Measuring Policy Success: Evaluating Public Sector Reform in Bhutan

There has been resurgence in evaluation of policy, reflected mostly by an increase in ex ante studies. Although there is a shift towards ex post evaluation, this has been gradual, resulting in a paucity of ex post evaluation literature. To address this gap, we apply a revisionist approach to evaluate a major public sector reform in the Bhutanese civil service. We conclude that it provides a more holistic approach for ex post evaluation policy, and also a more nuanced evaluation which moves us beyond the narrow binary view of success or failure in reform.     

Subjected to Sanitation: Caste Relations and Sanitation Adoption in Rural Tamil Nadu

If solving the global sanitation crisis lies within Indian borders, then it is important to understand the influence of caste relations on sanitation building and usage. Our ethnography investigated three villages in rural Tamil Nadu where seven separate sanitation interventions had failed. The analysis indicates caste relations played a key role in the failed interventions by creating and reinforcing the means by which caste groups distinguished themselves from each other at the village scale. Issues of cleaning, access to subsidies, latrine design, and purity served to facilitate and limit the processes that enable the everyday, unequal relationships of caste.     

Indigenous land claims or green grabs? Inclusions and exclusions within forest carbon politics in Indonesia

In this paper we outline the new political conjuncture in forest governance emerging in Indonesia and trace how it is influencing the land claim strategies of an Indigenous community in Central Kalimantan. The new political conjuncture is comprised on three inter-related elements: a Constitutional Court decision to recognise Indigenous land claims; the development of the Reducing Emissions from Forest Degradation and Deforestation Plus (REDD+) forest carbon programme; and a national initiative known as One-map. Drawing on concepts of governmentality, assemblage and territoriality we trace how the Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) are using this moment to assemble a land claim in Bahanei. We find that the conjuncture is providing opportunities for Indigenous communities to engage with a new assemblage of interests normally associated with green grabs to claim land back from state and private interests. However, the romantic green Indigenous subjectivities the new political conjuncture requires to attract carbon investment rarely fit the heterogeneous make up of village life. This is leading to intimate exclusions based on ethnicity and class, raising troubling questions about the extent of overlap between land claims and green grabs.     

Performing blackness in the “Rainbow Nation”: Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania

This article applies Saidiya Hartman’s framework of performing blackness to South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s performance series, The Future White Women of Azania, to consider the ways in which the performances index the convoluted imbrications of colonialism, specifically Apartheid policy in South Africa, and postcolonialism, specifically the anti-Apartheid struggle(s) and the current political and economic structure of South African democracy. It argues that Ruga’s performance makes evident political and economic systems that tout black and queer liberation while perpetuating black queer death. Ruga’s work also relocates Hartman’s framework to a transnational, postcolonial context, expanding the notion of performing blackness (and the entangled processes of domination and subordination that it maps) beyond the trans-Atlantic paradigm, suggesting that performing blackness could be used to understand the correlation between broader spatial and temporal phenomena that shape blackness. Finally, situating The Future White Women of Azania as not only a performance of blackness, but of queerness as well, postulates that layering sexuality onto Hartman’s model reveals that the dynamics articulated under performing blackness are evident between oppressors and oppressed and between members of each of these groups as Hartman notes, but also between the contingent axes of subjectivity within an individual’s experience.     

Regression Discontinuity Designs Based on Population Thresholds: Pitfalls and Solutions

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold‐based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence from France, Germany, and Italy, we highlight two common pitfalls that arise in exploiting population‐based policies (compound treatment and sorting), and we provide guidance for detecting and addressing these pitfalls. Even when these problems are present, population‐threshold RDD may be the best available research design for studying the effects of certain policies and political institutions.     

A tale of two ex-dominions: why the procedures for changing the rules of succession are so different in Canada and Australia

In 2011, the leaders of the nations that share Queen Elizabeth as their head of state agreed to change the rules governing the inheritance of the throne. The federal nature of the Canadian and Australian Crowns raises the question of whether Canadian provinces and Australian states should be involved in the process for modifying the rules of succession. Australia's federal government has decided to include its states in the process, whereas Canada's did not. This article will assess what the differences between these two approaches reveal about the political cultures and leaders of these nations. The issues discussed include relations between the civil service and elected politicians, the contested social memory of the British Empire, and the relationship between neoliberalism and cooperative federalism.     

Estimating the Effects of Conflict on Education in Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

This article evaluates the effect of armed conflict on years of schooling in Côte d’Ivoire. We combine differences in conflict intensity across departments and differences across age cohorts to identify an individual’s indirect exposure to conflict. The difference-in-difference outcomes indicate that the average years of education for a school-going-age cohort is 0.94 years fewer compared to an older cohort in conflict-affected regions. We further use a set of victimisation indicators to identify the direct effect of conflict. Overall, the findings across different models suggest a drop in average years of education by a range of 0.2 to 0.9 fewer years. The estimated effect is larger for males and individuals between 19 and 22 years of age.     

The ox fall down: path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture

ABSTRACT

Although India’s cotton sector has been penetrated by various input- and capital-intensive methods, penetration by herbicide has been largely stymied. In Telangana State, the main obstacle has been the practice of ‘double-lining’, in which cotton plants are spaced widely to allow weeding by ox-plow. Path dependency theory primarily explains the persistence of sub-optimal practices, but double-lining is an example of an advantageous path for cash-poor farmers. However, it is being actively undermined by parties intent on expanding herbicide markets and opening a niche for next-generation genetically modified cotton. We use the case to explicate the role of treadmills in technology ‘lock-in’. We also examine how an adaptive locked-in path may be broken by external interests, drawing on recent analyses of ‘didactic’ learning by farmers.