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Governance Reform Under Real-World Conditions : Citizens, Stakeholders, and VoiceThis book is a contribution to efforts to improve governance systems around the world, particularly in developing countries. It offers a range of innovative approaches and techniques for dealing with the most important nontechnical challenges that prevent many of those efforts from being successful or sustainable. By so doing, the book sets out the groundwork for governance reform initiatives. Its overarching argument is that the development community is not lacking the tools needed for technical solutions to governance challenges. The toolbox is overflowing; best practice manuals in various areas of interest tumble out of seminars and workshops. However, difficulties arise when attempts are made to apply what are often excellent technical solutions under real-world conditions. Human beings, acting either alone or in groups small and large, are not as amenable as are pure numbers. And they cannot be put aside. In other words, in the real world, reforms will not succeed, and they will certainly not be sustained, without the correct alignment of citizens, stakeholders, and voice.
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Political Alternation as a Restraint on Investing in Influence : Evidence from the Post-Communist TransitionThe authors develop and implement a method for measuring the frequency of changes in power among distinct leaders and ideologically distinct parties that is comparable across political systems. The authors find that more frequent alternation in power is associated with the emergence of better governance in post communist countries. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that firms seek durable protection from the state, which implies that expected political alternation is relevant to the decision whether to invest in influence with the governing party or, alternatively, to demand institutions that apply predictable rules, with equality of treatment, regardless of the party in power.
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Development Strategies : Integrating Governance and GrowthA frontier challenge for development strategy is to move beyond prescribing optimal economic policies, and instead -- taking a broad view of the interactions between economic, political and social constraints and dynamics -- to identify entry points capable of breaking a low-growth logjam, and initiating a virtuous spiral of cumulative change. The paper lays out four distinctive sequences via which the different dimensions might interact and evolve over time, and provides country-specific illustrations of each. Each sequence is defined by the principal focus of its initial step: 1) State capacity building provides a platform for accelerated growth via improved public sector performance and enhanced credibility for investors; strengthened political institutions and civil society come onto the agenda only over the longer term; 2) Transformational governance has as its entry point the reshaping of a country's political institutions. Accelerated growth could follow, insofar as institutional changes enhance accountability, and reduce the potential for arbitrary discretionary action -- and thereby shift expectations in a positive direction; 3) For 'just enough governance', the initial focus is on growth itself, with the aim of addressing specific capacity and institutional constraints as and when they become binding -- not seeking to anticipate and address in advance all possible institutional constraints; 4) Bottom-up development engages civil society as an entry point for seeking stronger state capacity, lower corruption, better public services, improvements in political institutions more broadly -- and a subsequent unlocking of constraints on growth. The sequences should not be viewed as a technocratic toolkit from which a putative reformer is free to choose. Recognizing that choice is constrained by history, the paper concludes by suggesting an approach for exploring what might the scope for identifying practical ways forward in specific country settings.