AID EFFECTIVENESS AND THE PARIS DECLARATION: A MISMATCH BETWEEN OWNERSHIP AND RESULTS‐BASED MANAGEMENT?

Although recent years have witnessed substantial changes in the global aid architecture, less effort has been devoted to investigating the process of implementing those changes. By using the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) as an illustrative and critical case, this article shows how a donor development priority—gender—travels from Stockholm and headquarters to a Paris Declaration‐infused aid practice in three cases with different aid modalities: Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Cambodia. More specifically, the qualitative empirical investigation conducted here shows that the implementation of the new aid architecture puts severe and competing demands on development practitioners. At the core of this tension is the fact that although all donors are supposed to promote partner country ownership, harmonize their efforts with other donors, and align themselves with partner country priorities, results‐based management simultaneously implies not only a focus on continuously measuring and reporting results but also stricter prioritizations on behalf of donor governments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Science governance and the politics of proper talk: governmental bioethics as a new technology of reflexive government

Abstract

The article examines the emergence of governmental bioethics in Great Britain, France and Germany, i.e. bodies, discourses and procedures meant to guide policy-making in terms of ethical considerations. It argues that governmental bioethics, marked by openness, transparency and participation, can be understood as a form of reflexive government in the realm of science governance. It grew out of the problematization of older forms of science governance based on ideas of effectiveness, scientific expertise and system stability, and operates through structuring and managing proper talk rather than intervening in processes of techno-scientific development. Yet, rather than challenging the commitment to techno-scientific ‘progress’, it stabilizes it through mechanisms of inclusion, involvement and mobilization: within the framework of proper ethical talk, participation can be employed to pursue rather than oppose system stability.     

Arenen des demokratischen Experimentalismus. Zur Konvergenz von nordamerikanischem und französischem Pragmatismus

In their works on The public and its problems and Politics of nature John Dewey and Bruno Latour develop theoretical models of a democratic experimentalism. Taking their assumptions as a base, this paper examines the thesis of a convergence of North American and French pragmatism. This thesis is supported not only by further analogies in the works of Dewey and Latour, but also by the pragmatic sociology of justification upheld by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, which can be on the one hand integrated into the frame-work of Latour’s theory on democratic experimentalism. On the other hand, comparisons can readily be drawn to the pragmatic theory of social worlds and arenas of Anselm L. Strauss. The theories differ in respect to their expectations as to whether, where and how social arenas are formed, once different social worlds and conventions come into critical conflict with each other and need to be rearranged by experimental processes. However, any remaining disparity in the assumptions regarding such arena figurations of democratic experimentalism could definitely have a stimulating effect on their empirical cartography and analysis.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Grand Coalition's Response to the Economic Crisis

The German grand coalition's track record with regard to managing the financial crisis is mixed. The government has spent enormous amounts of money to prevent a breakdown of the banking system and to cushion the effects of the recession. It was at least partially successful as these programmes indeed prevented collapses of banks as well as bank runs, kept unemployment relatively low and somewhat mitigated the recession. Nonetheless, at least some of the crisis policies lacked coherence, particularly with regard to the bank rescue packages. The reason is that even in the face of a systemic banking crisis and a GDP decline of 5 per cent, programmatic differences between the coalition partners have not disappeared and became manifest in government policies.