Browsing by Subject "GOVERNANCE"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Open Access
Bargaining with the devil: States and intimate life
(Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2014-01-01) Hasso, FS
Since the 1980s, an explosion in state, international, and nongovernmental campaigns and programs propose to increase women's rights and protections in Arab countries. Women and women's rights activists often invite and appeal to male-dominated states to regulate, intervene, or change the rules in sexual and family life in order to address a range of problems and challenges, including lack of economic and other resources, political and citizenship exclusions, or intimate violence. What are the implications of relying on states as the main arbiters of rights and protections This is a longstanding feminist question whose answer hinges on underlying assumptions and theories about states and governance. Reliance on states as the primary sources of protection and support in intimate life has largely worked to rearticulate gendered, economic, and other inequitable power relations, bolster states, reconstitute state authority over intimate domains, and limit possibilities for gendered, sexual, and kin subjectivities and affinities. This dynamic may be metaphorically described as a "devil's bargain" since state-delivered rights and protections in these realms are so often attached to important restrictions and foreclosures. The article conceptually and theoretically expands on my research on family law projects in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2011). Its title is inspired by Deniz Kandiyoti's influential article, "Bargaining with Patriarchy" (Gender & Society, 1988), which I re-engage for analytical purposes. © 2014 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies.
Open Access
Integrating core concepts from the institutional analysis and development framework for the systematic analysis of policy designs: An illustration from the US National Organic Program regulation
(Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2016-01-01) Carter, DP; Weible, CM; Siddiki, SN; Basurto, X
© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. Public policies are structured by policy designs that communicate the key elements, linkages, and underlying logic through which policy objectives are to be realized. This paper operationalizes and integrates core concepts from the institutional analysis and development framework, including the institutional grammar, the rule typology, action situations, and levels of decision making, to provide a systematic approach for analyzing policy designs. The approach is illustrated through an application to the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program regulation, which outlines an unusual semi-voluntary regulatory program that relies on independent third-party organizations for Program administration. The conclusion identifies opportunities and a research agenda for the institutional analysis of policy designs.
Open Access
“Lies build trust”: Social capital, masculinity, and community-based resource management in a Mexican fishery
(World Development, 2019-11-01) Siegelman, B; Haenn, N; Basurto, X
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd This paper relates how fishermen in San Evaristo on Mexico's Baja peninsula employ fabrications to strengthen bonds of trust and navigate the complexities of common pool resource extraction. We argue this trickery complicates notions of social capital in community-based natural resource management, which emphasize communitarianism in the form of trust. Trust, defined as a mutual dependability often rooted in honesty, reliable information, or shared expectations, has long been recognized as essential to common pool resource management. Despite this, research that takes a critical approach to social capital places attention on the activities that foster social networks and their norms by arguing that social capital is a process. A critical approach illuminates San Evaristeño practices of lying and joking across social settings and contextualizes these practices within cultural values of harmony. As San Evaristeños assert somewhat paradoxically, for them “lies build trust.” Importantly, a critical approach to this case study forces consideration of gender, an overlooked topic in social capital research. San Evaristeña women are excluded from the verbal jousting through which men maintain ties supporting their primacy in fishery management. Both men's joke-telling and San Evaristeños’ aversion to conflict have implications for conservation outcomes. As a result, we use these findings to help explain local resistance to outsiders and external management strategies including land trusts, fishing cooperatives, and marine protected areas.
Open Access
Local Institutional Responses to Global Market Pressures: The Sea Cucumber Trade in Yucatán, Mexico
(World Development, 2018-02-01) Bennett, A; Basurto, X
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd The expansion of global seafood trade creates opportunities as well as risks for small-scale fisheries (SSFs) livelihoods. Markets provide economic opportunity, but without effective governance, high demand can drive resource degradation. In the context of small-scale sea cucumber fisheries in Yucatán, Mexico, this study documents local governance responses to new markets and identifies factors driving those responses. We conducted a comparative case study of two SSF communities, collecting participant observation and interview data during 16 months of fieldwork. Our study found that local rules-in-use did not match government regulations and that the emergence of local rules was shaped by relations of production in each study site. Specifically, patron–client relationships promoted an open access regime that expanded local fishing fleets while fishing cooperatives attempted to restrict access to local fishing grounds through collective action and multi-level linkages with government. We propose that the different material incentives arising from the way that patron–client relationships and cooperatives organize labor, capital, and profits help explain these divergent governance responses. We hypothesize that this finding is generalizable beyond the study context, especially given that patron–client relationships and cooperatives are common throughout the world's SSFs. This finding builds on previous research that indicates local institutions can mediate the effects of market pressures, showing that the emergence of local rules depends on how resource users are organized not just in relation to resource governance but vis-à-vis the markets themselves. Therefore, effective policies for SSFs facing market pressures require a greater emphasis on regulating local-level trade and governing the commercial aspects of fishing livelihoods. These lessons are relevant to the estimated 540 million individuals whose livelihoods SSFs support who may increasingly engage in the global seafood trade.
Open Access
Nonstate Actors and Compliance with International Agreements: An Empirical Analysis of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention
(International Organization, 2018) Jensen, NM; Malesky, EJ
© 2017 The IO Foundation. International relations scholarship has made great progress on the study of compliance with international agreements. While persuasive, most of this work has focused on states' de jure compliance decisions, largely excluding the de facto behavior of nonstate actors whose actions the agreement hopes to constrain. Of particular interest has been whether the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC) might reduce the propensity of multinational corporations (MNCs) to bribe officials in host countries through its mechanisms of extraterritoriality and extensive peer review. Unfortunately, research is hampered by reporting bias. Since the convention raises the probability of investors' punishment for bribery in their home countries, it reduces both the incentives for bribery and willingness to admit to the activity. This generates uncertainty over which of these incentives drives any correlation between signing the convention and reductions in reported bribery. We address this problem by employing a specialized survey experiment that shields respondents and reduces reporting bias. We find that after the onset of Phase 3 in 2010, when the risk of noncompliance increased for firms subject to the OECD-ABC, those MNCs reduced their actual bribery relative to their nonsignatory competitors.