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Gacaca and DDR:The Disputable Record of State-Building in Rwanda
Get PDFState-building is currently considered to be an indispensable process in overcoming state fragility: a condition characterized by frequent armed conflicts as well as chronic poverty. In this process, both the capacity and the legitimacy of the state are supposed to be enhanced; such balanced development of capacity and legitimacy has also been demanded in security sector reform (SSR), which is regarded as being a crucial part of post-conflict state-building. To enhance legitimacy, the importance of democratic governance is stressed in both state-building and SSR in post-conflict countries. In reality, however, the balanced enhancement of capacity and legitimacy has rarely been realized. In particular, legitimacy enhancement tends to stagnate in countries in which one of multiple warring parties takes a strong grip on state power. This paper tries to understand why such unbalanced development of state-building and SSR has been observed in post-conflict countries, through a case study of Rwanda. Analyses of two policy initiatives in the security sector – Gacaca transitional justice and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) – indicate that although these programs achieved goals set by the government, their contribution to the normative objectives promoted by the international community was quite debatable. It can be understood that this is because the country has subordinated SSR to its state-building process. After the military victory of the former rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the ruling elite prioritized the establishment of political stability over the introduction of international norms such as democratic governance and the rule of law. SSR was implemented only to the extent that it contributed to, and did not threaten, Rwanda’s RPF-led state-building.research repor
Evidence from Spatial Correlation of Poverty and Income in Kenya
Get PDFUsing the district-level data, we found that even in a relatively poor country like Kenya, ethnic diversity is associated with better economic outcomes at local level. However, we found that income spillovers depend on ethnic similarity. This suggests the influence of ethnic bias through which ethnic diversity may undermine economic efficiency at the national-level, as many crosscountry regressions have pointed out. This result implies, for policy making, that the question of interregional transaction costs cannot be narrowly focused on problems of transportation infrastructure but it is also related with ethnic divisions in African context.research repor
What Makes the Bangladesh Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) So Effective?
Get PDFThe Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) is renowned for its superior effectiveness compared with other public organizations in Bangladesh. Using the management and organizational theory framework, this paper attempts to answer the following two related questions: (i) why is LGED so effective, and (ii) has there been complementarity between LGED’s own strengths and the capacity development support of its donors. LGED’s business domain has been conducive to its effectiveness and to the mobilization of resources which it has used tactically to improve its effectiveness. LGED’s main strengths have been in the organizational behavior elements, which were formed over time by the leadership and practices of the founding chief executive and his close associates, but LGED has also created a certain effective level of organizational structure. While weaknesses have persisted in procedures/rules of financial management, audit, quality assurance, etc, they have been balanced by the strengths in organizational behavior and structure, and further strengthened since the 1980s through capacity development support from donors. LGED is an interesting case because it has been successful without having fully adopted key recommendations of New Public Management on organizational management, such as transformation to agency, merit-based personnel management, and decompression of salary structure. In the final section of this paper, policy implications are presented for improving the performances of other public organizations in Bangladesh and for enhancing the performance of LGED. Keywords: capacity development, public administration, organizational analysis, rural development, Bangladeshresearch repor
Impact of Community Management on Forest Protection:Evidence from an Aid-Funded Project in Ethiopia
Get PDFThis study uses remote sensing data to quantitatively examine the impact of establishing participatory forest management associations in Ethiopia. The results indicate that where there is a forest association, forest area declines more in the year the association is established than it does in a forest area where there is no association. This suggests that villagers may engage in“last-minute” logging. However, one year after associations are established, forest area where there is an association increases substantially, probably due to the associations planting trees at boundary areas between forest and non-forest and monitoring illegal logging. On average, where there are forest associations, forest area increases by 1.5 percent in the first two years, while forest area where there is no association declines by 3.3 percent. Totaling this impact over two years yields a 4.8 percent positive net increase in the rate of change.research repor
Social Capital as an Instrument for Common Pool Resource Management:A Case Study of Irrigation Management in Sri Lanka
Get PDFThis paper investigates the effect of social capital between irrigation canal head-enders and tail-enders on their water allocation problem. Although social capital is considered to be an instrument for common pool resource management, a consensus has not been reached on its effect among heterogeneous players. In irrigation management, the water allocation problem between head-enders and tail-enders is one of these serious problems. Using unique natural and artefactual field experiment data as well as general household survey data collected by JICA, this study finds that social capital, especially trust toward their tail-enders, has a significantly positive effect on satisfaction with water usage among head-enders. Considering the fact that the incentive structure of irrigation water allocation for head-enders closely resembles that in the dictator and trust games, this finding also supports the validity of experimentally measured social capital. In addition, this study deals with the simultaneity bias between satisfaction level and experimentally measured social capital, and finds that OLS estimators are downward biased, which is consistent with the hypothesis that scarcity of resources enhances the level of social capital.research repor
Gender Perceptions in Southeast Asian Countries: Findings from JICA-RI Value Surveys
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Promoting Gender Parity Lessons from Yemen: A JICA Technical Cooperation Project in Basic Education
Get PDFDespite remarkable progress supported by international commitment to meeting the
MDGs, countries such as Yemen still face great challenges in achieving gender parity in
education and in reducing in-country disparities. Strengthening community participatory
school management is a key area which JICA has prioritized in its programs for reaching
marginalized children and for improving access to and quality of education. One instance of this
is a technical cooperation project in Yemen called Broadening Regional Initiative for
Developing Girls’ Education (BRIDGE) Phase 1 (2005-2008), which piloted a participatory
school management model supported by school grants with the objective of eliminating gender
disparity in basic education. How successfully has this approach been in such a traditional
society? Our analyses of the performance of the project’s pilot schools based on
analyses of data collected at three points in time – at the initial year and end year of the
project and two years after the project’s end – suggests the following: Interventions in
school management that strongly emphasize girls can be effective in rather quickly
improving gender parity regardless of the schools’ initial conditions. However, we also
observe that the post-project performance of the pilot schools in terms of gender parity
is mixed, even though budgets for school grants were allocated by the local government
to all pilot schools. We further observe that such variation in performance appears to be
significantly correlated to school leaders’ perceptions of gender equality, to community
participation, and to the number of female teachers employed. These findings point to
the importance of continuous long-term guidance to the schools and monitoring of those
which implement school improvement programs. Attention should be paid to key factors
that might influence school performance, such as those identified in this paper.conference pape
State Inaction in Resource Governance:Natural Resource Control and Bureaucratic Oversight in Thailand
Get PDFThis paper argues that the continuing failure of environmental governance by the state lies not only in inappropriate actions taken by the responsible agencies, but also in the way bureaucratic structures have evolved to limit their policy choices. Whether effective or not, the state continues to be dominant in determining the use (and non-use) of natural resources in many parts of the world. Based on a detail case study of Thailand, the paper draws two major conclusions: First, inter-departmental conflict has historical roots that have shaped the present policy environment. New mandates and responsibilities are continuously added on top of the policy space. Because the Thai government established vested interests in the field of production in its formative period in order to expand commercial activities and generate revenue, a more recent mandates to conserve resources were left with little room. The late-coming departments are often pushed into performing mandates that limit them to the area of research and planning, often in isolation with the authority to enforce regulations. This asymmetric division of labor induced not only policy inaction among the departments who dared not step into the territories of other departments, but also provided a safe haven for production-oriented departments. Second, bureaucratic competition is often controlled by pre-existing veto players—i.e., those who now belong (and originally belonged) to the production sector and developed strong vested interests in the status quo. The way bureaucratic division of labor occurs gives us hints on why innovative institutions perform poorly. Environmental projects that ultimately aim to regulate production must identify the key veto players and incorporate them strategically from the outset if they are to advance their objectives.research repor