The relationship of accountable governance and constitutional implementation, with reference to Africa

This article offers a framework for analysing the interrelationships between democratic accountability and constitutional implementation with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa. It opens by noting the subject’s importance and the contested meaning of key terms, before proceeding to elaborate the significance that constitutional implementation and accountability have for one another. The main purpose is to suggest an agenda lying at the interface between constitutional law and politics that is worthy of further research. The article argues there is considerable scope for analysts of law and politics to collaborate for the purpose of shedding light on many questions that cut across issues of both democratic accountability and constitutional implementation in Africa

The government's review of sub-national economic development and regeneration: key issues

We are now in the midst of another concerted attempt by Government to make sense of and tidy up the sub-national governance of economic development and regeneration. This is a challenging task made all the more difficult by being undertaken in a UK context following a period of uneven devolutionary change and cross-cut by new and existing scales of institutions and spatial policies at the sub-regional, city-regional, regional and pan-regional levels as well as the economic slowdown. The current endeavour has taken the form of the Review of Sub-National Economic Development and Regeneration led by HM Treasury, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Communities and Local Government department and the consultation Prosperous Places: Taking Forward the Review of Sub National Economic Development and Regeneration (hereafter SNR). We recognise that SNR is emergent 'policy-in-the-making', containing some potentially radical steps for government across a range of geographical levels, and represents a laudable attempt to establish a clearer framework replete with challenging opportunities for RDAs, local authorities and other existing and emergent spatial institutions. Our purpose here is to raise some key issues for debate and reflection as part of the process of addressing sub-national economic development and regeneration policy and governance

Explaining the EU's Policy Portfolio: Applying a Federal Integration Approach to EU Cohesion Policy. Bruges Political Research Paper No. 20, December 2011

This paper engages with the debate about why the nature of the EU's policy portfolio is as it is. It does so by taking cohesion policy and asking the question, why has it come to occupy so important a position in the EU‟s policy portfolio? It is argued that the two most common conceptually-based approaches applied to cohesion policy – intergovernmentalism and multilevel governance – do not adequately explain either the timing or the dynamic of cohesion policy. A model that combines economic integration approaches and federal approaches is developed in the paper to provide a basis for a new explanatory framework for the prominent position of cohesion in the portfolio. We suggest that our approach – which we call a federal integration approach – has the potential to be applied to other policy areas

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Governance crises and the Andean region: A political economy analysis

The Andean countries, a region with abundance of natural resources and other valuable assets, exhibit a variety of governance problems that hinder its potential for social peace, stability and economic prosperity. Their empirical governance record, based on historical and recent data, although varies from country to country has been characterized by political instability, considerable frequency of constitutional reforms, presidential crisis, volatility of democratic institutions and violence. In turn, the empirical evidence on quality of institutions put the Andean region in a relatively modest place in international rankings of (survey-based) indices of voice and accountability, rule of law, regulatory burden, control of corruption, political instability and violence although improvements are also detected in some of these governance dimensions. Institutional reform, in a broad sense, is needed to ensure the basic conditions of economic development.

Unravelling the role of parliament in developing network industries: comparative case of ICT sector reform in Kenya and South Africa

Several scholars have identified institutional and regulatory conditions under which Information Communication Technologies (ICT) reforms can accomplish positive public policy outcomes. This literature pays little attention, however, to the role of parliaments in these reforms. The institutional factors determining the degree and nature of parliamentary participation in ICT sector reforms in Africa is what this thesis examines. Drawing from the political economy tradition, this thesis explores the interplay between the executive, the parliament and the various sectoral interests that determine ICT sector reforms in developing countries. It does so by placing parliament in a conceptual framework that combines the concept of ICT as a complex ecosystem with that of a constellation of institutions. The gathered empirical evidence is studied through this conceptual lens to build the cases of parliamentary participation in Kenya and South Africa - two of the most dynamic ICT markets in sub-Saharan Africa - which are then analysed comparatively. Some of the information is gathered through a self-assessment survey by members of the ICT parliamentary committees and complemented by high-level interviews with the main sector players. The findings are triangulated with those from an extensive document analysis. This thesis contextualises institutional analysis in specific political circumstances of the two countries in order to understand the relevance of parliament in sector reforms. The findings have important implications for our understanding of structural and institutional constraints on parliaments in developing countries and nascent democracies. Parliaments lack capacity to simply fulfill their legislative and oversight roles, let alone creating an enabling environment for innovative public policy, sector investment and public interest outcomes as required by this dynamic sector in any modern, globalised economy. Systematic coding of the data revealed national governance and institutional arrangements as key determinants of an ICT ecosystem that adapts to local and international conditions, confirming parliament as not simply a neutral legal structure but a significant power broker, reflecting competing interests at play. The formal legal system in both countries is uneven and underutilized, ineffective in achieving robustly-contested public interest outcomes. In order to manage political interests, parliament structures and serves principal agent-relationships, vetoes ICT policy and decision-making processes, links interest groups to government and party agendas, resolves conflicts and, sometimes, builds consensus among key players. The examination of institutional designs of both parliaments identifies critical capacity deficits that are at the heart of the negative outcomes in national legislative and oversight processes. In South Africa, the reason for these deficits is primarily that the parliamentary system promotes political party and executive dominance, which undermine multi-party and participatory structure of parliamentary processes to achieve party preferences and control outcomes. In Kenya, whilst the combination of distinct separation of powers and a constituency-based electoral system provides a legal basis for greater parliamentary accountability, the highly fragmented sector arrangements compounded by lack of internal capacity to utilize parliamentary instruments and mechanisms constrain parliament's participation. These weak institutional arrangements and designs, in both Kenya and South Africa, limit independence of parliament from the executive and sometimes industry, compromising the parliamentary oversight and visionary leadership expected from specialized portfolio committees. This calls for a transformation of arrangements to uphold and reinforce constitutional mandates that give parliament the power and ability to fulfill its role in policy reforms