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651. Does Citizenship Abate Class? Evidence and Reflections from Bangalore, India

Author:
Ebony Bertorelli, Patrick Heller, Siddharth Swaminathan, and Ashutosh Varshney
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
Drawing on data from a large household survey in Bangalore, this paper explores the quality of urban citizenship. Addressing theories that have tied the depth of democracy to the quality and effectiveness of citizenship, we develop an index of citizenship that includes various measures and then explore the extent to which citizenship determines the quality of services and infrastructure that households enjoy. Our findings show that citizenship and access to services in Bangalore are highly differentiated, that much of what drives these differences has to do with class, but we also find clear evidence that the urban poor are somewhat better in terms of the services they receive that they would be without citizenship. Citizenship, in other words, abates the effects of class.
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

652. When Courts Plan: The Greening of Delhi's Autorickshaws

Author:
Atul Pokharel
Publication Date:
08-2016
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
Implementing municipal-scale policies is challenging in megacities. Despite this, between 1986 and 2006, Delhi converted its entire public transportation network of nearly 100,000 vehicles to use Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) instead of diesel and petrol. The use of CNG is widely assumed to have been ordered by the Supreme Court of India. But this overlooks how autorickshaws, privately owned and making up three-fourths of these vehicles, came to use CNG even though the court did not order it. Using two new sources of data, I show that the conversion of autos was jointly led by the largest private manufacturer together with the city government. The court facilitated coordination between several other actors, allowed them to experiment, and monitored progress over two decades leading up to the auto conversion. After capping the total number of autos, it ultimately refrained from passing judgment on two consequential aspects of greening them: vehicle ownership and fuel type. As a result, auto owners were buffeted by decades of incremental policy experimentation. Eventually, these experiments reconfigured auto ownership as some sold their operating permits to become renters, while state institutions remained indifferent to this shadow conversion underfoot.
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

653. Cabal City: Regime Theory and Indian Urbanization

Author:
Patrick Heller
Publication Date:
07-2016
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
This paper explores the interaction of politics and business through the lens of the city. The power of business to influence politics in India would lead to a prediction that Indian cities are, in the classic sense of the term, growth machines. Yet we argue in this paper that fundamental problems of governance in India’s megacities have precluded the possibility of business coalitions exerting cohesive influence over investments policies in cities. The result has been the predominance of what we call cabals, that are expert at extracting rents from the city, but in the end fail to promote development in the sense of an institutionalized process of economic and social improvement in the city. Where there has been high growth, it has not been accompanied by the expansion of the cities’ infrastructure and overall coordination capacities. In the end, what is good for business and politicians had neither been good for capitalism in terms of dynamic accumulation nor for inclusion of middle and poorer social groups.
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

654. Flexible Governance and Perceived Fairness: Evidence from Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems in Nepal

Author:
Atul Pokharel
Publication Date:
07-2016
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
Abstract:
What is the relationship between flexible governance and fairness? I examine this question in a new longitudinal dataset of irrigation canals in Nepal that were celebrated as paradigmatic cases of successful local governance. The prevalent explanation is that users have avoided knotty collective action problems by committing to rules and mutually monitoring compliance. These rules are understood to have been iteratively crafted over decades so as to render cooperative behavior reasonable. Embedded in a local context that is assumed to be common knowledge for users but ultimately impenetrable to outsiders, it is critical that locals discursively devise the rules and uniformly enforce them. Revisiting these cases three decades later, I first illustrate a distinction between two aspects of flexible governance: flexible rules and flexible enforcement. The former refers to changing rules over time, the latter to variations in enforcement. I document the predicted flexibility of the rules in these cases. I then show that a significant number of successes are associated with flexible enforcement. Whether flexible enforcement helps or hinders sustained collective action appears to depend on how fair users perceive the rules to be. Thus, discretionary enforcement may be related to the possibilities and limits of local governance in achieving fair outcomes, and not just for merely solving collective action problems.
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

655. Local Democracy and Economic Growth

Author:
Carl Henrik Knutsen, John Gerring, and Svend-Erik Skaaning
Publication Date:
11-2016
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
Theoretical work on the institutional sources of economic growth regards decentralization and democracy in a positive light. Despite this, empirical work shows that neither fiscal decentralization nor national democracy is a robust predictor of per capita GDP growth. We argue that these theories have failed to bear fruit because they ignore the linchpin of decentralization and democracy, namely local democracy. Democracy at a local level enhances economic growth by enabling decentralized policy selection and incentivizing local politicians to select policies that benefit economic development, including the provision of local public goods. We test for the relationship using a novel measure of local democracy with global coverage and time series extending from 1900 to the present. We find robust evidence that local democracy nurtures growth. This relationship holds up when accounting for country- and year-fixed effects, when controlling for democracy at the national level, and when we treat our measure of local democracy as an endogenous regressor. Additional tests reveal that the relationship is clearer in contexts where our argument suggests that it should operate more strongly, namely (national- level) democracies and in periods and regions where local-level institutions have a more pronounced role in policy-making.
Topic:
International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

656. Space for Local Content Policies and Strategies

Author:
Columbia Centre on Sustainable Investment
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
This paper explores both the role that local content measures can play in advancing sustainable development, and the impact that trade and investment treaties concluded over the past 20 years have had and will continue to have on the ability of governments to employ those tools. Certain local content measures had been restricted under the WTO due to wide agreement by negotiating parties that their costs outweigh their benefits. But the WTO also left a number of local content measures in governments’ policy toolboxes. As is discussed in this paper, however, that is changing, with the range of permissible actions for many countries being significantly smaller than it was even a decade ago. This narrowed policy space, in turn, can limit the steps governments can take to make progress on the universally adopted Sustainable Development Goals.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

657. Employment from Mining and Agricultural Investments: How Much Myth, How Much Reality?

Author:
Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Olle Östensson, and Perrine Toledano
Publication Date:
07-2016
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
Employment creation is often seen as a key benefit of investment in natural resources. However, this benefit sometimes falls short: job estimates may be inflated, governmental policies may fail to maximize employment generation, and, in some cases, investments may lead to net livelihood losses. A more thorough examination of employment tied to mining and agricultural investments is thus useful for assessing whether and how employment from natural resource investments contributes to sustainable economic development—a particularly timely topic as countries consider how they will achieve the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015.
Topic:
Agriculture, International Affairs, and Economic Growth
Political Geography:
Global Focus

658. Guide to Land Contracts: Agricultural Projects

Author:
Columbia Centre on Sustainable Investment
Publication Date:
03-2016
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
Agricultural investment contracts can be complex, with complicated provisions that are difficult to understand. This Guide provides explanations for a range of common provisions, and includes a Glossary of legal and technical terms. It assists non-lawyers in better understanding agricultural investment contracts, such as those available on OpenLandContracts.org. The Guide was prepared by International Senior Lawyers Project staff and volunteers in collaboration with the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.
Topic:
Agriculture and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

659. The Use of Force Against the Islamic State

Author:
Tamás Lattmann and Veronika Bílková
Publication Date:
11-2016
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Institute of International Relations Prague
Abstract:
The Islamic State (IS) must not be recognized as a State. It is an illegitimate non-state actor engaged in serious violations of international law. The use of force against the IS does not have a uniform legal basis. Some of the related actions can be justified on the grounds of the consent of the territorial State (this is the case with the US in Iraq, and Russia in Syria). The legality of other actions against the IS (those of Turkey in Iraq, and of the US in Syria) remains doubtful. The IS is likely to be defeated in the upcoming months. The situation does not require a more active engagement by the Czech Republic beyond what it is already doing (provision of weapons, training of armed and police personnel, etc.).
Topic:
International Security and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

660. Lost Hopes: Where to Go after the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons?

Author:
Miroslav Tuma
Publication Date:
02-2016
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Institute of International Relations Prague
Abstract:
The 9th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was held from 27 April to 22 May 2015 at the UN Headquarters in New York, but it failed. The Czech Republic should engage in urging other countries to achieve progress in nuclear disarmament through a compromise approach known as “the building blocks”. In parallel, it should also actively support the process of emphasizing the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Also, the Czech Republic’s good relations with Israel should focus on the support for holding a Middle East conference on the creation of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, a project enjoying long-term EU support. It would also be desirable for the Czech Republic to continue with its strong support for the achievement of the NPT’s universality, the early entry of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty into force and the start of a substantive debate about the main points at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
Topic:
Nuclear Weapons and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus