What threatens the property rights of business owners? And what makes these rights secure? This book transcends the conventional diagnosis of the issue in modern developing countries by moving beyond expropriation by the state ruler or by petty bureaucratic corruption. It identifies 'agent predation' as a novel threat type, showing it to be particularly widespread and detrimental. The book also questions the orthodox prescription: institutionalized state commitment cannot secure property rights against agent predation. Instead, this volume argues that business actors can hold the predatory state agents accountable through firm-level alliances with foreign actors, labor, and local communities. Beyond securing ownership, such alliances promote rule of law in a rent-seeking society. Taking Russia and Ukraine between 2000 and 2012 as its empirical focus, the book advances these arguments by drawing on more than 150 qualitative interviews with business owners, policy makers, and bureaucrats, as well as an original large-N survey of firms.

In one of the only accounts of Latino legislative behavior, Stella M. Rouse examines how well the growing Latino population translates their increased presence into legislative influence. Latinos in the Legislative Process explores Latino representation by considering the role of ethnicity throughout the legislative process - from bill sponsorship, to committee deliberations, to floor votes - in seven state legislatures. Rouse first identifies issues that are priorities for Latinos and tells us whether a Latino political agenda exists. She then provides a theoretical framework for ethnicity in legislative behavior and outcomes. Rouse demonstrates that ethnicity is a complex dynamic that plays a variable role in the legislative process. Thus, Latino representation cannot be viewed monolithically.

The level of government responsible for implementing policies affects intent, services provided, and ultimate outcomes. The decision about where to locate such responsibility is the federal design dilemma faced by Congress. Taking a new approach to this delegation and decentralization, The Federal Design Dilemma focuses on individual members of Congress. Not only are these legislators elected by constituents from their states, they also consider the outcomes that will result from state-level versus national executive branch implementation of policies. Here, Pamela J. Clouser McCann documents congressional intergovernmental delegation between 1973 and 2010, and how individual legislators voted on decentralization and centralization choices. Clouser McCann traces the path of the Affordable Care Act from legislative proposals in each chamber to its final enactment, focusing on how legislators wrestled with their own intergovernmental context and the federal design of health insurance reform in the face of political challenges.

This book discusses the fundamental issues regarding the effect of real estate regulation on housing, urban development, and considerations of justice and efficiency. Bringing together the contributions of prominent scholars representing diverse methodologies and academic disciplines, this book offers new perspectives on core topics such as the effectiveness of land use regulation in terms of housing availability, enhanced equality, and sustainable development; and different modes of regulation and their mutual influences. The book's eleven chapters are divided into five parts which address different aspects of real estate regulation, combining theoretical analysis with a close observation of diverse case studies, from North America and Europe to China, the Middle East, and developing economies. Part I offers cutting-edge analysis on how to measure, model, and understand the impact of zoning and other modes of real estate regulation, from economic and normative theoretical viewpoints. Part II complements Part I by providing historical observations and empirical knowledge on the actual contribution of zoning and historical conservation regulation to cities' shape. Part III considers the outcomes of business and industrial land development policies. Part IV studies urban land development regulation and allows to compare between two relevant case studies-one from Germany, and the other from Poland. Finally, Part V concerns standardization in the real estate market by analyzing the justification and outcomes of such attempts, particularly in the mortgages market. Providing an interface between theory and practice, the book will appeal to a broad audience, consisting of scholars, policy-makers, practitioners, and students, interested in an interdisciplinary overlook on real estate regulation.

Contemporary practices of international peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction are often unsatisfactory. There is now a growing awareness of the significance of local governments and local communitites as an intergrated part of peacebuilding in order to improve quality and enhance precision of interventions. In spite of this, 'the local' is rarely a key factor in peacebuilding, hence 'everyday peace' is hardly achieved. The aim of this volume is threefold: firstly it illuminates the substantial reasons for working with a more localised approach in politically volatile contexts. Secondly it consolidates a growing debate on the significance of the local in these contexts. Thirdly, it problematizes the often too swiftly used concept, 'the local', and critically discuss to what extent it is at all feasible to integrate this into macro-oriented and securitized contexts. This is a unique volume, tackling the 'local turn' of peacebuilding in a comprehensive and critical way. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

The impact of legacies and memories on social movements has been paid only limited attention in what is now a sizeable literature. While there is a growing interest in memory, there is little systematic theory or comparative research on the long-lasting institutional consequences of important events-or how they are remembered by future generations. In Legacies and Memories in Movements, Donatella della Porta and her collaborators examine the concepts of historical legacy and memory, suggesting ways to apply them in analyses of the long-term effects of movements, movement participation, and movement strategies and tactics. In particular, they explore a critical juncture, rich with consequences for social movements: the transition to democracy. Through a comparative-historical study of social movements in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the authors tease out the complex and varied ways different modes of transition can produce new types and uses of memories for social movements. To do so, they analyze how moments of transition create institutional change that impacts future movements and consider how past protests enhance and constrain social movements today. Focusing on the reverberation of events and how past events serve as guides for the future, Legacies and Memories in Movements brings together the literature on collective memory and social movements for the first time.

While some academic attention has been paid to the impact of new digital technologies on African media in the colonial languages of English, French and Portuguese, there is a dearth of research into African language digital communication. This book analyses the online presence of African language media. The chapters in the book focus on the speed, structure, content, navigation and interactivity, operations and performance, and audience of the online media. They also pay particular attention to how social media such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have been appropriated by African language media. Using a wide range of case studies, the contributors assess the challenges of adopting digital technologies by the media, and how the technologies have impacted journalistic practice and media operations.

Examining the ability of the African language press to adopt new technologies, this book will be of interest to scholars of media, journalism, communication, social media and culture in Africa.

Table of Contents



Introduction: Not to be left behind: African languages, media and the digital sphere 1. Access, Skills, African Perspectives and ‘Development’? in Africa: Local Knowledge in Local Languages 2. Alaroye, Isolezwe and the adoption of digital technologies 3. Okun Radio Online as an Impetus for Maintaining the Dialects and Cultural Heritage of Okun-Yoruba People 4. Grassroots Media and Social Media Adaptation: Case Study of Urhobo Today 5. Breaking Protocol: Indigenous Language Usage Practices in Online Readers’ Comments in Zimbabwe 6. Perceptions of and motivations for accessing Swahili Online newspapers among students at the University of Dar es Salaam 7. Use of Indigenous Languages for Social Media Communication: The Nigerian Experience 8. Politics of language, ethnicity, and identity in Zimbabwean ethnolinguistic online communities 9. ‘Digital Chieftaincy’: Social Media, Register and Community Policing in Kenya 10. New Technologies, Indigenous Language Media Practice and Management for Development in Nigeria 11. Issues and challenges of adopting digital technologies by African language media: The YoruÌbaì example 12. African language online journalism in Malawi: Challenges and Prospects

Today, regional parties in India win nearly as many votes as national parties. In Why Regional Parties?, Professor Adam Ziegfeld questions the conventional wisdom that regional parties in India are electorally successful because they harness popular grievances and benefit from strong regional identities. He draws on a wide range of quantitative and qualitative evidence from over eighteen months of field research to demonstrate that regional parties are, in actuality, successful because they represent expedient options for office-seeking politicians. By focusing on clientelism, coalition government, and state-level factional alignments, Ziegfeld explains why politicians in India find membership in a regional party appealing. He therefore accounts for the remarkable success of India's regional parties and, in doing so, outlines how party systems take root and evolve in democracies where patronage, vote buying, and machine politics are common.

China has undergone dramatic change in its economic institutions in recent years, but surprisingly little change politically. Somehow, the political institutions seem capable of governing a vastly more complex market economy and a rapidly changing labor force. One possible explanation, examined in Zouping Revisited, is that within the old organizational molds there have been subtle but profound changes to the ways these governing bodies actually work. The authors take as a case study the local government of Zouping County and find that it has been able to evolve significantly through ad hoc bureaucratic adaptations and accommodations that drastically change the operation of government institutions. Zouping has long served as a window into local-level Chinese politics, economy, and culture. In this volume, top scholars analyze the most important changes in the county over the last two decades. The picture that emerges is one of institutional agility and creativity as a new form of resilience within an authoritarian regime.

Democratization from Above seeks to explain why some national and state governments in the developing world introduce reforms to make local governance more democratic while others neglect or actively undermine democracy at local levels of government. The study challenges conventional wisdom that local democratization is implemented as a means of granting more autonomy to local actors. Instead, Anjali Thomas Bohlken argues that local democratization offers higher level government elites who lack control over party organizational networks an alternative means of increasing the effectiveness of local intermediaries on whom these elites rely to mobilize political support. The book starts with a focus on India and uses original data, and a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence, to show support for the argument. The study then relies on an original cross-national dataset to show how the argument helps explain the variation in the implementation of local democratization reforms across the developing world.

This book investigates the new representation unfolding in Chinese local congresses. Drawing qualitative fieldwork and data analysis from original surveys of 5,130 township, county, and municipal congressmen and women and constituents, Melanie Manion shows the priorities and problems of ordinary Chinese significantly influence both who gets elected to local congresses and what the congresses do once elected. Candidates nominated by ordinary voters are 'good types', with qualities that signal they will reliably represent the community. By contrast, candidates nominated by the communist party are 'governing types', with qualities that reflect officially valued competence and loyalty. However, congressmen and women of both types now largely reject the Maoist-era role of state agent. Instead, they view themselves as 'delegates', responsible for advocating with local government to supply local public goods. Manion argues that representation in Chinese local congresses taps local knowledge for local governance, thereby bolstering the rule of autocrats in Beijing.

This book presents contributions from migration sociologists inspired by Florian Znaniecki's theory and the results of his studies to conduct their own research in countries like Austria, China, Greece and Poland. The authors evaluate today's migration phenomena with reference to a coherent theoretical system. The book can be used as a manual presenting the tools for examining the migration experience from many angles: a sense of national identity (ethnic and civic), family ties, the importance of the social environment in the process of an individual's integration with the society or an evolution of entire social systems within which the migrants operate.

This Yearbook of the Central and Eastern European Forum of Young Legal, Political and Social Theorists is devoted to the analysis of the consequences of the Central and Eastern European transition. The volume focuses on understanding the constantly evolving process of democratization. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union democratic transitions took place all over this region and the new democracies had different shapes. All states, however, wished to become a western-type democracy. The authors evaluate the ongoing struggle in the region to understand and to make others understand the peculiarities of these seemingly western-type, but somewhat different democratic regimes.

There is no one-size-fits-all decentralized fix to deeply divided and conflict-ridden states. One of the hotly debated policy prescriptions for states facing self-determination demands is some form of decentralized governance - including regional autonomy arrangements and federalism - which grants minority groups a degree of self-rule. Yet the track record of existing decentralized states suggests that these have widely divergent capacity to contain conflicts within their borders. Through in-depth case studies of Chechnya, Punjab and Quebec, as well as a statistical cross-country analysis, this book argues that while policy, fiscal approach, and political decentralization can, indeed, be peace-preserving at times, the effects of these institutions are conditioned by traits of the societies they (are meant to) govern. Decentralization may help preserve peace in one country or in one region, but it may have just the opposite effect in a country or region with different ethnic and economic characteristics.

This volume provides a unique insight into the ways local governments have maintained financial resilience in the face of the significant challenges posed by the era of austerity. Taking an international perspective, it provides an enlightening and practical analysis of the different capacities and responses that local governments deploy to cope with financial shocks.Moving beyond traditional approaches dealing with financial stress, the financial resilience perspective reveals a wider range of organisational responses and enables consideration of the dynamic role played by internal and external contextual factors. The international case study approach allows for a comparative analysis of financial resilience in the context of different administrative and policy environments. By providing a unifying view of financial resilience, the importance of building resilience into organisational financial management is demonstrated, uncovering the relative effectiveness of different resilience building approaches. This edited volume is a valuable source for practitioners and academics, as well as students of public policy, public management and financial management.

Indonesia is Southeast Asia's largest economy and freest democracy yet vested interests and local politics serve as formidable obstacles to infrastructure reform. In this critical analysis of the politics inhibiting infrastructure investment, Jamie S. Davidson utilizes evidence from his research, press reports and rarely used consultancy studies to challenge mainstream explanations for low investment rates and the sluggish adoption of liberalizing reforms. He argues that obstacles have less to do with weak formal institutions and low fiscal capacities of the state than with entrenched, rent-seeking interests, misaligned central-local government relations, and state-society struggles over land. Using a political-sociological approach, Davidson demonstrates that 'getting the politics right' matters as much as getting the prices right or putting the proper institutional safeguards in place for infrastructure development. This innovative account and its conclusions will be of interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asia and policymakers of infrastructure investment and economic growth.

First published in 1935, this book was created to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the London City Council (LCC). The text describes various aspects of life in London and the LCC's role in maintaining an effective infrastructure, including areas such as health care, education, poor relief and finance. The condition of London's green spaces and housing is also described. Numerous photographs, original drawings and a bibliography are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British history and the development of the LCC.

Why do some ethno-national groups live peacefully with the states that govern them, whereas others develop into serious threats to state authority? Through a comparative historical analysis, this book compares the evolution of Kurdish mobilization in Turkey with the Berber mobilization in Morocco by looking at the different nation-building strategies of the respective states. Using a variety of sources, including archival documents, interviews, and memoirs, Senem Aslan emphasizes the varying levels of willingness and the varying capabilities of the Turkish and Moroccan states to intrude into their citizens' lives. She argues that complex interactions at the ground level - where states have demanded changes in everyday behavior, such as how to dress, what language to speak, what names to give children, and more mundane practices - account for the nature of emerging state-minority relations. By taking the local and informal interactions between state officials and citizens seriously, this study calls attention to the actual implementation of state policies and the often unintended consequences of these policies.

Why are some states able to deliver public services to their citizens while others cannot? Why are some states beset by internal conflict that leaves many impoverished? Much of what has become known as the failed states literature attempts to engage with these questions, but does so in way that betrays a particular bias, engaging in advocacy for intervention rather than analysis. The Idea of Failed States directly challenges existing thinking about conventional state strength as it finds that institutional approaches to state strength obscure as much as they reveal. The question of why some states are strong and others weak has traditionally been addressed using measures of economic growth, resources, and quality of life. This book compares the dimensions of state strength characterised by community, society, and nation and uses social capital concepts to further illuminate them. Applying this approach across forty-two countries shows 'weak' states exhibiting a consistent and unique patterns of relationships between community, society, and nation as well as equally consistent and unique relationships in strong states. A blend of theory and empirics, The Idea of Failed States present a new way to think about the state - one that applies to both strong and weak alike. This work should be of interest to students and scholars researching social capital, public policy, international development and security studies.

As performance management has evolved, it has encompassed many different tools and approaches including measurement, data analysis, evidence-based management, process improvement, research and evaluation. In the past, many of the efforts to improve performance in government have been fragmented, separated into silos and labeled with a variety of different names including performance-based budgeting, performance-informed management, managing for results and so on. Making Government Work: The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management by Katherine Barrett and Rich Greene is loaded with dozens of stories of what practitioners are currently working on-what's working and what's not. The benefits are ample, so are the challenges. This book describes both, along with practical steps taken by practitioners to make government work better. Readers will discover that while the authors strive to meet the documentation standards of carefully vetted academic papers, the approach they take is journalistic. Over the last year, Barrett and Greene talked to scores of state and local officials, as well as academics and other national experts to find out how performance management tools and approaches have changed, and what is coming in the near-term future. Performance management has been in a state of evolution for decades now, and so Barrett and Greene have endeavored to capture the state of the world as it is today. By detailing both the challenges and conquests of performance management in Making Government Work: The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management, Barrett and Greene insure readers will find the kind of balanced information that is helpful to both academics and practitioners-and that can move the field forward.

In this volume scholars from around the world discuss the innovative forms of collaboration between public and private actors that contribute to making our cities more liveable. It offers helpful insights into the practices of partnerships and the ways in which partnerships can contribute to a more liveable urban environment. The liveability of our cities is a topic of increasing relevance and urgency. The world's cities are becoming congested and polluted, putting pressure on affordable housing and causing safety to become a major problem. Urban governments are unable to address these major challenges on their own, and thus they seek cooperation with other governments, companies, civil society organizations, and citizens. By focusing on examples such as greenery in the city, affordable housing, safety, neighbourhood revitalization, and 'learning by doing' in urban living labs, this book asks two key questions. How do partnerships between public and private actors contribute to the liveability of cities? Under what conditions are partnerships successful, and when do they fail to yield the desired results?

In one of the only accounts of Latino legislative behavior, Stella M. Rouse examines how well the growing Latino population translates their increased presence into legislative influence. Latinos in the Legislative Process explores Latino representation by considering the role of ethnicity throughout the legislative process - from bill sponsorship, to committee deliberations, to floor votes - in seven state legislatures. Rouse first identifies issues that are priorities for Latinos and tells us whether a Latino political agenda exists. She then provides a theoretical framework for ethnicity in legislative behavior and outcomes. Rouse demonstrates that ethnicity is a complex dynamic that plays a variable role in the legislative process. Thus, Latino representation cannot be viewed monolithically.

There is often a moment in time that acts as a rallying point around a particular issue. 2015 was one of those moments for women, peace and security as numerous landmark anniversaries were celebrated in the field. Africa has, in many ways, been the global laboratory for the gender, peace and security agenda, not only because of the number of conflicts occurring on the continent but also because African regional organisations, governments and civil society organisations have been at the forefront of striving for gender equality and implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. This book explores gender, peace and security in Africa from multiple angles, including: the conceptual and implementation challenges and shifts around women, peace and security in Africa over the last 15 years; women’s role as combatants in national liberation forces in South Africa; the dynamics of gender in the military through the lens of Kenyan women combatants; food security through a feminist lens; and a series of case studies on the nexus between gender and security in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Somalia. This book was previously published as a special issue of the African Security Review.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Romi Sigsworth and Cheryl Hendricks

1. Women, peace and security in Africa Conceptual and implementation challenges and shifts

Cheryl Hendricks

2. The convergence and divergence of three pillars of influence in gender and security

’Funmi Olonisakin, Cheryl Hendricks and Awino Okech

3. Women combatants and the liberation movements in South Africa: Guerrilla girls, combative mothers and the in-betweeners

Siphokazi Magadla

4. Feminine masculinities in the military: The case of female combatants in the Kenya Defence Forces’ operation in Somalia

Mokua Ombati

5. Gender, feminism and food studies: A critical review

Desiree Lewis

6. A case study of gender and security sector reform in Zimbabwe

Netsai Mushonga

7. Women police in the Nigerian security sector

Tosin Akinjobi-Babatunde

8. Madagascar: Paving the way to national ‘fampihavanana’ and lasting peace

Gaby Razafindrakoto

9. Sexual and gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Yolanda Sadie

10. Kenya and Somalia: Fragile constitutional gains for women and the threat of patriarchy

Hawa Noor Mohammed