Decentralisation processes and development issues

L’Environnementalité en Lieu de la Solidarité : La Formation des Sujets et le Gouvernement Intime des Forets dans la Région de Kaolack au Sénégal

by Ewan Robinson

New Political Spaces and Public Sphere 'Deliberativeness' in Ecuador, 1822-2011

by Conor Farrington

Widely adopted decentralisation policies have increased the significance of local citizen participation in Latin... more Widely adopted decentralisation policies have increased the significance of local citizen participation in Latin America, especially with regard to ‘new political spaces’, or spaces for citizen–government engagement distinct from both electoral democracy and non-electoral political activism. Since new political spaces tend to employ ‘deliberative democratic’ methods of decision making, their prospects depend to a considerable extent on the extent to which surrounding ‘public spheres’ enable or constrain deliberation. This paper focuses on the specific case of Ecuador, drawing upon theories of deliberative democracy and the public sphere to assess the likely prospects for new political spaces in Ecuador through an examination of the key aspects of Ecuadorian politics and society since independence from Spain in 1822.

Viljan att aktivera: Mobilisering av förorten som politisk teknologi

by Magnus Dahlstedt

published 2006 in Utbildning & Demokrati, 15 [3]; 83-106

During the 1990s, the ideal of ”mobilization from below” and building”partnerships” between public and private actors,... more During the 1990s, the ideal of ”mobilization from below” and building”partnerships” between public and private actors, political institutions, local communities and NGOs became a salient feature of Swedish debateon multi-ethnic suburbs. In this article, the discourse of ”active citizenship” is analysed in three different policy areas: democracy, urban andeducational policy. The theoretical point of departure is the work of Michel Foucault and his theories of power and political technology. Following the framework established by Foucault, the aim of ”mobilizing the suburb” which dominates contemporary debate about multi-ethnic suburbs is analysed in terms of particular ”technologies of government” that create citizens as ”active” and ”responsible” subjects. In the move towards ”active citizenship”, it is argued, a neo-liberal agenda has gained momentum in Swedish politics, further emphasizing the role of individual responsibilities and initiatives as opposed to public arrangements and interventions.

PERKEMBANGAN RAJA AMPAT PASCA PEMEKARAN DAERAH DAN PENERAPAN OTONOMI KHUSUS

by Ikhsan Darmawan

Paper dipresentasikan dalam Seminar Internasional Percik ke-11, 23-24 Juli 2010, diselenggarakan oleh Yayasan Percik di Kampung Percik, Salatiga, Jawa Tengah, Indonesia dengan tema ‘Ada Apa dengan 10 Tahun Pelaksanaan Otonomi Daerah”

Desentralisasi dan pemekaran daerah menjadi salah isu pokok yang mendapat perhatian khusus pasca runtuhnya rezim Orde... more Desentralisasi dan pemekaran daerah menjadi salah isu pokok yang mendapat perhatian khusus pasca runtuhnya rezim Orde Baru. Berkaitan dengan hal it u, salah satu daerah di Papua (lebih tepatnya sekarang ini adalah Provinsi Papua Barat) yang merupakan daerah hasil pemekaran daerah adalah Kabupaten Raja Ampat. Pembentukan Kabupaten Raja Ampat merupakan satu hal yang tak terhindarkan. Paling tidak, hal itu didasari oleh kondisi geografis Raja Ampat yang berbentuk kepulauan. Prinsip penataan daerah untuk mewujudkan pemerintahan yang efektif dan efisien dengan mendekatkan pelayanan publik ke rakyat menemukan relevansinya di Kabupaten Raja Ampat. Selain itu, sejak disahkannya UU No.21 Tahun 2001 tentang Otonomi Khusus Papua,
Tanah Papua (untuk dapat menggambarkan pencakupan wilayah Papua Barat setelah resmi berdiri sebagai provinsi sendiri). Secara otomatis, Kabupaten Raja Ampat yang berada di wilayah Provinsi Papua Barat mengalami dampak dari pelaksanaan otonomi khusus. Penelitian ini ingin menjawab permasalahan: Bagaimana dampak pemekaran Kabupaten Raja Ampat dan penerapan otonomi khusus Papua terhadap pembangunan dan kesejahteraan masyarakat di Kabupaten Raja Ampat?
Penelitian ini dilakukan di Kabupaten Raja Ampat dengan menggunakan beberapa metode, seperti wawancara mendalam, observasi langsung, dan pengunaan data sekunder. Teknik penarikan sampel untuk informan adalah dengan teknik purposive sampling. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa pasca pemekaran daerah, dapat dikatakan bahwa Kabupaten Raja Ampat adalah daerah yang pembangunannya paling terdepan jika dibandingkan dengan kabupaten/kota lain di Provinsi Papua Barat yang juga termasuk dalam kategori daerah hasil pemekaran daerah. Selain itu, Pemerintah Daerah Raja Ampat juga mengeluarkan kebijakan khusus, yaitu pemberian dana sebesar Rp 150 juta per kampung per tahun untuk mempercepat pelaksanaan pembangunan di kampung, yang terinspirasi dari kebijakan pemberian dana otonomi khusus di seluruh tanah Papua sebesar Rp 100 juta per distrik (kecamatan). Hanya saja, perlu dicatat bahwa proses pembangunan yang selama ini dilakukan di Kabupaten Raja Ampat yang cenderung melakukan pemekaran kampung, perlu ditinjau ulang. Pasalnya, jika kembali kepada prinsip dasar desentralisasi dan pemekaran daerah, yakni efisien dan efektif,

Trading Solidarity for Environmentality: Subject Formation and Intimate Government of Forests in Kaolack Region, Senegal

by Ewan Robinson

Master's thesis, 2011

Community-based natural resource management projects widely fail to meet their stated goals. But what do such... more Community-based natural resource management projects widely fail to meet their stated goals. But what do such interventions and policies actually achieve? How do they alter the practices and consciousness of the people whom they involve in management? Drawing on work on environmentality, this thesis examines the legacy of a community-based natural resource management project in Kaolack Region, Senegal. Prior to the project, residents of this region subtlety and collectively refused to comply with state forest regulation, relying on widespread solidarity to avoid being caught and sanctioned by the forest service. However, this situation changed in the 1w990s with the arrival of a project known as PAGERNA. As residents became implicated in forest management, some began to develop environmental subjectivities: new ideas of self-interest and commitment to environmental protection. After the close of PAGERNA, these environmental subjectivities led certain residents to collaborate with local government officials and the forest service in order to enforce new restrictions on forest use. Management after the project took the form of a regime of “intimate government,” in which communities regulated themselves, working with state authorities. However, not all rural residents adopted environmentalist values. Some complied with restrictions only because their activities were closely monitored. Others, residents of the poorest villages, continued to resist regulation. However, these resistors found that in the new regime environmentality had replaced solidarity; they were sanctioned by village guards and government foresters. The case of Kaolack reveals how subject formation shapes the long-term legacy of natural resource policies and projects. It shows how management systems are constituted by multiple subjectivities and how rural residents are controlled through multiple mechanisms of rule. The thesis argues that, rather than focusing on single outcomes, we must examine heterogeneous changes in people’s practices, identities, and relationships with institutions.

An Overview of Decentralization in Sub-Saharan Africa

by Pasquale De Muro

Decentralization and Development in South-Saharan-Africa

by Pasquale De Muro

Decentramento istituzionale e sviluppo nell'Africa Subsahariana

by Pasquale De Muro

Villes, énergie et développement durable en Jordanie : entre néolibéralisme et improbable décentralisation

by eric verdeil

in Expérimenter la ville durable au sud de la méditerranée. Chercheurs et professionnels en dialogue, Barthel, Pierre-Arnaud et Zaki, Lamia (Ed.) (2011) 291-319

The paper analyses the changes in the Jordanian energy policy in the context of a new priority for the sustainable... more The paper analyses the changes in the Jordanian energy policy in the context of a new priority for the sustainable development from a local public policy framework perspective focusing on issues of liberalization and decentralization. How do energy policies play at the local level? In this respect Jordan is an interesting case. Electricity consumption is on the rise. The governement is undertaking major institutional reshffling of the sector, including the end of subsidies and privatization as well as the development of renewable energy. The local consequences of such changes are analyzed in the paper. We highlight that the sustainable urban development emphasizes the trend towards the liberalization of space, ie the bypass of local municipal authorities by private and corporate management in the name of efficiency.

Aggravating the resource curse: Decentralisation, mining and conflict in Peru

by Javier Arellano-Yanguas

Resurgimiento minero en Perú: ¿una versión moderna de una vieja maldición?

by Javier Arellano-Yanguas

Spanish version

The renewed importance of mining in the Peruvian economy and the expectation of new investments in the sector have... more The renewed importance of mining in the Peruvian economy and the expectation of new investments in the sector have nourished the hope of reducing the poverty levels and overcoming political instability. That is why Peru maintains itself within orthodox politics and economy. Recent governments have kept a strict macroeconomic stability and, since 2001, they have encouraged a political agenda that stresses decentralisation, participation, and collaboration between private initiatives and public institutions. However, the increase of conflicts around mining operations questions the capacity of mining to promote development. I contend that in the context of a state with important limitations, the simplistic implementation of the new political agenda generates a new form of "curse of the resources" that consists of two changes: a) the appearance of new political actors; b) the emergence of the sub-national level as the crucial space in which this "curse" is manifested.

Planning at the Grassroots: An Experiment with Integrated District Planning

by Joydeep Baruah

Published in Social Change and Development, Vol. 6, 2009

Drawing upon a field based exercise herein I have addressed the issue of constructing aggregate preferences based on... more Drawing upon a field based exercise herein I have addressed the issue of constructing aggregate preferences based on individual preferences within social choice framework

Search Engines and Online Museum Access on the Web

by Jonathan Bowen

Teresa Numerico, Jonathan P. Bowen and Silvia Filippini-Fantoni (University of Paris I, Sorbonne, France). In David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (eds.), MW2005: Museums and the Web 2005, Vancouver, Canada, 13-16 April 2005. Archives & Museum Informatics, 2005.

Read more: Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2005: Papers: Numerico, Bowen & Filippini-Fantoni, Search Engines and Online Museum Access on the Web http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/numerico/numerico.html 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

We can consider Web browsing as a similar experience to visiting a museum, when we take decisions about where to stop... more We can consider Web browsing as a similar experience to visiting a museum, when we take decisions about where to stop and where to skip over the exhibited objects. This is the same in museums; there are some tools available to help people select what they want to see such as maps, brochures, etc. Just as in a real museum, where maps and brochures help people organize their visit, search engines support the user in their navigation on the Web by assisting them in finding the most relevant material, while ignoring the rest. The Web is a unique "museum" where there are all sorts of data, including multimedia objects, so it is particularly crucial to respect the potentially different attitudes of users that may have various interests and different perspectives. (This is once again the same in museums.) The role of search engines is particularly problematic because they have to guarantee the efficiency of the service without betraying the multiplicity of users' purposes.

The aim of this paper is to show the result of testing the difficulty of access to useful museum-related resources that are not very well known, but contain relevant information when search engines and other query techniques are used. We will show that many museum Web sites and databases belong to the hidden part of the Web that is not accessible unless the precise URL is known. We will discuss some practical issues on finding museum information and how museums could improve their search rankings and their own searching facilities, especially with respect to the widely used Google search engine.

Further, we will introduce some promising solutions for finding museums' Web sites and searching within them, such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) search tools, intelligent agents that are specialized for information retrieval using "clustering" strategies based on user preferences, as well as systems of collaborative filtering and collaborative categorization from user experiences and judgments, allowing a personalized search.

All these alternative methods have only a little in common, but share the characteristics of respecting the decentralized and dynamic topology of the Web, while search engines are based on traditional techniques of information retrieval; namely, strategies to access pre-structured data using the appropriate pre-established queries. The Web cannot be compared to a repository of structured data; it requires the development of innovative approaches and methods that take into account its chaotic nature. For all these reasons we do not consider the metadata solution here in detail, despite its role in searching specific museum collections on-line; we believe that there are interesting alternative methods to investigate for the future.

Keywords: search engines, queries, mapping on the Web, the hidden part of the Web

Military Entrenchment and the Weakening of the Bureaucracy in Pakistan: The 2000 Devolution Reforms

by Muneeb Ansari

An examination of the local government reforms instituted by the Musharraf government in 2000 in Pakistan. It... more An examination of the local government reforms instituted by the Musharraf government in 2000 in Pakistan. It demonstrates how the devolution reforms decreased the political and administrative influence of the bureaucracy by removing their executive administration powers and caused further politicization and decay of the civil service. Non-traditional authorities and local elites were able to capture many of the new elected positions resulting in little improvement in the people’s participation. Patron-client relations between the local elite and civil servants were reversed, further weakening the bureaucracy. The rise in power of the military and its infiltration into all institutions of the state allowed it to systemically weaken the bureaucracy’s elite cadre (the DMG) and marginalize a potential institutional competitor. Local elites became subservient to the military as well, which further decreased the need for a partnership with the bureaucracy. This served to remove a potentially powerful competitor for the military regime and fit the larger trend of the increasing encroachment of the military into the state. The nature of the reforms, though meant to increase democratization and participation, further served to entrench the power of military as the strongest institution in the country.

Fiscal Decentralization: Explaining Successful Local Economic Development in Latin America

by Heidi Jane Smith

Fiscal Decentralization: Explaining Successful Local Economic Development in Latin America

by Heidi Jane Smith

CAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS BE USED AS AGENT FOR GROWTH? EXPLAINING LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA

by Heidi Jane Smith

Thoughts on the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils Act of 1995

by Martijn van Beek

van Beek, M. (1997, December). "Thoughts on the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils Act of 1995." Mountain Forum electronic conference on Mountain Policy and Law.

Ladakh: independence is not enough

by Martijn van Beek

van Beek, M. and Kristoffer Brix Bertelsen (1995). Ladakh: 'Independence' Is Not Enough. Himal. 8: 7-15.

Lessons from Ladakh? Local responses to globalization and social change

by Martijn van Beek

van Beek, M. (2000). Lessons from Ladakh? Local Responses to Globalization and Social Change. Globalization and Social Change. J. D. Schmidt and J. Hersh. London, Routledge: 250-266.