Soft budgets and elastic debt: farm liabilities in the agrarian political economy of post-Soviet Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

Since Tajikistan’s independence, market reforms and pressure from international donors have brought changes to the state’s role in the economy. The official narrative holds that the post-socialist state reduced its control over agriculture, but there are still various mechanisms through which it exerts control over farming. In this paper, I examine Tajikistan’s post-socialist agrarian change through the prism of farm debt. Farm debt used to be an accounting nuisance in Soviet agriculture as a result of so-called soft-budget constraints. In the political economy of post-socialist transformation, farm cotton debt has been transformed into indebted land. I classify this debt ‘elastic’ for its ambiguous nature. It ties farmers to land and makes farmers’ independence illusory. With an in-depth analysis based on original ethnographic insights, I aim to provide a theoretical contribution to the way in which debt is conceptualised and politicised in post-Soviet Tajikistan.     

Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework

ABSTRACT

This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.     

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.     

Understanding food security and international security links in the context of climate change

Food production has been changing significantly in recent years as a result of climate change and of growing demand for food. This article aims to understand the link between food security and international security in the context of climate change, applying a systematic and qualitative analysis of the literature using the bibliometric method. This research observes that climate change tends to affect agricultural productivity, exposing societies to risk and the need for migration. However, good governance, together with international cooperation, can reduce the hazards of food insecurity, strengthening ties between countries and stimulating a fairer and more inclusive form of international trade.     

The Influence of Resistance to Change on Public-Sector Reform Implementation: The Case of Italian Municipalities’ Internal Control System

The present research tries to contribute to the academic debate on public management reform adoption, focusing on the reasons for the discrepancies between actual and formal changes and using resistance to change as theoretical basis. The study hypothesizes that high levels of individual and organizational resistance to change may be associated to the formal implementation of public management reforms. The research results allow to confirm the hypothesis when large-size municipalities are considered, while when considering medium-size entities a definite evidence of a relation between resistance to change and the formal implementation of the reforms does not emerge.     

How to Make the Mix Matter: A Case Study of Post-Transformational Leadership in Hybrid Public Management

The purpose of this article is to explain how public managers can influence the mix of institutional logics in a process of organizational change. To do this, the concept of post-transformational leadership is related to institutional logics. The article is based on a case study of the Danish Crime Prevention Council. The study shows how post-transformative leaders are urged to move from strategies of collaboration to strategies of manipulation, hypocrisy, and the hijacking of institutional logics.     

Reshaping State Structure and Strategy: The Reform of Railway Policy in Germany and Italy

For almost four decades, the reform of the state has been a recurrent and relevant topic for social sciences. Has the s.c. positive state been replaced by a regulatory state, or have hybrid configurations emerged? Based on a comparative analysis of German and Italian railway policies, this article aims to contribute to the literature on regulation, considering the possibility of policy mixes in which elements of the positive and the regulatory state are interrelated. Such hybridization is the result of multiple-actor policy arenas, where regulatory tools are used to restructure state’s direct intervention rather than to bring about its retreat.     

Governance of a public sector joint venture: the control challenges of dominated owners

Local governments increasingly choose to provide a wide range of services through cooperation with other local governments. Providing complex services through intergovernmental units creates collaboration risks and collective action dilemmas that need to be mitigated. Based on a longitudinal case study, an investigation is made into the dynamic processes in the governance of a public sector joint venture (JV) and the control challenges of dominated owners. The findings illustrate that the approach to mitigating collective action dilemmas is far less rational than that prescribed by the normative literature, resulting in control challenges at later stages in the relationship. Limitations in the assessment of collaboration risks are explained by drawing on resource dependence theory (RDT) arguments. Dynamic processes in the JV relationship create the need to adjust the governance system. However, adaptability is constrained by power asymmetry and control complexity.     

The peasants in turmoil: Khmer Rouge,state formation and the control of land in northwest Cambodia

Over the past 15 years, northwest Cambodia has seen dramatic agrarian expansion away from the central rice plain into the peripheral uplands fuelled by peasant in-migration. Against this background, we examine the nature of relations between the peasantry and the state. We first show the historical continuities of land control processes and how the use of violence in a post-conflict neoliberal context has legitimised ex-Khmer Rouge in controlling land distribution. Three case studies show the heterogeneity of local level sovereignties, which engage the peasants in different relations with authority. We examine how these processes result in the construction of different rural territories along the agricultural frontier and argue that, in this region of Cambodia, the struggles between Khmer Rouge and neoliberal modes of land control are central to state formation processes.     

The Effects of Blaming Others for Legislative Inaction on Individual and Collective Evaluations

Legislators commonly blame others for gridlock. We posit that legislators may engage in this type of rhetoric to minimize the individual reputational risks associated with legislative inaction or to boost the relative standing of their party. In a series of six survey experiments, we find that blaming others for inaction undermines voters’ evaluations of individual legislators who engage in this rhetorical strategy. This effect is particularly pronounced among out-partisans and independents. However, blaming rhetoric can also enhance the standing of the blamer’s party relative to the opposing party across all groups (including out-partisans), in large part by undermining the reputations of these other actors. Ultimately, we show that when an individual legislator engages in blaming rhetoric, the immediate net electoral effects are null. This suggests that coordinated efforts by a party to blame opponents may improve the party’s relative standing, while imposing few costs on those engaged in blaming.