Measuring Policy Success: Evaluating Public Sector Reform in Bhutan

There has been resurgence in evaluation of policy, reflected mostly by an increase in ex ante studies. Although there is a shift towards ex post evaluation, this has been gradual, resulting in a paucity of ex post evaluation literature. To address this gap, we apply a revisionist approach to evaluate a major public sector reform in the Bhutanese civil service. We conclude that it provides a more holistic approach for ex post evaluation policy, and also a more nuanced evaluation which moves us beyond the narrow binary view of success or failure in reform.     

Framing a fiscal/cultural micro-encounter: value added tax meets calypso in Dominica

This article focuses on the performance of the calypso song ‘VAT on You’, as a response to the introduction into Dominica of the value added tax (VAT). The article applies a set of concepts to frame and so enhance our understanding of the event in terms of global history. Both calypso and VAT have extended histories and this performance represents an unusual meeting of earlier and current forces of globalisation. The conclusion assesses the helpfulness of the framing concepts ‘longue durée,’ continuities, centring, class divisions and micro-resistance, and assesses the song’s contribution to such resistance     

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.     

Forget “Blind Leading the Seeing” – Improving Public Service Management

The aim of this research is to identify the most effective public service management approaches for outsourced services. Our focus is on the phases of transition and service management post provider selection. To reach this aim, comparative case studies across sectors were conducted. The studied cases indicate that managing an outsourced service should not be a separate area of public management research nor practice, but rather a part of service management. Best practices in (outsourced) public service management are provided. Management focus on transition phase after provider selection, performance measurement, and evaluation will bring efficiency to public sector service production.     

Unpacking Local Economic Development: A Case Study from Nekemte Town and Its Hinterlands,Oromia, Ethiopia

Most agree that local economic development (LED) is a “bottom-up” development approach seeking to unleash the development potential of a locality. Nonetheless, focusing closely on the dynamics of specific localities, this can be criticized for being too local and overlooking extra-local links. This article explores the drivers of LED from the local economic actors’ perspectives in Nekemte town and its hinterlands, Oromia region, Ethiopia. The results clarify that LED is not only just “local”, but also an approach that links urban and rural areas, and thus, understanding rural–urban linkages is a prerequisite for a better understanding of the local economic development.     

Nonviolence as teacher education: a qualitative study in challenges and possibilities

This paper explores the challenges and possibilities of teaching nonviolence in teacher education. Using qualitative teacher research, this paper discusses teacher education students’ responses to the notion of nonviolence and how to create beneficial pedagogical conditions for students to learn nonviolence and its meanings for education. The data were collected from three graduate classes that, to different degrees, addressed the role of nonviolence in education. Three shifts in students’ understanding of nonviolence as a result of their learning are identified: the shift from a narrow to a broad understanding, the shift from a passive view to a proactive view, and the shift from looking outside to looking inside and engaging in emotional work. The pedagogical conditions that facilitated these shifts are also discussed, including strategies for engaging students’ inner work, creating experiential relationships with the other, and transforming classroom relational dynamics. This study also suggests the need not to approach violence and nonviolence as binary but to approach nonviolence as a daily practice to continuously unlearn violence and promote nonviolent relationships. Implications of this study for teacher education are discussed last.     

Looking beyond the economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin's voting coalition

The arrest of the protest punk band Pussy Riot (PR) in March 2012 and the subsequent prosecution of three band members pose a significant puzzle for political science. Although PR's performances presented a coherent alternative to the Putin regime's image of Russian reality, it was unlikely that the discordant music and crude lyrics of their art protest would inspire Russian society to take to the streets. Yet, the regime mounted a very visible prosecution against the three young women. We argue that the trial marked a shift in the Kremlin's strategy to shape state–society relations. In the face of declining economic conditions and social unrest, the PR trial encapsulated the Kremlin's renewed focus on three related mechanisms to insure social support: coercion, alliance building, and symbolic politics. The PR trial afforded the Kremlin an important opportunity to simultaneously redefine its loyal constituency, secure the Church–state relationship, and stigmatize the opposition.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

Use of Self in the Context of Youth Work

Used in the education of counselors, nurses, occupational therapists and social workers, “use of self” is a way of understanding how practitioners bring about human change. In this article, the author discusses how use of self can be applied to youth work and is related to “developmentally responsive practice” thereby providing a deep theoretical construct for understanding youth work as relational. The author concludes by presenting the barriers to the use of self paradigm in the current climate of assessment and accountability, designed to measure static inputs and outputs rather than dynamic systems or ecologies and presents a challenge to the field for designing methodologies that are equally dynamic, responsive and relational.     

The origins of severance pay in unemployment compensation: a comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to an under-developed field in the social policy literature through an analysis of the origins of severance pay (SP)/redundancy pay schemes and, more specifically, their first designs in nine countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal. It has two objectives: first, to identify the key actors who shaped the design of the first SP schemes; second, to explain variations in terms of their mode of regulation, generosity and coverage. By building on the state-centric and power-resource perspectives, it identifies the conditions under which the state had an autonomous role vis-à-vis organized labour in SP reforms and the circumstances under which organized labour was the main actor. When the state was the key actor, it preferred legislation for the regulation of SP either to legitimize its apparatus in a ‘revolutionary’/‘potentially revolutionary’ context or to facilitate structural transformations of the economy in a ‘reformist’ context. When organized labour was the key actor, its preference was to regulate SP through ‘only collective bargaining’ or ‘legislation’, subject to the degree of unionization. Lastly, the paper argues that key actors (the state or organized labour) took into account the distributive structure of existing UI schemes when designing the coverage and generosity structure of the first SP schemes during the post-war era.