Paradigm shift or business as usual? Workers' views on multi-stakeholder initiatives in Bangladesh

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi‐stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready‐made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer‐driven, compliance‐based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation‐based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers

The Political Economy of Domestic Tax Reform in Bangladesh: Political Settlements, Informal Institutions and the Negotiation of Reform

This paper explains the persistence of a tax system characterised by low revenue collection and extensive informality in Bangladesh. It combines analysis of long-term formal and informal institutions and of micro-level incentives shaping negotiation of short-term reform. The system is unusually informal, discretionary, and corrupt, but remains resistant to change because it delivers low and predictable tax rates to business, extensive opportunities for corruption to the tax administration, and an important vehicle for fundraising by political leaders and rent distribution to their elite supporters. We then explore the dynamics of micro-level reform and external pressure within the constraints of this overarching political bargain

Changing local weather and adaptation in two coastal villages in Bangladesh

Coastal Bangladesh is experiencing the effects of weather and climate-related stressors. The paper reports on the ways in which members of nine occupational groups in two coastal villages in South-west Bangladesh understand and respond differentially to recent changes in local weather and weather-related events and processes. Their understanding is grounded in local experiences and varied livelihood options, which are a complex interaction between people's social and spatial locations and local weather and non-weather events and processes. Their priorities are to protect livelihoods through resilience-building actions, which address proximate causes of vulnerability (improving coastal embankments, rehabilitating and strengthening homesteads, protecting agricultural land). Government support is limited to traditional development interventions that assist some more than others and often disconnected from local people's priorities. Most adaptation actions are practical measures within the prevailing politico-legal order. There is some evidence of more rights-based cooperative action between a national non-governmental organisation and local farmers that challenged aspects of that order

Pride and performance in the public service: Three Asian cases

10.1177/0020852301671007International Review of Administrative Sciences67199-11