Understanding resource nationalism: economic dynamics and political institutions

Resource nationalism is on the rise around the globe. During the recent global resource boom, many governments have adopted nationalistic policies to maximise the political and economic benefits from their mining and energy sectors. Existing theories of resource nationalism rely upon economistic bargaining models, which fail to interrogate how political processes shape governments’ resource policy strategies. This article extends and develops these bargaining models by theorising the role of political institutions – specifically those found in rentier, developing and liberal market economies – in determining patterns of resource nationalism. A survey of 12 major resource-producing countries reveals that contemporary resource nationalism takes a range of distinct forms, which are connected to differences in political institutions that structure the objectives and policies of governments. It is therefore argued that while economic dynamics function as an enabling factor, political institutions are an equally important conditioning factor shaping the distinctive forms of resource nationalism observed today.     

Political Parties and Minority Governance in Hybrid Political Orders: Reflections from Lebanon’s Palestinian Settlements and Kosovo’s Serbian Enclaves

This article analyses how minority populations govern and are governed in South Lebanon’s informal Palestinian settlements and the Serbian enclave in North Kosovo. Drawing on literature about hybrid political orders, it is argued that in both settings political parties play a linchpin role in local governance. Based on this finding, three key functions of political parties in the governance of minority populations in hybrid political orders are identified: representation, provision and brokerage. Understanding the interdependencies and trade-offs between these different roles contributes to remedying the analytical blind spot regarding the nature, positions and roles of political parties in hybrid political orders.     

He who pays the piper calls the tune: Credit rating agencies and multilateral development banks

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have proved to be one of the most popular and enduring forms of international organization ever created, in large part because of their unique financial model. MDBs raise most of the resources needed for operations from international capital markets rather than government budgets, which greatly increases their financial capacity and attractiveness to member governments. However, this model has a trade-off: MDBs must pay close attention to the perceptions of bond investors, who have little interest in development goals. This paper explores the influence of credit rating agencies (CRAs) on MDB operations, based on an analysis of the methodologies used by CRAs to evaluate MDBs and interviews with MDB financial staff and CRA analysts. The study demonstrates that the methodology used by Standard and Poor’s seriously undervalues the financial strength of MDBs, limiting their ability to pursue their development mandate. These findings suggest that MDB dependence on capital market financing may weaken the ability of major shareholder governments to fully control MDB activities.     

Policies for Decent Labour Standards in Britain

Decent labour standards are a prerequisite for perceived justice and social cohesion. Insofar as they have been achieved in Britain in the past, it has been the result of collective bargaining between employers and trade unions. This has all but vanished in the private sector and, it is argued, there is no chance of its being revived. Upholding labour standards now lies in the provision of statutory individual employment rights. Experience with minimum wages provides some guidance on how these might be developed through social partnership arrangements. Once achieved, such rights amount to little without effective enforcement. Increasingly important for this is the use of the law and consumer campaigns to expose poor employment practices and complex supply chains so that offending employers can be held to account. If Britain is to avoid falling into a competitive ‘race to the bottom’ with Brexit, it must institute a robust means of implementing and enforcing decent labour standards.     

Evaluating Collaboration: The Solution to One Problem Often Causes Another

Collaboration has become the predominant approach to solving complex public problems. This choice, however, often is not driven by demonstrated effectiveness. Collaboration is instead chosen in the hope that a networked arrangement will be more effective than individual organizations working on the issue alone. Questions regarding collaborative effectiveness persist and constitute a significant challenge facing both public management practitioners and public administration scholars. In light of the case study in this issue of Public Administration Review by Maurits Waardenburg and colleagues, this article reviews the current thinking on the measurement of collaborative performance and discusses steps that professionals can take to evaluate the effectiveness of their collaborative endeavors.     

Development engineering meets development studies

The importance of science in development has been increasingly recognised in development discourses and policy since 2000. Engineering is less visible though engineering and engineers are important for the building and maintenance of transport, water, energy, industrial, informatics, urban and health systems. This article aims to investigate why engineering has not received more emphasis, including why development engineering has not been institutionalised like tropical medicine. It explores the nature of engineering in development, highlights recent efforts to headline engineering for development and, using analyses of what engineers know and do inside international development, suggests that its profile and effectiveness is emerging.     

An enterprising municipality? Municipalisation,corporatisation and the political economy of Birmingham City Council in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries

English local authorities not only have a high level of path dependency but also are capable of significant path-breaking innovations. Conventional ‘great man’ and punctuated equilibrium explanations of path-switching undervalue material factors. Theoretical sampling is used to develop and illuminate the way in which material conditions impact two significant changes in the institutional path of Birmingham City Council – the late nineteenth-century municipalisation of private providers (gas and water) and the early twenty-first century corporatisation of public services (back-office functions, building control, educational support, and museums and art galleries). Data are drawn from secondary sources including Council documents and contemporary accounts. Centrifugal pressure in the early twenty-first century result in arm’s length companies offering greater financial resilience. This contrasts with late nineteenth-century centripetal pressure to minimise the patchwork of private providers and trade for a wider public benefit.     

Reconnecting the person with humanity: how psychiatric nurses work with suicidal people

A modified grounded-theory (qualitative) study was undertaken in an attempt to discover the psychosocial processes involved when psychiatric/mental health nurses provide care to suicidal people, and in so doing, to induce the first comprehensive theory of psychiatric nursing care of the suicidal person. The findings highlight that the key psychosocial process (or core variable of the theory) is "reconnecting the person with humanity" and that this has three stages: reflecting an image of humanity, guiding the individual back to humanity, and learning to live.     

Model villages in the neoliberal era: the Millennium Development Goals and the colonization of everyday life

What explains the recent re-emergence of ‘model village’-style social experiments, and what does this tell us about the contradictions of neoliberal development? This paper focuses on two experiments of this kind – the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Rural Cities Project in southern Mexico – both of which aim to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated set of interventions at the village level. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's work on the colonization of everyday life, I argue that the Millennium Development Goals function in these cases to facilitate and legitimate the production of social reality based on a naturalised vision of market society. These utopian projects embody the paradoxical character of neoliberalization, demonstrating the necessarily social production of the supposedly natural order on which neoliberalism is discursively premised, while reproducing the strategies of social engineering that the neoliberal project is rhetorically oriented against.