Aid as an encounter at the interface: the complexity of the global fight against poverty

International development discourse has recently shifted its focus from top‐down economic adjustment to participative anti‐poverty policy. This shift hints at an acknowledgement of the local complexities within the poverty process and at a need to listen to and develop actions with the ‘poor’. But, whereas the mainstream argument remains couched in a technical framework, we argue that the fight against poverty is inevitably political. Conceptualising the aid industry as a set of global–local interfaces, it follows that a closer look at ‘participation’ in anti‐poverty interventions is needed to come to grips with the political issues involved. Four issues are discussed: the complexity of local ‘participation’, given the ‘polycephalous’ character of third world societies; the power biases in the aid chain; the potential problem of ‘false consciousness’; and the ambiguities of the role of local development brokers. We conclude that anti‐poverty policy is in need of ‘interface experts’, who, through ‘provocation’ can beget ‘participation’.     

From the Executive Board to the Classroom. What Debt Relief Means for Education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

ABSTRACT

This analysis re-assesses the IMF’s decision to grant debt relief to the DRC in 2010 based on the country’s poverty reduction and growth performance: would the IMF come to the same conclusion given the current knowledge available about the impact of the debt relief process on public governance and service delivery? First, it shows that, whereas the direct resource effect of this aid modality was minimal, the indirect effect was more significant: the conditionalities attached to the process helped to stabilize the economy and increased the overall budget of the Congolese state. This increased resource availability also sustainably percolated to the education sector. Second, however, the impact on social development was minimal: school enrolment increased but was hardly accompanied by extra budget per pupil, whereas more complicated challenges like disparities in access or quality of schooling were left untouched. The government’s strategy was also partly short-circuited by the electoral process.     

Democratization in the Balkans: Challenges and prospects

The post‐communist states of the Balkans face daunting challenges as they experiment with pluralism. The absence of a strong democratic tradition, national rivalries within and between states, weak civil society, and the impact of communism on political culture, complicate the emergence of open politics. There is a lack of agreement about the management of political competition and an absence of political institutions able to integrate conflicting forces. Compared with democratizing southern Europe, the Balkans faces numerous handicaps, and support from heartland democracies has been meagre. The fate of democracy may well be determined by events outside local control, namely the economic situation and the outcome of the war in former Yugoslavia.     

The ICC and the Prevention of Atrocities: Criminological Perspectives

One of the founding principles of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the prevention of atrocities by punishing those most responsible for them. This paper builds on the literature that has both hailed and critiqued the prospects of the ICC’s ability to deter future atrocities, adding insights from criminology and psychology to enhance the understanding of the ICC’s deterrent capabilities. This will allow for a more careful analysis of how the deterrence process exactly works. The paper then uses these insights to examine the ICC’s experiences over the past 14 years with deterring offenders. The main findings are that, although the ICC can constructively contribute to a normative shift toward accountability and a change in international rules of legitimacy, its prospects for the direct and meaningful deterrence of future atrocities are slim. The current practice of relying on the ICC as a crisis management tool is therefore both unwise and unfair.     

Flexible framing: Analysing innovative austerity talk from a cultural perspective

This article examines how local policy elites conceptualize and communicate potential innovations to overcome the fiscal crisis. Four austerity frames based on cultural theory are developed: an individualist, hierarchist, egalitarian and fatalist frame. Two expectations are tested by tracing frame usage in austerity speeches by the leadership in Birmingham, Cologne and Rotterdam. First, the modest contribution of the individualist frame in NPM‐sceptic Cologne is confirmed, but no evidence is found of individualist dominance in NPM‐minded Birmingham. Second, it is shown that leaders in Birmingham and Rotterdam combine elements of multiple frames so as to create a new promising narrative which opens up routes towards innovation. The importance of ‘frame flexibility’ is stressed to deal with the complexities of coping with the fiscal crisis in ways that are logical (given available views) and innovative (exploring alternative views), and highlight the importance of further developing understandings of such (municipal) coping.