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Political Economy of Reform and Regulation in the Electricity Sector of Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textAs part of electricity sector reforms, Sub-Saharan African countries have established independent regulatory agencies to signal legal and political commitment to end selfregulation and provision of service by the state. The reforms aimed to encourage private investments, improve efficiency, and extend the service to the millions who lacked the service. However, after nearly two and half decades of reforms, these expectations have not been met and the electricity sectors of these countries remain undeveloped. There are anecdotes that these outcomes are due to poor design, non-credible, unpredictable regulations, and political interference. This paper studies the performance of the reforms in the context of government political ideology. We use a dynamic panel estimator and data from 45 Sub-Saharan African countries to investigate ideological differences in the effect of independent sector regulation on access to electricity and installed capacity. We find negative impact from independent regulation on installed capacity in countries with leftwing governments while we find a positive effect in countries with right-wing governments. Moreover, we find negative impact on electricity access in countries with left-wing governments. These results have interesting policy implications for attracting private sector participation to increase generation capacity and access rates especially in countries with left-wing governments
How is Anti-corruption Practiced in Multinational Companies?
Full text linkIn this thesis I analyze anti-corruption in multinational companies by examining how it is practiced
by compliance officers. In light of a growing number of studies conceptualizing anti-corruption as a
macro-structural norm or a micro-exchange between individuals, and scholarly calls for more
attention to anti-corruption in the private sector, I theorize anti-corruption as situated and recursive
activity. As a situated practice, anti-corruption happens within the socio-material context of
multinational companies in global governance and globalization. As a recursive activity, anticorruption
is analyzed as the discursive and non-discursive action of compliance officers. In this
sense, the broad question I ask in this study is how is anti-corruption practiced by compliance officers
in multinational companies? To answer this question, I employ a praxiography-inspired methodology
which allows for the reconstruction of the practice of anti-corruption. Fieldwork took place in
Denmark and China to address both the design and implementation of anti-corruption corporate
programs, and consisted of semi-structured interviews with anti-corruption and compliance experts,
participant observation in relevant events, and document analysis of public and private documents
and other written material
A situated inquiry into ‘healing architecture’
No full textThis dissertation is about the spatial organization of contemporary psychiatric practice, about
‘healing architecture’ in psychiatry. I take ‘healing architecture’ to represent a particular effort to
spatially and materially organize contemporary psychiatric practice. The problem motivating my
inquiry is not about how architecture and space mediate health outcomes and promote patient
recovery, what ‘healing architecture’ is or should be, but rather, what it actually does. How
architecture in health care settings contributes to the ordering of space and interaction, enabling
certain practices, while constraining others is, I argue, largely eclipsed in the social science
literature and thus a key point of convergence throughout the dissertation. The inquiry is
brought to bear on a purpose-built psychiatric hospital in Slagelse, Denmark, opened in late
2015. With ‘healing architecture’ and the idea of recovery literally built into the bricks and
mortar of the building, the new hospital in Slagelse is considered the vanguard of contemporary
hospital design, representing the future of psychiatric inpatient facilities. As such, the Slagelse
Hospital can be understood as a paradigmatic case for considering the spatial organization of
contemporary psychiatric practice. When the subtitle of this dissertation is a situated inquiry into
‘healing architecture’ it is because I consider the novel spatial circumstances of the Slagelse site
based on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and by empirically investigating how the relationships
between space and interaction are ordered in and through psychiatric practice
