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Conventional international development project approaches to enable participation of the excluded often fall short of building countervailing power, which is key for accountability. This study analyzes possible exceptions to identify causal pathways, as well as long-term effects beyond projects. The methodology combines the identification of positive outliers, process tracing and comparative analysis of five World Bank projects from the 1990s that were also the focus of subsequent academic research. Tangible openings from above that enabled countervailing power took two main forms: 1) institutionalized power-sharing over allocation of social funds — at local, subnational and national levels and 2) support for autonomous, multi-level social organizations, including collective titling of ethnic territories. Over the longer term, projects lacked strong national allies and their most innovative contributions were reversed, watered down or at best contained - though these differences mattered to social actors on the ground. The most analytically significant finding is that projects can have not only contested and uneven outcomes ("mixed results"), but also contradictory interaction effects. This poses the methodological challenge of how to measure and explain the relative weights of both countervailing power shifts and elite capture.

This study examines patterns in societal and government-based religious discrimination (SRD and GRD) against 307 religious minorities in 67 Christian-majority democracies using the Religion and State-Minorities round 3 (RASM3) dataset. Despite expectations that all forms of religious discrimination, especially GRD, should be lower in Western liberal democracies, it is, in fact, lower in developing countries. I argue that three factors explain this discrepancy. Economically developed countries have more resources available for discrimination. Western democracies have higher levels of support for religion than Christian-majority developing countries and countries which more strongly support religion are more likely to discriminate against religious minorities. Finally levels of SRD are higher in the West and SRD is posited to be a cause of GRD. Empirical tests support these propositions.

AbstractPolitical secularism is defined as "an ideology or set of beliefs advocating that religion ought to be separate from all or some aspects of politics or public life (or both)." In thesecular–religious competition perspective, I argue that political secularists compete with religious political actors to influence government policy around the world. Yet this competition is complicated by many factors. The contributions to this symposium demonstrate that this is the case in their examination of secular–religious tensions and state–religion relations in Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Tunisia. These cases show that government religion policy evolves over time and is deeply influenced by secular–religious competition but that this competition is a complex one involving many other factors and influences.

Abstract
This study examines government religion policy in 26 Western democracies between 1990 and 2014 using the Religion and State round 3 (RAS3) dataset to determine whether these policies can be considered secular. While many assume that the West and its governments are secular and becoming more secular, the results contradict this assumption. All Western governments support religion in some manner, including financial support. All but Canada restrict the religious practices and/or religious institutions of religious minorities. All but Andorra and Italy restrict or regulate the majority religion. In addition religious both governmental and societal discrimination against religious minorities increased significantly between 1990 and 2014. All of this indicates religion remains a prominent factor in politics and society in the West.

"Religious Regulation: Discrimination Against Religious Minorities" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Religious Regulation: The Regulation of All Religion in a Country" published on by Oxford University Press.

Terminology in the accountability field is ambiguous, encompassing both top-down, technocratic control initiatives and bottom-up efforts to challenge the abuse of power and promote equity. The main proposition is that communicating accountability strategies should rely on conceptual and cross-cultural translation rather than awkward attempts at direct linguistic translation. To illustrate how accountability keywords are both politically constructed and contested, this article briefly reflects on the origins, circulation, and transformation of six relevant terms: transparency, the right to know, whistle-blower, advocacy, openwashing, and social accountability – including reflections from accountability advocates from Pakistan, Guatemala, and the Philippines. The conclusion calls for a two-track approach to communicate public accountability strategies, which involves (1) searching within popular cultures to find existing terms or phrases that can be repurposed, and (2) inventing new discourses that communicate ideas about public accountability that resonate with culturally grounded common-sense understandings.

Civil society accountability initiatives that take into account power structures at multiple levels can produce more lasting institutional change, compared to locally-bounded initiatives that address the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of accountability failures. Vertically integrated civil society policy monitoring and advocacy initiatives involve inter-relationships between local, subnational, national and international actors.The research combines two complementary perspectives: a scholar�s overview of this strategic approach, including five propositions on vertical integration, in dialogue with a practitioner�s in-depth analysis of Textbook Count in the Philippines, a civil society coalition which, in partnership with government reformers, provided independent monitoring of an entire supply chain in the education sector. The analysis addresses the implications of vertical integration for civil society coalition dynamics, and the distinction between independent policy monitoring and advocacy. The conclusions suggest that better donor coordination of civil society support can create opportunities for more integrated initiatives, taking advantage of critical entry points provided by sector-specific approaches. Facilitating dialogue between different actors and supporting longer implementation strategies can also advance integrated monitoring and advocacy.