Depoliticisation and ahistoricism of transparency and accountability via global norms: assessing the EITI in Ghana and Nigeria

ABSTRACT

While extant assessments of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) have focused on institutional and regulatory regimes, such evaluations have largely tended to depoliticise institutions. This article argues that a more robust understanding of EITI processes must give central attention to historically situated political structures and power relations that continue to shape the present institutional quality/capacity of extractive industries' transparency, and EITI reforms. Assessing the EITI in Africa through the lens of historical institutionalism clarifies how global governance regimes interface with specific institutional pathways, state-corporation-civil society configurations, and historical legacies to produce outcomes that may complement or undermine intended reforms.     

Crisis and contract breach: The domestic and international determinants of expropriation

The Review of International Organizations - In this paper we address how external factors shape government decisions to break or uphold contracts, specifically focusing on how economic shocks and...     

Public Management on the Ground: Clustering Managers Based on Their Behavior

Public management research has identified a dizzying array of management variables that affect organizational performance. While scholars have learned much by analyzing one or a few specific behavioral dimensions of public management at a time, we argue for the value of a more holistic and inductive approach that uses data on several aspects of public management for identifying manager types. Such an approach accounts for both the cognitive processes of people affected by management and the reality that managers’ individual behavioral decisions are interrelated. We examine the overlap of 21 aspects of public school management behavior using cluster analysis. We identify four different manager types (“firefighters,” “laissez-faire managers,” “administrators,” and “proactive floor managers”), each reflecting a distinct constellation of managerial behaviors. The manager types we call “administrators” and “proactive floor managers” are associated with relatively better outcomes, while “firefighters” are associated with relatively worse outcomes.