Suchergebnisse

How to secure sustainable access to water is an increasingly acute problem that is global in scope. "From Resource Management to Political Activism: Civil Society Participation in Nicaragua's Rural Water Governance" demonstrates that this problem is also one that intersects in crucial ways with democratic political processes. Based upon thirteen months of field research in Nicaragua, this dissertation examines how community-based resource managers and water service providers transcend their rural localities and roles in order to engage in fundamentally new forms of political engagement, advocacy, and networking. After thirty years of constituting a legally-unrecognized resource management scheme in the country's rural areas, Potable Water and Sanitation Committees (CAPS) have formed dozens of new transcommunity, multi-sectoral "CAPS networks." These networks are serving as platforms for the participation of rural social actors in formal politics and their integration into policy processes. Notably, these dynamics are unfolding in an unlikely context: one of extreme political polarization and state attempts at cooptation via new mechanisms of direct democracy at the subnational level. This dissertation is motivated by the puzzle of how CAPS collectively assert themselves across political scales while maintaining autonomy and pluralism--even as the state seeks to incorporate expressions of civil society into partisan channels of citizen participation from above. I argue that this outcome of autonomy and pluralism is explained by three interrelated and mutually-dependent factors: 1) the CAPS' empowerment, capacities, and legitimacy as local resource managers; 2) their alliances with domestic and international NGOs and multilateral organizations; and 3) their strategic discourses of water use, access, and distribution. Principal research methods include semi-structured interviews; participant observation; and review and analysis of government and nongovernmental reports and documents, newspaper articles, and national legislation. Guided by an explicitly interdisciplinary orientation, this dissertation generates more robust theoretical arguments about two important trends in Latin America: democratization and decentralization.

Reply to the CARIM-East RR2012/09 ; CARIM-East: Creating an Observatory of Migration East of Europe ; Migration management is among Georgia's key external and internal policy priorities. This is demonstrated by the latest agreements signed by Georgia in order to integrate into the European Union as well as into the rest of civilized and democratic world. Prof. G. Gabrichidze's (hereafter: "the author") study "Legal Aspects of Labour Migration Governance in Georgia" (hereafter: "the study") is an attempt to assess current legal instruments of migration management. The study is crucial for anyone wanting to have a full picture about the existing legal context, achievements, as well as gaps and measures that should be further taken. However, the study does not fully reflect a dynamic evaluation of legal and policy-making developments, nevermind the approaches and aspirations of Georgia to improve the migration management within and outside the country. ; CARIM-East is co-financed by the European University Institute and the European Union.

Over the past decade the contours of political party competition in Latin America have been dramatically altered by an upsurge of support for leftist-populist parties and the related weakening of established parties on the center and right end of the political spectrum. Drawing on both aggregate and individual-level evidence, this article explores the roots of this swing of the political pendulum. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which attributes the rising "pink tide" to citizen dissatisfaction with market-oriented policies, economic performance, and/or social inequality, the analysis focuses on the role played by improving external economic conditions during the early 2000s, which relaxed the preexisting constraints on policy choice, enhanced the credibility of anti-status quo political actors, and created new opportunities for the pursuit of statist, nationalist, and redistributive political projects and associated challenges to U.S. hegemony. Consistent with this line of theoretical argument, the macro-level evidence indicates that the odds of electing a leftist-populist president in the region rose with improvements in the terms of trade. At the micro level, survey data also show that support for leftist-populist presidents in the region has been positively associated with citizen satisfaction with democracy and the state of the economy as well as with anti-Americanism. The results underline the potential significance of economic fluctuations for understanding electoral dynamics and party system change, particularly under conditions in which government policy choice is constrained by the operation of international markets. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

This article examines the phenomenon of increased political pressures on governments in four Westminster systems (Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand) derived from changes in mass media and communications, increased transparency, expanded audit, increased competition in the political marketplace, and political polarization in the electorate. These pressures raise the risk to impartial public administration and management performance to the extent that governments integrate governance and campaigning, allow political staff to be a separate force in governance, politicize top public service posts, and expect public servants to be promiscuously partisan. The article concludes that New Zealand is best positioned to cope with these risks, in part because of its process for independently staffing its top public service posts. The article recommends this approach as well as the establishment of independently appointed management boards for public service departments and agencies to perform the governance of management function.

The article examines the implementation by the Italian Ministry of Health of performance-based funding to allocate resources for research to IRCCS (Istituti di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico) hospitals. The analysis provides evidence that ten years from its introduction the performance-based funding system has persisted, but it has been implemented rather differently from what had been imagined by its proponents. By drawing on the theoretical frameworks of policy implementation, agency, and relational contracting, the study establishes that the overall design of the system has contributed to this final outcome only to a limited extent. Rather, the lack of procedural fairness, as well as of political leadership in linking the system to national research priorities, has undermined the basis for trust between hospitals and the Ministry of Health. The article discusses how, in this, the governance of performance-based funding and its strong ownership by the ministerial bureaucracy has been determinant. Adapted from the source document.