Suchergebnisse

Hun Sen, the longtime leader of Cambodia, has used almost every tool in the authoritarian playbook to consolidate his grip on power over the past three decades. Things came to a head early this month when one of Cambodia's two premier English-language newspapers, The Cambodia Daily, was forced closed after being blindsided by the government with a $6 billion tax bill that it couldn't possibly pay. Rendering an extraordinary confluence of dictatorial strategies, the newspaper's final issue on September 4, 2017, headlined with the news of the midnight arrest of the leader of the country's only real opposition party.

The document of record may be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316718513. ; Transformative peace operations fall short of achieving the modern political order sought in post-conflict countries because the interventions themselves empower post-conflict elites intent on forging a neopatrimonial political order. The Peacebuilding Puzzle explains the disconnect between the formal institutional engineering undertaken by international interventions, and the governance outcomes that emerge in their aftermath. Barma's comparative analysis of interventions in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan focuses on the incentives motivating domestic elites over a sequence of three peacebuilding phases: the elite peace settlement, the transitional governance period, and the aftermath of intervention. The international community advances certain forms of institutional design at each phase in the pursuit of effective and legitimate governance. Yet, over the course of the peacebuilding pathway, powerful post-conflict elites co-opt the very processes and institutions intended to guarantee modern political order and dominate the practice of governance within those institutions to their own ends.

The article of record may be found at http://blog.oup.com/authors/naazneen-h-barma/ ; Featured image credit: New Era Foreign Policy Project by Bridging the Gap.

Transformative peace operations fall short of achieving the modern political order sought in post-conflict countries because the interventions themselves empower post-conflict elites intent on forging a neopatrimonial political order. The Peacebuilding Puzzle explains the disconnect between the formal institutional engineering undertaken by international interventions, and the governance outcomes that emerge in their aftermath. Barma's comparative analysis of interventions in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan focuses on the incentives motivating domestic elites over a sequence of three peacebuilding phases: the elite peace settlement, the transitional governance period, and the aftermath of intervention.

AbstractCountries rich in natural resources do not all experience the resource curse in the same way. The rentier state logic holds that the main political–economic impacts of resource dependence rest on how the state handles windfall resource rents. I differentiate how countries experience the resource curse by disaggregating the rentier effect into how governments generate and distribute resource rents. A simple typology of variation in rentier state experiences explains how the overall credibility of intertemporal commitment and degree of political inclusiveness in a country determine its distinct experience of the resource curse. Four brief country cases—comparing the micro political economy of natural resource governance in Laos, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, and Timor‐Leste—illustrate how intertemporal credibility and political inclusiveness affect patterns of resource rent generation and rent distribution. Different countries experience the resource curse in different ways, with implications for policy attempts at mitigation.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/app5.26 ; Countries rich in natural resources do not all experience the resource curse in the same way. The rentier state logic holds that the main political–economic impacts of resource dependence rest on how the state handles windfall resource rents. I differentiate how countries experience the resource curse by disaggregating the rentier effect into how governments generate and distribute resource rents. A simple typology of variation in rentier state experiences explains how the overall credibility of intertemporal commitment and degree of political inclusiveness in a country determine its distinct experience of the resource curse. Four brief country cases—comparing the micro political economy of natural resource governance in Laos, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, and Timor-Leste—illustrate how intertemporal credibility and political inclusiveness affect patterns of resource rent generation and rent distribution. Different countries experience the resource curse in different ways, with implications for policy attempts at mitigation.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2012.703535 ; International peace-building interventions in post-conflict countries are intended to transform the socio-political context that led to violence and thereby build a stable and lasting peace. Yet the UN's transitional governance approach to peace-building is ill-suited to the challenge of dealing with the predatory political economy of insecurity that often emerges in post- conflict societies. Evidence from peace-building attempts in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan illustrates that the political economy incentives facing domestic elites in an environment of low credibility and weak institutionalization lead to a cycle of patronage generation and distribution that undermine legitimate and effective governance. As a result, postconflict countries are left vulnerable to renewed conflict and persistent insecurity. International interventions can only craft lasting peace by understanding the political economy of conflict persistence and the potential policy levers for altering, rather than perpetuating, those dynamics.

Contemporary political economy research suggests that whether a country falls prey to the resource curse depends on a number of structural and economic factors. The cumulative body of large-N analyses of resource-rich developing countries indicates that the quality of existing institutions is perhaps the key factor that mediates a resource-rich country's economic outcomes. Yet there is a gap in the political economy literature in terms of the subsequent causal reasoning about why institutions play this crucial intervening role in the resource curse. In this chapter, I examine the micropolitics of petroleum in Cambodia and East Timor through a framework rooted in the natural resource value chain to develop a sense of the mechanisms underpinning the resource curse in fragile nations. Postconflict states offer fertile ground for generating hypotheses about the causal interplay between fragile political institutions, limited state capacity, and resource riches as they impact economic outcomes.

Abstract
Over the past decade or more, an increasing number of US initiatives and institutions has taken on the challenge of promoting policy-relevant research and bridging the academia–policy divide. Much of the emphasis of such programmes has been on how scholars can better engage the policy community and the broader public. Less attention has been paid to the pitfalls to avoid when seeking to bridge the gap. In this article, we argue that the more that scholars are engaged in producing and disseminating policy-relevant research, the more essential it is to consider how they can build a set of bridging standards to accompany their ideas. We identify four key dimensions of how scholars engage in policy and public debates and discuss how paying careful attention to these four 'I's—Influence, Interlocutors, Integrity and Inclusion—can mitigate the most egregious instances of falling prey to a cult of relevance in bridging the gap. We then explore these factors in a discussion of two case-studies that highlight challenges that arise for those scholars who seek to contribute to policy and public debates: the applications of theories to US foreign policy surrounding the so-called democratic peace; and the efforts of international relations scholars to contribute to peace-building in post-conflict states.

The World Bank Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, Public Sector Governance Unit, Policy Research Working Paper 6744 ; The adequacy of compensation for government workers and the affordability of the public sector wage bill are important concerns for many developing countries. Suitable pay is considered a necessary—albeit far from sufficient—condition for attracting and retaining skilled public sector staff. This paper makes the case for conducting fine-grained analysis of pay and compensation issues in order to enable an accurate assessment of the challenges faced and thereby to generate good-fit reform recommendations that are both principled and feasible. The first part of the paper focuses on prevalent challenges in pay reform, both contextual and analytical. It builds on the experiences from three very different settings: Armenia, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and Mongolia. The study begins by surveying some of the common difficulties in conducting granular analysis on civil service compensation. It then outlines a series of methodological approaches that can prove useful in developing comprehensive, targeted, and nuanced pay analyses and discusses how it is possible to overcome potential limitations in practice. The second half of the paper presents a case study of pay and compensation analysis in Lao PDR. The study illuminates how a number of these approaches can be combined in assessing a specific set of pay challenges and generating robust recommendations tailored to context. A brief postscript, with the benefit of hindsight on what subsequently happened on the ground in Lao PDR, reflects on the limitations of technical analysis in motivating reform implementation in practice.

Électricité du Laos (EDL), the public electricity utility of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, has achieved remarkable institutional success over the past two decades, particularly in terms of the gains in rural electrification it has achieved in the country. EDL has distributed electricity to a steadily increasing proportion of the Lao population, with improving levels of service consistency and technical efficiency. Through the expansion of the electricity grid to remote areas and the poorest elements of the Lao population, EDL has built legitimacy for itself in the eyes of its clients and stakeholders across the country and, in turn, played an important part in building the legitimacy of the state. Its successes have, moreover, proven durable over almost four decades, across several changes in leadership and in the face of setbacks. EDL's mandate includes the essential business of electricity generation, a dimension that has provided essential financial and institutional resources to the Government of Lao PDR and has become even more crucial as the country has modernized.

The Lao People's Democratic Republic is a small, landlocked, geographically diverse country, populated sparsely with 6.5 million multiethnic peoples. Lao PDR is one of the poorest countries in the East Asia and the Pacific region, but it has enjoyed more than two decades of rapid economic development. The country's overall level of institutional capacity has risen steadily over the past 20 years - in tandem with growth and as a result of a concerted program of economic and administrative reforms. This brief introduction contextualizes the political economy environment and imperatives that have enabled and shaped two particular cases of successful institutional development in Lao PDR - the Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MPWT) in the roads sector and Électricité du Laos (EDL) in the power sector.