Browsing by Subject "Bureaucracy"

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Open Access
Constrained Coordination: How Strategic Interests and Bureaucracy Shape Donor Coordination
(2019) Olayinka, Adebola I.
Scholars and practitioners recognize the importance of coordination in mitigating the costs of aid proliferation and improving the effectiveness of foreign aid. However, low levels of donor coordination persist. In this dissertation, I address this donor coordination puzzle. I offer a novel theory of coordination called Constrained Coordination, in which I posit that two key factors that play a crucial role in shaping coordination. First, I argue that donors strategic interests are a damper on coordination – the greater the strategic political, economic, and security interests of a donor government in a recipient country, the less coordination its aid agency will engage in. Second, I argue that aid agency autonomy is positively associated with coordination – the greater the level of autonomy – or freedom – that an aid agency has from its home government, the more that aid agency will coordinate. In order to test my Constrained Coordination theory, the dissertation uses mix-methods, and includes a quantitative analysis of hundreds of donor agencies coordination. I also leverage over one hundred extensive interviews with key stakeholders to present two qualitative case studies of donor coordination in Nigeria and Zambia. Finally, I use qualitative evidence to look at the coordination of South-South donors, a group of donors growing in importance. I find that a donor government’s strategic interests have a significant impact on whether its aid agency will coordinate within recipient countries. Similarly, when a recipient is strategic to a large number of countries, donors will not be well coordinated. Second, I find that aid agencies with greater levels of autonomy from their home governments coordinate more. And finally, I find that these effects amplify one another – a high autonomy donor working in a low priority country coordinates more than any other combination of strategic interests and autonomy.
Open Access
Detained Immigrants, Excludable Rights: The Strange Devolution of U.S. Immigration Authority, 1882-2012
(2012-04-23) Nofil, Brianna
“Detained Immigrants, Excludable Rights” analyzes how plenary power, as a form of discretionary authority, enabled U.S. immigration authorities to initiate, expand, and privatize a system of immigration detention over the past 130 years. While in theory plenary power privileges the executive branch, in practice, plenary power has devolved to privilege immigration bureaucrats, allowing the bureaucracy to occupy a uniquely autonomous role in U.S. government. This thesis looks specifically at how plenary power privileges bureaucratic decision-makers to become “immigration judges,” invoking sovereign authority with little recourse for immigrants and almost no judicial oversight. It also examines how plenary power faced, and continues to face, opposition from both the government and the public, and how this opposition has served as a crucial check on bureaucratic power. “Detained Immigrants, Excludable Rights” reveals that despite the many shifts in leadership, bureaucratic structure, and policy, the doctrine of plenary power both influenced and drove the history of U.S. immigration detention. The three chapters of this thesis each focus on a separate location and catalyzing event for immigration detention. Chapter One analyzes the early years of the immigration bureaucracy and the foundations of plenary power, looking first at the Chinese Exclusion cases, then at the various administrations of Ellis Island, to reveal how the late 19th century and early 20th century created foundations for the discretionary authority of immigration officers. Chapter Two examines the Mariel boatlift as a national refugee crisis that sparked the rebirth of detention. In a political moment when the United States desperately needed to assert its authority and control, the executive branch looked to plenary power to generate dramatic new immigration policies that would transform how the nation approached immigrants. Finally, Chapter Three assesses the dramatic expansion of immigration detention following Reagan’s War on Drugs and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I argue that while the language of security came to define immigration policy in the 1990’s and 2000’s, immigration detention became a tool to propel both political and corporate interests rather than the interests of public safety.
Open Access
Documenting Chile: Visualizing Identity and the National Body from Dictatorship to Post-Dictatorship
(2016) Suhey, Amanda Suhey
I study three contemporary Chilean works of visual culture that appropriate and re-assemble visual material, discourse, and atmosphere from the bureaucracy of the military state. I examine Diamela Eltit’s textual performance of legal discourse in Puño y letra (2005); Guillermo Núñez’s testimonial art Libertad Condicional (1979-1982) based on the documents pertaining to his imprisonment, parole and forced exile; and Pablo Larraín’s fictional film Post Mortem (2010) inspired by Salvador Allende’s autopsy report. I argue that they employ a framework that exposes both the functional and aesthetic modes of bureaucracy complicit in state terror that operate within the spectacular and the mundane. Furthermore, I trace bureaucracy’s origins from the founding of the nation to its current practices that enabled the societal conditions for dictatorship and continue to uphold dictatorial legacies into the present.
In my analysis, I engage theories from performance, legal and media studies to interpret how Eltit critiques the press coverage of human rights trials, Núñez informs institutionalized preservation of memory, and Larraín demonstrates the power of fiction in our documentary reconstruction of the past. I conclude by arguing that this examination of bureaucracy is imperative because state bureaucracy anchors vestiges of the dictatorship that persist into the present such as the dictatorship-era constitution and the newly revived preventative control of identity documentation law.