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Inherent Tension (inherent + tension)
Selected AbstractsImproving the Evaluation of Rural Development Policy Pour une meilleure évaluation de la politique de développement rural Die Evaluation der Politik zur Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums verbessernEUROCHOICES, Issue 1 2010David Blandford Summary Improving the Evaluation of Rural Development Policy A previous EuroChoices (Vol. 7, No. 1) compared and contrasted approaches to rural development policy in the EU and US. This Special Issue focuses on the evaluation of these policies, drawing on a workshop held in June 2009 at OECD Conference Center in Paris. Evaluation is an activity that runs parallel with policymaking and is capable of contributing to effectiveness and efficiency at all stages. Evaluators, wherever they work and whatever aspect of rural development is their focus, face some common technical problems. These include multiple (and often ill-defined) policy objectives, the choice of appropriate indicators (especially the need to distinguish between outputs and outcomes), how to establish baseline values, where to draw boundaries in terms of impact and time, and the identification of additionality and causality. Ensuring that lessons learned from evaluation are actually applied is problematic. Experiences covered in this Issue include the use of macro and case-study approaches, and various schemes (investment in human and social capital, and agri-environment and forestry). There is an inherent tension between using a common approach across countries and regions in the interests of comparability and the flexibility needed to capture all the relevant factors in the diverse situations in which rural development actions take place. Un précédent numéro de EuroChoices (Vol. 7, No. 1) comparait et mettait en regard les approches de l'Union européenne et des États-Unis en terme de politique de développement rural. Ce numéro spécial est consacréà l'évaluation de la politique et tire parti d'un atelier qui s'est tenu en juin 2009 au Centre de Conférences de l'OCDE à Paris. L'évaluation va de pair avec l'élaboration des politiques et peut contribuer à améliorer l'efficacité et l'efficience à tous les stades. Quels que soient leur affiliation et l'aspect du développement rural sur lequel ils se concentrent, les évaluateurs sont confrontés à certains problèmes techniques communs. Il s'agit des objectifs multiples (et souvent mal définis) de la politique, du choix d'indicateurs pertinents (en particulier la nécessité de faire la différence entre produit et résultat), de la manière d'établir des valeurs de référence, de la fixation de limites en terme d'incidence et de durée, et de l'identification des effets additifs et de la causalité. Il est difficile de s'assurer que les leçons tirées des évaluations sont effectivement retenues. Les expériences rapportées dans ce numéro comprennent des approches macroéconomiques ou fondées sur des études de cas, et couvrent différents programmes (investissements dans le capital social et humain, mesures agroenvironnementales, mesures forestières). Il existe une tension évidente entre l'utilisation d'une approche commune entre chaque pays et région, qui vise la comparabilité, et la flexibilité qui permet de prendre en compte l'ensemble des différents facteurs des situations variées dans lesquelles les mesures de développement rural sont appliquées. In einer vorherigen Ausgabe von EuroChoices (7:1) wurden Herangehensweisen an die Politik zur Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums in der EU und in den USA verglichen und diskutiert. Diese Sonderausgabe beschäftigt sich auf der Grundlage eines Workshops, der im Juni 2009 am OECD-Hauptsitz in Paris abgehalten wurde, mit Politikevaluation. Die Evaluation erfolgt parallel zur Politikgestaltung und kann in jeder Phase zur Steigerung von Wirksamkeit und Effizienz beitragen. Evaluatoren stehen einigen allgemeinen technischen Problemen gegenüber , ganz gleich, wo sie arbeiten und welchen Aspekten ländlicher Entwicklung sie sich widmen. Dazu zählen multiple (und oftmals unzureichend definierte) politische Ziele; die Auswahl von geeigneten Indikatoren (hier muss insbesondere zwischen Endprodukten und Ergebnissen unterschieden werden); die Frage, wie Ausgangswerte festzulegen und wo Grenzen im Hinblick auf Auswirkungen und den zeitlichen Rahmen zu setzen sind; sowie die Identifizierung von Additionalität und Kausalität. Es ist schwierig sicherzustellen, dass die Erkenntnisse aus der Evaluation auch umgesetzt werden. Die in dieser Ausgabe aufgegriffenen Erfahrungen berücksichtigen u.a. Makro- und Fallstudienansätze sowie verschiedene Maßnahmen (Investitionen in Human-/Sozialkapital sowie Agrarumwelt und Forstwirtschaft). Es besteht eine grundsätzliche Spannung zwischen einer im Interesse der Vergleichbarkeit einheitlichen länder- und regionenübergreifenden Herangehensweise und einer Flexibilität bei der Erfassung aller relevanten Faktoren in den verschiedenen Situationen, in denen ländliche Entwicklung stattfindet. [source] The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center siteAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2004Setha M. Low ABSTRACT An inherent tension exists between the meanings of the World Trade Center site created by dominant political and economic players and the significance of the space for those who actually live near it. Most of the writing on and analysis of the site have focused on the construction of a memorial space for an imagined national and global community of visitors who identify with its broader, state-produced meanings. But New Yorkers, in general, and downtown residents, in particular, bring to meaning making their own personal involvement in and knowledge of a located history that has social, political, and economic significance for their everyday lives. These meanings are as much a part of memorialization as the dominant players' political machinations and economic competition for space and status. Uncovering and eliciting these local memorial discourses is part of an ethnographic project that focuses on how personalized narratives of loss emerge and are manipulated within mass-mediated representations of the World Trade Center space. My contribution to understanding how the memorial process works has been to analyze what downtown residents say about their experience of September 11 and its aftermath, to record their feelings about a memorial, and, in so doing, to contest, expand, and modify the dominant media and governmental representations of September 11 and its memorialization. [source] Securing Safety in the Dutch Prison System: Pros and Cons of a SupermaxTHE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 4 2001Arjen Boin In the Western world, prison systems have to deal with the inherent tension between the need for safety and the aim to offer rehabilitative opportunities to prisoners. Conventional prison wisdom tells us that safety concerns tend to constrain opportunities for rehabilitation, while treatment programmes undermine safety. The small group of violent and escape-prone prisoners found in most prison systems poses a special problem. In theory, two policy options exist in order to deal with this problem: (i) disperse high-risk prisoners throughout the system, or (ii) concentrate high-risk prisoners in a so-called supermax prison. The Dutch prison system has long shifted between concentration and dispersion. In 1993, a supermax was built. This article explains why this shift occurred and how penal experts have dealt with issues of safety and treatment in this new supermax. [source] How Has Rural Tax Reform Affected Farmers and Local Governance in China?CHINA AND WORLD ECONOMY, Issue 3 2007Ran Tao H57; H71; P32 Abstract Using nationally representative data, the present paper examines the impact of China's ongoing rural tax reform on farmers. The difficulties in further local governance restructuring are also discussed. It is argued that the issues associated with rural taxation and local governance in China result from inherent tension between an increasingly liberalized economic system and a still centralized political system. Although rural tax reform has helped to reduce farmers' tax burdens in the short term, the establishment of an effective local governance regime requires coordinated reforms to downsize local bureaucracy by providing social security for laid-off cadres, to strengthen local accountability by granting higher local formal tax autonomy, and to promote meaningful participation by expanding local democracy. [source] When a Career Public Servant Sues the Agency He Loves: Claude Ferguson, the Forest Service, and Off-Road Vehicles in the Hoosier National ForestPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 6 2009Rosemary O'Leary Claude Ferguson, who in his own words "met the test of his lifetime," deviated from the norms of the U.S. Forest Service articulated by Herbert Kaufman in The Forest Ranger to became a government guerrilla against the organization he loved. This profile highlights several enduring themes: the inherent tensions between democracy and bureaucracy, the many masters of career bureaucrats, how organizational culture can both empower and constrain employees, and what it means to act responsibly, ethically, and with integrity as a public servant. In addition, this case demonstrates how the Forest Service has evolved since Kaufman's classic study. First, Kaufman depicted forest rangers as "valuing the organization more than they value[d] getting their own way," yet this profile underscores that public servants do not check their worldviews, mores, or ethics at the door. Second, Kaufman described the Forest Service's efforts to routinize the decisions of its employees in an effort to prevent allegiances to, or co-optation by, local populations. Yet in this Administrative Profile, Ferguson's hidden strategic tactics co-opted local stakeholders to enlist their support for a cause he deeply felt was right and just. [source] Cross-border ,Traffic': Stories of dangerous victims, pure whores and HIV/AIDS in the experiences of mainland female sex workers in Hong KongASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2005Kevin D. Ming Abstract:,In recent years, dramatically increasing numbers of mainland Chinese women have entered Hong Kong to engage in sexual labour. Public discourses on the threat of HIV/AIDS increasingly locate these women's bodies as sites of danger, colluding with pre-existing imaginations of mainland rural women as ignorant, desperate and deceptive in representing these women's penetration of Hong Kong's border as a primary means of infection of the Hong Kong body. Drawing on state, media and popular representations, and the narratives of female sex workers themselves, this paper examines the interwoven bio-medical, gendered, sexual and cross-border relationships that intersect in the experiences of mainland Chinese sex workers in Hong Kong. I argue that while images of disease and danger have been used to regulate these women's bodies, mainland female sex workers challenge these images by drawing on other popular stereotypes of mainland women as pure, feminine and traditional. Although images of the related but still ,other' figure of the mainland Chinese woman are powerful mechanisms for the regulation of these women's bodies, mainland female sex workers skilfully use inherent tensions in those images in resisting that control and in struggling to achieve their own personal and economic goals. [source] | |||||||||||||