Janine R. Wedel

Toward an Anthropology of Public Policy

As the rational choice model of “policy” proliferates in “policy studies, ” the social sciences, modern governments, organizations, and everyday life, a number of anthropologists are beginning to develop a body of work in the anthropology of public policy that critiques the assumptions of “policy” as a legal-rational way of getting things done. While de-masking the framing of public policy questions, an anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results. In a rapidly changing world, anthropologists’ empirical and ethnographic methods can show how policies actively create new categories of individuals to be governed. They also suggest that the long-established frameworks of “state” and “private, ”“local” or “national” and “global, ”“macro” and “micro, ”“top down” and “bottom up, ” and “centralized” and “decentralized” not only fail to capture current dynamics in the world but actually obfuscate the understanding of many policy processes.

Blurring The State-Private Divide: Flex Organisations and The Decline of Accountability

Spurred by two decades of deregulation, public-private partnerships and a worldwide movement towards privatisation, non-state actors now fulfil functions once reserved for government. Moreover, the inclination to blur the “state” and “private” spheres now enjoys global acceptance. An international vernacular of “privatisation”, “civil society”, “non-governmental organisations” and other catch terms de-emphasising the state is parroted from Washington to Warsaw to Wellington. The blurring of the traditional boundaries of state and private encompasses longpractices of governance “reorganisation” such as the outsourcing and subcontracting of government work. It includes state-private hybrids such as the well-entrenched quasi-non-governmental organisations (often called “QUANGOs”) of the United Kingdom and the “parastatals” of Third World countries. Such reorganisation is being intensified inmany places (witness the increased outsourcing in the United States). But the acceleration of this familiar practice fails to convey the processes under way in governments, which are increasingly labyrinths of interconnected state and private structures. Indeed, in some settings, governance is reordering itself in ways that standard vocabularies are ill-equipped to characterise. For example, the “flex organisations” I observed in Eastern Europe can switch their status – from state to private – according to the situation, strategically manoeuvring to best access state, private and international resources. These organisations play multiple, sometimes conflicting, and ambiguous roles that overlap with both government and business, enabling them to bypass the constraints governing either type of activity.

The Unintended Consequences of Western Aid to Post-Communist Europe

Foreign aid is a powerful vehicle for influencing the policy — and the psychology — of the recipients. It can threaten delicate balances within the recipient countries, and this may deflect attention from the real issues confronting them. The impact of any aid depends on how the donor structures and implements it, as well as on how the recipients cultural and institutional capacities shape the ways aid is put to use. The donors agenda, strategies and priorities are inevitably altered by the political and socioeconomic context into which aid is delivered. Aid is never neutral. It is not and cannot be simply a means of introducing outside expertise or physical goods into a country.

Confronting corruption, building accountability: Lessons from the world of international development advising

Corruption, Accountability and Economic Progress Origins and Approach Structural Problems in International Economic Consulting Measures Across Organizations and Contexts Measures Within International Development Organizations Appendix A: Workshop on Building Accountability into International Development Advising (Pultusk, Poland: September 21-24, 2003)Appendix B: Host Governments and Multinational Corporations: Enron Comes to Nepal D.Gyawali Appendix C: Guidelines and Recommendations for Officials in Recipient Countries For Use in Contracting and Negotiating Consulting Services G.Rivas & B.Ejupovic Appendix D: Prototype Consultancy Contract I.Fawzy Appendix E: A Closer Look at the World Bank Process Appendix F: Recurrent Themes Among Recipient and Donor Representatives Appendix G: World Bank Guidelines Regarding Conflicts of Interest: An Analysis and Taxonomy

What Russia Can Learn from China in its Transition to a Market Economy

The new Russia began its attempted transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy in January 1992, just days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991. It was not alone in its efforts to meet this daunting challenge. The Administration and Congress of the United States hoped to build a positive economic and political relationship with its former adversary. International financial institutions and Western donors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and assistance. Prominent economic advisers converged on the scene to offer their services. Unfortunately, thirteen years later, many Russians are worse off in a large number of ways than they were under the Soviet system, while the need for structural reform of the economy is as great as ever. Life expectancy and living standards have fallen, while crime, corruption, alcoholism, drug abuse and inequality of income have risen.1 The positive developments in the economy in the past few years mainly stem from the boosts that the Russian economy received from the devaluation of the rouble following the currency crisis in August 1998, and from the more recent trebling of the oil price on the world markets.

Mafia Without Malfeasance, Clans Without Crime

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the American stereotype of the “Evil Empire” has been replaced by quite another image of the new Russia: that of “mafia.”1 Western images of the mafia zero in on “criminal” activities,2 widespread corruption, and their potential threats. As in many stereotypes, that of the new Russia as mafia-influenced holds some truth: Payments to governmental officials are common; contract murders and trafficking in drugs and prostitutes are widespread; the trade in black-market weapons and nuclear materials across borders is widely reported and often presented by Western media and governments as a national security threat. Countering eastern European organized crime and corruption and introducing the “rule of law” has become a growth industry in the United States and some other Western nations.

U.S. AID TO CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: RESULTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The 1989 collapse of the communist Eastern bloc inspired a major shift in the priorities of the Western development and aid community. Western agencies re-oriented resources and diverted personnel en masse from the Third World to Central and Eastern Europe. Although the donors had long-standing foreign aid institutions in place to handle aid to the third world, donors nevertheless added new entities and reorganized the mechanisms of aid management to administer aid to the new recipients.

High Priests and the Gospel of Anti-Corruption

The anti-corruption industry, with economists at the helm, has focused its efforts mostly on “need” corruption in poor countries. This anthropologist, with lots of field experience, says that this focus has deflected attention away from the “greed” and other kinds of damaging corruption now prevalent in the West.

Corruption, Accountability, and Economic Progress

W hen the financial crisis swept around the world in the late summer/early fall of 2008, there was a widespread fear that something very basic had gone wrong with the global market system. Market capitalism, hailed as triumphant less than two decades earlier as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, suddenly seemed about to come unglued. Large and venerable financial institutions, long regarded by many as the bedrock of economic stability, teetered at the brink of disaster. Governments around the world, perhaps most spectacularly in the United States, felt compelled to rush forward with hundreds of billions of dollars to save the day, against the very principles that those financial institutions had long espoused. It seemed that, when they got themselves into deep enough trouble, the kind of massive government intervention the leaders of the private sector had so often inveighed against was all right after all.

Structural Problems in International Economic Consulting

W hat are the institutional circumstances (or lack thereof) that constrain or enable the activities and roles of consultants? The international development consulting system entails a complex web of players and interests, involving many parties to the process and potential interactions among them. These parties include, but are not limited to, consultants, international development organizations, host governments and officials, host individuals and organizations with whom consultants come into contact while doing project work, and the public—ostensibly the intended beneficiaries of the advice.