Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Ambiguity has often been taken as the bete noir of policy implementation, with policy intent stymied by unclear goals and lack of clarity about processes. This paper argues that, given sufficient apparent certainty about strategic intents, ambiguity can actually be an enabling factor that allows for quick adaptations. It goes do in three ways – first, ambiguity allows the creation of faint paths that are overwritten in the light of new decisions; second and relatedly, this enables the bureaucracy to take more risks, in light of the relatively low sunk costs; third, ambiguity allows for experiments with fuzzy parameters of success, which contributes to innovation. In all three, the role of learning is crucial.
This thesis of ambiguity as enabler of learning by bureaucrats is tested in the case of water security in Singapore, which faced economic, technology and security ambiguities. There is a bureaucratic tendency to react to ambiguity with a search for more information and clarity. However because of the ambiguity-enabled learning, Singapore through a very roundabout and messy implementation process, was able to overcome a key strategic vulnerability.

Despite the growing need for private sector participation (PSP) in the water sector, private sector investments in the water sector have experienced a downturn in recent years, especially concession projects, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of all PSP projects in urban water utilities from 1990 to 2005. This paper traces the concession to its origin—the French model—and focuses on the challenges of transferring the model into the context of developing countries, by comparing two cases of concession projects in Jakarta and Manila. This comparative analysis suggests that although the French model appears a compelling choice because of its promise of attracting capital investments and improving efficiency, successful applications of the model may require substantial modifications to its original form in order to adapt to prevailing legal and social norms as well as to local governance capacity.

Abstract
Government information activities are often thought to be motivated by a classic calculus of blame minimization and credit maximization. However, the precise interactions of "blame" and "credit" communication activities in government are not well understood, and questions abound about how they are deployed in practice. This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) machine-learning sentiment analysis of a unique dataset composed of several thousand tweets of high-level political leaders in four OECD countries—namely the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Canada—during 2020–2022 to examine the relationships existing between "blame" and "credit" communication strategies and their relation to the changing severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in an objective and subjective sense. In general, the study suggests that during this high-impact, long-lasting, and waxing and waning crisis, political leaders acted in accordance with theoretical expectations when it came to communicating credit seeking messages during the periods when the COVID situation was thought to be improving, but they did not exclusively rely upon communicating blame or scapegoating when the situation was considered to be deteriorating. The consequences of this finding for blame and credit-based theories of government communication are then discussed.

This article investigates how the "constructivist turn" in public policy and international political economy informs the interaction of global ideas and local practice in water governance. We use the implementation of ideas associated with IntegratedWater Resources Management (IWRM) in the Lower Mekong river basin. This article provides some explanation of the attitudes in the villages in Cambodia due to the Sesan 2 Dam, which would see the relocation of thousands of people, damage fisheries, and inflict high coping costs on villagers. Based on 24 in-depth interviews with villagers, commune heads and local community leaders, we find diverse narratives which transcend the "pro or anti" dam narrative. We find four narrative types-myths, stories, noise and informed opinion, which relate to each other in degrees of social meaning and ideational force. Of these, the first two are more likely to be useful in terms of mobilization and policy-making. This typology provides a framework for analysis of social change in the studied villages and other contexts of policy translation. We should state that these four types are not separate from each other but are linked along two axis which together conscribe the four types of narratives outlined.