External Actors and the Provision of Public Health Services in Somalia

Concentrating on the health sector, this article argues that the provision of collective goods through external actors depends on the level of state capacity and the complexity of the service that external actors intend to provide. It shows that external actors can contribute most effectively to collective good provision when the service is simple, and that simple services can even be provided under conditions of failed statehood. Effectively delivering complex services requires greater levels of state capacity. The article also indicates that legitimacy is a key factor to explain variance in health service delivery. To demonstrate this, the article assesses health projects in Somalia. It shows that simple services—malaria prevention and tuberculosis control—are provided effectively in all three Somali regions, including the war‐torn South‐Central region. In contrast, the HIV/AIDS project only achieved substantial results in Somaliland, the only region with a comparatively higher level of state capacity, and failed in the South‐Central region and Puntland.     

Dysfunctional state institutions,trust, and governance in areas of limited statehood

Areas of limited statehood where the state is absent or dysfunctional are rarely ungoverned or ungovernable spaces. The provision of rules and regulations, as well as of public goods and services – governance – does not necessarily depend on the existence of functioning state institutions. How can this be explained? To begin with, we identify functional equivalents to state institutions that fail to govern hierarchically. Moreover, we focus on informal institutions based on trust that are endogenous to areas of limited statehood. Personalized trust among community members enables actors to overcome collective action problems and enhances the legitimacy of governance actors. The main challenge in areas of limited statehood, which are often characterized by social heterogeneity and deep social and cultural cleavages (particularly in post‐conflict societies) is to move to generalized trust beyond the local level and to “imagined communities among strangers,” despite dysfunctional state institutions. We propose two mechanisms: First, the more group‐based identities are constructed in inclusive ways and the more group identities are cross‐cutting and overlapping, the more they lead to and maintain generalized trust. Second, experiences with fair and impartial institutions and governance practices – irrespective of whether state or non‐state – also lead to generalized trust beyond the local level and allow for the upscaling of governance.     

Transnational Partnerships: Conditions for Successful Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood

Transnational public–private partnerships (PPPs) are external governance actors in the field of development cooperation and vary in composition, potentially including nonprofit and for‐profit organizations, state and public agencies, and intergovernmental organizations. This article analyzes the conditions under which PPPs have been successful in providing access to basic services (water, sanitation, and food) in areas of limited statehood in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya. We focus on 10 projects carried out by two PPPs that differ in two key respects: legitimacy and institutional design. We show that partnerships with high empirical legitimacy and an appropriate institutional design are best able to fulfill complex tasks in contexts of limited statehood. A participatory approach can promote legitimacy and thus success; projects that lack legitimacy are prone to failure. Additionally, a project's institutional design must address problems that commonly affect areas of limited statehood: It should provide access to resources for capacity development, ensure adequate monitoring, and be tailored to local needs.     

State‐Building and the European Union's Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus: Why Legitimacy Matters

This article asks under which conditions the state‐building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites “from below.”     

Multinational Corporations and Service Provision in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Legitimacy and Institutionalization Matter

This article considers attempts by multinational corporations to provide services in areas of limited statehood. Under which conditions are such attempts effective? We make two arguments: First, they must be legitimate to be effective. Second, the institutional design of the firms’ service provision programs is an important factor for their effectiveness. We assess these arguments by analyzing multinationals in the South African car industry fighting HIV/AIDS, and international mining firms in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo trying to improve public security. The analysis demonstrates that under conditions of legitimacy and high degrees of institutionalization firm programs effectively contribute to service provision in areas of limited statehood.     

Governance Delegation Agreements: Shared Sovereignty as a Substitute for Limited Statehood

Governance delegation agreements—international treaties allowing external actors legal authority within host states for fixed terms—succeed in simple and, under certain conditions, complex state‐building tasks. These deals are well institutionalized and have input legitimacy because ratification requires sufficient domestic support from a ruling coalition. In order to obtain that input legitimacy, however, host states constrain external actors commensurate with their level of statehood: Stronger states delegate less legal authority. This article argues that these constraints, which produce joint rather than complete authority, require external actors to work within state structures rather than substituting for them, and thus make coordination of complex tasks more difficult. A quantitative overview of data on consent‐based peacekeeping missions complements a qualitative analysis focused on comparative case studies in Melanesia and Central America to test the theory. The results support the theory and suggest that these deals hold promise particularly for accomplishing complex tasks in especially weak states.     

Why International Trusteeship Fails: The Politics of External Authority in Areas of Limited Statehood

International trusteeship is widely touted as a solution to the problem of failed states, an extreme form of limited statehood. Current theories of legitimacy and statebuilding suggest that trusteeships should produce more capable states. These theories, however, fail to take into account the self‐interest and political strategies available to trustees and politicians within new states. We pose a more political model of statebuilding by the international community, the trustee, and national politicians that predicts that trusteeship will fail to produce states with greater capacity. We test for the effects of trusteeship on state capacity, measured by service provision, by creating a matched sample of countries. We find that there is no evidence that states under trusteeship develop greater capacity leading to better provision of public goods than comparable states not under trusteeship. Would‐be statebuilders must be more aware of the political incentives of all parties involved in the process.     

Intergovernmental Political Competition in American Federalism

Many policies in the United States are jointly determined by federal and state actions. In the game theoretic model offered here, politicians in both the state and national governments seek credit for providing goods desired by the public and avoid blame for the taxes necessary to provide the goods. In line with Peterson's (1995) theory of functional federalism, the level of government that is better able to supply particular goods and services tends to take the lead in their provision, even to the extent of fully crowding out much less efficient governments. However, under a broad set of circumstances, both state and national politicians seek credit via public spending, and their joint provision leads to a relative "oversupply" of public goods and services, and thus to "overtaxation." Under joint provision, states vary in their responses to changing federal spending patterns based both on the causes of the national changes and on state characteristics .     

Innovations in the provision of public goods and services

Current efforts at administrative reform in both developed and developing countries have invariably focused on the critical issue of provision of public goods and services. The accumulated experience and attendant innovations are therefore vast. Few attempts have been made to pull this experience together and draw salient features which might be of use to newcomers to the task of improving provision of public goods and services. This article draws on a panel of experts and government officials convened by the author who have reflected and/or experimented with innovative approaches to public good and service provision. After discussing the role of the state, market and civil society relative to public goods and services, the article lays out a set of basic institutional options for innovations in provision. The article concludes with some strategic considerations on the sequencing of steps to achieve successful market-based innovations in the provision of public goods and services in the context of the minimalist and the strong but restrained state. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regulatory mobilization and service delivery at the edge of the regulatory state

Where there is weak state capacity to carry out regulatory, redistributional, and developmental functions characterizing much of the developing world, the role of governance and service delivery is also performed by a myriad of private actors. Institutional reform in the utility sector in developing countries has often failed to distinguish between social and economic regulation. I show how private actors like NGOs and local community groups undertake what I term “regulatory mobilization” to influence the new rules of the service delivery game, as well as to deliver much‐needed basic services to urban poor communities. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out in the Philippines, this article reveals and explains the politics of the informal sector at the edge of the regulatory state. More than a decade since the privatization of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System in Metro Manila in 1997, water access for the urban poor remained limited as privatized water utilities faced difficulties in extending service provision. In the context of an unpredictable regulatory landscape and an oligarchic patrimonial state, unexpected collective action by organized urban poor communities and NGOs has taken place around water as a subsistence right. Combining hybrid mobilizations to obtain water as well as influencing the rules governing their provision, these forms of regulatory mobilization appear to be peripheral and episodic. However, depending on how local and sectoral politics are conflated, such regulatory mobilization may sometimes not only result in obtaining subsistence goods, but may also occasionally project countervailing power in the policy sector, and influence formal regulatory frameworks in surprising ways.     

New rôles of government in supporting manufacturing: the capabilities of support agencies in Ghana and Zimbabwe

This study examines the roles and capabilities of executive agencies in providing support services to manufacturing in Ghana and Zimbabwe. It asserts that the new roles of government during and after adjustment have not been clearly defined and are in fact more complex than running state‐owned productive enterprises. The basic shift is said to be from direct provision of goods and services to the provision of an enabling environment through support in areas such as training, information, finance, export and investment promotion and technology. Economic development is stimulated when there is a harmonious relationship between entrepreneurs and their institutional environment, much of which is provided by the state. This article concentrates upon the role of meso‐level agencies in changing incentives faced by entrepreneurs and shifting them out of unproductive activity and into productive entrepreneurship, and outlines some of the preliminary results from related research. There are several factors which influence the capabilities of agencies providing these services. Essentially they may be divided into internal and external factors. This allows the analysis to consider not only budgeting and incentive systems but also the impact of external pressures experienced by any given agency. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On collective goods,private wealth,and the core solution of simple games with sidepayments

This essay identifies consequences for the core solution in a class of social decision problems concerning the provision of collective goods (or bads) if the rules are modified to permit sidepayments. In these problems, a kind of formal decision procedure that includes any weighted or unweighted majority rule governs only the decision about collective goods. Each decision about collective goods, however, implies a vector of the agents' endowments of private wealth that can, but need not, vary across the alternatives. Any agent may offer to make sidepayments from this endowment that are contingent on the collective goods decision, but the agent holds preferences that, given any fixed decision about collective goods, strictly increase in the agent's own wealth. The results indicate that the core's response to introducing the possibility of sidepayments depends on whether any agent possesses a veto over the collective goods decision. If no one has a veto, then an outcome belongs to the core of the game with sidepayments only if no sidepayment is made and the same decision about collective goods belongs to the core of the associated game without sidepayments. In this case, introducing the possibility of sidepayments does not bring a new collective goods decision into the core. Indeed, merely adding the possibility of sidepayments can cause the core to vanish. On the other hand, if at least one agent possesses a veto, then introducing sidepayments can (but need not) lead to a new core solution concerning the decision about collective goods. In any such new solution, at least one agent who has a veto — but no one who lacks it — receives a sidepayment.     

'All for One and One for All': Transactions Cost and Collective Action

Rational choice analysis of collective action predicts that individual members of a large group will not contribute voluntarily towards a common cause; members of large groups attribute no significance to individual action. Large groups are mobilised by the attraction of private goods and services; private interest, rather than identity with a common cause, is the stimulus. Yet the efficacy of such selective incentives depends on the signal that erstwhile 'profits' (from the provision of private goods) are dedicated to achieving a collective goal. At the same time, the signal that collective action is 'non-profit' enhances the intrinsic value of the act of participation. When the impact of individual action on outcome is difficult to discern, individuals rely on low-cost signals relating to process . There are incentives to identify with the pursuit of a common cause when collective action is deemed 'non-profit' and a common goal is non-rival.     

Privatization,information and incentives

In this paper the choice between public and private provision of goods and services is considered. In practice, both modes of operation involve significant delegation of authority, and thus appear quite similar in some respects. The argument here is that the main difference between the two modes concerns the transactions costs faced by the government when attempting to intervene in the delegated production activities. Such intervention is generally less costly under public ownership than under private ownership. The greater ease of intervention under public ownership can have its advantages; but the fact that a promise not to intervene is more credible under private production can also have beneficial incentive effects. The fundamental privatization theorem (analogous to the fundamental theorem of welfare economics) is presented, providing conditions under which government production cannot improve upon private production. The restrictiveness of these conditions is evaluated.     

Accountability Mechanisms in Public Services: Activating New Dynamics in a Prison System

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study analyzes the activation of accountability mechanisms in public services and the changing dynamics between relevant actors. It remains unclear how accountability relationships emerge, when they are introduced, and under which circumstances administrative values are challenged over the course of administrative reforms. Our analysis of a Brazilian state prison system elucidates some of these elements by investigating a case in which an institutional crisis resulted in administrative reforms and new accountability dynamics. Our findings suggest that initiating accountability reforms before some services reach the level of severe crisis may be particularly difficult. We demonstrate that the development of accountability relationships is largely influenced by prominent actors capable of strategizing their actions in a collaborative fashion with other stakeholders. Additional layers of external regulation are also crucial to reduce the risks of political and regulatory capture, engage previously absent stakeholders, activate accountability mechanisms, and make reforms possible.     

Informal Accountability, Socially Embedded Officials, and Public Goods Provision in Rural China: The Role of Lineage Groups

In recent studies, analysts have found that so-called “informal accountability” exerts significant influence on public goods provision in rural China. According to these studies, such informal accountability may be formed through the embedment of local officials in social groups. However, there seems to be no agreement on the identification of such embedment and the conditions under which this embedment can influence public goods provision. To advance the literature of this debate, this study examines village officials who are embedded in such social groups as lineage groups and explores their role in shaping public goods provision in rural China based on a unique set of nationwide-survey data. Using a direct measure of social embeddedness of village officials, we have found that the embedment of village officials in a social group can be identified through a direct measure designed in this study and that the embedment has a positive effect on public goods provision in rural China. Finally, we draw some important policy implications from our findings.     

Rational Choice and Politics

The rational-choice approach brings scientific deductive methods to bear on politics. Appropriate methods are derived from physics, when actors interact probabilistically but non-rationally, and from game theory when they interact rationally. Collective action problems occur in the provision of public goods. As policies are themselves public goods, this leads to the game-theoretic analysis of voting, bureaucracy and lobbies. It is inconsistent to believe that economic actors are basically self-interested but that political actors are not. Rather, one should treat people as equally (not necessarily wholly) self-interested in each sphere. The paradoxes of social choice are then shown to have important implications for political science.     

The lightship in economics

What role does government play in the provision of public goods? Economists have used the lighthouse as an empirical example to illustrate the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. This inquiry, however, has neglected the private provision of lightships. We investigate the private operation of the world’s first modern lightship, established in 1731 on the banks of the Thames estuary going in and out of London. First, we show that the Nore lightship was able to operate profitably and without government enforcement in the collection of payments for lighting services. Second, we show how private efforts to build lightships were crowded out by Trinity House, the public authority responsible for establishing and maintaining lighthouses in England and Wales. By including lightships into the broader lighthouse market, we argue that the provision of lighting services exemplifies not a market failure, but a government failure.     

The Provider/Purchaser Split: A Report from New Zealand

This article focuses on a narrow topic: the provider/purchaser split. It discusses the theoretical arguments justifying the separation of state agencies providing goods and services from the agencies which purchase those services on behalf of government. It also discusses some of the main criticisms of the theory and briefly reviews application of the theory to reform of New Zealand's state sector provision of policy advice, health care and scientific services.