A failure of governmentality: why Transparency International underestimated corruption in Ben Ali’s Tunisia

This article critiques the Foucauldian approach to governance indicators. Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) underestimated Tunisian corruption levels under President Ben Ali: his regime was highly corrupt but foreign investors were less affected. CPI methodology meant it reflected primarily the needs of foreign investors. The Foucauldian approach specifically excludes analysis of governance indicators’ methodologies. It thus fails to demonstrate the effectiveness of governance indicators as a technology of government, and it fails to show how the production of the CPI is embedded in a wider global political economy.     

Governance and disorder: neoliberalism and violent change in Jamaica

Structural adjustment policies (SAPs) facilitate the hollowing out of the traditional roles performed by states. As a consequence, private entities (some perverse) offer services the state is incapable of or unwilling to provide. Beginning in the 1980s, SAPs plunged neighbourhoods in Latin America and the Caribbean into socioeconomic, and political disorder. This paper assesses the relationship between neoliberal reforms to the Jamaican state and the metamorphosis of violence since the mid-1980s. Neoliberalism transformed violence in Jamaica by increasing inter-gang conflicts, shootings and gang-related murders in Kingston’s garrisons. It also transformed political enforcers into community dons who use violence as a tool for business transactions in the international drug trade, and as a method of gaining local respect and authority.     

Administrative Styles in the OECD: Bureaucratic Policy-Making beyond Formal Rules

As we know from comparative public policy, bureaucracies contribute to a considerable degree to the contents and the ways of policy-making. One important driver of administrative policy-making are their specific “styles” or “cultures”. “Administrative styles” are understood here as the standard operating procedures and routines that characterize the behavior and activities of administrative bodies in initiating, drafting and implementing policy. In this article, we convey the concept of Administrative Styles to the level of International Organizations (IOs) and apply it to the Organization for Economic Development and Co-Operation (OECD). The article proceeds in three steps: First, the concept of administrative styles is introduced and refined. Drawing on expert interviews with OECD staff, we secondly show that consideration of OECD administrative styles significantly advances the literature’s understanding of the organization. Finally, we give an outlook on new research avenues and the relevance of our findings for the study of International Public Administrations (IPAs) more generally.     

Small Countries,Big Performers: In Search of Shared Strategic Public Sector HRM Practices in Successful Small Countries

This article compares strategic public sector HRM practices between 10 small countries that have consistently shown extraordinary economic, social, and governance performance. The fact that these small countries, which are traditionally considered to be disadvantaged, have become benchmarks of good government suggests they have uniquely maximized and leveraged their key resource: people. In search of novel lessons, we assess through secondary data how their public sectors have organized and institutionalized four key HRM activities: 1) selection, 2) appraisal, 3) training, and 4) compensation, and whether they engage in strategic, centralized efforts to architect and “bundle” these activities. Our exploratory case study findings show that these high performing countries employ various integrated efforts to attract the best and brightest into their public sectors, and train and reward them well, although they differ in terms of their centralization dynamics. We conclude our article with seven propositions for future research and implications for emerging small countries.     

Applying a Dynamic Performance Management Framework to Wicked Issues: How Coproduction Helps to Transform Young People’s Services in Surrey County Council,UK

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a dynamic performance management (DPM) approach can give policy makers a more integrated, time-related understanding of how to address wicked problems successfully. The article highlights how an outcome-based approach to solving wicked policy problems has to balance three very contrasting objectives of stakeholders in the policy making process – improving service quality, improving quality of life outcomes and improving conformity to the principles of public governance. Simultaneous achievement of these three objectives may not be feasible, as they may form an interactive dynamic system. However the balancing act between them may be achieved by the use of DPM. Policy insights from this novel approach are illustrated through a case study of a highly successful co-production intervention to help young people with multiple disadvantages in Surrey, UK. The implications of DPM are that policy development needs to accept the important roles of emergent strategy and learning mechanisms, rather than attempting ‘blueprint’ strategic planning and control mechanisms. Some expectations about the results may indeed be justifiable in particular policy systems, as clustering of quality of life outcomes and outcomes in the achievement of governance principles is likely, because behaviours are strongly inter-related. However, this clustering can never be taken for granted but must be tested in each specific policy context. Undertaking simulations with the model and recalibrating it through time, as experience builds up, may allow learning in relation to overcoming barriers to achieving outcomes in the system.     

Policy Analysis,International Relations,and European Governance – Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries

ABSTRACT

The article highlights the rationale of the special issue in terms of its objectives and guiding principles. It maps different evolutions and challenges within three analytical streams (1) regarding the field of policy analysis, (2) concerning the interaction between domestic and international affairs, and (3) with regards to the transformation of European Union governance in troubled times. These three research avenues highlight how not only European governance itself has evolved in a changing world, but also how the analysis of interests, institutions, and policy-making has morphed, oftentimes transgressing disciplinary and methodological boundaries.     

Arguing deep ideational change

ABSTRACT

How do actors come to contest previously uncontested background ideas? This is a difficult question to ask. On the one hand, deep backgrounds seem to be too foundational for actors to transform. Their political efficacy appears to end where ideas constitute their efficacy in the first place. On the other hand, ideas must not be reified. Even deeply taken-for-granted ideas do not always stay the same, and agents have a lot to do with these changes. In order to answer this question, we draw from social theory and rhetorical studies. We conceptualize the deep background as nomos, and the more easily accessible background as endoxa. We then proceed to identify three sets of conditions that make nomic change possible. These relate to opportunity, message, and messenger. Nomic change becomes possible when the need for something new has become widely established and a supply of new nomic ideas is easily available (opportunity); new nomic ideas are ‘smuggled’ into more orthodox and widely resonating arguments (message) as well as rhetorical encounters in which these arguments are made; and advocates are widely recognized as interlocutors (messenger). A plausibility probe of nomic contestation about nuclear governance provides evidence for this framework.     

Food sovereignty and new peasantries: on re-peasantization and counter-hegemonic contestations in the Basque territory

This paper contributes to debates about the potential of re-peasantization and its contribution to food sovereignty with a case study from the global North, where such questions are relatively under-studied. I examine how Euskal Herriko Nekazarien Elkartasuna (EHNE)-Bizkaia, a Vía Campesina member organization from the Basque Country (Spain), advances food sovereignty through re-peasantization. I also analyze the motivations of new peasants engaged in agroecology, their understandings of food sovereignty, and the challenges that they face. Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, I argue that whereas re-peasantization contributes to a shift from corporatist to counter-hegemonic struggles, the political-economic and biophysical contexts structure agroecological production in ways that limit the extent to which new peasantries can become ‘agents of their own history’. I conclude that closer attention to peasants’ messy practices of making a living is needed to address questions of political agency.     

State–peasant movement relations and the politics of food sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador

This contribution argues that the articulation between the state and peasant organizations’ internal structures – the class characteristics of their mass bases, their leaderships and the modes of interaction between the two – is critical for determining the nature of contemporary struggles guided by the discourse of food sovereignty. It will show that that counter-hegemonic demands are not synonymous with counter-hegemonic practice; rather than struggling to replace the neoliberal food regime, many peasant organizations employ the food sovereignty discourse as a political tool in their negotiations with the state in order to access resources from within the prevailing neoliberal model, not to transform it.     

The EU and the Global Order: Contingent Liberalism

Abstract

Politicians, diplomats and analysts commonly assume that commitment to multilateralism and liberal norms is part of the EU’s very DNA. Increasingly, however, the EU’s commitment to the liberal global order is more selective. We demonstrate the shift to a more contingent liberalism by examining the EU’s recent record in relation to four different challenges: international trade; US leadership; Russian actions in the eastern neighbourhood; and security in the Middle East. We speculate on what this may portend for the EU’s self-identity, European interests and the integrity of the prevailing global order.