How can Public Professional Services be Restored in a Weak State? Options for Animal Health in Congo's South Kivu

How does one deal with a shortcoming in a public service when even a state “pocket of effectiveness” is unlikely to fill it directly? In the Belgian colonial era, South Kivu Province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo had a vibrant animal production system, which then was shattered by successive wars. The regeneration of Kivu's livestock industry is greatly constrained by the unreliability of the province's state and private animal health services, which have become commercialized and are unable to overcome the asymmetric information problem inherent to the professions and provide the trustworthy effectiveness farmers need to use them effectively. The Congolese state is unlikely to be able to fill this gap itself. Nonetheless, it can be an architect of solutions to the problem. We were able to identify in the local institutional repertoire at least four possible ways policy‐makers could use non‐governmental organizations to provide missing trustworthiness to the market. This conclusion is hopeful for places with development potential that have weak states and imperfect markets. © 2017 International Livestock Research Institute. Public Administration and Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Operationalizing Strategy Content: An Example from the Transit Industry

While models of organizational strategy saturate private sector research, public sector research lags behind. The model created by Boyne and Walker (2004) is an exception. The main objective of this study is to operationalize this model using a unique data set from the US transit industry. Through a survey of 103 local transit agencies, we developed separate strategy profiles for each agency that help us answer important questions about organizational strategy. We find that not only do the organizations adopt a mix of strategic stances through the action areas; they also have distinct profiles, which vary greatly between agencies.     

Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009

How can people and organisations best respond to emergency events that are significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated, expected, prepared for – or even imagined? What forms of organisations are likely to be best able to cope with such events – and what procedures and practices will aid in their ability to do so? Obviously, extreme events – events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of our ordinary experience and expectations – by definition will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely to any given emergency organisation). Nonetheless, when they do occur they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States (US) in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010 – these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.     

NGOs in a global future: marrying local delivery to worldwide leverage

This article argues that global trends are creating unprecedented opportunities for civic action at local, national and international levels. Three interconnected trends are identified: economic and cultural globalization, and the inequality and insecurity they breed; the increasing complexity of humanitarian action in response to ethnic conflict and intrastate violence; and the reform of international co‐operation to deal with the problems these trends create. In response, new forms of solidarity are emerging between citizens and authorities at different levels of the world system. It is these new relationships—expressed through partnerships, alliances and other forms of co‐operation—that provide the framework for NGO interventions, but they also require major changes in NGOs themselves. Chief among these changes are a move from ‘development‐as‐delivery’ to ‘development‐as‐leverage’; new relationships with corporations, elements of states, the military, international institutions and other groups in civil society; and new skills and capacities to mediate these linkages. These developments call for major changes in NGO roles, relationships, capacities and accountabilities. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing the Discourse of Declining Policy Capacity: Rail Policy and the Department of Transport

It has been observed that countries that implemented new public management (NPM) reforms are currently witnessing growing complaints about a decline in the policy capacity of their public services. Australia is a part of this trend with public sector leaders increasingly voicing concern about policy capacity decline within the Australian Public Service (APS). This article sets out to examine whether there is an empirical basis for this discourse and to assess allegations that NPM reforms have contributed to any related shifts. It draws on rail policy and the Department of Transport as its case study. It finds that the reforms transformed role of the department in a way that enhanced strategic policy capacity. However, the reforms also introduced a number of structural impediments that make it difficult for the new role to be effectively executed .     

Understanding Presidential Failure in South America

This article examines the issue of presidential failure in South America by evaluating the multiple factors that create risk of resignation, removal, or impeachment of presidents. The study draws on various economic variables that have not been thoroughly investigated in the past and uses survival analysis to identify what factors are influential. In performing this testing, the importance of variables such as civil protest, executive wrongdoing, and specific measures of economic hardship—inflation and prolonged recession—becomes clear. Majority legislative support also remains significant, supporting early arguments about the influence of presidential institutions. This investigation provides a unique perspective on presidential survival while evaluating the importance of previously excluded variables in a comprehensive manner.     

Book Reviews

Throughout the twentieth century, the city of Khartoum was the subject of analyses and knowledge produced by diverse actors, such as scholars, urban planners, government agents and institutions, urban dwellers and, more recently, actors from the humanitarian and private sectors. The aim of this article is to offer a critical analysis of Sudan urban studies from the 1970s onwards, and to illustrate their strengths and shortcomings. A revisitation of the work of anthropologist Richard Lobban on Tuti Island, where I recently conducted ethnographic fieldwork, will allow me to comment on Marxist anthropology as the theoretical framework used by Sudanist scholars in the early decades of urban studies, to focus on methodological strategies for data collection, and to analyse the use of concepts such as “urbanisation” and “community”. These reflections will be used to suggest a research agenda for urban studies in Sudan, as well as recent academic approaches to the treatment of the urban question.