Clientelism: factionalism in the allocation of public resources in Iraq after 2003

This article examines clientelism in Iraq as a case study of one form of corruption. Iraq is an unusual case of corruption, because a key feature of Iraq's corrupt environment is an institutionalised factional political system based on sectarian quotas. The article explores the many links between clientelism and political factionalism, discussing whether clientelism arose because of factionalism, or whether factionalism merely determines the ways that clientelism currently operates in Iraq. Using fieldwork data, the findings show there are two distinct levels of clientelism in Iraq, both of which are linked to political factions: the individual level and the organisational level. First, clientelism at the individual level entails the elites of many political factions regarding ‘money politics’ as a means of influence in Iraq/Kurdistan by buying people's affiliations and thereby governing people. Second, clientelism at the organisational level entails that the spoils of political office are shared out among the elites of the political factions in a proportionate fashion. The article concludes that clientelism is a form of political rather than economic corruption; and that while there may be some immediate value in clientelism, its long-term harm outweighs its short-term value.     

Understanding the ABC of University Governance

University governance is complex and contested. In view of the seemingly unceasing rise of commercial values within public universities, this contribution argues the case for a holistic, mission‐related integrated governance approach for the Australian public university sector. The ‘ABC of University Governance’, as proposed for broad‐scope governance within the sector, involves an integrated emphasis on the three key components of governance: academic governance, business governance and corporate governance. Respectively, these components of public university governance are concerned with scholarship, performance and conformance. Placing academic governance first in the ABC of university governance reminds us all of the vital role and importance of scholarship, which should never be downplayed or underestimated in public universities.     

Marketization as political technology: unintended consequences of climate finance in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Climate finance involves the transfer of money from advanced economies into developing countries in order to contribute to carbon mitigation or climate adaptation efforts while simultaneously advancing poverty alleviation and sustainable development objectives. Dominant carbon mitigation efforts resemble what Michel Callon calls ‘civilizing markets’, a deliberate harnessing of formal markets to achieve social goals by engaging with multiple political constituencies in market design. This paper looks at carbon marketization in the Democratic Republic of Congo and finds that, despite inclusive planning, climate finance experts produce unintended consequences by assigning social and environmental goals separate strategies within a national portfolio of climate finance interventions. Resulting from the challenges of finding commensurate criteria for measuring market impacts in both social and environmental domains, this programmatic segregation obscures the interconnections between poverty, forest use and climate change in the Congo. Findings suggest a need to reconcile the design of environmental-focused markets with the difficult-to-measure embedded social benefits of informal natural resource economies.     

Following in China's footsteps? The political economy of North Korean reform

Since the coming to power of Kim Jong Un in 2012, the North Korean government has recently announced, and to some degree has implemented, a new set of economic management policies known as the June 28th measures in 2012 and the May 30th measures in 2014. Both of these sets of measures seek to build upon the abandoned reforms of the early 2000s through restructuring North Korea's highly inefficient collective farm and state-owned enterprise management system. In addition, the government has intensified ongoing efforts at building special economic zones for the purpose of attracting foreign investment. As such, the country is attempting to emulate the reforms adopted by China in the late 1970s. Although the success of these efforts is by no means guaranteed, they do serve to question mainstream analyses that suggest that Juche Self-Reliance or S?n'gun Military First Politics ideologies will inhibit any genuine attempt at economic reform in North Korea. We argue, in contrast, that ongoing changes to North Korean state and society mean that, a cyclical stop and start rhythm to the reforms notwithstanding, such attempts at economic reform are likely to continue. However, we also argue that while the contemporary reform drive resembles and may indeed reproduce some of the successes of the Chinese experience, North Korea faces significantly greater challenges, including the greater decline of North Korean industry, local resistance to reform, and the dangers of inflation. Furthermore, North Korea faces a highly challenging external security environment that undermines the ability of the regime to attract investment and by extension the political standing of reformist elements within the country. Given this contrast with the international environment surrounding China's own reform experience, our analysis emphasises the importance of geopolitical context in shaping experiences of economic reform and of development more broadly.     

Decolonising online development studies? Emancipatory aspirations and critical reflections – a case study

Academics in high-income countries are increasingly launching development studies programmes through online distance learning to engage practitioner-students in low-income countries. Are such initiatives providing opportunities to critically tackle social injustice, or merely ‘mirroring’ relations of global inequality and re-entrenching imperial practices? Building on recent scholarship addressing efforts to ‘decolonise development studies’ and the complex power dynamics they encounter, we reflect on this question by analysing experiences of faculty and students in a United Kingdom-based online development studies programme, focusing particularly on perspectives of development practitioner-students working from Africa. We discuss barriers to social inclusivity – including the politics of language – that shaped participation dynamics in the programme as well as debates regarding critical development course content, rethinking possibilities for bridging counter-hegemonic development scholarship with practice-oriented approaches in a range of social contexts. Our analysis unpacks key tensions in addressing intertwined institutional and pedagogic dilemmas for an agenda towards decolonising online development studies, positioning decolonisation as a necessarily unsettling and contested process that calls for greater self-reflexivity.     

The Women's Movement and Government

Some scholars have suggested that institutionalisation and professionalisation of women's movement organisations leads to ‘feminist fading’. This article examines whether such propositions hold true for the Australian women's movement. It maps changes in the women's movement that had emerged by the 1990s, including increased diversity and increased national and international networking as well as increased institutionalisation. It finds that loss of political influence has less to do with institutionalisation than with a changed discursive environment that constructed the welfare state and women's reliance on it as a problem. Nonetheless, women's movement institutions have continued to sustain feminist values and engage in differently organised but effective campaigns. A case study of the women's health movement in Victoria shows how it succeeded in having abortion removed from the criminal code in 2008. Repertoire had changed since the 1970s but the goal remained the same.     

The Forgotten Pirates: Iraqi and Iranian Pirates in the Arabian Gulf Who Have Never Been Reported to the International Maritime Bureau

If piracy attacks are unreported, a misleading impression is given of piracy situations in regions where there could be serious consequences for ships traveling in waterways on the assumption that they are piracy-free waters. However, sometimes not reporting piracy attacks could help to contain piracy before it expands, because reporting can lead to the media over-focusing on piratical incidents, and armed guards being deployed on ships, which causes pirates to use heavier arms and escalates the level of conflict. Piracy that took place during 2003–2012 in the north and the center of the Arabian Gulf has never been reported to the International Maritime Bureau. The present article examines this case of unreporting, and discusses its causes and consequences.     

Preventing construction deaths: The role of public policies

Are stronger direct financial incentives or regulatory enforcement effective in reducing fatalities in the construction industry? We examine two important policies—state workers' compensation (WC) programs and federal and state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) activities—which embody those strategies. We examine their impact by looking at state-level fatality rates in the construction industry from 1992 to 2016. Setting aside highway crashes and violence, the majority of employee deaths occur in construction. We find that states which exempt small firms from the requirement to buy WC insurance have higher fatality rates. When eligibility for compensation is restricted by longer waiting periods, fatality rates are substantially higher. More frequent federal or state OSHA inspections and, especially, consultation visits are associated with lower fatality rates, but higher average penalties are not. Limited variation in these policies over our sample period, especially for WC, makes these results suggestive rather than definitively causal.     

A Bridge Too Far? Examining Bridging Assumptions in Common-Space Estimations

While most common-space estimations rely upon members who served in both the House and Senate as “bridges” to scale the remaining members, this assumes that these “bridge members” do not change their preferences when they change chambers. Such an assumption conflicts with standard notions of representation, that is, that legislators’ votes reflect (at least to some degree) the wishes of their constituents. We examine the constancy of this common-space voting assumption by focusing on a subset of House members who move to the Senate: those who come from statewide House districts. Using these members as the bridge actors—and thus bridging by constituency explicitly—in a one-dimensional item response theory model, we find that the standard assumption of chamber switchers in common-space estimations is technically, but immaterially, false. While there are statistically distinguishable differences in House and Senate voting records for chamber switchers, they are not sufficiently large to meaningfully undermine bridging.