Coercive Policy Diffusion in a Developing Country: The Case of Public-Private Partnerships in Sri Lanka

Over the last two decades, public-private partnership policy has been adopted in developing countries to a lesser degree than in industrialised countries. This paper argues that this policy has been diffused to developing countries like Sri Lanka with coercion from international aid-granting organisations through conditionalities attached to financial assistance. It details the country-specific challenges faced by Sri Lanka in responding to conditionalities as it has sought to implement this policy. Drawing on policy diffusion theory the paper develops a framework to be used in analysing the issues under investigation.     

Strengthening Humanitarian Law: what role for Commonwealth countries

This article explores some of the new challenges confronting Commonwealth countries in the context of international humanitarian law (IHL). The very nature of non-international armed conflicts presents new challenges that did not exist in the context of inter-State conflicts, which were conducted in the traditional battlefield with well demarcated boundaries. The point is made that, in addressing the role of the Commonwealth in relation to contemporary IHL issues, a good starting point would be the shared commonalities between the two branches of law, HRL and IHL, notwithstanding their distinct paths of development. There are several important areas that could form the core of Commonwealth cooperation in strengthening IHL, including in the area of legislation, national mechanisms for the implementation of IHL and regional measures to strengthen IHL.     

Antitrust policy in a hostile environment: institution building in venezuela's procompetencia

Theories of bureaucracy in Latin America generally stress institutional weakness, political volatility and the politicized nature of government agencies. One product of market liberalization in Venezuela was the creation of the anti-monopoly agency called “Procompetencia”, which managed to survive a change of government and a move toward interventionist, anti-market mechanisms hostile to its survival. The strategy and tactics of this agency are reviewed with the objective of detecting bureaucratic responses to threat and successful efforts to survive. Some lessons are derived for infusing more stability into weak institutions.     

A business process improvement framework for knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial ventures

Pushed by the transition towards the knowledge economy, as well as several other change drivers, an ever-increasing number of knowledge intensive ventures are relying on operational knowledge intensity in order to generate value. Through their interaction with their varied stakeholders—from actors within their supply chains to educational and financial institutions—knowledge intensive enterprises are increasingly becoming a key component of regional economic stability. Within their complex environment, these organisations lack the support of suitable frameworks to inform their efforts to optimise, adapt and improve their underlying business processes in order to maximise the efficiency of their performance and pursue growth ambitions. This paper examines the distinct nature of knowledge intensive entrepreneurial ventures (KIEs) and the applicability of current business process improvement (BPI) frameworks to their setting. Finally, a KIE-oriented business process improvement framework is developed through an integrative adaptation of the concepts of knowledge intensity and knowledge management to the principles of business process redesign and re-engineering reported in existing literature. The proposed framework contributes to the existing literature in the subject of BPI modelling for knowledge intensive entrepreneurial ventures by addressing a distinct set of improvement concerns that this type of organisations face at a process level.     

oceanic corpo-graphies,refugee bodies and the making and unmaking of waters

This essay considers the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of ‘the liberal state’ and ‘the liberal subject’, and argues that the latter are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. This distinction, constituted by the freedom of the sea-going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture's contemporary sea romances, and in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. In the diverse forms of traffic flowing from south to north, the historical oceanic mobility of this unfettered liberal subject (always shadowed and weighted down by its invisible freight of non-white bodies) now meets the transversal movements of the contemporary transnational subaltern as complex subject. Through the narratives of two refugees to Australia, the article traces the possibilities of an embodied refugee poetics for inscribing new geographies across the global borderlands.     

Tuning knowledge ecosystems: exploring links between hotels’ knowledge structures and online government services provision

The development of knowledge-based business opportunities in many economic sectors worldwide is often conceived through a silo-mentality, whereby efforts are focused in either industry or government entities in isolation. Without a systemic or holistic understanding of connections between these, any present or future project evaluation becomes either input- or output-based instead of having a comprehensive understanding of its impact. In order to address such a challenge, this empirical study focuses on the Spanish hospitality sector, which currently thrives by continuously accessing external and internal sources of knowledge, thus offering opportunities to conceptualise it as a knowledge ecosystem. Lessons learned from the Spanish hospitality sector have the potential to inform the design of online government services as part of a knowledge ecosystem. This can, in turn, yield further opportunities for innovation in the hospitality sector. A structural equation model validated by factor analysis of 130 hotels is used to assess the extent to which hotels currently benefit from online government services. This study concludes that online government services can be better fostered by nurturing external communities while also setting up internal working communities and practices. The model and its implications can also inform initiatives which seek to pursue ecosystem-oriented research and practice, as well as future policy and technology transfer initiatives.     

Bermuda triangulation: embracing the messiness of researching in conflict

ABSTRACT

In conflict-affected states, poor transportation infrastructure and risk-averse security protocols can significantly constrain researchers’ ability to access information. Pressure on academics to be methodologically rigorous and produce policy-relevant research means that the problematic nature of the data we use is often obscured and ignored in research outputs. Through an autoethnography of research in the DRC, this article critically discusses the messiness of triangulating information in the field amidst the competing knowledge claims of different actors on the ground. Nonetheless, it argues that information which is messy and difficult to triangulate can itself be a valuable source of conflict knowledge. This knowledge emerges from what is here termed ‘Bermuda Triangulation’—whereby the verification of one piece of information leads to the uncovering of multiple views, which may themselves tell us much about the drivers of conflict.