we say what we are and we do what we say: feminisms in educational practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

From four countries (Canada, England, New Zealand and the United States of America) and five disciplines (Counselling & Guidance, Adult Education, Early Years Education, Indigenous Education and Human Development), five feminists in academia come together to share how feminism affects their practice. Ranging in reflections on teaching, research, service and scholarship, this article describes a cooperative enquiry into feminism in action in Aotearoa, New Zealand.     

A Model of Spoils Politics

Accounts of state failure in the developing world frequently highlight a logic of "spoils politics" in which a government and an opposing faction vie for control of the state and the accompanying spoils. Attempts to buy the opposition off play a key role in this logic, and an informational problem often complicates these efforts. Because of limited transparancy, the government generally has a better idea about the actual size of the spoils than the opposition does. We formalize this aspect of spoils politics as a signaling game in which the government has private information about the size of the spoils and tries to co-opt the opposition by offering a share of the spoils. The opposition can accept the offer or reject it by fighting. Consistent with the strong empirical finding that the probability of civil war is higher when income is low, the probability of breakdown increases as the size of the spoils decreases. We also study the effects of uncertainty, the opposition's military strength, the cost of fighting, and power-sharing agreements on the probability of fighting.     

Give them toys? Military allocations and regime stability in transitional democracies

In contrast to the conventional wisdom that democratization reduces coups, 46% of coups targeted democracies from 2000–2009, twice the rate seen in the prior half-century. Efforts to explain coups have arrived at wildly varied conclusions regarding the vulnerability of democracies. We argue that this is attributable to regime type acting as a conditional influence. We theorize that democratization incentivizes old elites to veto the process, and these vetoes are more likely to occur when the new regime cannot credibly commit to the military’s corporate interests. Using cross-national data for 172 states for the years 1952–2009, we find that though young democracies are more vulnerable to coups than either civilian authoritarian regimes or older democracies, this vulnerability is mitigated when military expenditures are near or above the sample mean. We also find that commonly argued determinants of coups appear to be driven by their influence in democracies, suggesting the need for scholars to revisit commonly held assumptions regarding autocratic survival.     

Big Windows and Little Windows: Implementation in the 'Congested State'

This paper argues for the need to re-assess models of policy implementation in the 'congested state'. This re-appraisal focuses on two main directions. The first involves locating implementation in the context of wider models of the policy process. We fuse three models, those of Kingdon, Wolman, and Challis et al ., to form a new 'policy streams' approach. The second examines implementation in multi-level governance. In the UK and elsewhere, much of the focus of traditional implementation studies has been on the link between one central government department and a local agency. However, this vertical (central-local) dimension fails to give sufficient stress to the other horizontal dimensions of 'central-central' and 'local-local'. Paraphrasing Kingdon's terms, implementation models also need to incorporate the 'little windows' at local level as well as the 'big' windows at national level. Using evidence relating to the implementation of UK policy towards health inequalities, this paper argues successful implementation is more likely when the three policy streams are linked across the three dimensions. The model is thought to be applicable to other areas of the public sectors and complex issues facing all governments.     

Professional Innovation: Corporate Lawyers and Private Lawmaking

Through an intensive examination of the development and diffusion of a new legal device—the shareholder rights' plan or poison pill—this article demonstrates the entrepreneurial, lawmaking role of corporate lawyers. This study case suggests that corporate lawyers may act as legal entrepreneurs, developing and promoting new legal devices and strategies on behalf of actual and potential clients. If affirmed by the courts, these devices or techniques are rapidly diffused thereby contributing to the creation of new legal knowledge. The creation and successful defense of the shareholder rights' plan led to both new caselaw and statute law. In this way, corporate practitioners contribute to the creation of new legal knowledge, suggesting a bottom-up approach to knowledge creation rather than the conventional top-down view. It is suggested that legal innovations like the shareholder rights' plan are more likely to be developed in newer firms than in established firms and in specialized firms than general service law firms.     

Culture: Intervention or solidarity?

This article deals with certain themes concerning religion, culture, and development, in part to help to set the context for the rest of this edition. It considers the religious and/or cultural background of many Northern agencies and individuals, and its effect on their development agenda. Arguing that local cultural values define what development means, it looks at some of the cultural issues -- political and moral, thematic and practical -- which arise in North-South development interaction. It concludes that the history of intervention, whatever its motives, has been a sorry one. It is time to play a supporting role, as people in the South make development their own history.