms during 1965–78 are used to analyse the link between the size of a firm and its financial environment. Exogeneity tests reveal that large firms with improved investment prospects could obtain external finance at the margin, but that small firms could not. The policy of directing bank credit accordingly relaxed a binding constraint on small firms, raising investment. Assuming that all of the rise in the credit‐sales ratio in small firms was policy‐induced then so was about one third of the 170 per cent rise during 1965—78 in their investment—sales ratio.     

Share tenancy,external risk and labour use: A note on Pakistani data

This article outlines a labour market based explanation of the institution of sharecropping. It is argued that two distinct rationales for sharecropping within the non‐tradable labour based explanation pertain to the supervisory labour endowments of land owners on the one hand and non‐supervisory family labour endowments of tenant households on the other. The validity of these rationales is tested at a macro level based on data computed for each district of the Punjab and Sind provinces in Pakistan. It is found that a labour market based explanation of sharecropping is important in the Pakistan context. The analysis has some regional and dynamic implications as well.     

Lawful and unlawful seizure of aircraft

Professor Sundberg attempts to show that there is a very important reservation made when the word “unlawful” was included in the title of the antihijacking convention entered into at The Hague in 1970, and that the avenues into which it leads are largely unexplored. With the aid of a number of litigated hijacking cases he shows that the doctrine of justification—one of the general defences admitted in all penal‐law systems—also addresses itself to matters occurring abroad, including foreign penal‐law systems, and that this doctrine is sufficiently broad to provide good defenses in a great many hijacking cases simply as a side effect of what foreign policy is pursued. Professor Sundberg ends with the pessimistic note that conventions probably cannot be drafted without such a reservation simply because governments cannot achieve by convention what they have not succeeded to achieve at home by statute.     

An Alternative Understanding of Political Participation: Challenging the Myth of Political Indifference in Hong Kong

Abstract

The characterization of Hong Kong's political culture as one of indifference deserves further examination as the inquiries conducted by proponents of the indifference framework have all used a narrow definition of political participation. This paper begins with a critique of the inherent narrowness of orthodox definitions of political participation: political participation as acts making demands on a government; as lawful activities; and as activities vis‐a‐vis one government. Contrast these assumptions, the author contends that political participation needs to be understood as activities that include both making demands on and showing support for a government, as well as both lawful and unlawful activities. Furthermore, the author refutes the one‐government‐locus theme of the orthodox concept and proposes a three‐government‐loci theme that is more relevant to the historical experience of the colonial Hong Kong. The political relevance of the social domain and its implications on broadening the definition of political participation are discussed. Finally, the author argues for the importance of considering discursive participation as a form of political participation in Hong Kong.     

INNOVATION,PUBLIC POLICY AND PUBLIC SERVICES DELIVERY IN THE UK. THE WORD THAT WOULD BE KING?

This paper explores the dialogue about innovation in public services currently found within public policy and creates an interaction between research and practice about its strengths and limitations. It argues that this dialogue is a flawed one, often both at odds with the existing evidence and lacking a holistic understanding of the nature of innovation and its distinctive policy and managerial challenges. It therefore synthesizes existing research to challenge current public policy thinking about the role and determinants of innovation in public services. It concludes by offering five lessons towards effective policy‐making and implementation that would provide a more sophisticated and evidence‐based approach to the encouragement and sustenance of public service innovation – and four key areas for further research.     

Export instability and the domestic economy: Questions of causality

The conventional view concerning the impact of export instability on the domestic economies of developing countries is one of pessimism. Export instability is thought to adversely affect the short‐run stability and longer‐run growth of income. Empirical evidence on these matters is, however, inconclusive. This article applies a Granger/Sims reduced form approach to examining whether export instability generates short‐run instability in domestic income. For each of a sample of 20 trade‐dependent countries the results obtained strongly support the contention that export instability induces short‐run macroeconomic instability.     

A THEORY OF CULTURE‐SWITCHING: LEADERSHIP AND RED‐TAPE DURING HURRICANE KATRINA

This article draws upon studies of organizational culture and sense‐making to develop a theory of culture‐switching. Culture‐switching occurs when organizational actors shift emphasis from one existing organizational cultural assumption to another to reshape organizational action. The concept is demonstrated in a case study of the Hurricane Katrina response by the US Department of Defense (DOD). A slow initial DOD response arose because of self‐imposed red‐tape designed to limit engagement in crisis response, reflecting a cultural assumption of the need to maintain autonomy. DOD leaders altered the nature of the response by committing to another widely‐shared cultural assumption: a ‘can‐do’ approach to achieving difficult goals regardless of obstacles. The case illustrates how different organizational cultural assumptions interact with red tape to foster either inertia or a proactive response.     

Europe and local government

The Care in the Community initiative has resulted in a renewed interest in collaboration between local and health authorities. The focus of such collaboration is commonly on the transfer of long‐stay patients from psychiatric and mental handicap hospitals that are due to close, though the extent of local authority involvement in closure programmes varies considerably.

Joint planning typically involves a number of local authority departments: social services, housing, chief executives’ offices and legal services. It sometimes also involves education, recreation and leisure departments. Joint planning can be very time‐consuming and can call for considerable effort. It frequently gives rise to a good deal of conflict between the participating agencies. The pay‐offs, on the other hand, often appear to be small. Such plans as are finally implemented tend to be small‐scale: attempts at broader strategic planning almost invariably come to grief. The question then has to be asked, whether joint planning is worth all the effort. In the end, the primary justification for such planning has to lie in its ability to produce more appropriate services for service‐users.

This paper examines one local authority's experience of joint planning in relation to the closure of a large psychiatric hospital. Despite several setbacks, joint plans were eventually agreed and a number of former long‐stay patients were able to move into the community. The paper considers both the achievements and the shortcomings of the authority's collaboration with the health service.     

THE SEPARATION/SPECIFICATION DILEMMA IN CONTRACTING: THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT EXPERIENCE IN VICTORIA

This article draws on evidence from case studies of local government contracting in the Australian state of Victoria. It argues that one of the key elements of competitive tendering – the separation of purchasers from providers – undermines another of its essential mechanisms – the specification of services – at the point where previously in‐house services are exposed to competition. The managers who are to become purchasers lack the requisite knowledge of services, which instead resides in the minds of the service delivery staff whose work is to be subjected to competitive processes. Separating purchasing from service‐provision ‘distances’ the staff from the managers, impairing employees’ willingness to share the relevant information. At the same time, the introduction of competition increases the probability that staff will withhold that knowledge, and makes it harder on probity grounds to maintain the type of collaborative relationship which might overcome their reluctance to share it.     

A farm‐sizewise analysis of irrigation distribution in India

This article analyses and describes the relationship between the size of operational holding on the one hand and various irrigation and irrigation‐related variables, on the hand, using cross‐section regression analysis of farm‐sizewise/statewise Indian data. The overall conclusion that emerges from the analysis is that irrigation development in India as a whole seems to be such that its propagation and diffusion among agricultural households seems to be somewhat in favour of larger farms. Even though the government predominantly controls the development and distribution of flow‐sources of irrigation, especially of canal irrigation, it does not seem to have produced any significant positive impact on reducing the level of inequity involved in the distribution of irrigation across farm‐size groups.     

PERSUASION AS GOVERNANCE: A STATE‐CENTRIC RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Debates about governance and the relationship between governance and government have focused upon markets, hierarchies and networks as principal modes of governance. In this paper we argue that persuasion constitutes a further and distinctive mode of governance, albeit one which interpenetrates other modes of governance. In order to assess the nature, limitations and scope of persuasion and the complex relationships between markets, hierarchies, networks on the one hand and persuasion on the other, we interpret persuasion through the prism of two theoretical perspectives on governance. We argue that the society‐centred perspective usefully draws our attention to the role played by non‐state actors in the exercise of governance through persuasion but that a state‐centric relational account can help us to better understand important facets of persuasion as a mode of governance.