Governance, rational choice and new public management (npm): a general view (and some critics)

This article aims to study the New Public Management (NPM), one of the main trends associated to neoliberalism. It studies governance to show its general, wider and abstract scope. It also focuses on the Rational Choice as an important theory about governance, a basis for NPM. And it observes the neoliberal foundations of NPM, showing critical aspects of its real practice. Methodology: hypothetical deductive method of research, with a qualitative and critical approach and bibliographic-documental research technique. As results of this research, we can conclude that: i) the ideological usage of NPM has been expressed in a culture of minimal state and government - but in practice, such culture, when embossing implemented reforms, seldom reverted the role of the state, destroyed social safety nets, and placed the tax burden on the working majority rather than on the wealthy elite; ii) advocates for NPM have Western-shaped minds, generally making erroneous assumptions about institutions and cultures, which may be present in Anglo-American countries, but not in other culturally different ones; iii) in practice, NPM reforms were imposed to low-income countries by donor institutions to adjust their states for good governance - but those reforms did not solve problems with inefficiency and corruption. This work is original and valuable because it shows that even when public policies highlight the importance of less state intervention, solid norms and institutions are always necessary, and because it helps demystifying discourses that simply put that less state/more market politics can be valuable everywhere

No Bel-Robinson Tensor for Quadratic Curvature Theories

We attempt to generalize the familiar covariantly conserved Bel-Robinson tensor B_{mnab} ~ R R of GR and its recent topologically massive third derivative order counterpart B ~ RDR, to quadratic curvature actions. Two very different models of current interest are examined: fourth order D=3 "new massive", and second order D>4 Lanczos-Lovelock, gravity. On dimensional grounds, the candidates here become B ~ DRDR+RRR. For the D=3 model, there indeed exist conserved B ~ dRdR in the linearized limit. However, despite a plethora of available cubic terms, B cannot be extended to the full theory. The D>4 models are not even linearizable about flat space, since their field equations are quadratic in curvature; they also have no viable B, a fact that persists even if one includes cosmological or Einstein terms to allow linearization about the resulting dS vacua. These results are an unexpected, if hardly unique, example of linearization instability.Comment: published versio

The Local Governance of the 2014 Ebola Epidemic: A Comparative Case Study of Liberia and Sierra Leone

This research investigates community-led interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The objective is to examine the parallels and differences in the response and outcomes of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Many challenges made aid less effective such as misinformation, rumors, stigma, and logistical difficulties that lowered the demand for aid resources. These market inefficiencies were the demand-side barriers that were prolonging the disease spread. A qualitative methodology was employed to answer the research question. Sixty-seven semi-structured interviews were conducted from January to July 2017; 33 of these interviews were in Sierra Leone and 34 interviews in Liberia. Informants included health workers, chiefs, chiefs’ advisors, a secret society leader, NGO representatives, a government worker, and volunteers during the outbreak. Thematic analysis and the data were supported by NVIVO. The key themes are: ‘Government’s Response and Community Reaction,’ ‘Local Institutional Intervention,’ and ‘Governing the Outbreak.’ Informants were chosen through purposeful sampling methods in three provinces in each country. The findings demonstrate that traditional leaders in Sierra Leone immediately responded through rulemaking and enforcement after the first Ebola case was officially announced. Specifically, rulemaking helped to create behavior changes to increase demand for aid resources, such as mandatory referrals to the health centers. These laws and door-to-door contact tracing were scaled up to a national emergency strategy, relying on traditional leaders to monitor and enforce them. In Liberia, community and traditional leaders organized in many areas to correct some of these demand-side barriers too. In both cases, the response from community-level leaders happened before the international community scaled up aid resources in August 2014, with some donors and humanitarians arriving as late as December 2014. However, Liberia’s local strategies were not scaled up and coordinated nationally, as it was in Sierra Leone. Thus, the interventions implemented were not universal. According to figures by the World Health Organization, Sierra Leone had 25% more Ebola cases than Liberia but had 18% fewer Ebola deaths. This is interpreted as contact tracing and institutional changes having more impact in Sierra Leone to refer Ebola patients into early treatment and reduce deaths

Shortcuts to Spherically Symmetric Solutions: A Cautionary Note

Spherically symmetric solutions of generic gravitational models are optimally, and legitimately, obtained by expressing the action in terms of the two surviving metric components. This shortcut is not to be overdone, however: a one-function ansatz invalidates it, as illustrated by the incorrect solutions of [1].Comment: 2 pages. Amplified derivation, accepted for publication in Class Quant Gra

Circular Symmetry in Topologically Massive Gravity

We re-derive, compactly, a TMG decoupling theorem: source-free TMG separates into its Einstein and Cotton sectors for spaces with a hypersurface-orthogonal Killing vector, here concretely for circular symmetry. We can then generalize it to include matter, which is necessarily null.Comment: amplified published versio

‘It was organized from the bottom’: the response from community-based institutions during the 2014 Ebola epidemic

What was the turning point in the world's largest and deadliest outbreak of the Ebola virus disease? Public health interventions tend to focus on supply-side provision of public health goods. These goods are clinical resources such as medicine or equipment. However, no nation has enough resources to ‘treat’ its way out of a widespread epidemic. Behavioural changes, such as social distancing, are needed too. Behaviours are the demand-side of public health goods and if unaddressed, perpetuate disease transmission. Community-based institutions addressed demand-side barriers during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Sixty-seven interviews were conducted in several provinces in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The findings show that information asymmetry and collective action challenges lowered the demand for clinical resources. Community-based institutions intervened via health sensitization and emergency regulations. Therefore, health seeking and public cooperation improved. This research study demonstrates a need to integrate community-led action into public health emergency management

Time (in)dependence in general relativity

We clarify the conditions for Birkhoff's theorem, that is, time-independence in general relativity. We work primarily at the linearized level where guidance from electrodynamics is particularly useful. As a bonus, we also derive the equivalence principle. The basic time-independent solutions due to Schwarzschild and Kerr provide concrete illustrations of the theorem. Only familiarity with Maxwell's equations and tensor analysis is required.Comment: Revised version of originally titled "Kinder Kerr", to appear in American Journal of Physic