Your search
Results 23 resources
-
Recent decades have seen growing emphasis on enhancing public participation and accountability in governance processes. Yet the valence of these discussions has focused almost entirely on the character of citizen engagement itself, with little attention to the ways in which citizens’ agency is constituted in relation to changing forms of public authority. In this paper, I advance a theoretical account of political representation, a concept that is central to analysis of democracy, but which...
-
We identify and document a new principle of economic behavior: the principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand. In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman celebrated the Hiding Hand, which he saw as a benevolent mechanism by which unrealistically optimistic planners embark on unexpectedly challenging plans, only to be rescued by human ingenuity, which they could not anticipate, but which ultimately led to success, principally in the form of unexpectedly high net benefits. Studying eleven projects,...
-
Research can improve development policies and practices and funders increasingly require evidence of such socioeconomic impact from their investments. This article questions whether information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) research conforms to the requirements for achieving socioeconomic impact. We report on a literature review of the impact of research in international development and a survey of ICT4D researchers who assessed the extent to which they follow...
-
In 2012 the Danish city of Aarhus was appointed European Capital of Culture for 2017. The appointment was based on an ambitious programme that – under the headline Rethink – tried to set an agenda of societal transformation, mainly by seeking to increase the impact of art and culture, and to enhance civic participation at all levels of society. In this article we examine one of the first attempts of Aarhus 2017 to realize these grand ambitions: ‘The Playful Society’, a series of micro grants...
-
The article presents a yet unexplored framework for analysing the multidimensionality and dis/connections of participatory processes and their outcomes by using the concept of the ‘assemblage’ (DeLanda, 2006). The case is an eight-month collaboration between a task force initiated by Central Denmark Region, the socio-economic company Sager der Samler, and citizens. The collaboration is aimed at bringing together and working across various institutional and user perspectives to act on a...
-
Adaptive management is an approach for simultaneously managing and learning about natural resources, by acknowledging uncertainty and seeking to reduce it through the process of management itself. Adaptive decision making can be applied to pressing issues in conservation biology such as species reintroduction, disease and invasive species control, and habitat restoration, as well as to management of natural resources in general. After briefly outlining a framework and process for adaptive...
-
Development actors facing pressure to provide more rigorous assessments of their impact on policy and practice need new methods to deliver them. There is now a broad consensus that the traditional counterfactual analysis leading to the assessment of the net effect of an intervention is incapable of capturing the complexity of factors at play in any particular policy change. We suggest that evaluations focus instead on establishing whether a clearly-defined process of change has taken place,...
-
Albert O. Hirschman's principle of the Hiding Hand stands stronger and more celebrated today than ever. The principle states that ignorance is good in planning,
-
The aim of participatory development (PD) in the context of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development (ICT4D) is to empower underprivileged communities and disadvantaged segments of the stakeholders. The literature on ICT4D is replete with empirical evidence showing that ICT interventions often fail since they are often externally initiated, with very limited involvement from the affected (Heeks, 2002). Clearly, the principles and concepts of PD are relevant to...
-
Payment by Results (PbR), where aid is disbursed conditional upon progress against a pre-agreed measure, is becoming increasingly important for various donors. There are great hopes that this innovative instrument will focus attention on ultimate outcomes and lead to greater aid effectiveness by passing the delivery risk on to recipients. However, there is very little related empirical evidence, and previous attempts to place it on a sure conceptual footing are rare and incomplete. This...
-
Calls to deepen levels of social accountability within social protection interventions need to be informed by the now extensive experience of promoting social accountability in developing countries. Drawing on a systematic review of over 90 social accountability interventions, including some involving social protection, this paper shows that politics and context are critical to shaping their success. We argue that the politics of social protection and of social accountability resonate...
-
How to achieve democratisation in the neo-patrimonial and agrarian environments that predominate in sub-Saharan Africa continues to present a challenge for both development theory and practice. Drawing on intensive fieldwork in Western Uganda, this paper argues that Charles Tilly’s ‘democratisation as process’ provides us with the framework required to explain the ways in which particular kinds of association can advance democratisation from below. Moving beyond the current focus on how...