National Governance Structures Research Articles

National governance structures for REDD+

This paper analyses a set of generic options for national REDD+ governance structures – i.e., (a) a market/project based architecture; (b) a system with national REDD+ funds outside existing national administrations; (c) a national REDD+ fund organized under the present administration; and (d) conditional budget support. The analysis is based on experiences from different, but similar governance structures – e.g., the Clean Development Mechanism, payments for ecosystem services, environmental trust funds and various forms of budget support. While a solution with a market/project based structure has been favored by many, we conclude that this is the most problematic alternative. Concerning the other three, the national/local conditions will be of importance for their functioning. If REDD+ policies involve a large part of a county's forested area, establishing a good link to the general forest and other sector policies will be necessary.

National governance in international labour migration

International labour migration is increasingly perceived as a global governance issue although national governance structures are and will remain much more dominant in driving and executing policy. In the end, it is the national governance which determines the size, scope and quality of a country’s migration management mechanisms as well as the level of participation solicited from different stakeholders. Good international labour migration governance requires cohesive legislation, policies, implementation, enforcement and institutional frameworks supported by national governments and focused on creating competitive as well as fair labour migration conditions beneficial to the labour-receiving country, the labour-sending country, and the migrant him or herself. This paper examines the current and potential role of national governance structures within the complex Asian international labour migration market. The focus is on temporary low-skilled Asian labour migration to Middle Eastern countries as well as to high/middle income countries within Asia. This paper scrutinizes the challenges and gaps which exist between national domestic policies and the implementation of foreign employment policies. It also reviews how governments in the countries of origin could play a more significant role in improving migration management by focusing on longer-term developmental benefits. Strengthening national governance in countries of origin is key to more effective migration governance. Doing this will bring tangible and critically important benefits to the migrants and their communities. Global governance can be a tool to strengthen national governance by setting international standards and benchmarks from which country level initiatives could be measured. Currently, the benefits from international labour migration rest more so with the labour-receiving countries that with the countries of origin and the communities migrants leave under the pretext of supporting. While the support does exist and remittances can be quantifiably measured in financial terms, the endemic poverty levels and lack of opportunity in places or origin remain even after generations of community members have become international labour migrants.

Participating in urban myths about women's rural water struggles

abstract This Perspective draws together and reflects on primary research conducted by the author over the past decade regarding the barriers to ‘real’ participation of community members and the obstacles to their holding officials and politicians accountable for the delivery of rural water and sanitation services in South Africa. It argues that change in rural areas, that would most affect rural women's realities, is not simply a technical matter as often portrayed. While municipal capacity and finance are indeed a concern The first part reviews very broadly the nature of different roleplayers involved in this dynamic, including water committees and community-based organisations (CBO), social movements, non-governmental organisations (NGO), and municipal and national government structures. It discusses their interests, particularly in terms of both the gender composition and the identity and dynamics within and between organisations. It highlights how class and education mean that typical societal assumptions of homogeneity in women's interests do not apply. The second part draws on the research findings of The Water Dialogues, a multi-stakeholder research and dialogue process that conducted research in eight municipalities in South Africa (www.waterdialogues.org).1 Its findings serve as a basis for discussing present barriers to participation by rural communities, particularly women, and suggests how participation could be structured at the local level and at other levels to hold government accountable. Finally it concludes by considering potential agents for change.

Public transaction costs of agri-environmental schemes and their determinants—Analysing stakeholders' involvement and perceptions

Despite an overall budget increase for rural development in the new programming period (2007–2013), most older Member States in the now expanded European Union are facing a substantial reduction in their budget for rural development and thus for agri-environmental schemes (AESs). It can be assumed that, in most countries, none or at best only part of this loss can be offset by national funds. Therefore the design of more efficient national governance structures for AESs, which decrease public transaction costs (TCs), would be an appropriate solution to this problem. The objective of this paper is to define the factors that influence these public TCs, so that appropriate action can then be taken to reduce them. A statistical analysis, with a proxy for public TCs, is combined with an analysis of stakeholder perceptions (excluding farmers) concerning public TC influencing factors. The research showed that it is mainly scheme related factors that are perceived to be important, although the governance structure, institutional environment and level of trust also play a role. Finally, the analysis of perceptions concerning TCs also showed that AES related actors have a limited knowledge of TCs.

Commercializing War: Private Military and Security Companies, Mercenaries and International Law

This paper addresses the growing involvement of foreign and private military, defense and security firms and mercenaries, particularly in the countries with the least effective control of their often remote and dangerous resource rich territories. Private military and security companies pride themselves as responses to the failure of national, regional and international public governance structures to play effective roles in maintaining peace and security. This paper shows that international law rules on regulating the use of violence of non-State actors is divided between those cases like terrorism, where the state responsibility has been laid down in mandatory terms by the Security Council. By contrast, the regulation of private military and security companies has not attracted the same kind of categorical obligations on the part of States. What we see then is how the commercialization of violence has created differing responses in international law and institutions to the violence meted out by non-State actors - between those defined as terrorists and are currently stringently regulated, on the one hand, and those which define themselves as providing security, order and other ancillary services, who are currently not as stringently regulated under international law. In addition, this paper shows a divide between vigorously pursuing individuals responsible for commission of crimes against bodily integrity in the international criminal context, and much less of a focus on the economic actors who are often complicit as accessories to those crimes. The paper argues in favor of tougher regulatory controls through new international legal framework and national standards backed up by a concurrent multilateral commitment to dealing with mercenaries as decisively as with other non-State actors who wield violence.

Incompatible strategies in international mergers: the failed merger between Telia and Telenor

The aim of this paper is to explore the problems of incompatible strategies in international mergers. Studying a failed merger between the two state-owned Scandinavian telecom corporations, we examine how the parties' strategies were incompatible. We find that the parties' strategies were incompatible in three distinctive areas, and study how the companies tried to resolve these incompatibilities. Owing to national governance structures established to protect national interests, the parties were unable to resolve these strategic incompatibilities.

Neoliberalism, Activism, and HIV/AIDS in Postapartheid South Africa

The transition to democracy in South Africa was marked by discourses on ruptures with the colonial, apartheid past and the establishment of a new democratic, socially responsible, and responsive order. Indeed, the new South African constitution promised freedoms and rights that had seemed unimaginable in the old apartheid state — the protection of people’s rights regardless of their race, class, religion, culture, gender, or sexual orientation. In the changing landscape of nascent democracy, the social, economic, and political organization of everyday life was being renegotiated. Discourses on the democratization of South African society focused attention on meeting the needs of “the people.” Public forums of various kinds organized by national, provincial, and local government structures, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and a varied array of civic, religious, and women’s organizations were engaged in debates examining what it meant to be a democracy, what kinds of transformations should take place, and how changes should be implemented to meet the diverse concerns and interests of the peoples of South Africa. These discussions were beginning to address the histories of dispossession, disenfranchisement, displacement, poverty, and violence that so profoundly shaped people’s everyday lives, their relationships to each other, and their places in the racist order that was the legacy of the apartheid state. These exciting and promising beginnings were very quickly eclipsed by, on the one hand, a transition to neoliberalism and, on the other, the

Innovations in Enlarged European Union from the Point of Innovation Diffusion Theory

The article analyzes the main possible dynamics of innovationsystem in enlarged European Union (EU). Thegovernance of the EU innovation policies, underlining thecooperation and emergence of national innovation culturesand governance structures are shown by presenting threepossible scenarios. The main issues concerned in the articleare: the challenges and opportunities in the innovationand science research fields of enlarged EU; the EuropeanResearch Area (ERA) creation, highlighting three componentsof knowledge management: production, disseminationand exploitation of knowledge. Also the article informsabout the Sixth Framework Programme (FP-6) and itsimplementation instruments that are focused on researchand technology activities and innovation. Based on theoreticalassumptions, were examined factors explaining thedifferences of innovation diffusion process in differentcountries, analyzing the impact of country, culture andtime to innovation diffusion. This study emphasizes that theERA is the broad heading for a range of connected policiesthat attempt to ensure the development of European researchand facilitate the research policies of MemberStates in order to improve the efficiency of European researchcapabilities. The final issue identified was to encourageR&D and innovation as part of corporate strategiesand management policies so that they were fully integratedinto the government, education and business sectorsacross the whole EU.

Scaling up the community management of rural water supply

Community management must mature from being an NGOor donor-driven model, based on time-bound pilot projects. Instead, under the leadership of government, it must encompass scaled-up delivery of water supply services, with community institutions governing and operating their systems, supported by local and national government structures.

Environmental policy and the small firm in Japan: comparisons with the Netherlands

This article explores how environmental policy arrangements influence the attitudes and behaviour of small firm owners. The findings are presented from a qualitative study exploring the influence of national governance structures on the environmental practices of restaurant and mechanical engineering firms in Japan. A comparison is made with the Dutch environmental policy context to illustrate how structural factors can crucially influence the individual responses of small firm owner-managers to environmental pressures. The political enfranchisement of Dutch small firms and their participation in ‘target group’ policy consultations appears to have been a key factor contributing to their engagement with environmental initiatives. The paper concludes by suggesting the need for a more participatory institutional structure in Japan in order to encourage the ‘greening’ of the small firm sector.

The Europeanization of National Government and Policy: A Departmental Perspective

Existing scholarship claims that national policy has been much more deeply and dramatically Europeanized by the European Union (EU) than the administrative structures of national government. This finding appears to confirm the explanatory power of ‘new’ institutional theories, which emphasize the resilience of institutions in the face of strong pressures promoting greater convergence among dissimilar European political systems. Of the various national government structures that could be Europeanized, departments (or ministries) are especially important because they are primarily responsible for reconciling (or ‘fitting’) the demands of EU and national policy. However, existing scholarship does not fully investigate the extent to which departments themselves are Europeanized by the EU, or the impact that such a change could have on national policy. Taking as an example the Europeanization of one policy sector (the environment) in the United Kingdom, this article reveals that the national department has undergone a much deeper and more profound cultural change than one would expect if national structures were essentially unchanged by the Europeanization of policy. This single, but critical, case implies that the next phase of Europeanization research should open up the ‘black box’ of the state and examine the co-evolution of administrative structures, policies and politics.

The International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI): Global priorities for the conservation and management of coral reefs and the need for partnerships

The International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) is an international partnership, established to reverse the global degradation of coral reefs. In this paper, the ICRI process is outlined and placed within an international policy framework. The outcomes of five regional ICRI workshops are also summarized with respect to threats to coral reefs and needs for their conservation and management. One global priority is to develop and/or establish multi-stakeholder partnerships involving the public and private sectors, NGOs, the scientific community and, in particular, local communities. This reflects growing skepticism that governments alone can bear the responsibility for managing and protecting the environment. The theme of ‘partnerships’ is then discussed and a framework for their establishment is presented. This is followed by a synthesis of experiences and lessons learned in fostering the involvement of stakeholders in resource management. Finally, it is argued that much of the debate between ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ approaches is misplaced and that attention should focus, instead, on the need to link local concerns, needs and actions to the national and international governance structures that have been developed to conserve and manage the global environment.

Cultural policy and the performing arts in Southeast Asia

The influence of national government policy and structures for culture upon the shape and survival of pre-national 'traditional' performing arts in Southeast Asia has interested scholars for some time.1 Given the rapid economic, social, and political change in the region over the past fifty years, and the emergence from colonial domination of nations that state their new nationhood in cultural terms (against an arbitrary political unity imposed by the previous colonial power), the theatre of cultural change that is part of this process is itself a dramatic performance to observe. Staged before us is a drama of change sharp-focused over two or three generations. In all societies, cultural forms are intimately linked to a sense of social and national identity. In the post-colonial societies of Southeast Asia, as that sense of identity shifts with each generation moving further towards a new national reality (a sense of identity both expanding and contracting, for on the one hand becoming nationally aware provides a larger consciousness and a place in an inter-national arena, but on the other hand national consciousness forces an awareness of one's cultural origins as merely regional or infra-national) so are pre-national cultural forms called into question. In this context, what is the purpose of performing arts? What is their meaning as 'heritage'? What role have performing arts played previously, and what role do they play now? How do the priorities of nationhood and national identity, and the image the nation wishes to portray of itself internationally all affect the form, status, and support for the performing arts? The focus of much recent research into the contemporary situation of performing arts in Southeast Asia has been in two main areas the redefinition of pre-national performance forms into nationally acceptable ideals of 'tradition', and the role of tourism in redefining and commod itizing of culture.2 In both cases, the tendency is to view national cultural policy and government structures of administration for culture as an outside agent of change (usually the major outside agent of change) that

The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade: Dogmatic Means to a Debatable End

The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-1990), has called for a whole new approach to water sector development. The spotlight is on communities - community participation, community management, community financing - and away from national and local government structures. In this paper it is argued that the Decade rhetoric has not created the capacity and infrastructural networks to achieve and sustain its objective of universal water and sanitation coverage. The result is a contradiction between strategy and structures. It is concluded that community participation and community management may be conducive to achieving the Decades target; but are not sustainable alternatives to strong local and national government institutions in the water sector.