Moderate Reform Research Articles

Muhafazakârlık Ve Reform Arasında Bir Hareket: Neolog Yahudilik

Neolog Judaism is a moderate reform movement that develeoped in mid-nineteenth century Hungary. With the impact of German Reform Judaism movement on Hungarian Jewry reform tendencies had already appeared in the commity organizations of Hungary from the beginning of the 19th century. Although German Reform provided Hungary Jewry with an ideology and a specific program of religious innovation difference in political and economic conditions in Hungary combined to mold the unique character of Hungarian Neology. Neolog Judaism, whose leading spokesmen there were Aaron Chorin and Leopold Low, pronounced prayer in the vernacular with an uncovered head, approved of the use of an organ on the Sabbath, curtailed the seven-day period of mourning and allowed riding and writing on the Sabbath. Neolog Judaism had separated from Orthodox Judasim at the General Jewish Congress convened in 1868-69, but refrained from introducing drastic reforms and adopted a distinctly moderate orientation.

The politics of deportation and the restrictionist movement in the post-9/11 era

The first reports that the Obama administration had deported a record number of people came as a surprise to many. As both Presidents Obama and Bush have attempted to pass moderate immigration reform laws that allowed for legalization, we must ask from where the impetus for driving up the deportation rate has come. The explanation leads to the passage of Secure Communities in 2008, which allowed state and local law enforcement to identify undocumented immigrants through federal information sharing. I seek to explain the social dynamics behind the passage of Secure Communities starting with a review of previous cycles of rapid deportation in US history. I then examine the political activities of the contemporary immigrant restrictionist movement for an understanding of their role.

Between punishment and discipline: comparing strategies to control unauthorized immigration in the United States

Immigration scholars have noted the rise of a distinctive discourse concerning immigrants in the United States. The ‘immigrant threat’ discourse is said to portray immigrants as an existential threat to the country and contributes to highly restrictive enforcement policies. Through a close examination of national political debates concerning comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) (2005–2007), the paper shows that most politicians involved in this debate (from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans) agreed with the basic assumptions of this general discourse. But the paper also identifies important variants on the ‘threat’ discourse and associated strategies. Hardline conservatives stressed that the essential ‘illegalness’ of immigrants posed a threat to the country. Protecting the nation state from this threat required policies to totally banish all undocumented immigrants from the country, irrespective of their ‘good’ conduct or exceptional circumstances. Moderate and liberal reform advocates agreed with the idea that undocumented immigrants posed a threat to the country. However, they believed that banishment alone could not address the threat. Instead they advocated a strategy of risk management whereby the population would be differentiated according to levels of risk (high to low priority) and policies of inclusion and exclusion would be adjusted accordingly. This would allow the government to incorporate low risk/priority immigrants while freeing government resources to target the ‘truly threatening’ groups (i.e., criminals, delinquents, homeless, repeat unauthorized entries, etc.). Thus, while both sides conceded that undocumented immigrants were a threat to the country, they developed important variants on the discourse and contrasting policy solutions to exert control over the population.

Debating Constitutionalism in China: Dreaming of a liberal turn?

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Xi Jinping's first term as China's new president has been jam-packed with ambition and action. It began with his nationalistic call to pursue the Dream (zhongguomeng ...), a vision aimed at China's national rejuvenation but decidedly straying from the 2008 Beijing Olympics slogan, World, One Dream. Then came the campaign against corruption and graft in the upper echelons of the Party, during which a hand- ful of important officials were impeached, one of them the former Chongqing Party secretary, princeling rising star Bo Xilai. Following close afterward was a mass line rectification campaign that vowed to clean up the four unde- sirable work styles, featuring self-criticism meetings among Party cadres as well as a movement against liberal elements in the media and civil society.Meanwhile, a heated debate on constitutional government has also emerged. Fought by liberal reformists and party conservatives, the debate was staged under a partly wishful and partly strategic optimism that Xi might rekindle the long-interrupted political reform. On the one hand, liberal reformists drew inspiration from Xi's open-minded remarks in a speech de- livered on the 30thanniversary of the 1982 Constitution in December 2012. Xi said, No organisation or individual has the privilege to overstep the Con- stitution and the law, and any violation of the Constitution and the law must be investigated.(1)Liberals read Xi's comment as a sign of his deter- mination to undertake a liberal overhaul of the political system. Deliberately leveraging this optimism, they urged the Communist Party (CCP) to uphold constitutional government, ensure the rights enshrined in the Chinese Con- stitution, and set up checks and balances on the power of the Party-state.In response, a loose coalition of conservatives, including party ideologues and leftist intellectuals, responded by unleashing a spate of ferocious counterat- tacks in a number of key Party publications. Adopting an ideological stance, they argued that constitutional government is a by-product of Western capi- talism, incompatible with China's own practice of socialism, and that China's political system must reflect the country's social and cultural conditions. In this respect, China is incompatible with Western notions such as constitution- alism, representative democracy, the separation of powers, and judicial inde- pendence. They argued that the campaign for constitutional government was part of a malicious Western plot to subvert the CCP, just as Gorbachev's con- stitutional reform brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.This essay examines the arguments in the debate by situating it in the current status of the Constitution and its future role in China's political life. First, it looks at the state of the Chinese Constitution, its unfulfilled promises, and the obstacles to full implementation. Second, it reviews the current episode of constitutional debate and summarises the arguments both for and against implementing constitutionalism in China. It seeks to show that, despite the Party's tolerance of the on-going intellectual debate on consti- tutionalism, the recent crackdown against civil society suggests that Party leaders have made a conservative move against the actual practice of con- stitutional government, which diminishes hopes for genuine political reform.China's quest for constitutional governmentThe struggle for a constitutional state has been a perennial theme for more than a century in China. The earliest experiment could be traced to the con- stitutional reforms in the late Qing. At that time, moderate reformers fol- lowed the footsteps of Japan to establish a constitutional monarchy, but soon failed in the wake of a brewing revolution. Then in the Republican Era came various attempts to establish a constitutional state, but none of them were successful, given the frequent infighting between Republican warlords. …

Broadcasting and market-driven politics in the UK and Germany: the Peacock Committee in comparative perspective

When, from the 1980s onwards, market-driven politics won widespread recognition in liberal capitalist Western democracies, processes of broadcasting marketization in the UK and Germany were decisively determined by two inquiries: the Committee on the Financing of the BBC, chaired by Alan Peacock, and the Commission for the Development of the Technical Communications System (KtK), chaired by Eberhard Witte. This article compares how both inquiries, driven by their chairmen, affected domestic communications policy-making. The research is situated within a critical political economy framework and it is argued that critiques from scholars within cultural policy depicting Alan Peacock and the inquiry he chaired as driven by a narrowly economistic understanding of broadcasting are partly unjustified. As the comparison with the radical restructuring pursued by Eberhard Witte brings to the fore, Peacock, in fact followed a moderate reform agenda of gradual change, aiming to preserve some core cultural elements within public service broadcasting.

Toward a hermeneutics of doodling in the era of Folly

Erasmus' doodles, and those of his circle of acquaintances, serve as evocative relics of their textual sociability, registering their peculiar habits of visualization. As remnants of active textual engagement, doodles bring into higher relief the reciprocity of linguistic production and visual conception, the correspondence of scribal techniques and graphic illustration, and the psychically charged vacillation between readership and authorship. The drawings, illustrations, and paintings considered in this essay lie at the intersection of humanist visual and literary culture in the years surrounding the publication of The Praise of Folly and suggest the powerful identification these erudite men felt toward the figure of Folly, as an exemplar of sorts. Read alongside formal portraits Erasmus commissioned to construct an extra-textual ‘public’ face, the scholar's travestied autographs shadowed and prefigured his self-promotional machinations. As a patron and promoter of portraiture, Erasmus valued art's ability to rewrite the autonomous body as a social intertext, a visual corollary of the emulative circuitry of humanist rhetorical practices. However, as the humorlessness of the Luther-bloc radicalized reformatory rhetoric, iconoclastic and censorial fury – the dark side of doodling – turned against the image of Erasmus in word and image, undercutting hopes for moderate church reform.

The ordering of things: visual syntax in the poetry of Eleni Vakalo

Erasmus' doodles, and those of his circle of acquaintances, serve as evocative relics of their textual sociability, registering their peculiar habits of visualization. As remnants of active textual engagement, doodles bring into higher relief the reciprocity of linguistic production and visual conception, the correspondence of scribal techniques and graphic illustration, and the psychically charged vacillation between readership and authorship. The drawings, illustrations, and paintings considered in this essay lie at the intersection of humanist visual and literary culture in the years surrounding the publication of The Praise of Folly and suggest the powerful identification these erudite men felt toward the figure of Folly, as an exemplar of sorts. Read alongside formal portraits Erasmus commissioned to construct an extra-textual ‘public’ face, the scholar's travestied autographs shadowed and prefigured his self-promotional machinations. As a patron and promoter of portraiture, Erasmus valued art's ability to rewrite the autonomous body as a social intertext, a visual corollary of the emulative circuitry of humanist rhetorical practices. However, as the humorlessness of the Luther-bloc radicalized reformatory rhetoric, iconoclastic and censorial fury – the dark side of doodling – turned against the image of Erasmus in word and image, undercutting hopes for moderate church reform.

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater: Australia’s New Policy on Treaty-Based Investor-State Arbitration and its Impact in Asia

Treaties allowing investors to initiate arbitration claims directly against host states for illegally interfering with cross-border investments are becoming increasingly common in Asia, but Australia announced in 2011 that it will no longer include such protections in future treaties. The backdrop to this decision includes keen interest from Asia in foreign direct investment (FDI) into Australia’s resources sector, meaning that potential investors may not be significantly deterred by a lack of arbitration provisions in future treaties. This article argues, however, that Australia’s policy shift risks undermining the entire investor-state arbitration (ISA) system, with the earliest impact being felt by major pending treaty negotiations by Australia with Japan, China and Korea (respectively); and that the shift may significantly reduce FDI flows or have other adverse effects. The article criticises the cost-benefit analysis of ISA protections in one pivotal study conducted in 2010 by an Australian Government think-tank, arguing that this assessment is insufficiently nuanced. Instead, the article presents a justification for more tailored and moderate changes to ISA provisions in future treaties. Its tentative interest-group analysis suggests, however, that there may be surprisingly few public or private constituencies that would prefer such moderate reforms, and that most may well prefer the more extreme position recently adopted by Australia, despite the damage that will be done to the ISA system as a whole. The article also argues that Australia’s policy shift and think-tank analysis may make Asian countries more cautious about ISA, especially those (like the Philippines and Vietnam) which have traditionally been more cautious about this dispute resolution system.

Rising powers and global governance: negotiating change in a resilient status quo

Economic convergence of the large emerging economies (Brazil, China and India) on the incumbent industrialized economic powers has produced divergent predictions: rising powers are viewed as challengers of existing global governance or nascent supporters of the status quo. The preferences of rising powers, as revealed in global economic negotiations and international security regimes, indicate that they are moderate reformers that seek greater influence within existing forums and also attempt to safeguard their policy-making autonomy. Even if their preferences change, the translation of growing economic weight into usable capabilities is not automatic. Domestic political constraints often make the mobilization of capabilities difficult in international bargaining. Strategies of collective action, whether South-South or regional, have not yet produced a consistent increase in bargaining power at the global level. The counter-strategies of delay and cooptation implemented by the incumbent powers have maintained incumbent influence and enhanced the legitimacy of existing global governance institutions. Risks of conflict remain along three negotiating divides: system friction, distributional conflict and institutional efficiency. Institutional innovations such as greater transparency, institutional flexibility and construction of informal transnational networks may provide modest insurance against a weakening of global governance and its institutions.

The American model of state and school: an historical inquiry

Introduction: Weakness and Strengths of the American Model Chapter 1: Colonial Background New England Southern colonies Mid-Atlantic colonies Secondary Schools Chapter 2: The Idea of Forming Citizens Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the Allies of Jefferson Resistance to 'republican' education Utopian Reformers Evangelical and Humanitarian Initiatives Chapter 3: Schooling in the New Republic Schooling for poor children Funding and local control The blurred public/private distinction Chapter 4: Schooling as Response to the Immigrant Threat Chapter 5: The Educator-State Horace Mann and Henry Barnard Pennsylvania: moderate reform Michigan: progress and retreat California Resistance to state leadership in popular schooling State authority and its limits. Chapter 6: Creating an Education Profession Redefining the Role of Women The State and the Training of Teachers Chapter 7: Religion Becomes the Focus of Controversy over Schools Recapitulation of the Ante-Bellum Situation The Developing Educational System after the Civil War The Influence of Church/State Conflicts in Europe Religious Expression in Public Schools Public Support for Religious Schools After the Second World War Chapter 8: Progressive Education as Movement and as Influence Kilpatrick and child-centered teaching Dewey on democratic education Progressive Education theory as established doctrine Educational and political progressivism Critics of Progressive Education What's Left of Progressive Education? Chapter 9: Concluding Reflections References.

El precio de la exclusión: La política durante la Segunda República, by Manuel Alvarez TardíoPalabras como puños: La intransigencia política en la Segunda República española, ed. Fernando del Rey

The day after the rout of the Socialist Party (PSOE) at last November’s general election, the sympathetic daily El País could not resist some parthian ‘antifascist’ shots provided by a 107-year-old survivor of the civil war of 1936–9. During that epochal conflict, Spain’s Second Republic attained (sensu stricto) a universal iconic status. In historiographical terms, the template of an aspirant democratic Republic, with its rigid Socialist backbone, was set by Manuel Tuñón de Lara. One-time organiser of the Communist youth movement, ex-intern of Franco’s prison-camps, Tuñón returned from exile after the dictator’s death. His classic study of the Republic soon appeared—an unregenerate Marxist assessment which, for instance, analysed each of its sixteen peacetime governments according to ministerial class origins. It presented an ethical polity, dedicated to moderate reform and consensus, but constantly thwarted by a property-owning, clericalist, reactionary right. ‘White’ recalcitrance—expressed via ‘fascist’ violence—eventually provoked the PSOE to...

Weathering the Storm

Employment security is a traditional characteristic of public employment but has been affected by public management reforms and more recently by the global financial crisis (GFC). This article considers employment security through a case study of an Australian state public service. Queensland has only pursued moderate reforms, but this has still challenged employment security. Institutional tensions became clear, as the central personnel agency defended and even strengthened employment security policies, whereas the central industrial relations (IR) agency issued potentially contradictory policies and departments thwarted policy intentions during implementation. The economic context arguably allowed for weaker scrutiny of new employment initiatives and highlighted the tensions in the current powers and responsibilities of the central personnel agency.

Reform oder Nicht-Reform ist die Frage

Abstract Reform or No Reform - That is the Question: Empirical Results about the Desire for Reform of the Lectionary among the Expert Practitioners. The questionary among pastors, Church musicians and lectors showed that a moderate reform is advocated.

Economic Transition and Accounting System Reform in Vietnam

Since 1986, Vietnam has been reforming its economic system, moving from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented economy connected to the rest of the world. This process has been shaped by the tensions and power relationship between moderate and radical reformers and the interaction of their reform strategies. This paper demonstrates that, unlike many reforms in former socialist countries, the Vietnamese accounting reform resulted from both external pressures and internal needs. Because Vietnam switched from state capitalism to a type of mixed capitalism, the country was in a position to adapt the former ‘socialist’ accounting system relatively ‘quietly’, moving towards a private capitalist accounting model but preserving many fundamental peculiarities of the old system. The maintenance of the old accounting structure can be explained by the continuity of the political, economic and social environment. However, the transformation has also generated some difficulties due to adapting a private capitalist accounting system to work in a state-dominated market economy.

William Wrightson, the Yorkshire Whigs and the York 'Peterloo' Protest Meeting of 1819

William Wrightson (1752–1827), was MP for Aylesbury from 1784 to 1789, but then played a more significant role in Yorkshire politics over a longer period between 1795 and 1819, in close co-operation with Christopher Wyvill, the leader of the Yorkshire Association. During the years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the strengthening of Toryism in the West Riding, together with political differences between moderates and radicals among the Whig gentry, inhibited the public activities of those Whigs favouring moderate reform, previously expressed through county meetings initiated by the Yorkshire Association. After a long period of frustration, an opportunity for the Yorkshire Whigs to reunite was presented by the 'Peterloo' protest meeting held at York in October 1819 as a consequence of the disastrously-terminated public meeting in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, in August of that year. This article considers the York meeting in the context of the difficulties being experienced by Yorkshire Whiggism. The resolutions presented at the meeting are compared with the draft preserved among the archives of Earl Fitzwilliam to show how far traditional Whig modes of thought had to be adjusted to become acceptable to the mood prevailing among anti-Tory reformers in the post-war years.

Using the law to change the custom

The custom often acts as a powerful hindrance to equity-increasing changes. In this paper, we present a simple model of legal dualism in which a progressive legal reform can, under certain conditions, shift the conflicting custom in the direction intended by the legislator. Formal law then acts as an outside anchor that exerts a 'magnet effect’ on the custom. We also characterize the conditions under which a moderate reform performs better than a radical one in improving the welfare of the disadvantaged sections of the population. We illustrate our insights using examples on inheritance, marriage, and divorce in Sub-Saharan Africa and India.

The Global Awareness Curriculum in International Business Programs: A Critical Perspective

Designing educational sequences that enhance the cognitive, behavioral, and critical skills of a diverse learning community seeking global competencies, requires mindfulness of different international educational models, a tailored curriculum designed to build different types of awareness learning, and clarity in targeted outputs keeping in mind a range of potential occupations and life situations in which such skills will be used. This article outlines conceptual frameworks for global awareness sequences in international management programs, building on existing cross-cultural research, training literature, and comparative analysis of different higher education models. It updates global competence learning frameworks to include recent advances in cultural intelligence, critical reflexivity, and post-colonial perspectives on management education. It calls attention to changing student demographics as a catalyst for moderate curriculum reform, especially a rehabilitation of core global awareness knowledge components eclipsed by cross-cultural courses and humanities requirements. A curriculum for business students with a sequential and/or simultaneous implementation of three pedagogical dispositions (knowledge, behavior, and critical acculturation) is discussed.

The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture Joshua R. Jacobson The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture, by Tina Frühauf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 284 pp. $74.00 Tina Frühauf has given us a book that is as much about Jewish identity as it is about music. She presents the organ as a marker of Jewish identity: at first as a marker of assimilation in the context of nineteenth-century reformation, and later as a marker of dissimilation, as Jewish musicians sought to find a unique voice. The introduction of the organ into Jewish worship in Germany in 1810 stirred up a fierce controversy. In the opinion of most traditional Jews, the organ was treyf, totally unfit for Jewish worship. Since the fifteenth century the organ had been associated with Christian worship, and halakha forbade hukkat ha-goy—imitation of gentile practices. Furthermore, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the rabbinic authorities had declared that the entire nation was in a state of mourning, and music, especially instrumental music, was inappropriate. And playing any musical instrument on Shabbat or a holiday was considered forbidden work (or might lead to the forbidden work of repairing an instrument). But the reformers countered that beautifying the worship service was one of the exceptions to the halakhic ban. They also pointed to the precedent of the magrephah, (according to some interpretations) a hydraulic organ used in the Temple in ancient Israel many centuries before the organ was used in Christian worship. But the elephant in the room was the early reformers' plan to remove any aspects of Judaism that were dissonant with the lifestyle of their German Lutheran neighbors. They eliminated traditional nusah (prayer chant) and cantillation, [End Page 180] and completely did away with the role of the hazzan (cantor). The rabbi, like his counterpart in the church, led the services, and the music consisted of chorales sung by the choir and congregation, supported by the organ. For the emancipated Jews of Central Europe the organ came to symbolize the enlightenment and their assimilation into a refined culture and a society into which they so desperately longed to be admitted. Decades later, moderate reformers sought a middle ground in which the hazzan regained his position on the bimah alongside the organ and the choir. Now the organ was used to accompany the cantorial recitative, to perform preludes and postludes, music for meditation, as well as to accompany congregational singing. Salomon Sulzer, the great cantor of nineteenth-century Vienna, reversed his initial opposition to the organ and opined that the mighty instrument could be used to "lead, control, to cover dissonances" in congregational hymns. His younger colleague in Berlin, Louis Lewandowski, composed organ accompaniments to traditional recitatives that boxed their free rhythms into a rigid meter of four beats to the bar, and their exotic Eastern modality into German classical functional harmony. Again the organ was being used as an instrument in the battle to purge Jewish culture of its "otherness." It was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that organ music displayed signs of dissimilation. Whereas nineteenth-century synagogue organists were church musicians who moonlighted on Saturdays, now we find a cohort of trained Jewish organists. Whereas previously enlightened Jews were eager to discard their otherness, now the banner of nationalism was ascendant. In the wake of growing antisemitism and inspired by Zionist ideologies, many Jews embraced rather than hid their ethnic identity. Inspired by composers such as Bartok and Rimsky-Korsakov, Jewish musicians sought to find their own unique voice, one that would blend East and West in a more equitable balance. The prosperous Jews of early twentieth-century Germany built huge ornate synagogues, equipped with some of the most elaborate organs in the country. When it came to power in 1933 the Nazi party segregated Germany's Jews into an apartheid situation. Banned from attending or performing in public concerts, forbidden to play music by "real" German composers, many Jews turned inward and discovered or rediscovered their Jewish cultural heritage. The synagogue became the venue for concerts of music by Jewish composers, the organ was increasingly...

Testimony of John C. Coates IV Before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment on Proposed Corporate Governance Reforms

The financial crisis has generated a renewed interest in financial regulation as well as corporate governance more generally, among both academics and lawmakers. A large number of bills have been introduced in the Congress to address one or more aspects of corporate governance, including most prominently the Shareholder Bill of Rights Act of 2009 (S. 1074), introduced by New York’s Senator Charles Schumer. The following testimony of Prof. Coates takes up three broad themes: (1) the need for corporate governance of financial institutions to differ from that of other companies, (2) the general weakness of academic and scientific evidence on corporate governance topics, and (3) the general need for carefully considered moderate reforms that can be revised as evidence develops over time. The testimony reviews the state of the evidence on specific, current policy proposals, including “say on pay,” splitting the chair and CEO roles, staggered boards, and proxy access.

Diverse Contexts, Strategies, and Outcomes for Comparative Technology Transfer

Diverse Contexts, Strategies, and Outcomes for Comparative Technology Transfer Donald E. Klingner Introduction Technology transfer concerns the exogenous adaptation of innovations from their place of origin to other organizations, countries, or regions. As the articles in this issue of Comparative Technology Transfer and Society illustrate, the sustainability of diffused innovations depends heavily upon local contexts, requires innovative and flexible adaptation strategies, and results in diverse outcomes. Economic pressures and increasingly global research interests prompt universities around the world to focus on the commercial potential of their faculties’ research. One result is academic spin-offs. These have varied widely in effectiveness, leading researchers to investigate why some succeed while others have not. In the first article in this issue (University Spin-Offs as Technology Transfer: A Comparative Study among Norway, the United States, and Sweden), Norwegian scholar Alf Steinar Sætre and his co-authors assess the comparative effect of universities’ efforts capitalize on faculty inventions in these three countries. They identified four key dimensions—university relations, government-support mechanisms, industry relations, and equity funding—as central elements in all cases. Interestingly, they also concur with other researchers’ (Julnes & Holzer, 2001; Landry, Lamari, & Amara, 2003) conclusion that the distinctive and varied faculty-research cultures make it difficult for university technology transfer offices to cooperate effectively and consistently with government agencies and venture capitalists. In fact, they conclude that these offices seem to impede the development of startups and spin-offs as often as they help. The authors certainly suggest that increased competencies and a greater understanding of the innovation process among those who dole out grants might diminish waste and increase the effectiveness of government-support systems designed to advance the commercial prospects of technologies originating in universities. Technology transfer has played a similarly significant yet ambiguous role in national economic development. In the second article (Political Impediments to Technological Diffusion in Northeast Brazil, 1909–1964), historian Eve Buckley uses the case study of water-management projects in northeastern Brazil to study these effects. Beginning in the 1930s, Brazilian reformers sought to replicate the success of the Tennessee Valley [End Page vii] Authority (TVA) in the United States by using similar water-management projects to reduce drought, increase agricultural productivity, and generate electric power in the large northeastern region of their country. While the TVA had achieved tremendous success at using water-management infrastructure improvements not only to achieve economic objectives, but also changes in the political and social culture of Appalachia during the 1930s (Selznick, 1966), the Brazilian projects did not replicate these results. Paradoxically, although the water projects were intended to reduce the imbalance of wealth and power, their actual effect was to increase it. Infrastructure improvements (e.g., dams, roads, and irrigation canals) increased the security of landowners, their crops and their cattle, but did not reduce the poorest inhabitants’ vulnerability to drought or to the exploitative demands of their landowning patrons. In sum, Buckley concludes that underlying political and social factors (e.g., land ownership and class structure) trumped the otherwise admirable agricultural and economic objectives of moderate reformers and strengthened the argument of more radical reformers, who had unsuccessfully pushed for land redistribution in addition to infrastructure improvements. As always, this case demonstrates how local circumstances influence the outcome of international transfer projects designed to promote economic development. Economic-development literature generally supports this conclusion. While problems in one country may seem similar to those in another, most analysts (Borins, 1998; Jones & Kettl, 2003) are well aware that solutions that are effective in one context may not succeed in another. Thus the term “smart practices” (Bardach, 2000) is preferable to the more commonly used “best practices,” because smart practices bring into view the need to adapt in order to sustain exogenous innovations. While we can learn much from comparative studies, applying what we learn must always take account of a number of variables specific to the local receiving context (Jabbra & Dwivedi, 2004). In this case, this awareness helps explain why reform has ascended in the political agendas of some nations but not others (Barzelay, 2001, 2003). Smart-practice policy making emphasizes first elucidating and then reducing the mechanisms and factors that inhibit adaptation to contingency and...