ABSTRACT This study addresses a central puzzle in comparative education policy: why do governance reforms succeed in some institutional contexts but fail in others? This study examines how governance capacity shapes education reform implementation across 157 countries from 1789 to 2024. The findings identifies nonlinear capacity-reform relationships characterized by critical governance thresholds at which modest governance improvements generate disproportionate implementation gains. Below these thresholds, reforms achieve limited traction regardless of resources; within transition zones, returns to capacity-building investments prove substantial; at advanced levels, political and coordination factors supersede administrative capacity. This study reveals strengthening governance-reform linkages as institutional frameworks mature. Colonial administrative legacies impose persistent implementation constraints through fragmented authority structures and resource allocation inefficiencies. These findings carry direct implications for targeting capacity-building assistance, explaining cross-national implementation variance, and designing context-appropriate reform strategies. This study extends institutional theory while providing empirical foundations for matching education reforms to governance realities across diverse contexts.

ABSTRACT The primary purpose of this article is to identify and describe political polarization in Armenia, the factors that have contributed to its development and modes of its manifestation. To this end, on the one hand, we seek to understand the nature, scale, and causes of polarization, including using the methods of content analysis and public surveys, and, on the other hand, with the help of in-depth interviews, to understand the positions of the ruling and opposition parties regarding this phenomenon. In-depth interviews also help us understand the (lack of) readiness, intention and resources among the Armenian political parties to overcome political split and polarization. The article also explains the actual and potential role of foreign and international organizations in supporting the institutionalization of political parties and overcoming political polarization. Our findings suggest support for the correlation between polarization and democratic decline, particulalry due to decline of trust, mutual securitization of poles that normalizes each others' illebaeral treatment and partisan willingness of voters to tolerate wrongdoings of the party they support.

ABSTRACT The relationship between school choice and segregation remains a contentious issue in both academic and policy spheres. In recent years, the redesign of school choice policies has gained traction as a strategy to mitigate their negative impacts on school segregation. In this context, Barcelona (Spain) implemented desegregation policies in 2019, primarily based on redesigning specific school choice policy instruments to reduce the uneven distribution of socially disadvantaged students among schools. This study examines the impact of these policies on school segregation and explores how their effectiveness varies according to the characteristics of different areas within the city. The findings indicate that desegregation policies have reduced the uneven distribution of socially disadvantaged students and their isolation in specific schools. However, our results also show that, in each area, impacts are mediated by factors such as residential segregation, the enrolment in subsidized private schools, the share of students schooling outside their educational area, and the prevalence of siblings already attending a school, which confers priority access in admissions. We argue that the relative success of Barcelona’s school choice reform in addressing school segregation lies in its shift from a coordinated to a controlled choice model.

ABSTRACT Since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, the Northern Triangle has exhibited persistent governance fragility. Under Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), Honduras experienced democratic backsliding marked by electoral irregularities, institutional capture, state violence, and transnational criminal entanglements. In response to sustained civic mobilization, the JOH administration endorsed the MACCIH (2016–2020), a hybrid anti-corruption initiative backed by the OAS. This study – drawing on official documentation, over 1,000 press sources, and fieldwork in Tegucigalpa and Washington D.C. – argues that, despite its mandate, the MACCIH inadvertently reinforced corrupt entrenchment and elite convergence, becoming a reluctant agent in Honduras’s democratic backsliding.

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship of qualitative data to place-based decision-making and the role of data observatories in these emerging debates and practices. Qualitative data enables the understanding and evaluation of the lived and felt experience of place. This article identifies where qualitative data approaches intersect with place-based policy and existing data observatory initiatives. While data observatory initiatives and projects address how data is stored and shared, the specificities and nuances of doing this work for qualitative data remain unexamined. This article analyses findings from a project that scoped the potential of a qualitative data observatory. It draws together empirical data from a review of different types of data observatories, a series of interviews and focus groups with qualitative data users, and two workshops with creative practitioners and stakeholders. This mixed-methods approach seeks to outline the possibilities of combining qualitative data and data observatory methods. The findings suggest three themes that guide a framework for designing, building and sustaining a qualitative data observatory: generation, connection, use.

ABSTRACT The fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe at the end of the twentieth century was not without its fair share of challenges. One of these was the dilemma of whether it was possible to repair the injustices committed by these oppressive regimes and what shape a reparatory scheme ought to take in case of a positive answer to this question. In this article, we adopt a position according to which achieving reparatory justice was necessary in the context of the political transitions of the 1990s in order to restore the moral fabric of societies affected by egregious historical injustices. We focus on the specific case of the former communal villages in Romania. We employ the Institutional Analysis and Development framework in order to analyze the development of the obști, but we go further than preceding studies in also assessing the normative implications of the restitutive measures adopted in the 1990s. We argue that the obști case study shows a failure to instantiate even a minimalist conception of historical justice. We end the article by presenting a way forward, one that is based on social capital as opening the possibility of a more meaningful return to self-governance.

ABSTRACT Since the end of the civil war, Sri Lanka has increasingly drifted toward a competitive authoritarianism, representing a cumulative outcome of the executive presidential system. The concentration of power in the executive presidency has progressively weakened the legislature, judiciary, and civil service, rendering the public administration subservient to political authority. This article, thus, examines how competitive authoritarianism – entrenched through constitutional engineering and political manoeuvring – has eroded Sri Lanka's democratic public administrative system, a topic that has received limited scholarly attention among South Asian scholars. The 1978 Constitution and subsequent constitutional amendments institutionalized competitive authoritarianism by centralizing authority in the hands of the Executive President, thereby dismantling the independence of the civil service and other key accountability institutions. The article contends that the executive presidency empowered successive leaders to manipulate governance mechanisms, undermine watchdog institutions, and weaken the accountability framework, ultimately subverting both public administration and democratic norms. Thus, Sri Lanka serves as a critical test case for understanding how an executive presidential system can contribute to democratic backsliding and the deterioration of a public administration originally established during the British colonial period as an impartial, legitimate, rational, and rule-based system.

ABSTRACT This study examines disability governance in a rentier state context, to determine whether it sustains institutionalization or advances deinstitutionalization. Employing the meso-level Policy Arrangement Approach, the study explores four dimensions – discourse, actors, resources, and rules. Using a corpus of 427 coded text segments analysed through qualitative and computational (R-based) methods, the findings reveal a hybrid governance model – controlled neo-corporatism – where the state retains centralized authority while permitting structured roles for non-state actors in service delivery. The findings identify a “controlled neo-corporatist” model that paradoxically combines state dominance in agenda-setting and resource allocation with structured non-state participation in service delivery and advocacy. This model partially aligns with rights-based framework, but is constrained by institutional resilience. The study rejects the hypothesis of persistent centralized control, supporting instead a transition to hybrid governance driven by global norms and modernization, though full deinstitutionalization remains limited by state-centric priorities. This contributes to comparative disability studies by highlighting unique governance dynamics in rentier states, bridging macro-level policy with micro-level exclusionary outcomes.

ABSTRACT The ageing populations in countries across the world raise concerns about the effectiveness of welfare policies to support the health and well-being of older people (aged 66 years and older). Many older people live in poverty without a regular income and the welfare support available can vary considerably across different countries. In the UK, an estimated 2.2 million older people live in relative income poverty and many have unmet care needs. However, not all older people in the UK take-up the means-tested welfare benefits that they are entitled to. Research in the North West of England suggests that a number of interlinked factors were associated with older people not taking up welfare benefits including: awareness, not recognizing vulnerability, fear, a lack of trust, the complexity of applying, stigma and embarrassment, language barriers and concerns about having money taken away. There was a determination amongst older people not to be seen as being a burden or in need, but also frustration and anger about their right to welfare support. As the population ages, more effective and accessible welfare systems are required, which recognize the support needs of older people, as part of a renewed relationship between citizens and the state.

ABSTRACT This article examines Qatar's evolving governance model as it transitions from a rentier, state-centric welfare regime towards a more participatory framework, integrating the private sector and civil society. Grounded in administrative-governance and collaborative-governance theories, the analysis tests four key conditions for effective state-society collaboration: regulatory coherence, inter-sectoral coordination, legal-institutional flexibility, and stakeholder inclusiveness. Employing a mixed-methods design, the study draws on 30 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, experts, and NGO leaders, complemented by a systematic review of academic and policy literature, and triangulated with legal texts and public project data. The 2020 Public-Private Partnership Law has spurred private investment, demonstrating that UNCITRAL-aligned regulation can strengthen performance legitimacy. Yet overlapping statutes, rigid contractual frameworks, and a charitable licensing model for NGOs continue to hinder adaptive governance. These constraints result in duplicated services, delays, and limited civic input-undermining procedural legitimacy in a non-electoral context. The article proposes policy recalibration through statutory harmonization, an NGO advocacy license, a supra-ministerial interpretive council, and institutionalized feedback mechanisms linking public input to policy outcomes. By situating empirical findings within Gulf political realities, it contributes to debates on collaborative governance in hybrid regimes seeking legitimacy through institutional innovation.