The Rhetoric of Educational Reform

This article is an examination of the language of recent large-scale education reform in England, New Zealand, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. In each jurisdiction, we review both the official documents and the parliamentary debate around a set of major educational reforms, looking at both the similarities and differences between jurisdictions and at the overall nature of official discourse. Although some similar rhetoric was used in all four settings, we conclude that the differences in justifications were more significant than the commonalities. Our analysis supports a view of official rhetoric as being primarily symbolic and intended to create or support particular definitions of problems and solutions, but also as shaped by the historical context, institutional structure, and political culture of each setting.     

THE HUMAN RIGHT TO INFORMATION,THE ENVIRONMENT AND INFORMATION ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT: FROM THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION TO THE AARHUS CONVENTION

Citizen access to government-held information and the amelioration of environmental problems are considered statutory matters in the United States, but at the international level these are seen as fundamental human rights. In recent years two categories of human rights demanded by activists, the right to government information and the right to environmental protection, have converged into a new human right—the right to government information about the environment. The 1998 Aarhus Convention, binding in more than forty nations in Europe and Central Asia, is the first multilateral treaty to specifically denote a human right to government information about the environment. While the Aarhus Convention has some untested procedural difficulties and laborious bureaucratic requirements, the treaty can serve as a model for the world's nations at large, because citizen oversight of government actions toward the natural world is a powerful tool for those concerned about both the environment and government transparency.     

FROM THE DAGGER TO THE BOMB: KARL HEINZEN AND THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL TERROR

Historians and political scientists have been quick to draw a continuum between the tyrannicide theories of years gone by and the modern terrorism of today. Yet the underlying motivations and intended results are very different in tyrannicide and terrorism. The question this raises is what changes occurred in the theory of political violence to make the transition between tyrannicide and terrorism possible? In this article, the author looks at the writings of a little-known nineteenth-century journalist, Karl Heinzen, to gain insight into the connection made in the mind of a terrorist between tyrannicide theory and terrorism.     

The Power of Secrecy and the Secrecy of Power: FACA and the National Energy Policy Development Group

One of President George W. Bush's first official acts was to charter an advisory committee that would make recommendations for a new American energy policy. While the National Energy Policy Development Group was officially made up only of government employees, journalists and watchdogs suspected that the committee was inappropriately meeting with representatives of energy firms. Two citizens' groups brought suit under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to unveil the secrecy surrounding the National Energy Policy Development Group and its policymaking processes. The ensuing court battle revealed the weaknesses of FACA and its paradoxical use by the Bush Administration in continuing the very same government secrecy that the act is intended to prevent. This article examines a particular case of secrecy in the Bush Administration—the formulation of energy policy by Dick Cheney's energy task force—with an analysis of the known activities of the group and the history of citizen challenges to its secrecy. The article then considers the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of the Federal Advisory Committee Act as a safeguard against government secrecy.     

Replication Studies of Development Impact Evaluations

Six years ago, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) launched a programme to promote and fund replication studies of impact evaluations in international development. We designed the programme with the objective of improving the quality of evidence for development policy-making, using replication research to both validate the results of published impact evaluations and build the incentives for more transparent and high quality research going forward. The programme’s focus is internal replication, which uses the original data from a study to address the same question as that study. This Journal of Development Studies special issue compiles the majority of completed 3ie-funded replication studies initiated in the first years of the programme. In all cases the pure replication components of these studies are generally able to reproduce the results published in the original article. Most of the measurement and estimation analyses confirm the robustness of the original articles or call into question just a subset of the original findings. These replication studies mostly focus on providing additional information about the impacts of the interventions – especially additional information that can be important for interpreting the articles for the purpose of policy-making.