Development strategies : integrating governance and growth

A frontier challenge for development strategy is to move beyond prescribing optimal economic policies, and instead – taking a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints and dynamics -- to identify entry points capable of breaking a low-growth logjam, and initiating a virtuous spiral of cumulative change. The paper lays out four distinctive sequences via which the different dimensions might interact and evolve over time, and provides country-specific illustrations of each. Each sequence is defined by the principal focus of its initial step: 1) State capacity building provides a platform for accelerated growth via improved public sector performance and enhanced credibility for investors; strengthened political institutions and civil society come onto the agenda only over the longer term; 2) Transformational governance has as its entry point the reshaping of a country’s political institutions. Accelerated growth could follow, insofar as institutional changes enhance accountability, and reduce the potential for arbitrary discretionary action -- and thereby shift expectations in a positive direction; 3) For'just enough governance', the initial focus is on growth itself, with the aim of addressing specific capacity and institutional constraints as and when they become binding -- not seeking to anticipate and address in advance all possible institutional constraints; 4) Bottom-up development engages civil society as an entry point for seeking stronger state capacity, lower corruption, better public services, improvements in political institutions more broadly -- and a subsequent unlocking of constraints on growth. The sequences should not be viewed as a technocratic toolkit from which a putative reformer is free to choose. Recognizing that choice is constrained by history, the paper concludes by suggesting an approach for exploring what might the scope for identifying practical ways forward in specific country settings.Governance Indicators,National Governance,Parliamentary Government,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Political Economy

Capital social y desarrollo: la agenda venidera

Incluye Bibliografí

Conferencias: "El fin de la historia" y "Confianza"

Los documentos contenidos en esta publicación son transcripciones de grabaciones de conferencias dictadas en el marco del evento de celebración de los 40 años del SENA celebrado en Bogotá, donde el invitado especial al evento fue el politólogo estadounidense Francis Fukuyama, autor de la conferencia principal contenida en esta publicación.The documents contained in this publication are transcripts of conference recordings given in the framework of the event celebrating the 40th anniversary of the SENA held in Bogotá, where the special guest at the event was the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of the main conference contained in this post.Confianza y prosperidad para mejores colombianos -- Federación Nacional de Comerciantes FENALCO Junta Directiva Nacional Resolucion no. 2 de 1.997 -- Redireccionamiento de la formación empresarial -- Nueva época de crecimiento y fortaleza del SENA -- La confianza y el capital social.na98 página

Grand narratives then and now: can we still conceptualise history?

Reading the Communist Manifesto today, it is impossible not to be struck by the confidence with which it conceptualises history. The positive energy of this bold grand narrative stands in such stark contrast to the negative and jaded mentality of our times, which conceives of grand narratives only to tell us that there can be none. Such talk as there is of history today is more likely to be of "the end of history". There are three senses in which references to the end of history feature in contemporary debates: apocalyptic prediction, postmodernist pronouncement and capitalist triumphalism. This paper addresses the crisis of historicity in our time in relation to these positions and asks what is it about our age that produces them. It explores the widespread rejection of grand narratives, as well as grand narratives, which nevertheless persist, implicit and explicit, right and left. It looks at the position of marxism in the 1990s, counterposing it to postmarxism and postmodernism in particular on the question of grand narratives. It calls for resistance to the detotalising pressures of the age and revival of a totalising (as opposed to totalised) philosophy of history

Revolution and the end of history: Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest

Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, written and performed very soon after the Romanian revolution in 1990 and performed both in London and Bucharest, is a dynamic, inter-cultural play that represents a variety of perspectives on the revolutionary events, as well as oscillating between English and Romanian cultural and language coordinates. It has a peculiar topicality in its detailed and specific usages of different aspects of the revolutionary narrative, its sketches of family life before and after the revolution, and the inclusion of the revolution as reported in quasi-documentary-style testimony. The perspective in this article is one that places the play within a framework that thinks through Mad Forest’s relationship to the triumphant, neoliberalist heralding of “the end of history,” most famously argued by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 article of that name. This discourse gained further confidence from the collapse of Eastern Europe, a collapse that was viewed by proponents of the end-of-history argument as signalling the permanent disintegration of communism and a victory for capitalism. However, Mad Forest is considered here as a play that reflects multiple perspectives on the revolutionary period and, while declining to provide political solutions as such, simultaneously refuses to accede to the implications of the end-of-history argument

When Do People Trust Their Social Groups?

Trust facilitates cooperation and supports positive outcomes in social groups, including member satisfaction, information sharing, and task performance. Extensive prior research has examined individuals' general propensity to trust, as well as the factors that contribute to their trust in specific groups. Here, we build on past work to present a comprehensive framework for predicting trust in groups. By surveying 6,383 Facebook Groups users about their trust attitudes and examining aggregated behavioral and demographic data for these individuals, we show that (1) an individual's propensity to trust is associated with how they trust their groups, (2) smaller, closed, older, more exclusive, or more homogeneous groups are trusted more, and (3) a group's overall friendship-network structure and an individual's position within that structure can also predict trust. Last, we demonstrate how group trust predicts outcomes at both individual and group level such as the formation of new friendship ties.Comment: CHI 201