Transnational policy entrepreneurs and the cultivation of influence : individuals, organizations and their networks

The ‘policy entrepreneur’ concept arises from the Multiple Streams’ theory of agenda setting in Policy Studies. Through conceptual stretching’, the concept is extended to global policy dynamics. Unlike ‘advocacy networks’ and ‘norm entrepreneurs’, the discussion addresses the strategies of ‘insider’ or ‘near-governmental’ non-state actors. The analysis advances the policy entrepreneur concept in three directions. First, the discussion develops the transnational dimensions of this activity through a case study of International Crisis Group. Second, rather than focusing on charismatic individuals, the discussion emphasizes the importance of organizational resources and reputations for policy entrepreneurship and access into international policy communities. Organizations maintain momentum behind policy solutions and pressures for change over the long term when individuals retire or depart for other positions. Third, the discussion outlines four distinct entrepreneur strategies and techniques that both individuals and organizations cultivate and deploy to enhance their power and persuasion in global policy processes and politics

Dependence and Autonomy: Conditions of Possibility for Nigerien Ownership in the Water Sector

In order for development assistance to contribute to sustainable reform it is considered necessary for recipient states to become owners of and assume leadership over their own policies and strategies. Based on state–agent narratives and participation in ministry–donor negotiation meetings and workshops, this paper investigates the process of achieving Nigerien ownership in the water sector through the implementation of the programme approach. Against the backdrop of new mechanisms of aid and promises for the future, the article shows how Nigerien ownership in the water sector is imagined as the ability to act, which requires the close presence of donors rather than autonomous decision-making. At the same time, the promise of agency creates a space for negotiation of the role of the state that may or may not be utilized

Between Discipline and Dissent: Situated Resistance and Global Order

In this article we contextualise the Disciplining Dissent project through a series of observations about the ways in which the papers collected here contribute to existing perspectives on global resistance, and make a broader argument in favour of situated approaches to studying the interplay between global discipline and dissent. After outlining the concerns that led us initially to formulate the project, we offer a series of reflections about the contribution of this special issue to existing debates about (i) the place of resistance in global order and (ii) the ways in which global discipline and dissent can be known. We suggest that the papers collected in this special issue, through their attention to concrete and specific practices of discipline and dissent, prompt reflection on the particular forms of visibility associated with different methodologies, and on the politically charged knowledges these methodologies engender. Attention to the interplay between context-specific practices of discipline and dissent opens up space, we argue, to examine whose and what knowledges count in the theory and practice of global ordering and resistance. It also invites consideration of the ways in which self-consciously situated approaches to researching and theorising might help open up and decolonise this terrain of enquiry. We conclude with some reflections on the interplay of discipline and dissent at work in our own immediate context of the British university

Seeing like an international organisation

International organisations (IOs) often serve as the ‘engine room’ of ideas for structural reforms at the national level, but how do IOs construct cognitive authority over the forms, processes and prescriptions for institutional change in their member states? Exploring the analytic institutions created by IOs provides insights into how they make their member states ‘legible’ and how greater legibility enables them to construct cognitive authority in specific policy areas, which, in turn, enhances their capacity to influence changes in national frameworks for economic and social governance. Studying the indirect influence that IOs can exert over the design of national policies has, until recently, often been neglected in accounts of the contemporary roles that IOs play and the evolution of global economic governance. By ‘seeing like an IO’, we can increase our understanding of the cognitive and organisational environment that guides an IO's actions and informs its policy advice to states, which enables a more comprehensive picture of how the everyday business of global governance works in practice. Instead of ‘black boxing’ IOs, the contributors to this special issue demonstrate how studying IOs from the inside out expands our understanding both of the policy dialogue between IOs and their member states and how IOs and states learn from each other over time