Successful delivery of public service depends on how the relationships are forged by the actors (organizations) involved in service provision in a given socioeconomic and political context. By applying Agency Theory to the accountability features of service transaction and Activity Theory as a tool to define relationships, I have demonstrated that the public sector (District Governments) exhibits a more liberal attitude towards relationships with community based organizations (Water Users' Committees) in the provision of rural drinking water, while being more formal in relationships with the technical service providers (NGOs). The resolution of the dilemma regarding whether to choose trust-based or more formal contractual relationships with community and service providers in service provision, depends on how effectively the public sector builds their capacity to monitor, supervise and enforce the terms of the service provision relationship. The study of the application of accountability features in the service delivery transaction helps us to understand how a government organization structures its relationships with community organizations and with others, by using either a social or a market approach. The research also reveals that it is difficult to assign accountability in the collaborative network type of service provision, particularly for the provision of public goods and services, which demands a greater level of formal accountability to legitimize the functioning of the government.

UK regeneration exists amid a ‘burgeoning’ literature which states the ongoing desire to improve the outcomes of urban policy. However, concern about the symbolic nature of regeneration policy and its re-production in the form of ‘linguistic debates’, can latterly be witnessed in the context of more ‘discursive’ concerns rooted in shifting patterns of governance. Drawing empirically from research with fifty UK regeneration professionals and Laclau & Mouffe’s (2001) theory of socialist hegemony to explore reasons for the persistence of such ambiguity, three rival discourses emerge in the form of ‘Building City Regions’; ‘Narrowing the Gap’; and ‘Building Community Capacity’. What a critical analysis suggests is that by ‘deconstructing’ rather than ‘deciphering’ the goals of regeneration policy, a temporary ‘discursive’ form of regeneration emerges in which the contradictions and tensions within the discourse are represented in the form of ‘nodal points and floating signifiers’ and articulated through the notion of lack. This can be linked to the bureaucratic struggles which emerge as a result of a ‘new right’ hegemony, which commodifies all aspects of work and social life to bring market-informed ways of seeing and doing to every aspect of regeneration practice. Actors seek to manage such complexity through emotional investment.

This thesis presents a development of the concept of post-liberalism to analyse processes of statebuilding in Central Asia by the example of Kyrgyzstan from a decolonial angle. Recent debates in peace, conflict and intervention studies have conceived of ‘post-liberal’ and ‘hybrid forms of peace’ as modalities of resistance against and re-negotiation of a globally dominant ‘liberal peace’ template promoted by Western governments and the international intervention architecture. This research proposes to critically reconsider these debates by introducing ‘imaginaries of statebuilding’ – understood as mental constructs structuring people’s thoughts and actions – through which the study captures the complex and contradictory processes of reception, adoption and resistance against globally dominant notions of capitalist economic development, democracy, and peacebuilding and security practices. Practices of peacebuilding and community security – and their embeddedness in the post-liberal trajectory of statebuilding – are analysed by the example of local crime prevention centres, territorial youth councils, and a national level NGO network working on police reform and participatory provision of public security. The research demonstrates how exclusion, structural violence and precarity are reproduced and feed into patterns of post-conflict governmentality which exist in sync with seemingly emancipatory and contextually meaningful ways of coexistence and steps towards institutional reform.

The aim of EU Regional Policy is to intervene effectively in regions that “lag behind” in economic terms and to finance development programmes through the allocation of Structural Funds which operate in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity, additionality and partnership. This policy should allow regions to converge with EU averages in terms of income and employment. Italy and Spain provide very good examples within the EU as a whole, of significant economic disparities between regions that still appear to be present. We argue and provide substantial evidence of the fact that the persistence of such disparities is mainly due to inefficient administrative and institutional capacity at the regional level. Although some regions have brought themselves towards the average, in Italy and Spain, there is evidence that certain administrative, institutional and implementation problems have tended to appear, hampering the opportunities of regions to converge in the required way. Because of this, regional economic convergence and thereby socio-economic cohesion are still beyond reach. Two decades after the 1988 Reform of the Structural Funds, EU Regional Policy has only partially succeeded in reducing regional economic divergence within Italy and Spain, where regional economic inequalities still exist. Although we demonstrate that some regions have been able to move forward in the requisite way, it is questionable whether all of the support for these regions can actually be eliminated completely in the near future with the challenges that the EU faces, particularly in relation to the latest round of Enlargement.

This study is about public sector performance measurement in the context of developing economies; more specifically, the study focuses on local government performance measurement systems as applied in Indonesia. Although there have been numerous research studies examining performance measurement, most empirical work has been undertaken in the context of developed economies. Performance measurement research in the milieu of developing economies is still very much underdeveloped and the progress is considerably much slower than those in developed economies. This study adopts an interpretive approach and applied case study research method in order, to develop an understanding of a) what drives the new performance measurement b) how it is designed and c) how it is used? The findings show that performance measurement in the context of developing economies tends to be driven by different reasons than compared to those developed economies. The findings also indicated developing economies encounter various challenges in designing and implementing performance measurement which eventually affected the use and usefulness of performance measurement. This study thus contributes to improve our understanding of the design, implementation and use of performance measurement in the context of developing economies. More specifically, it improves our understanding regarding (i) internal and external driving forces for performance measurement initiatives in the developing economies, (ii) the effectiveness of design, implementation and use, (iii) technical, organisational and institutional factors influencing design, implementation and use and the complex interactive effects of these three categories of factors, (iv) the interdependence between design, implementation and use, and (v) the complex conflicts of interest among different stakeholders in this context.

Thesis. 1975. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / Bibliography: leaves 353-361. / Ph.D.

The New Labour government placed communities at the heart of urban regeneration policy. Area deprivation and social exclusion were to be addressed through rebuilding community in deprived areas, a process involving tenure diversification and the building of bridging social capital to support community empowerment, increased aspirations and wide-spread mutually supportive relationships. There is, however, little empirical evidence that tenure mix is an effective means for achieving the social goals of neighbourhood renewal. This thesis contributes to the mixed tenure debate by exploring the impact of regeneration on community. The research was guided by theories of social structure and cultural systems and argues that the regeneration process may give rise to social divisions and conflict between community groups, inhibiting culture change. The research was conducted on a social housing estate located within the West Midlands region. The findings represent the views of local residents and community workers and suggest that greater recognition needs to be given to the role intimate social ties play in community sustainability, that the provision of supportive services must be balanced with individual self-efficacy, and that regeneration policy should focus less on what new homeowners can bring to a community and more on what community can already offer.

The aim of this project is to find whether the national system of performance measurement in the Russian public sector is affected by deliberate data manipulation. Using mixed methods I demonstrate that locally generated data are more likely to be manipulated than data reported by external agencies. Instead of improving managerial decisions, performance indicators have become a tool of symbolic bureaucratic accountability not linked to real managerial activities. 25 current and former civil servants from three regional governments in Russia were interviewed (including three ministers of economic development); quantitative data were obtained from a publicly available performance dataset covering the period of 2007-2011 (with data for a unified list of over 300 indicators from 83 regional governments). Two strategies of data manipulation were identified: a “prudent bureaucrat” strategy consisted in minimizing long-term risks by reporting “more-normal-than-real” figures; a more ambitions “reckless bureaucrat” strategy aimed at inflating figures to maximise credit. Systematic application of these two strategies has produced a detectable bias in the overall performance data with “prudent bureaucrat” strategy dominating. Performance reporting creates a “bureaucratic panopticon” and resulting behaviour may be understood using Michel Foucault’s notion of normalisation.

The European Union (EU) has set itself ambitious objectives in order to transform its neighbourhood. It aims to induce domestic reforms in order to promote democracy, good governance and prosperity. Theoretical-oriented empirical analyses on the impact of the EU’s attempts to trigger institutional, regulatory and normative changes in domestic policies remain scarce. It is necessary to increase our understanding of the EU’s potential, limitations, and the conditions under which it may have an impact. This thesis contributes to closing this empirical and theoretical gap by examining the impact of the EU on Georgia, a country included in the Eastern dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This evaluation is derived from original empirical research of four different modes of EU governance in the context of the ENP: Governance by conditionality (access to the single market regarding economic issues); intergovernmental governance (cooperation in foreign and security policies); external governance (energy security); and cooperative governance (Security Sector Reform). This thesis suggests that we can explain the responses to EU policies in neighbouring countries if we use a synthetic ideational/rationalist analytical framework which takes into account additional variables in the EU–neighbour relations in the domestic and regional context. The findings indicate that the impact of the EU is slowly increasing, even in areas dominated by geopolitics such as energy security. Although the impact has been uneven at policy level, the EU has become an important external influence in Georgia. The thesis argues that, although important, EU incentives and geopolitical pressures are less decisive than the existing literature would predict. In contrast, the role of ideas in bilateral relations has had a crucial role across the case studies, showing in some instances the limitations of the alluring power of the EU as a ‘normative power’. Thus, EU impact is based on the existence of a coherent institutional framework of relations; embedded in social, political and economic links that are locked into favourable path-dependence processes and where ideational convergence is present.

Thesis (MPA.) --University of Limpopo, 2006 / Refer to document