The Continuing Volatility of Devolution in Northern Ireland: The Shadow of Direct Rule

Since the establishment of devolution in 1999, Northern Ireland's power‐sharing governments have been fragile and prone to crisis. However, following a decade of relative stability and cooperation between Nationalists and Unionists at Stormont, hopes were high that the devolved arrangements had finally become embedded and more resistant to collapse. This optimism was dashed when Sinn Féin brought down the devolved institutions in January 2017. A snap election once again returned the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin as the largest parties and their inability to form a government resulted in yet another political stalemate. This article begins by outlining the pattern of political crises in Northern Ireland and assesses both the trigger factors and the responses. It then goes beyond the most obvious explanation for this continuing instability—that of the deep sectarian based divisions—and points to a number of other reasons for the volatility. These include issues such as the incomplete implementation of previous agreements, the impact of broader UK policies and the shadow of Direct Rule.     

The 2008 World Development Report and the political economy of Southeast Asian agriculture

This article seeks to determine what light the literature on the political economy of agriculture in Southeast Asia can shed on the analysis that underpins the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development. It argues that work on Southeast Asia highlights gaps and problems in the Bank's account relating to the dynamics of boom crops, to the nature of social and political mobilisation around agriculture, and to the conceptualisation of agrarian transition.     

Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America

There has been increased emphasis in the last three decades on the decentralization of natural resource governance decisions to local government in developing countries as a means of improving environmental quality, public service delivery, and the accountability of local officials. We examine the performance of decentralization of natural resource management services in a large sample of municipal governments in four Latin American countries. Our analysis includes a variety of factors discussed in the literature as important in influencing the responsiveness of government officials to local needs. We provide a nested institutional model in which local officials respond to incentives created by the structure of formal political institutions at both the local and national level. The results provide support for the importance of considering local and national institutional arrangements as these co-determine the political incentives within decentralized systems.

Expressing Uncertainty in Dental Age Estimation: A Comparison between Two Methods of Calculating the “Average” Standard Deviation

The expression of uncertainty is defined by the standard deviation and is usually expressed in multiples of the standard deviation (±1sd, ±2sd, and ±3sd). The objective was to use weighting of the sd calculation by the number or count of subjects for each tooth development stage. A comparison shows the difference between the range of uncertainty using the unweighted sd and the weighted sd. The range of uncertainty related to Dental Age Estimation is statistically significantly greater (p < 0.001) for the weighted sd compared to the unweighted sd. It is concluded that the number of subjects for each Tooth Development Stage in the Reference Data set should be included in the calculation for a single Dental Age Estimation using the Simple Average Method when presenting the uncertainty associated with the point estimate of the “mean” for Dental Age Estimation of a single subject of unknown age.