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Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study challenges existing literature which maintains that technology latecomers usually depend on imported technologies to develop emerging high-tech sectors. This paper argues that the domestic institutional environment in facilitating networking might be more important for developing academia-industry ( A- I) networks. The co-evolution of institutions and the knowledge transfer process in the Taiwanese Biopharmaceutical Innovation System ( TBPIS) is a case in point. Far from relying purely on foreign technologies, several important institutional and policy changes, which transform the institutional environment from prohibiting A- I intertwining into encouraging A- I collaborations, have enabled domestic research institutes to influence the acquisition, creation, and diffusion of knowledge in the innovation network. Nonetheless, the country continues to struggle in commercializing domestic scientific research to step into a knowledge-based economy. Therefore, this paper suggests that more productive strategies would be helpful to advance domestic academic research, sustain A- I networks, and strengthen the innovation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent spikes in commodity prices, the growing appetite for primary commodities among emerging economies, growing interest in biofuels and speculations over future returns to land and its products have led to a renewed interest in farmland in the global South. With highly publicized risks and polarized 'win-lose' narratives, so-called 'land grabbing' has become an important focus of transnational governance activity. In juxtaposition to those seeing large-scale land acquisitions as inherently risky or undesirable, some argue for the potential opportunities they engender-provided risks can be mitigated through improved governance. This paper explores this argument through a systematic analysis of the formal features of the multi-sited governance mechanisms in place to guide agricultural investment and govern its social and environmental effects. The intent is not to discount the importance of informal norms and practices or the so-called 'lived experience of governance,' nor the argument that such land acquisitions are inherently flawed irrespective of the 'discipline imposed on them.' Rather, the paper aims to explore the merits of the arguments advanced by the pro-investment camp, and to explore the extent to which the emerging global governance architecture is set up to deliver on the purported benefits of large-scale agricultural investment. Results suggest that serious weaknesses in the substantive scope, reach and/or implementation mechanisms in all of the reviewed governance mechanisms pose a serious risk to the likely effectiveness of the emerging governance architecture in minimizing risks and leveraging benefits. Addressing these weaknesses is an obvious first step for bolstering the credibility of those advocating that governance is the solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, interest has soared in the development potential of well-designed cash transfer programs. One particular application is the use of transfers by resource-rich countries (as recently initiated by Iran) to distribute rents across their populations. An emerging body of research suggests that the development impact of such programs tends to be positive and that, especially when received by poor individuals or households, they can unlock constraints on economic activities, allowing a further increase in income. This paper considers the use of biometric technology to underpin transfer programs and how new technology is opening up possibilities for effective transfer programs that, up to now, have only been a theoretical option in the institutional conditions that prevail in many developing countries. Once implemented, biometric identification systems can be used to support a wide range of other development initiatives including banking, voting, health care, and general identification systems. The paper reviews some of the programs using these technologies and how it is enabling poor countries to leapfrog rich ones in the area of identity, much as the cellphone revolution did in the area of communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficiencies of trust in many Latin American countries significantly impede efforts to attain sufficient levels of sustainable, long-term economic growth. This paper discusses the role of trust as seen through the eyes of small entrepreneurs in Latin America. Three tables are discussed that specifically portray the role of trust in society, how entrepreneurs use trust to sustain their enterprises and socioeconomic networks, and the impacts of low trust in economic development in Latin America. This paper confirms what many leading scholars have claimed over the past two decades, that a cultural legacy of fractious civil societies accompanied with disruptive and often-corrupt polities does matter when measuring human progress and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, the Ontario government passed the Places to Grow Act and the Greenbelt Act, both major changes in land use policy designed to preserve greenspaces and combat urban sprawl in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Canada's largest conurbation. This article examines the actors, actor beliefs, and inter-actor alliances in the southern Ontario land use policy subsystem from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). Specifically, this paper undertakes an empirical examination of the ACF's Belief Homophily Hypothesis, which holds that inter-actor alliances form on the basis of shared policy-relevant beliefs, creating advocacy coalitions. The analysis finds strong evidence of three advocacy coalitions in the policy subsystem-an agricultural coalition, an environmentalist coalition, and a developers' coalition-as predicted by the hypothesis. However, it also finds equally strong evidence of a cross-coalition coordination network of peak organizations, something not predicted by the Belief Homophily Hypothesis, and in need of explanation within the ACF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several theories compete to explain observed race- and ethnicity-based environmental injustice in society. This paper focuses on analyzing the extent to which firms' siting decisions based on community privilege can explain this outcome. A unique feature of this analysis is that we include analysis of both unwanted land uses (disamenity firms) and desired land uses (amenity firms). The environmental justice analysis of amenities other than green spaces is rare, but amenities are crucial components of urban areas to which environmental justice studies must attend. We use an agent-based model to explore community outcomes when environmental disamenities choose locations based on low community privilege, and compare this with scenarios in which disamenities only seek to minimize the cost of land. We also assess differences in environmental justice outcomes when amenities choose locations in areas with high community privilege. While disamenities' focus on locating in areas with low community privilege indeed affects environmental equity, the effect of amenity location is also important, and there are powerful interaction effects. The importance of privilege-based location is found in these simulations regardless of which social group-majority or minority-is assumed to be the privileged group. This study suggests a limitation of EJ policies and models that focus on the politics of disamenity siting without considering the politics of amenity siting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses change in oil and gas policies pushed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Administrative policy changes occurred not only because of election outcomes and the emergence of new governing coalitions but BLM's selective utilization of policy tools such as rulemaking, planning, environmental impact analyses, and the use of discretionary authority to increase or relax enforcement decisions. The data reveal that BLM put more emphasis on the use of discretionary authority to limit environmental inspections and to limit environmental reviews of proposed drilling projects under Bush while agency officials gave priority to adopting new planning procedures to allow greater stakeholder input under Obama as well as increasing the number of environmental inspections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of public attitudes toward fracking use and policies with an eye toward factors that help us account for differing levels of support. Using data from a national survey of American adults, we found that women and people residing in urban areas are slightly more inclined to oppose fracking and to favor more regulation in terms of drilling operations and company chemical disclosure requirements than men or people living in rural areas. Our key findings, however, are that opposition to fracking and support for current or increased levels of regulation are strongly related to Democratic Party identification and to pro-environmental policy attitudes. We conclude by suggesting that a tendency for people to view fracking as an environmental rather than an energy issue has potentially important implications for the implementation of locally based regulatory requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tremendous changes in technology, political and social frameworks, as well as the impacts of globalization, have put pressure on countries to become competitive. One strategy for creating an engine of economic growth is the creation of clusters. These clusters, be they naturally or artificially conceived, hold the promise of becoming the economic weapons of a country. Many studies have been done to understand the factors behind the successes and failures of clusters. One of the reasons behind the inconsistent success of existing cluster policy frameworks in managing cluster performance is the fact that clusters often are at different levels of development, and it will require different strategies to create, enhance, and sustain their competitive advantage. This paper aims to propose and demonstrate a more holistic framework designed to understand key cluster dynamics that drives cluster performance, which then will enable policy makers to work toward ensuring sustainable cluster development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Entrepreneurial” economic development strategies at the state level in the United States, which focus on nurturing home-grown, high-growth businesses, lack immediate payoffs for politically powerful constituencies, a condition that would seem likely to limit their appeal compared to the alternative “locational” strategy of attracting large investments from elsewhere. Nonetheless, many U.S. states have added programs with entrepreneurial attributes to their economic development portfolios in recent years. This paper explores how the political obstacles to such programs have been overcome. In a few cases, an institutional innovation in the policy-making process drew in new participants who provided ideas for and support to programs with entrepreneurial attributes. More commonly, the preferences of executive branch officials, especially governors, appear to have been critical to the enactment and implementation of such programs. This finding suggests that economic development policy making may be more technocratic than is commonly believed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology-based economic development programs have become a salient feature of the state policy landscape since the 1980s. While much research exists on the topic, little attention has been given to the processes of policy formation. State programs have moved towards high technology areas emphasized at the federal level over the past decades, and nanotechnology became one of the latest targets. This paper examines the eight-year process through which Pennsylvania adopted a “state-wide strategy,” culminating in the Pennsylvania Initiative for Nanotechnology. In this process, programs that responded to the interests of multiple agents came first, and a state policy was formulated after the fact. This pattern of “rationalized policy formation,” as opposed to rational policy formation, may be more common than suspected. Its strengths and weaknesses in this Pennsylvania case are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, those advocating for arts funding have shifted their arguments. When the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) was created in 1965, its supporters praised arts and culture for their uplifting qualities, and for their ability to counterbalance trends toward materialism and militarism. By the 1990s, arts advocates were far more likely to use instrumentalist arguments, showing that investment in arts and culture produce other desirable benefits, most notably economic development advances. This article reviews the changing discourse of arts advocacy in several ways: (1) by reviewing and coding Congressional debates on arts funding from 1965–2000, (2) reviewing arts coverage in the New York Times and selected arts periodicals during this same time period. Comparing this case to others in the literature on policy redefinition, the paper argues that cultural advocates have consciously reframed their arguments to broaden their appeal in the face new and more threatening opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The World Bank has always sold ideas, not just loans. Starting in 1996, then president James Wolfensohn rebranded the Bank by articulating a formal vision of a ' Knowledge Bank'-a provider of state-of-the-art expertise on development. After a number of internal changes and assessments, the Bank is acknowledging that it needs to be more humble, pluralistic, and practical. Why do some regard the Bank as a legitimate knowledge actor, whereas others contest that authority? We offer an analytical framework that can explain stakeholders' uneven recognition of the Bank's knowledge role. When stakeholders define knowledge as products, the Bank generally obtains recognition for the quality and quantity of the information it generates. This is the output dimension of legitimacy. On the other hand, when knowledge only counts as such to users who have been part of the process of creating it, the Bank finds itself with limited recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In academic studies of the interface between developing countries and large multinational oil corporations, scholars have noted that over time and through repeated interaction, the developing countries tend to negotiate better outcomes for themselves: they progress along a learning curve by incrementally improving their outcomes through bargaining and strategic interaction. This phenomenon can be demonstrated in a number of oil-rich developing countries. Nigeria's case, however, is more complex. During the two decades following its independence, the state successfully negotiated for more control over—made strides in the developing of the skills necessary to manage—its petroleum industry, as our model would predict. Then, in a puzzling late-1970s-to-mid-1980s change of course, the government abruptly gave back concessions, undermined local entrepreneurial endeavors, and repealed indigenization laws. This paper combines, in the analytic narrative tradition, the case study method with an extensive form game; it applies a dynamic bargaining model to Nigeria's historical experience, demonstrating that Nigeria improved its outcomes and ascended along the “bargaining learning curve,” only to reverse policy and “unlearn,” with serious consequences for the Nigerian population. Even so, the demonstration of both successful and improved outcomes in past negotiations give evidence that Nigeria could once again ascend its bargaining learning curve if the government were to re-commit to such a policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To help explain the role scientists play in policy change, concepts such as coproduction, boundary-work, and pollution and purity claims as they are used in science studies should be incorporated into policy theory. Moreover improved policy theory should specify the kinds of boundary-work that can occur and the kinds of values and beliefs that drive boundary-work, explaining how boundary-work leads to policy change. The cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky, and others can help specify conditions for coproduction and change in science, institutions, and policy when recast as a theory involving three critical institutional boundaries. This theory-development article uses this recast version of CT to help explain the most recent dramatic shift in federal land and wildlife management policy in the Pacific Northwest. The article illustrates how cultural combatants use boundary-work including pollution and purity claims to align themselves and the domain of authoritative science with scientists whose constructs of nature and policy prescriptions are functional for their preferred institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of environmental taxation policies had reached most European countries by the late 1990s. The pricing of activities considered harmful to the environment has given rise to the design of various economic instruments, such as environmental taxes, aimed at promoting environmental responsibility and at enabling the Kyoto Protocol targets to be met, and at the same time generating a marked increase in tax revenues. The aim of this article is to examine whether convergence in environmental taxation has taken place among 27 EU countries, doing so by analyzing time series and applying unit root tests. Our findings show there has been no such convergence, overall, despite the existence of groups of countries with common patterns of behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long-dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community-based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California-based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state- or industry-led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars debate whether states or markets drive economic policy in the context of internationalization. Unpacking the market-state dichotomy, liberal pluralists and institutionalists alike conduct sectoral analysis to examine economic policies and outcomes. They debate the relative importance of sectors versus factors and the impact of sectoral coalitions, structural characteristics, and institutional trajectories. Building on previous scholarship, this article argues that state imperatives, such as national security and technological advancement, are an important guide to understanding dominant patterns of economic policy, defined as state goals, government-business relations, and state methods. Beyond that, the organization of institutions and structural sectoral attributes influence the ways in which actual policy outcomes vary across sectors and time. Case studies of the liberalization and subsequent reregulation of foreign direct investment across subsectors of telecommunications in China substantiate this argument. Evidence from other industries further validates this explanatory model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological innovations are by no means Pareto-improving. I build on the argument that incumbent innovators can use political means to block rival innovations by emphasizing that the competitiveness of political system and some political institutions may diminish their ability to do so. I specify an institutional mechanism of agenda power, which provides newcomers with an improved ability to enter the game. The number of agenda power holders varies significantly among political systems, electoral systems, and administrative structures. With a sample of about 100 countries and across 20 years I show that politically competitive regimes, majoritarian electoral rules, and federal structures supply more holders of agenda power in comparison to their counterparts and, other things being equal, produce more innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has generated increasing interest in technology-intensive industries as a way to sustain national economic competitiveness. High-technology growth is often conceptualized as a 'high road' to prosperity, more amenable to private-public, industry-labor, and interfirm cooperation than tax, regulatory, or cost competitive strategies. While specialization in technology-intensive industries does deliver several benefits, this article uses Finland's successful transformation into a high-technology economy to highlight the significant economic and political risks associated with this strategy. Economically, movement into electronics exposed Finland to cost competition and disruptive technological innovations. Politically, high-technology competition weakened the solidaristic ties that characterized postwar capitalism and the coordinating capacities that underpinned economic growth. In short, high-technology growth exacerbated the problems it was supposed to solve. The article concludes by generalizing the argument to several non-Nordic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many governments have implemented environmental justice mandates requiring agencies to consider the implications of cleanup decisions for poor and/or minority populations. To the extent that this mandate alters decisions, it usually does so by considering the composition of a community in the present without adjusting for potential demographic changes that may occur over time. However, communities change and these changes are likely to affect how well an agency meets its environmental justice mandate over the long term. In this research, an agent-based model is introduced to simulate how alternative environmental remediation scenarios may affect environmental justice outcomes in a dynamic residential environment with two demographic classes with preferences for living in proximity to neighbors similar to themselves. Under these circumstances, there is unlikely to be one best strategy to achieve both environmental improvement and environmental equity, and a focus on valuable land is the least effective over the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanoscience and nanotechnology--involving the engineering of materials, devices, and systems at very small scales--have emerged as important priorities not only for science but also for economic development. In this article, we propose an analytical framework that considers the socioeconomic effects of nanotechnology in six key areas: institutional development, knowledge flows, and network efficiency; research and education capabilities; industrial and enterprise development; regional spread; cluster and network development; and product innovation. We apply this framework to assess the early impacts of the evolving domain of nanotechnology for development, with a focus on China and its transitioning economy, where nanotechnology is assuming an important role in breaking existing innovation system lock-ins and historical path dependencies. We suggest that the analytical framework adds value in assessing the developmental impacts of new technologies and could be used to probe such impacts in other countries and locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation intermediary organizations ( IIOs) may build bridges between the demand and supply of knowledge. The understanding concerning the scope and functions of these intermediaries in the case of the agricultural sector is scarce, particularly for developing countries. The aim of this article is to discuss the functions played by IIOs operating in the segment of small farmers in the agricultural sector in the context of a developing country. The analysis allows extracting policy implications having in mind small farmers with different economic conditions and levels of innovativeness. This article uses a case study methodology. The main sources of information are interviews with members of the board and staff of the Produce Foundation, responsible for managing public resources to promote innovation processes in the agriculture sector in a specific state, Chiapas, as well as with farmers, technological suppliers, and researchers in this state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-1960s through 1980, major policy changes were adopted as a result of federal and state public lands protection statutes. This article analyzes the impact these policy changes have had upon the economies of gateway communities, a subject of limited discussion in the scholarly literature. One conclusion is that gateway community economies have become less dependent on resources extraction. This analysis finds that several factors––beyond policy change––have influenced the shift away from resources extraction. Likewise, there is the question over what economic mainstays have stepped in to fill the resources extraction void? For many gateway communities, it appears that the answer has been recreational tourism. The implications of this economic shift within gateway communities are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science and technology policy initiatives in the early 1980s have focused in both the United States and Western Europe on improving capacity to apply a good science base in practice, expecting increases in technological advancement, improved market presence and enhanced economic growth. Results varied broadly in the United States and Europe. Even more puzzling, Japan charged ahead in technological advancement without that strong of a science base of its own. Some industrialized economies do not conform to the expected science–technology relationship, whereby strong performance in science shall lead to strong technological performance. The puzzling science–technology relationship in advanced countries has plausible explanations. (1) Science–technology relationship is much interdependent or symbiotic. Its strength and primary direction at a given time varies largely by field of science or technological innovation and across long periods of time. (2) Science–technology link in a country may depend on the overall scientific and technological level of development in that country. The strength and interdependent nature of this link evolves historically and varies across fields of science and technology. The strength of the link is affected by scientific and technological specialization in a country. Different technological fields have different scientific intensities, or degrees of building upon the science base. (3) Specialization of countries across scientific and technological fields varies. Hence, the strength of science–technology link differs between countries. High technological specialization of a country may impact its technological performance more than its immediately current scientific performance does. History, tradition and knowledge transfers may affect more returns on R&D expenditures than the actual value of R&D funds spent in science or technology. Explanations of puzzling behavior of science–technology link may become policy recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accelerated national and international efforts to redress the acute lack of infrastructures in the developing world have focused on forging partnerships to spur infrastructure development. This article finds a sore lack in attempts to grasp how infrastructures implemented through multiactor partnerships within entrenched, often volatile, political environments, become durable. Durability is understood here through field analysis, an approach common within the “new institutional” literature. Two case studies of sanitation infrastructure-making from cities in India are presented as empirical evidence. Failure of the first case and the success of the second in acquisition of durability clearly illustrate the vital role political strategy plays in making infrastructures durable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and regional integration as a pathway to socioeconomic development in Africa and South America. Both regions share a colonial legacy often characterized by stronger economic ties to the developed world than within the regions. In recent decades, regional organizations have been involved in efforts to strengthen the infrastructure for ICTs, as well as the enhancement of economic and political integration as strategies to achieve development. However, the literature continues to show distinct research agendas that unwittingly overlook the connections between these areas. This article proposes a theoretical framework combining research on integration, ICTs, and development. It provides a brief analysis of each region and its ICT initiatives, the potential impact on regional integration, and how this relates to development. We suggest possible applications of the framework to identify and research the processes of integration and expected outcomes of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that in this age of globalization, important R&D—in automobiles and wireless telecommunication—exhibits a decisive home bias. This contrasts with findings on the rate and extent of globalization of the aggregate of activities classified as R&D. Sorting out R&D was deemed important at the outset by the firm, and comparing that to “regular” R&D by the same firms enables the argument. We take our findings on location a step further by examining, for this category of R&D, the reasons for nonglobalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we seek to rectify the absence of political analysis characterizing most literature on innovation and development. Although existing research is careful to note the lack of any single recipe or model of innovation, most scholars identify a range of institutions and policies influencing innovative performance. But such explanations beg the question of where institutions, so critical to policy implementation, actually come from. We argue that the answer lies in (1) the desire of political leaders to promote innovation and related institutions, and (2) the structure of political arrangements—especially the number of actors with the power and interest to block or promote reform—through which leaders must operate. We argue that both of these variables are strongly influenced by the threats facing leaders and the resources available to address such threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water institutions in India play a crucial role in managing scarce water resources and are central to economic development and poverty alleviation. Designing appropriate institutional mechanisms to allocate scarce water and river flows has been an enormous challenge due to the complex legal, constitutional, and social issues involved. The Indian water sector has been grappling with poor performance and deterioration of public (canal and tank) irrigation systems, high extraction levels of groundwater, and related economic and environmental problems. The objective of this article is to carry out a preliminary assessment of institutional mechanisms available to manage water resources in India. The article surveys various formal and informal institutional arrangements that are used at present and their design features in order to identify those institutions related to superior performance. The analysis indicates that crafting “winning institutions” and the policy frameworks to strengthen them should take into account not only the proven criteria of institutional design but also the changing socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinctive changes in China's rural land policy and administration have exerted significant impacts on China's rural socioeconomic development and grain production, either positively or negatively. This article reviews the changes of China's rural land policy and administration in the recent 5 decades. After the land reform accomplished in 1952 and the people's commune system implemented during 1952–1978, China adopted a house responsibility system, which was proven to be effective for increasing grain output and peasants’ income. Yet, it preserved the urban–rural dichotomous economy, formed in the people's commune era, which placed agriculture in a secondary position. The low efficiency in agricultural production and the small-scale household management, under the current rural land policy and administration, stimulated the transfers of agricultural laborers to the nonagricultural sectors and cultivated land to urban land. Grain production and cultivated land protection in China are conducted most times under the political mandates rather than the economic guidance. Although the previous rural land policies and the strict residence registration helped China to avoid problems prevailing in prime cities of other developing countries, compulsorily asking peasants to grow more grain and to stay in their native land resulted in outstanding social injustice, vulnerable grain production systems, and poverty in rural areas. There are also outstanding conflicts among the interests of central government, local governments, collectives, and peasant households. More flexible rural land policies and more strict cultivated land administrations could be solutions for improving the profitability of grain production and protecting the rapidly declining cultivated land. Compensations for the low profitability in grain production are also needed to encourage an increase in grain output and rural economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores why incentive packages continue to be offered by U.S. states to attract firms despite evidence arguing against their effectiveness. Discussion on functional federalism and the rise of the entrepreneurial state; Views on the reason for the persistence of bad economic development strategies.