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Party Politics and Economic Reform in Africa's Democracies
Argues that the interaction of formal institutions and the quality of democracy explain patterns of private sector development across Africa.
Property and Political Order in Africa
In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions - institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land - shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and "nationalization" of political competition.
Manufacturing Possibilities
Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests, and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies. Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on c...
Where There is No Government
It is safe to say that a sizeable majority of the world's population would agree with the proposition that that property rights are important for political and social stability as well as economic growth. But what happens when the state fails to enforce such rights? Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, this is in fact an endemic problem. In Where There is No Government, Sandra Joireman explains how weak state enforcement regimes have allowed private institutions in sub-Saharan Africa to define and enforce property rights. After delineating the types of actors who step in when the state is absent--traditional tribal leaders, entrepreneurial bureaucrats, NGOs, and violent groups--she argues that the...
Peri-urban Water and Sanitation Services
More than 2.6 billion people in the developing world lack access to safe water and sanitation service. The Millennium Development Goal’s (MDG) target is to halve the number of people without access to a sustainable source of water supply and connection to a sewer network by 2015. That target is unlikely to be met. If there is anything that can be learnt from European experience it is that institutional reform occurs incrementally when politically enfranchised urban populations perceive a threat to their material well-being due to contamination of water sources.
Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities
The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a tr...
What a City Is For
Portland, Oregon, is one of the most beautiful, livable cities in the United States. It has walkable neighborhoods, bike lanes, low-density housing, public transportation, and significant green space -- not to mention craft-beer bars and locavore food trucks. But liberal Portland is also the whitest city in the country. This is not circumstance; the city has a long history of officially sanctioned racialized displacement that continues today. Over the last two and half decades, Albina -- the one major Black neighborhood in Portland -- has been systematically uprooted by market-driven gentrification and city-renewal policies. African Americans in Portland were first pushed into Albina and the...
Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics
Why are some communities able to come together to improve their collective lot while others are not? Looking at variation in local government performance in decentralized West Africa, this book advances a novel answer: communities are better able to coordinate around basic service delivery when their formal jurisdictional boundaries overlap with informal social institutions, or norms. This book identifies the precolonial past as the driver of striking subnational variation in the present because these social institutions only encompass the many villages of the local state in areas that were once home to precolonial polities. The book develops and tests a theory of institutional congruence to document how the past shapes contemporary elite approaches to redistribution within the local state. Where precolonial kingdoms left behind collective identities and dense social networks, local elites find it easier to cooperate following decentralization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In This Together
In This Together explores how we can harness our social networks to make a real impact fighting the climate crisis. Against notions of the lone environmental crusader, Marianne E. Krasny shows us the power of "network climate action"—the idea that our own ordinary acts can influence and inspire those close to us. Through this spread of climate-conscious practices, our individual actions become collective ones that can eventually effect widespread change. Weaving examples of everyday climate-forward initiatives in with insights on behavioral and structural change, Krasny demonstrates how we can scale up the impact of our efforts through leveraging our community connections. Whether by inviting family, friends, or colleagues to a plant-rich meal or by becoming activists at climate nonprofits, we can forge the social norms and shared identities that can lead to change. With easy-to-follow dos and don'ts, In This Together shows us a practical and hopeful way forward into our shared future.
Greener Pastures
Uses the case of India's migrant shepards to critique the social science understanding of markets, states, and communities.
