Foreword

In the early 1990s, all but one Master’s degree programme on human rights in the world approached the topic from a narrowly legal perspective. They were mostly located in departments or schools of law. They had great virtues, as I had discovered when interacting with the programme at the Harvard Law School during the mid-1980s. But they largely omitted scholars from other disciplines – the social sciences, history, philosophy, etc. – who could offer crucial insights for a rounded understanding of human rights

Successful governance reforms in two Indian states: Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh

This study analyses governance reforms in two southern states in India's federal system, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Two reforms are considered in each state: one rural and one urban. In Karnataka, we examine the Bhoomi programme, which used information technology to provide farmers with land documents, and the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, which changed the operations of several municipal agencies. In Andhra Pradesh, we examine the reform of Metro Water, the body that oversees the provision of water to the state capital, Hyderabad, and the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) programme, which sought to provide rural women with credit in order to gain greater skills, confidence and autonomy. The first three initiatives achieved a substantial degree of success. The fourth, DWCRA, met with significant problems, but entailed enough change for the better to qualify as a partial success. The first three programmes were mainly intended to improve service delivery, but also had positive impacts in other areas, such as strengthening the capacity of state agencies. All were designed to avoid undermining fiscal stability. The four initiatives varied in their breadth (that is, the number of sectors or agencies they were intended to affect), and in the degree of change they sought to induce within them. Two of the four programmes examined - those from Karnataka - were entirely new initiatives, which other state governments are now considering replicating. The other two cases, from Andhra Pradesh, saw the state government pumping new energy and resources into pre-existing programmes. Three of the four initiatives (the exception being Bhoomi) entailed, to varying degrees, attempts to catalyse modest or substantial participation by ordinary people and demands from them upon government. All four initiatives qualify as programmes rather than sweeping macro-systemic policies for reform, and they entailed incremental rather than radical changes; both these factors made them comparatively easy to pursue

A node-capacitated Okamura-Seymour theorem

The classical Okamura-Seymour theorem states that for an edge-capacitated, multi-commodity flow instance in which all terminals lie on a single face of a planar graph, there exists a feasible concurrent flow if and only if the cut conditions are satisfied. Simple examples show that a similar theorem is impossible in the node-capacitated setting. Nevertheless, we prove that an approximate flow/cut theorem does hold: For some universal c > 0, if the node cut conditions are satisfied, then one can simultaneously route a c-fraction of all the demands. This answers an open question of Chekuri and Kawarabayashi. More generally, we show that this holds in the setting of multi-commodity polymatroid networks introduced by Chekuri, et. al. Our approach employs a new type of random metric embedding in order to round the convex programs corresponding to these more general flow problems.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

Democratic Decentralization in Africa and Asia

Summary This article summarizes recent research on one of the developmental fashions of our time ? democratic decentralization. After discussing various definitions of ‘decentralization’, it surveys the benefits that can follow when democratic decentralization works well. Among these are greater responsiveness, increased participation and two?way information flow between state and society, and reductions in absenteeism by local?level government employees and in corruption. It reviews decentralization's limitations ? notably its incapacity to facilitate poverty alleviation. It then examines problems which can prevent decentralization from working well. It helps enormously if a country attempting it has had a sustained experience of democracy, but that is not true in most of Africa and Asia. Finally, the article suggests approaches that can assist decentralization to work well ? most crucially the provision of adequate powers and resources from above, and measures to ensure that bureaucrats will be accountable to elected representatives, and that representatives will be accountable to citizens. RESUME La décentralisation démocratique en Afrique et en Asie Cet article présente un résumé des recherches récentes sur l'une des vogues développementales de notre ère: la décentralisation démocratique. L'auteur discute plusieurs définitions de ce que c'est que la ‘décentralisation’; ceci fait, il énumère les avantages qui peuvent découler d'une décentralisation démocratique bien gérée. Parmi ces avantages l'on compte une capacité de réponse accrue, une augmentation de la participation, un flot bidirectionnel d'information entre l'état et la société; et une diminution de la corruption et de l'absentéisme parmi les employés des administrations locales. L'auteur réfléchit également sur les limites de la décentralisation et notamment, sur son incapacité de faciliter l'allègement de la pauvreté. Ensuite il examine les problèmes qui peuvent empêcher le bon fonctionnement de la décentralisation. Les choses sont énormément plus faciles si le pays qui tente cette décentralisation possède une expérience longue et continue de la démocratie, or c'est loin d'être le cas dans la majorité des pays de l'Afrique et de l'Asie. En dernier lieu l'article propose certaines approches qui pourraient assister le bon fonctionnement de la décentralisation: parmi les plus importantes seraient la dévolution d'“en haut” de pouvoirs et de ressources adéquats, et de mesures qui garantiront que les bureaucrates devront répondre à des représentants élus, et que ces représentants devront répondre aux citoyens. RESUMEN La descentralización democratica en Asia y África Este artículo resume las recientes investigaciones en un área de moda en el desarrollo: descentralización democrática. Comienza describiendo diversas definiciones de descentralización, para luego detallar los beneficios que puede reportar ésta si obtiene éxito. Entre ellos están: una mayor receptividad, una mayor participación y una corriente de información fluida entre el Estado y la sociedad, así como una reducción del ausentismo y la corrupción entre los empleados públicos locales. En el artículo se reseñan las limitaciones de la descentralización ? principalmente su incapacidad para aliviar la pobreza. Luego se examinan los problemas que pueden impedir su éxito. Obviamente, es mucho mejor si los países en cuestión tienen una experiencia democrática continuada, pero ése no es el caso en la mayoria de los países asiáticos y africanos. Finalmente, se sugieren enfoques para ayudar a la descentralización; los más cruciales son la provisión de poder y recursos por parte de las autoridades y medidas para asegurar que los burócratas sean responsables ante los representantes elegidos, y éstos ante los ciudadanos

Measured descent: A new embedding method for finite metrics

We devise a new embedding technique, which we call measured descent, based on decomposing a metric space locally, at varying speeds, according to the density of some probability measure. This provides a refined and unified framework for the two primary methods of constructing Frechet embeddings for finite metrics, due to [Bourgain, 1985] and [Rao, 1999]. We prove that any n-point metric space (X,d) embeds in Hilbert space with distortion O(sqrt{alpha_X log n}), where alpha_X is a geometric estimate on the decomposability of X. As an immediate corollary, we obtain an O(sqrt{(log lambda_X) \log n}) distortion embedding, where \lambda_X is the doubling constant of X. Since \lambda_X\le n, this result recovers Bourgain's theorem, but when the metric X is, in a sense, ``low-dimensional,'' improved bounds are achieved. Our embeddings are volume-respecting for subsets of arbitrary size. One consequence is the existence of (k, O(log n)) volume-respecting embeddings for all 1 \leq k \leq n, which is the best possible, and answers positively a question posed by U. Feige. Our techniques are also used to answer positively a question of Y. Rabinovich, showing that any weighted n-point planar graph embeds in l_\infty^{O(log n)} with O(1) distortion. The O(log n) bound on the dimension is optimal, and improves upon the previously known bound of O((log n)^2).Comment: 17 pages. No figures. Appeared in FOCS '04. To appeaer in Geometric & Functional Analysis. This version fixes a subtle error in Section 2.