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Institute for Development Policy and Management
Part of the School of Environment and Development (SED)

Management, Governance and International Development Cluster

Research

Overview

Members of the Management, Governance and International Development cluster have research interests in the following areas:

Research Projects

Current and recently completed research projects conducted by members of the cluster include:

Gender, Development and Restructuring: The Impact of Transition on Female Employees in the Russian Federation

The project is concerned with analysing the gendering effects and gendered implications of the introduction of market based reforms for female Russian professionals. Drawing on interview data and document analysis the project seeks to evaluate the extent to which female professionals have assisted and/or benefited from the transition process in Russia. This will involve exploring how Russian economic and social changes have utilised female skills in the workplace and examine how development and career planning has materialised. The opportunities and practicalities for a gender sensitive development employment policy will be evaluated. Analysis will be undertaken against socially constructed understandings of feminist ideology and activism in the Russian Federation. To date 30 life history qualitative interviews have been conducted with women from a range of organizations including: NGO's, education, public administration, law, accountancy, and manufacturing.

View/download research project proposal (MS Word, 31kB)

Political Commitment to Reform in Developing Country Governments: Study of Swaziland

Lack of political commitment has been seen as a principal reason for the failure of development programs, and is the pretext for calls for 'selectivity' in the allocation of donor aid. A new model of commitment is proposed, and applied to a case study of civil service reform in Swaziland. The failure of repeated reform attempts there is indeed due to a lack of commitment that has its roots in Swaziland's unusual political system, in which 'traditional' rulers have effective power. Prospects for reform therefore depend either on fundamental political change, or on engaging with those rulers' fear that reform represents a threat to their interests. Applying the model of commitment to the case study highlights the importance of a political analysis, and suggests constructive forms of engagement with uncommitted governments that go beyond the minimal involvement that the selectivity approach advocates. The model may represent a tool for predicting, and helping to generate, a government's commitment to a given policy proposal.

Political Commitment to Civil Service Reform in Swaziland (IDPM, Public Policy and Management Working Paper No.17, zipped Word format)

Also published in 2003 in World Development , 31: 1015-31.

Gender and Diversity in Formal Indian Organisations

This project, supported by the British Academy, explored four Indian organisations, from the private, public and NGO sectors, looking at national and organisational culture, and gender, caste and other sources of difference. Attitudes were found to vary among individuals, but more pertinently between sectors. In the private sector there was systemic stereotyping and discrimination against women, whereas in the public sector career problems for women stemmed from domestic and societal attitudes, rather than the organisation. In the two NGOs the empowerment of women was espoused. In relation to caste, cultural attitudes were complicated by reservation, the Indian system of affirmative action effective within the public sector. Within the private sector caste was regarded as irrelevant to appointment by merit. The NGO sector made a positive effort to be inclusive in appointments, and was more likely to appoint and promote on competence and experience than qualifications. The most significant difference highlighted, however, was prior socio-economic status, which interviewees thought was more important than either gender or caste.

More information on this project is available from Dr Elisabeth Wilson .

Organizational Cultures and Spaces for Empowerment? Interactions Between Poor People's Organizations and World Bank Poverty Programs

Organizations can be usefully viewed as communities of people with their own ways of doing things, their own rules and norms and their own languages, as Handy and other organization theorists have argued. Just as people "have" cultures, so do organizations; just as human culture affects human action, so does organizational culture affect organized action; and just as cultural difference affects patterns of communication among people, so too does organizational culture affect the nature and possibility of communication and understanding among organizations. The point is not trivial, nor merely academic, because most development intervention is conducted via organizations: government agencies, NGOs, people's organizations, the World Bank and so on. Understanding the culture of these organizations thus becomes critical for understanding: how they perceive poverty; what they do about this; and how well they are able to understand, and work with other organizations.

With this general claim in mind, this research addresses a particular problem. As part of a broadening poverty agenda, and part of its growing commitment to community driven development, the World Bank will engage increasingly with organizations of the poor. In particular, investment projects will engage more and more in the direct financing of these organizations. It is therefore important to ask what effects will this engagement have on those organizations. In particular, how will it affect the culture (understood as rules, practices and norms of behaviour) of these organizations? How will this cultural impact in turn affect the impacts of these organizations on the income and empowerment poverty of their members? Given that the instrumental reasons given for working with organizations of the poor is that such a strategy will be more effective in promoting empowerment (by facilitating voice and participation) and income enhancement (by enhancing targeting and relevance), such questions are important to ask. It cannot be assumed that in the very attempt to work more directly with such organizations, the World Bank will not, unintentionally, reduce their very capacity to empower and address poverty.

It is also important to ask in what way does the culture of the Bank (and in particular its processes of appraising and managing projects) influence these impacts on poor people's organizations. How does this culture (again understood as rules, practices and norms) affect the extent to which the Bank is able to anticipate, understand and (if appropriate) respond to the unanticipated consequences that its operations may have on the organizations of the poor? While critical accounts of Bank (and other) interventions have argued that its own culture and "way of knowing" has such deleterious impacts, there is in fact very little careful empirical assessment of this problem.

This research, therefore, will address the link between culture and poverty at three inter-linked levels:
a) How does the culture of organizations of the poor - and, where relevant, that of intermediary organizations working on behalf of the poor -- affect the extent to which they are able to address their members' poverty?
b) How does the culture of the Bank influence the effectiveness of its poverty reduction projects that are implemented via organizations of the poor? And
c) How does the cultural difference between organizations of the poor and the Bank affect the possibility of their engaging with each other in poverty alleviation programs?

See D. Lewis, A. Bebbington, S. Batterbury, A. Shah, E. Olson, M. S. Siddiqi and S. Duvall, 'Practice, power and meaning: frameworks for studying organisational culture in multi-agency rural development projects' International Development 15: 541-557, or follow this link to access the article (external link)

Transnational Non-governmental Aid Chains and Rural Development in the Andes

This research studied transnational nongovernment aid chains funded by the co-financing agencies of the Netherlands and traced their effects on rural development in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia. There were four principal research questions:

a) What have been the main changes in the livelihood strategies of the rural population in the areas in which the aid chains operate?
b) In as far as there have been visible changes in rural livelihoods: (i) to what extent are these changes the effects or the impacts of NGO interventions; (ii) what types of intervention have contributed to poverty reduction and rural development?
c) How far have the interventions of these aid chains responded to the principal and most urgent needs of the rural population as perceived by people themselves?
d) What have been the specific contributions of the Dutch cofinancing agencies, both individually and collectively? What specific value do they add to rural development, and what are the strong and weak points in their contributions? To what extent have the different actors in the aid chain facilitated the implementation of projects, and the likelihood that these will have effects and impacts among the rural population?

These questions were pursued through the conduct of seven case studies conducted in areas of intervention of Andean NGOs supported by the Dutch co-financing agencies.

Access the project's final report in PDF format (893KB)

Human Resource Management in Developing Country Governments: Studies of Mauritius, Morocco, Malaysia and Sri Lanka

Evans and Rauch (1999) have established a link between the way governments manage their staff and the overall prosperity of their countries. In another quarter, Huselid (1995) and others have established a link between the way private companies in the US and the UK manage their staff and their overall profitability. This continuing research project takes those findings as their starting point, and explores how in fact developing country governments do go about managing their staff, and the prospects for managing them better. Studies of Mauritius and Morocco are already complete, and studies of Malaysia and Sri Lanka (and possibly also Tanzania) should be complete by July 2004. They will lead to a final overview article on lessons of the study for governments, and for scholars interested in developing country government performance.

Provisional findings are that the Strategic Human Resource Management model, the focus of the US and UK research, is not widely used, and it is likely that a hybrid model that takes account of government capacity has greater potential to improve staff performance. However, unlike in the private sector, staff management in government is fundamentally affected by political factors, so HRM specialists who want to contribute to improving government performance need to become political analysts, in order to understand why things are the way they are, and what can be done to improve them.

Follow the links below to access IDPM Working Papers on this subject:

Limits to Strategic HRM: The Case of Mauritius (IDPM, MID Working Paper No.4, available in PDF and zipped Word format)

The Politics of HRM: Waiting for Godot in the Moroccan Civil Service (IDPM, MID Working Paper No.9, available in PDF and zipped Word format)

Capacity Building and the Internal Dynamics of Regulatory Institutions

CRC Working Paper No.49 (coming soon)

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