The view from below: Local government and Putin's reforms

Local government reforms in contemporary Russia are placed in the broader contexts of political reform under Putin and the historical relationship between local administration and the state. Reforms of local government thus help illuminate the architecture of contemporary state building in Russia and the degree to which contemporary Russia perpetuates political traditions. This study reviews the antecedent action in local government prior to the Putin era. It then examines the Kozak Commission and the new law on local government, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these reforms. Finally, this study examines the challenges of implementing the reforms and what these challenges tell us about devolution and centralisation under Putin.     

Reviews

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The end of the post-colonial state in Africa? Reflections on changing African political dynamics

Examination of the political trajectory of African states sincethe terminal colonial period suggests that, by the 1990s, the‘post-colonial’ label still widely employed waslosing its pertinence. The term acquired widespread currencynot long after independence in acknowledgment of the importationinto new states of the practices, routines and mentalities ofthe colonial state. These served as a platform for a more ambitiousform of political monopoly, whose legitimating discourse wasdevelopmentalism. The colonial state legacy decanted into apatrimonial autocracy which decayed into crisis by the 1980s,bringing external and internal pressures for economic and politicalstate reconfiguration. But the serious erosion of the statenessof many African polities by the 1990s limited the scope foreffective reform and opened the door for a complex web of novelcivil conflicts; there was also a renewed saliency of informalpolitics, as local societies adapted to diminished state presenceand service provision. Perhaps the post-colonial moment haspassed.     

Risk and the Outsourcing of Risk Management Services: The Case of Claims Management

Outsourcing of risk management activities is a well-established practice, involving a range of services from actuarial audits to loss control training to risk financing management to claims administration services. Surprisingly, little work has been done to examine the risks associated with outsourcing risk management activities. This article examines the outsourcing of claims management services by reviewing the research on outsourcing risks and by interviewing leading practitioners. In doing so, the authors draw some provisional observations about risks and risk costs associated with outsourcing claims management services—observations that seem generalizable to all risk management outsourcing.     

Nothing but gloom: Women and academia in the new Germany

The real losers in restructuring the former East German university system are women scholars. Women are not only the first to lose their positions in the process of Abwicklung they are also the last to be considered in the new stage of rebuilding the university system. Thus the politics of Abwicklung, has to be understood as a microcosm of the gendered nature of German unification as a whole. Unification has provided German conservatives the opportunity to roll back not only the social policies of the east, but also the feminist achievements in the west. While this process may, because of the specificity of unification, be restricted to the German situation, nevertheless many studies show that even without the process of unification, women in virtually all former eastern European countries are experiencing their ‘forced’ return to the private sphere.