Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Ideas about social policy and its role in development have shifted over time, signaling the difficulty of finding clarity in approaches to social investment, poverty alleviation, and equity. In consequence, research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of "things that need to be done," along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. While these legacies contribute to the difficulty of developing overarching solutions to problems of social development and poverty alleviation, they also suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce what is often an overwhelming social policy agenda. The development community needs to get much better at matching ideas to realities, at considering how policy priorities could be assessed in terms of contextually specific feasibility, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step. While these are less ambitious questions than are often asked, they hold some promise of bringing ideas into better touch with the real world.

Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Career Civil Service Systems in Latin America

Patronage--the discretionary allocation of public sector jobs--continues to be a dominant way government is staffed in most Latin American countries and it is proving resistant to the imprecations of public sector reformers. Despite the ubiquity of patronage systems, however, all major countries in Latin America have legislation establishing a formal civil service system. In fact, such reform initiatives are swept aside or significantly altered after they have been legislated. In this paper, public sector reform initiatives in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile confirm that implementation is fraught with opportunities for distorting the intent of law and indicate a series of similar strategies used by the opponents of reform to offset the impact of new legislation. Taken together, such strategies have been remarkably successful in blocking the systematic implementation of civil service laws. Nevertheless, there is evidence that public sectors in each of the case study countries have made advances in the degree of stability, professionalism, and expertise in public offices, even in the absence of a Weberian civil service.

Good Governance: The Inflation of an Idea

Good governance has grown rapidly to become a major ingredient in analyses of what's missing in countries struggling for economic and political development. Intuitively and in research, good governance is a seductive idea--who, after all, can reasonably defend bad governance? Nevertheless, the popularity of the idea has far outpaced its capacity to deliver. In its brief life, it has also muddied the waters of thinking about the development process, and has become conflated with the capacity to generate growth, alleviate poverty, and bring effective democracy to peoples in poor countries. Scholars and practitioners need to develop a reasonable understanding of what good governance can deliver--and what it cannot. They must also assume more realistic expectations about how much good governance can be expected in poor countries struggling with a plethora of demands on their capacities to pursue change. In this paper, I explore how and why the concept of good governance emerged and grew, and then suggest ways that academics and practitioners can become more sensitive to the limitations of fads and to curb the tendency toward idea inflation.

Sanctions, Benefits, and Rights: Three Faces of Accountability

As countries throughout the world democratize and decentralize, citizen participation in public life should increase. In this paper, I suggest that democratic participation in local government is enhanced when citizens can reply affirmatively to at least three questions about their ability to hold local officials accountable for their actions: Can citizens use the vote effectively to reward and punish the general or specific performance of local public officials and/or the parties they represent? Can citizens generate response to their collective needs from local governments? Can citizens be ensured of fair and equitable treatment from public agencies at local levels? The findings of a study of 30 randomly selected municipalities in Mexico indicate that, over the course of a decade and a half, voters were able to enforce alternation in power and the circulation of elites, but not necessarily to transmit unambiguous messages to public officials or parties about performance concerns. More definitively, citizens were able to build successfully on prior political experiences to extract benefits from local governments. At the same time, the ability to demand good performance of local government as a right of citizenship lagged behind other forms of accountability.

Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of “things that need to be done”, along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. These suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries, in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce the agenda. Instead of new big ideas and new paradigms, the development community needs to get better at matching ideas to realities, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step.social policy, economic development history; poverty policy; development agenda; development cooperation

In Quest of the Political: The Political Economy of Development Policy Making

This paper explores some of the central debates in the application of political economy to development policy making. It is particularly concerned with the connection between theory, empirical observation, and the practice of policy decision making. It explores distinct traditions of political economy, some drawn from economics, others based in sociological theory, that generate distinct insights about why and when change is likely to occur in policies and institutions. The paper then raises the question of whether such traditions provide effective guidance about the politics of decision making and the process of policy reform and whether they generate helpful insights for reformers interested in encouraging such processes. It suggests that current approaches to political economy present a stark tradeoff between parsimony and elegance on the one hand and insight into conflict and process on the other. Both both traditions of political economy borrow assumptions about political interactions from contexts that may not be fully relevant to developing and transitional countries. In addition, when theory is compared to the extensive empirical literature that now exists about experiences for policy and institutional change, it fails to provide convincing explanations for some of the most important characteristics of real world politics--leadership, ideas, and success. Further, much theoretical and empirical work in political economy has fallen far behind in exploring the policy agendas that now confront developing and transitional countries.political economy of development, policy making in developing countries, policy reform, development policy choice

Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Ideas about social policy and its role in development have shifted over time, signaling the difficulty of finding clarity in approaches to social investment, poverty alleviation, and equity. In consequence, research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of “things that need to be done,” along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. While these legacies contribute to the difficulty of developing overarching solutions to problems of social development and poverty alleviation, they also suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce what is often an overwhelming social policy agenda. The development community needs to get much better at matching ideas to realities, at considering how policy priorities could be assessed in terms of contextually specific feasibility, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step. While these are less ambitious questions than are often asked, they hold some promise of bringing ideas into better touch with the real world

Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Career Civil Service Systems in Latin America

Patronage—the discretionary allocation of public sector jobs—continues to be a dominant way government is staffed in most Latin American countries and it is proving resistant to the imprecations of public sector reformers. Despite the ubiquity of patronage systems, however, all major countries in Latin America have legislation establishing a formal civil service system. In fact, such reform initiatives are swept aside or significantly altered after they have been legislated. In this paper, public sector reform initiatives in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile confirm that implementation is fraught with opportunities for distorting the intent of law and indicate a series of similar strategies used by the opponents of reform to offset the impact of new legislation. Taken together, such strategies have been remarkably successful in blocking the systematic implementation of civil service laws. Nevertheless, there is evidence that public sectors in each of the case study countries have made advances in the degree of stability, professionalism, and expertise in public offices, even in the absence of a Weberian civil service

Good Governance: The Inflation of an Idea

Good governance has grown rapidly to become a major ingredient in analyses of what’s missing in countries struggling for economic and political development. Intuitively and in research, good governance is a seductive idea—who, after all, can reasonably defend bad governance? Nevertheless, the popularity of the idea has far outpaced its capacity to deliver. In its brief life, it has also muddied the waters of thinking about the development process, and has become conflated with the capacity to generate growth, alleviate poverty, and bring effective democracy to peoples in poor countries. Scholars and practitioners need to develop a reasonable understanding of what good governance can deliver—and what it cannot. They must also assume more realistic expectations about how much good governance can be expected in poor countries struggling with a plethora of demands on their capacities to pursue change. In this paper, I explore how and why the concept of good governance emerged and grew, and then suggest ways that academics and practitioners can become more sensitive to the limitations of fads and to curb the tendency toward idea inflation

The new political economy : positive economics and negative politics

This paper discusses the theory that less politics makes better economics. It argues that this perspective on politics misrepresents the dynamics of policymaking in developing countries and is seriously limited in its ability to explain how policy changes come about or how policies are chosen that lead to socially beneficial outcomes. The author indicates that most models of political economy are not relevant for developing countries and are therefore unable to explain policy changes or wise policy choices. In light of this, the paper recommends an alternative approach to political economy that does not treat politics as a negative factor in policy choice. It emphasizes understanding the preferences and perceptions of policy elites, the circumstances that surround the emergence of policy issues, the concerns of decision makers, and the factors that affect the implementation and sustainability of policy change. In such an alternative, politics consists of efforts at problem solving through bargaining and the use of political resources in the context of great uncertainty.Economic Theory&Research,ICT Policy and Strategies,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Politics and Government