The Use of Evidence in Health Policy in Ghana: Implications for Accountability and Democratic Governance

The use of evidence in policymaking is often argued to improve accountability, effectiveness, and stakeholder involvement in policy decisions. The features of this practice, however, remain vague in the discourse of evidence-based policymaking, with the risk of obscuring important governance and legitimacy implications. In programme planning and evaluation especially, the use of evidence can be critical to translate technical measurements of policy achievements into political values for shaping future policy directions. This chapter presents a case study from Ghana to discuss how institutionalized evidentiary practices used in policy review affect aspects of governance. Drawing on interviews, we reflect on how the evidence review process—agreed in collaboration with development partners—links to the evidence advisory system and the accountability systems in place. We find that the uses of evidence promoted by international donors actually creates disconnect with the national accountability system in place, with implications for democratic governance

Marking their own homework: The pragmatic and moral legitimacy of industry self-regulation

When is industry self-regulation (ISR) a legitimate form of governance? In principle, ISR can serve the interests of participating companies, regulators and other stakeholders. However, in practice, empirical evidence shows that ISR schemes often under-perform, leading to criticism that such schemes are tantamount to firms marking their own homework. In response, this paper explains how current management theory on ISR has failed to separate the pragmatic legitimacy of ISR based on self-interested calculations, from moral legitimacy based on normative approval. The paper traces three families of management theory on ISR and uses these to map the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of ISR schemes. It identifies tensions between the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of ISR schemes, which the current ISR literature does not address, and draws implications for the future theory and practice of ISR

Strong, Transparent Public Institutions and Meta-governance

©2021 Springer. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71066-2_125-1fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Decoupling in the age of market-embedded morality : responsible gambling in a hybrid organization

This paper contributes to the understanding of hybrid organizations by refining the concept of decoupling as a strategic response to conflicting objectives and institutional expectations (Meyer and Rowan in Am J Soc 83:340–363, 1977). In today’s popular responsibility discourse one notes a hopeful “win–win” ideal that invites attempts, by companies in particular, to realize and balance conflicting values and to strive to fulfil both profit objectives and responsibility objectives. Although institutional theory has long acknowledged the strategic response of decoupling in organizational contexts, the potential of exploring and refining how this concept may be used to analyse strategic responses in the contemporary era of market-embedded morality has yet to be explored (Shamir in Econ Soc 37:1–19, 2008). There are good reasons to do so as the present-day discourse on the relation between the economy and morality offers a new set of options and challenges for legitimately responding to institutional demands. This paper draws on an explanatory, rich ethnographic and longitudinal case study of a Swedish fully state-owned company operating in the post 1990s gambling market. We suggest that contemporary hybrid organizations positioned at the crossroads of bureaucratic and market schemes of organizing, may find themselves in a particularly tight spot and seek legitimacy by decoupling—not only by adopting certain legitimizing structures, but also and increasingly with reference to market-embedded morality, a commoditizing of responsibility in their contested market setting. Based on the case findings, we suggest a distinction between organization-based decoupling and market-based decoupling and propose that market-based decoupling may be attractive to hybrid organizations owing to it being less sensitive to scrutiny and accountability claims. But at the same time, our findings indicate that market-based decoupling poses a risk to hybrid organizations, as it does not offer the same degree of legitimacy with key stakeholders/the general public as organization-based decoupling does