What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. ...At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions have been found. At the micro level, only a few programs outlast donor support and even fewer appear to achieve lasting improvements. The authors of this book argue that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. In their analysis, the authors apply the theoretical insights of the new institutional economics to several settings. First, they investigate the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, the authors use cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Throughout the book, the authors offer suggestions about how to improve aid's effectiveness. These suggestions include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation processes of development assistance programs. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199278849/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Krister Andersson, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change, Indiana University Matthew R. Auer, Associate Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Roy Gardner, Professor of Economics, Indiana University Clark C. Gibson, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California Elinor Ostrom, Professor of Government, Indiana University Sujai Shivakumar, National Research Council, Washington D.C. Christopher J. Waller, Chair of Economics, University of Notre Dame
Policy makers around the world tout decentralization as an effective tool in the governance of natural resources. Despite the popularity of these reforms, there is limited scientific evidence on the ...environmental effects of decentralization, especially in tropical biomes. This study presents evidence on the institutional conditions under which decentralization is likely to be successful in sustaining forests. We draw on common-pool resource theory to argue that the environmental impact of decentralization hinges on the ability of reforms to engage local forest users in the governance of forests. Using matching techniques, we analyze longitudinal field observations on both social and biophysical characteristics in a large number of local government territories in Bolivia (a country with a decentralized forestry policy) and Peru (a country with a much more centralized forestry policy). We find that territories with a decentralized forest governance structure have more stable forest cover, but only when local forest user groups actively engage with the local government officials. We provide evidence in support of a possible causal process behind these results: When user groups engage with the decentralized units, it creates a more enabling environment for effective local governance of forests, including more local government-led forest governance activities, fora for the resolution of forest-related conflicts, intermunicipal cooperation in the forestry sector, and stronger technical capabilities of the local government staff.
The poor conservation outcomes that followed decades of intrusive resource management strategies and planned development have forced policy makers and scholars to reconsider the role of community in ...resource use and conservation. In a break from previous work on development which considered communities a hindrance to progressive social change, current writings champion the role of community in bringing about decentralization, meaningful participation, and conservation. But despite its recent popularity, the concept of community is rarely defined or carefully examined by those concerned with resource use and management. We seek to redress this omission by investigating “community” in work concerning resource conservation and management. We explore the conceptual origins of the community, and the ways the term has been deployed in writings on resource use. We then analyze those aspects of community most important to advocates for community's role in resource management — community as a small spatial unit, as a homogeneous social structure, and as shared norms — and indicate the weaknesses of these approaches. Finally, we suggest a more political approach: community must be examined in the context of development and conservation by focusing on the multiple interests and actors within communities, on how these actors influence decision-making, and on the internal and external institutions that shape the decision-making process. A focus on institutions rather than “community” is likely to be more fruitful for those interested in community-based natural resource management.
•Utilizes a survey experiment in a representative exit poll during Kenya’s election.•Explores effects of incumbent co-ethnicity and mixed performance on vote choice.•Effect of co-ethnicity is highest ...under mixed (versus uniform) performance.•Mixed performance increases evaluation complexity, inducing ethnic heuristic.•Suggests challenges of evaluating performance create barriers to accountability.
Incumbent politicians often deliver mixed performance records: good results in some areas but poor ones in others. We explore the challenges these records generate for voters attempting to use elections to incentivize better governance, improved development outcomes, and greater accountability. We argue that evaluation of mixed records poses a more complex cognitive task for citizens than the evaluation of either uniformly good or bad records. Unlike uniform records, mixed records require weighting and aggregating information across multiple dimensions, raising the difficulty of arriving at a single, clear evaluation of performance. Evaluative complexity, in turn, induces voters to rely more heavily on informational shortcuts like ethnicity, reducing the effectiveness of elections as accountability mechanisms. We evaluate the link between ethnic voting and mixed performance records using a survey experiment implemented in a nationally representative exit poll during Kenya’s 2013 election. The survey experiment manipulated two factors, the ethnicity of a hypothetical candidate running for president and their performance record (with uniformly good, uniformly bad, and mixed performance conditions). We find that co-ethnicity between respondent and candidate had a large effect on voting when the candidate’s prior record was mixed, but no effect when it was uniform. Our results suggest that ethnic voting is situational rather than dispositional: even performance-oriented citizens vote ethnically when performance records are difficult to evaluate. They also suggest an under-appreciated source of accountability problems in developing countries: not fixed voter attachment to co-ethics, but rather reliance on informational shortcuts to deal with the challenges of evaluating performance in complex environments.
Did foreign aid impede or catalyze democratization in Africa in the 1990s? We argue that after the Cold War, donors increased their use of technical assistance in aid packages, improving their ...monitoring capacity and thus reducing autocrats’ ability to use aid for patronage. To remain in power, autocrats responded by conceding political rights to their opponents—from legalizing opposition parties to staging elections. We test our theory with panel data for all sub-Saharan African countries. While other factors played pivotal roles in Africa’s political liberalization, we find technical assistance helps to explain the timing and extent of Africa’s democratization.
Issues related to the scale of ecological phenomena are of fundamental importance to their study. The causes and consequences of environmental change can, of course, be measured at different levels ...and along multiple scales. While the natural sciences have long understood the importance of scale, research regarding scale in the social sciences has been less explicit, less precise, and more variable. The growing need for interdisciplinary work across the natural/social science divide, however, demands that each achieve some common understandings about scaling issues. This survey seeks to facilitate the dialogue between natural and social scientists by reviewing some of the more important aspects of the concept of scale employed in the social sciences, especially as they relate to the human dimensions of global environmental change. The survey presents the fundamentals of scale, examines four general scaling issues typical of social science, and explores how different social science disciplines have used scale in their research.
Local Enforcement and Better Forests Gibson, Clark C.; Williams, John T.; Ostrom, Elinor
World development,
02/2005, Letnik:
33, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Current studies of local resource management examine many factors thought to be associated with good resource conditions. Despite the number of studies and the importance of such resources to ...millions of people worldwide, a lack of theory and hypothesis testing beyond the case level limits the lessons empirical studies offer. We argue that regular monitoring and sanctioning of rules—rule enforcement—is a necessary condition for successful resource management. We test our theory using data regarding 178 user groups and by pairing rule enforcement with other important factors: social capital, formal organization, and dependence on forest products.
•We explore if fair elections enhance government legitimacy in fragile states.•We randomize a fraud-reducing technology in 'Afghanistan's 2010 election.•We match the experimental sample with ...post-election household survey data.•Improvements of elections’ procedural fairness bolsters attitudes toward the state.
Elections can enhance state legitimacy. One way is by improving citizens’ attitudes toward government, thereby increasing their willingness to comply with rules and regulations. We investigate whether reducing fraud in elections improves attitudes toward government in a fragile state. A large, randomly assigned fraud-reducing intervention in Afghan elections leads to improvement in two indices, one measuring attitudes toward their government, and another measuring stated willingness to comply with governance. Thus, reducing electoral fraud may offer a practical, cost-effective method of enhancing governance in a fragile state.
Effect of holding office on the behavior of politicians Enemark, Daniel; Gibson, Clark C.; McCubbins, Mathew D. ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
11/2016, Letnik:
113, Številka:
48
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Reciprocity is central to our understanding of politics. Most political exchanges—whether they involve legislative vote trading, interbranch bargaining, constituent service, or even the corrupt ...exchange of public resources for private wealth—require reciprocity. But how does reciprocity arise? Do government officials learn reciprocity while holding office, or do recruitment and selection practices favor those who already adhere to a norm of reciprocity? We recruit Zambian politicians who narrowly won or lost a previous election to play behavioral games that provide a measure of reciprocity. This combination of regression discontinuity and experimental designs allows us to estimate the effect of holding office on behavior. We find that holding office increases adherence to the norm of reciprocity. This study identifies causal effects of holding office on politicians’ behavior.
The success of efforts to decentralize governance responsibilities hinges upon the incentives of local politicians. We test this argument by studying the experiences of forestry sector ...decentralization in Bolivia and Guatemala. We analyze the survey responses of 200 mayors and show that local-level institutional incentives are systematically linked to variations in local politicians’ interest and investment decisions in the forestry sector. Further, we find that a decentralization policy that transfers very limited decision-making powers to local governments stifles local interest in organizing resource governance activities.
PDF
