Taming the menace of human trafficking

Simbine, Antonia T.; Attoh, Franca; Oladeji, Abubakar

doi:10.4324/9781315857718-6

Cited by 2 publications

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Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-building and Development in Africa

Hickey,

Pruce

2023

Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-Building and Development in Africa

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The role of bureaucratic ‘pockets of effectiveness’ (PoEs) in delivering development is generating renewed interest within development studies and development policy. In summarizing the state-of-the art in the field, this chapter shows that existing research on PoEs recognizes that politics plays a leading role in shaping the emergence and sustainability of high-performing state agencies, alongside the importance of organizational-level factors. However, the field lacks a clear sense of the particular forms of politics that shape PoE performance, partly because of a tendency to see PoEs as ‘islands’ that are divorced from their political contexts, which are in turn often theorized as being uniformly ‘neopatrimonial’ in nature. This chapter proposes an alternative approach to conceptualizing PoEs not as aberrations from the norm but as being firmly embedded within their historically-shaped political and transnational contexts, and the incentives and ideas that shape elite political behaviour therein. From this perspective, PoEs reflect the logics of patronage as well as merit-based civil-service systems, the elitism introduced into African bureaucracies by colonial rule, and the policy and lending priorities of international development agencies. PoEs thus emerge as interesting objects of enquiry in their own right but also as fascinating windows onto how the competing logics of regime survival, state-building, and democratization are playing out in Africa, within a shifting transnational context, and the implications that this has for both political and economic development.

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Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-building and Development in Africa

Hickey,

Pruce

2023

Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-Building and Development in Africa

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The Politics of Governing Oil Effectively: A Comparative Study of Two New Oil-Rich States in Africa

Hickey

Abdulai

Izama³

et al. 2015

SSRN Journal

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The challenges facing developing countries with new-found natural resource wealth are generally understood in terms of whether they have the institutions of 'good governance' required to avoid the resource curse. New insights from a political settlements perspective show how deeper forms of politics and power relations play a more significant role than such institutions, and help explain some counter-intuitive findings regarding how 'semi-authoritarian' Uganda seems to be governing oil somewhat more in line with its national interest as compared to 'democratic' Ghana. We find that bureaucratic 'pockets of effectiveness' play a critical role, with outcomes shaped by the nature of their embedded autonomy vis-à-vis different kinds of ruling coalition. Efforts to promote 'best-practice' governance reforms in such contexts might be misplaced, and could be replaced with a stronger focus on building specific forms of state capacity and a greater acceptance that 'developmental collusion' between political and bureaucratic actors may offer more appropriate or 'best-fit' solutions.

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Taming the menace of human trafficking

Cited by 2 publications

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Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-building and Development in Africa

Pockets of Effectiveness and the Politics of State-building and Development in Africa

The Politics of Governing Oil Effectively: A Comparative Study of Two New Oil-Rich States in Africa

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