Administration of pastoral development: lessons from three projects in Africa

Administrative problems are a major cause of the poor performance of pastoral development projects in Africa. This study focused on two aspects of project administration: policy development and organizational structure. From the literature, 11 actions in these 2 areas were identified that were supposed to enhance project performance. These 11 propositions were tested against evidence from 3 pastoral development projects in Africa funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Eight of these actions were strongly associated with improved project performance. These results become the basis for guidelines to improve design and implementation. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Equity and Accountability: The Impact of State Accountability Systems on School Finance

Using an 11‐year panel data set containing information on revenues, expenditures, and demographics for every school district in the United States, we examine the effects of state‐adopted school accountability systems on the adequacy and equity of school resources. We find little relationship between state implementation of accountability systems and changes in school finance equity, though we do find evidence that states in which courts overturned the school finance system during the decade exhibited significant equity improvements. Additionally, while implementation of accountability per se does not appear linked to changes in resource adequacy, states that implemented strong accountability systems did experience improvements.     

CHASING SHADOWS? PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT OF POLICY ADVICE IN NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS

Performance measurement is an integral part of the New Zealand model of public management, as it is for many other modern systems of governmental administration. This article examines data on performance indicators for the policy advice function in five government departments, for the years 1992 to 2005, to determine which types of indicators are used, and to gauge the extent to which they offer meaningful information about the quality of policy advice. As part of its managerialist drive in the early 1990s, the government developed conceptual material designed to improve policy advice and management in departments. In general, our findings indicate that these initiatives did not lead over time to the further development of genuinely meaningful measures of the quality of policy advice, and that the indicators that have been used meet narrow managerial rather than broader political needs.     

The Attitudes of Senior Public Servants in Australia and New Zealand: Administrative Reform and Technocratic Consequence?

This article is in the tradition of comparative international research conducted over recent years into changing political-bureaucratic role relations. Its focus is the attitudinal orientation held toward various dimensions of their work by senior public servants in Canberra and Wellington. In particular, it is concerned to gauge officials' tolerance for pluralistic politics, their programmatic commitment, democratic sensibilities, and identification with conventions of ministerial responsibility. The study draws on and develops into four the two categories of public servants identified by Robert D. Putnam during the early 1970s in Western Europe. The information generated may be used as a baseline for future surveys of a similar type, which could identify changing patterns of distribution among the four basic categories: Political Bureaucrats, Classical Bureaucrats, Traditional Bureaucrats, and Technocrats. The present survey shows some significant differences between senior public servants in the two cities. In particular, those in Canberra are less programmatically committed than their Wellington counterparts, and considerably more “elitist” in their attitudes to popular involvement in policymaking. In both capitals officials are proactively rather than reactively orientated, a finding that may run counter to reformers' beliefs in the predominance of “Sir Humphrey Applebys.” The article goes on to relate the survey findings to major public sector changes that have taken place in both cities since the data for this article was collected. It speculates that, especially in New Zealand (but perhaps less so in Australia), these changes will see the emergence of more strongly technocratic attitudes among top public officials. Such attitudes may not sit easily with expectations that senior public servants be both politically accountable and managerially orientated. Finally, the four categories used in this study are related to the “images” of political-bureaucratic role relations developed in other comparative research.     

Managing Future Liability At Petroleum Impacted Sites Through Proactive Strategic Environmental Baselining

An important consideration of any commercial and industrial property acquisition or divestiture—whether it is a single gasoline station or a suite of oil refineries—is the extant environmental conditions of the property(s) at the time of the transaction. Property sellers and prospective buyers each consider and negotiate how any existing or future liability associated with extant environmental conditions will be handled. In spite of this forethought and the agreed contract terms, future litigation over unanticipated environmental contamination remains a real possibility. Often precipitating future litigation are disagreements surrounding whether “newly realized” contamination is old (pre-sale) or new (post-sale). As a result, environmental forensic investigations are often faced with the issue of “age-dating” this newly discovered contamination in order to determine whether it was released pre- or post-sale. Age-dating contamination can be an inherently difficult task to perform and technically defend. Technical arguments between experts can be short-circuited if there was an irrefutable understanding of the nature of extant contamination that had existed at the time of the sale. Conventional environmental due diligence investigations (Phase I and II site assessments) fall short of providing this understanding. In this paper, we discuss Strategic environmental baselining (SEB), a cost-effective and pro-active form of environmental due diligence that incorporates a key component of environmental forensics, that is, advanced chemical fingerprinting using modified EPA Methods that are tailored for hydrocarbon fingerprinting. Sufficient sampling and advanced chemical fingerprinting performed at the time of a transaction (or, at least, properly archived samples analyzed in the future as needed) provides the evidence that eliminates the need to “age-date” contamination at some future date. Advanced chemical fingerprinting data also provides detailed characteristics of the extant contamination and thereby, helps distinguish “old” from “new” contamination, regardless of alteration of the chemicals of concern by weathering. Armed with this information both buyers and/or sellers can protect themselves in the event of any future claim(s).     

Dissecting White-Collar Crime: Offense Type and Punitiveness

It is commonly asserted that the public is indifferent toward white-collar crime and hence is reluctant to “get tough” with more “respectable” criminals. However, such a contention fails to consider that there are many varieties of upperworld criminality and that the punitiveness of the public may differ markedly according to the type of offense involved. Based on a 1981 survey conducted in Galesburg, Illinois, we have attempted to investigate whether the criminal sanctions prescribed by citizens will vary when the broad category of white-collar crime is “dissected” into its component types. The data suggest that (1) there is considerable variation in punitiveness by type of offense; (2) while street crimes are generally given the harshest sentences, violent forms of white-collar illegality are accorded severe sanctions that exceed those meted out for some F.B.I, crimes; and (3) there is little support for the notion that the public responds leniently to upperworld crime.     

COMPARING RESISTANCE TO OPEN DATA PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT: PUBLIC EDUCATION IN BRAZIL AND THE UK

Much is known about governmental resistance to disclosure laws, less so about multi‐stakeholder resistance to open data. This study compares open data initiatives within the primary and secondary school systems of Brazil and the UK, focusing on stakeholder resistance and corresponding policy solutions. The analytical framework is based on the ‘Three‐Ps’ of open data resistance to performance metrics, corresponding to professional, political, and privacy‐related concerns. Evidence shows that resistance is highly nuanced, as stakeholders alternately serve as both principals and agents. School administrators, for example, are simultaneously principals to service providers and teachers, and at once agents to parents and politicians. Relying on a different systems comparison, in‐depth interviews, and newspaper content analyses, we find that similar stakeholders across countries demonstrate strikingly divergent levels of resistance. In overcoming stakeholder resistance – across socioeconomic divides – context conscientious ‘data‐informed’ evaluations may promote greater acceptance than narrowly ‘data‐driven’ performance measurements.     

IN SEARCH OF A DEPENDENT VARIABLE: COMMENT ON AVAKAME, 1998*

In a previous Criminology article, Avakame (1998) applies hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) techniques to Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) to disentangle individual‐ and aggregate‐level factors associated with offending. A close reading of his analysis reveals serious flaws in the dependent variable, which renders the results meaningless. Although it is ambiguous whether Avakame intended to model homicide “risk” or “frequency,” either is problematic. “Homicide frequency” has no logical connection to the individual‐level predictors; “homicide risk” is constant in SHR data, which makes the analysis impossible. In detailing these problems, we spell out the logical data requirements and offer sound empirical examples for an HLM analysis.