Suchergebnisse

Most research examining the relationship between social capital and outcomes focuses on either internal social capital or external social capital. This article examines the impact of both internal and external social capital on the success of self‐organizing community initiatives. A study of community water projects in a developing country, Nepal, shows that communities that enjoy less internal conflict and more external partnerships are more likely to be successful in securing agency funds for their projects. Also, communities face trade‐offs between internal and external social capital. These dimensions of social capital are not perfect substitutes, and communities that maintain a strategic balance between the two maximize gains from a trade‐off. Moreover, such an optimal choice is dependent on the level of internal and external social capital that these communities hold.

Deploying perspectives from historical institutionalism and discursive institutionalism, this paper analyses the establishment of biopatents as a case of policy change driven by two mechanisms: institutional layering and ideational struggle between competing policy paradigms. The extension of patent law to agriculture creates a new institutional layer to agriculture policy and reinforces an incremental paradigm shift from agricultural exceptionalism to market liberalism. In response, the agricultural policy community successfully entrenches sector specific exceptions within patent law, turning patent institutions into new policy venues for the ideational struggle between the competing agricultural policy paradigms. Over the decades, legislative and jurisdictional processes unfold with contradictory dynamics. The case raises important questions about legitimacy, conflicting values, multiple orders and policy change in multi-arena governance.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the oldest dedicated development institution in the multilateral system, yet it remains one of the smallest in terms of funding and resources. This belies its central role in contributing to the rankings, benchmarks and ratings that have defined the process of development for states, non-governmental organisations and the private sector. The UNDP created the Human Development Report (HDR) and Human Development Index (HDI), coordinates the benchmarks of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and has recently partnered with Standard and Poor's (S&P) in devising sovereign credit ratings for developing countries. In this regard, mobilising numbers in support of development strategies is not new; yet, as this paper argues, the UNDP's development policy has seen a significant shift from the qualitative analysis presented in the HDR to the quantitative nature of credit rating. This paper will adopt a governmentality approach in looking at sovereign credit rating and analysing how the power of numbers informs the rationality underpinning the partnership between the UNDP and the rating agency S&P. It concludes that while pursuing sovereign credit rating may be seen as 'capacity development' for the UNDP, it in fact represents a shift by the organisation towards quantitative practices that have particular consequences for the global governance of development.

Formal and informal institutions are often viewed as complements or substitutes in empirical and theoretical works. However, no evidence of complementarities or substitutes is found in our empirical analysis of the interrelation between formal and informal decentralization across 64 provinces of Vietnam. This paper finds that the formally decentralized system of public service supply is accommodating the informal one, but informal decentralization in public order provision tends to compete with the existing ineffective formal system. This implies that the central government needs to reorganize the system of decentralizing the provision of public goods/services and public in order to make informal institutions complementary rather than rival or free-riding on formal ones.

The EU has been making strong inroads into the realm of security over the last few years. This is a remarkable development, since security matters used to be the preserve of states. The articles presented in this special issue all testify to the breadth of the EU security agenda, as they all try to capture some aspects of the EU's fast-changing security policies following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 December 2009. In parallel with a broadening of the EU's security agenda, an increase in supranational security governance in the EU can also be observed. The transition to supranational governance is reached in two ways. First, cross-border security threats generate demand for EU laws, which supranational organisations then supply. Reasons for changes in the EU polity are exogenous shocks, the fact that rule innovations are endogenous to politics, the diffusion of organisational behaviour and models of action, and policy entrepreneurship, whereby institutional entrepreneurs construct and revise 'policy frames', which engage other actors and define new relationships between them and chart courses of action. As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, 11 September 2001 provided such a major exogenous shock required for a change in the EU polity, which EU institutions exploited by providing increasing EU legislation, and even, as a by-product, stabilising a European legal order.