Book review:
Bangladesh: Reform Agenda for Local Governanceby Tofail Ahmed(Prothoma Prokashani, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2016, ISBN 201601000143, TK 260)http://bigd.bracu.ac.bd/index.php/resources/booklets/543-bangladesh-reform-agenda-for-local-governance-by-tofail-ahmed
Populists claim that they alone represent the voice of the people against a corrupt elite. We argue that populist governments augment this claim by appropriating and manipulating the language and methods of participatory governance. Advancing an analytical framework on content, process, effect, resource efficiency and communication dimensions, we illustrate these arguments with the National Consultations in Hungary in 2010–18. Our conclusion for the case study is that these exercises were deeply flawed for securing popular input into policy-making. The implication for scholarship is that participatory governance enthusiasts need to be more aware not just of the uses, but also the abuses, of public input, while scholars of populism should pay more attention to the actual policies and practices populist actors employ to gain or maintain power.
Based on a new governance theory as regulatory governance, this article analyzes how a new economy creates new transaction costs at the local level due to the lack of legal coordination based on diversity and competition. The literature focuses on how new platform technologies have decreased existing transaction costs (i.e., online platforms). Surrounded by uncertainties in today's diverse, complex, competitive, and a fast market environment, the lack of legal coordination has created new transaction costs for digital platform companies. There is limited research on new digital platform company experiences with high transaction costs. There is also limited information on how to overcome these costs, especially due to the lack of legal coordination. This article documents ways to understand how transaction costs are revealed through new technologies. It compares diverse regulatory impacts of the new economy on different localities, including San Francisco and Istanbul. Analyzing Uber as the case company, as well as its relationship with other stakeholders, this article adopts the governance model of regulation to identify the constitutive dynamics of the regulatory challenges. It reveals that local and global e-hail firms in the same country acquired different acceptance and responses in the local market. Thus, the level of transaction costs varied. Local communication based on diversity and competition was derived from the vested interests of lobbying powers, which led to the rising transaction costs. Comparing the local governance in two cities reveals the extent to which transaction costs affect the raison d'etre of companies to perform activities.
The corporate governance literature provides a rich framework for examining the theoretical models and related mechanisms by which a firm is operated and controlled, but there are a number of challenges for future research that remain. This paper identifies some of the key studies and contributions of the existing corporate governance literature, while identifying several fruitful areas for research where our understanding of corporate governance is incomplete. For example, what is the relationship between and corporate social responsibilities, and how might this change in different institutional environments? Expanding standard models to include more nuanced factors within diverse and dynamic institutional environments is one challenge we face in modeling governance more comprehensively. In addition, as data becomes more easily available on smaller countries, transitional economies, and in frontier and emerging markets, we also need to expand our studies beyond the large Western country context. Future empirical work should undertake to better understand and examine the institutional structures, systems, mechanisms and incentives within understudied regions around the world. Beyond the notion of replication studies, careful cross-country studies would enable us to compare outcomes with existing studies and better inform us on fundamental difference (and similarities) between systems, contributing to our discussions on the limits of conversation between governance systems.
In: Bulletin of the World Health Organization: the international journal of public health = Bulletin de l'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé, Band 97, Heft 3, S. 170-170A
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members' families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC's collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous "criminal criminal records" facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC's rapid expansion across Brazil.
AbstractThe concept of networks has gained interest in public administration and management. They address concerns such as the coordination of multiple actors within the policy process. Networks take both formal and informal forms. As the integration of formal and informal networks in public service delivery is gaining traction, this paper uses the example of diabetes care in Australia and India to provide an analytical framework to examine one of the ways such integration of networks take place. Diabetes, a chronic long‐term disease, poses to be a global problem with a high rate of diagnosis with implications for public health expenditure. A multi‐disciplinary team, which comprises both formal and informal categories, is required to manage diabetes. This paper highlights the integration of networks in diabetes care in different institutional and cultural settings. For such form of integration of networks to work, collaboration among the various actors is important. Lessons learnt from diabetes care will be relevant for other long‐term chronic conditions to help reduce the human resource and financial burden. The analytical framework developed based on the example of diabetes care will provide useful lessons for examining the mechanics and dynamics of the integration between formal and informal networks in the field of public administration and management.