Legislative strengthening meets party support in international assistance: a closer relationship?

Recent reports recommend that international efforts to help strengthen legislatures in emerging democracies should work more closely with support for building stronger political parties and competitive party systems. This article locates the recommendations within international assistance more generally and reviews the arguments. It explores problems that must be addressed if the recommendations are to be implemented effectively. The article argues that an alternative, issue-based approach to strengthening legislatures and closer links with civil society could gain more traction. However, that is directed more centrally at promoting good governance for the purpose of furthering development than at democratisation goals sought by party aid and legislative strengtheners in the democracy assistance industry

Special Libraries, July-August 1935

Volume 26, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1935/1005/thumbnail.jp

Centralization, Decentralization, and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa

This paper examines broadly the intergovernmental structure in the Middle East and North Africa region, which has one of the most centralized government structures in the world. The authors address the reasons behind this centralized structure by looking first at the history behind the tax systems of the region. They review the Ottoman taxation system, which has been predominantly influential as a model, and discuss its impact on current government structure. They also discuss the current intergovernmental structure by examining the type and degree of decentralization in five countries representative of the region: Egypt, Iran, West Bank/Gaza, Tunisia, and Yemen. Cross-country regression analysis using panel data for a broader set of countries leads to better understanding of the factors behind heavy centralization in the region. The findings show that external conflicts constitute a major roadblock to decentralization in the region.Fiscal decentralization; intergovernmental relations; Middle East and North Africa

Special Libraries, August 1933

Volume 24, Issue 7https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1933/1006/thumbnail.jp

Make it so! Jean-Luc Picard, Bart Simpson and the design of e-public services

In this paper, we report on a project applying participatory design methods to include people who have experience of social exclusion (in one form or another) in designing possible technologies for e-(local)-government services. The work was part of a project for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the UK, and was concerned with ‘access tokens’ that can provide personal identification for individuals accessing public services, based on technologies such as multi-functional smartcards, flash memory sticks, mobile phone SIMs or similar devices. In particular we report on our experience using the ‘pastiche scenarios’ technique recently developed by Mark Blythe. Our findings indicate that the technique can be effective and engaging in helping people to create realistic scenarios of future technology use and highlight some possible pitfalls to consider when using this technique.</p

Special Libraries, September 1969

Volume 60, Issue 7https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1969/1006/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, January 1960

Volume 51, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1960/1000/thumbnail.jp

Public financing of the arts in England

The paper describes the method, amount and composition of public financing of the arts and heritage services in England during the 1990s. This offers the background to a discussion of how far the rationale for government financing for such services can rely on arguments derived from welfare economics. The presence of ‘market failure’ has been widely accepted by successive governments and their advisers, but attempts to remove it have encountered the familiar problems of ensuring allocative and technical efficiency when production subsidies are the main policy instrument. Special attention is devoted to the policy dilemmas that are likely to arise in the years ahead in the performing arts, heritage and broadcasting.

Establishing Branch Libraries

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