Capacity development or new learning spaces through municipal international cooperation: Policy mobility at work?

Ewijk, Edith van; Baud, I.S.A.; Bontenbal, Marike; Hordijk, Michaela; Lindert, Paul van; Nijenhuis, Gery; Westen, Guus van

doi:10.1177/0042098014528057

Cited by 71 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(31 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Scholars have argued that technical assistance should move beyond service delivery to focus on reducing aid dependency, consistent with a rights‐based approach. Twinning, which pairs local institutions with foreign counterparts, has been offered as an alternative model to traditional technical assistance, and an extensive literature has chronicled its progress (Beisheim and Liese ; Bontenbal ; Jensen et al ; van Ewijk et al ). Despite an initial conceptualization of capacity building as an apolitical, technical exercise, researchers have come to understand that capacity building is fundamentally a political process (Grindle ).…”

Section: Rba and Public Administration: Opportunities And Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Other Side of the Coin: NGOs, Rights‐Based Approaches, and Public Administration

Schmitz

Mitchell

2015

Public Administration Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Th e majority of the world's population resides in low-and middle-income countries, where the problem of sustainable development is among the most pressing public administration challenges. As principal actors within the international development community, transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play a leading role in piloting a wide variety of development-focused strategies. During the past decade, many of these transnational NGOs, along with the United Nations, have embraced a rights-based approach (RBA) to development as an alternative to traditional service delivery. Despite the growing popularity of RBA among NGOs and other development actors, surprisingly little attention has been paid to understanding the signifi cance of RBA for public administration and for public managers-the "other side of the coin." Drawing on current research in NGO studies and international development, this article describes several varieties of contemporary rights-based approaches, analyzes their impact on development practices, and examines the intersection of RBA and public administration. Practitioner Points• Th e rights-based approach (RBA) to development has become a widely adopted framework that conditions civil society's interactions with government agencies around the world, particularly in low-and middleincome countries. • RBA shifts attention from technical to political dimensions of the development process, identifi es citizens as rights holders and government agencies as duty bearers, and seeks to empower citizens to demand rights fulfi llment directly from public agencies. • With RBA, transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seek to withdraw from substitutive direct service provision to focus instead on facilitating productive accountability relations between rights holders and government agencies. • RBA strategies include advocacy and litigation, coalition building, mobilization, and awareness raising. Th ese strategies may be contentious or conciliatory in nature and highlight the need for more holistic, cross-level activism at the local, subnational, and national levels. • Public managers in low-and middle-income countries should embrace decreased NGO direct service provision, increased rights-based claims and interest in institutional and social capacity building, and more extensive cross-sectoral collaborations in addressing governance challenges.on educating community members about how to organize collectively and claim their own rights in holding local and regional government offi cials accountable.During the past two decades, a growing number of development NGOs have adopted versions of a rights-based approach (RBA), which has emerged alongside "good governance" and "local ownership" as a new buzzword in development discourse (Joshi 2010;Nelson and Dorsey 2003). RBA signals a concerted eff ort to close the gap between the previously distinct human rights and international development fi elds (Uvin 2004) while addressing long-standing

show abstract

Section: Rba and Public Administration: Opportunities And Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Other Side of the Coin: NGOs, Rights‐Based Approaches, and Public Administration

Schmitz

Mitchell

2015

Public Administration Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This is not simply a matter of taking a policy from one location and implementing it in another. Rather, it involves adapting it to a specific local context, practice and policy community, with a focus on the political process [45,46,74]. Local adaptive capacity, in general and of local institutions, is a relevant factor in this stage (cf.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

City-To-City Learning for Urban Resilience: The Case of Water Squares in Rotterdam and Mexico City

Ilgen

Sengers

Wardekker

2019

Water

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cities worldwide are building ‘resilience’ in the face of water-related challenges. International networks have emerged through which urban communities draw on each other’s experiences and expertise in order to become resilient cities. Learning is a key principle in resilience-building, but thus far little empirical research is available on city-to-city learning and learning for urban resilience. This paper presents an analysis of how policy relevant knowledge on the notion of ‘Water Squares’ is exchanged between Rotterdam and Mexico City. We mobilize a framework composed of four distinct phases: exploration and marketing (phase 1), building pipelines (phase 2), translation and adoption (phase 3), and internalization and reflection (phase 4). Critical in first phase was introspective analysis of one’s own systems, strengths and weaknesses, rather than an outward-looking search for knowledge or mentees. During the second phase, the cities reframed their own narratives to match those of their counterparts as a way to create a mutual understanding of each other’s struggles and histories. This facilitated policy and knowledge exchange as equal partners on a basis of trust. In the third phase, strong local leaders were recruited into the process, which was key to anchor knowledge in the community and to reduce the risks of losing institutional memory in centralized, hierarchical institutions. For the fourth phase it should be stressed that by internalizing such lessons, cities might strengthen not only their own resilience, but also enhance future exchanges with other cities.

show abstract

“…There is significant documentation of local governments as primary sources of policy circulation, lending both technical expertise and reconfiguring knowledge and experience into different settings (Ewijk et al, 2015). The increasing recognition of local government as a driving force for economic and social development has underpinned a number of partnerships in North-South and South-South development cooperation that further institutionalises policy circulation and exchange.…”

Section: Governments and Civil Servantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The increasing recognition of local government as a driving force for economic and social development has underpinned a number of partnerships in North-South and South-South development cooperation that further institutionalises policy circulation and exchange. In this context policy circulation is dominated by an interest in peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange and the evidence from a number of studies suggests such partnerships and programs are effective in mobilising policy concepts into multilevel governance systems (Ewijk et al, 2015;Temenos and McCann, 2012). At the local government level policy circulation is noted for the shift away from hierarchical exchange of policy ideas from lender to borrower to a more equitable exchange where effort is focused on the reconstitution of ideas and practices into a local political and cultural context.…”

Section: Governments and Civil Servantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: the centrality of arenas, agents and actions

Baker¹,

Walker²

2019

Public Policy Circulation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Contemporary policy work is deeply informed by the circulation of policy initiatives and models from other jurisdictions. Sometimes close and at other times distant, the influence of various 'elsewheres' (Allen and Cochrane, 2007) has become a routine feature of the policy process. Researchers from a range of academic disciplines have matched the increased traffic of policy knowledge with a growing body of knowledge that seeks to document and understand it. While political scientists have the longest history of engagement with travelling policy, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, urban planners and other social scientists have joined the fray in recent years, creating a lively multidisciplinary research effort (Benson and Jordan, 2011; McCann and Ward, 2012). Yet, for the most part, this research effort has been disjointed. Despite having a common interest at their core (the movement of policy), there are largely separate conversations occurring, structured around concepts such as policy diffusion, policy learning, policy transfer and policy mobility. These conversations have 'lived together apart' for some time now, but appear to be converging toward a focus on diverse arenas, agents and actions implicated in the circulation of policy. We have also seen shifts from structure-agency binaries to notions of contextually-embedded agency, from neat, spatially and temporally delimited processes to messy, ongoing processes, and from an exclusive interest in the 'why' of travelling policy to a broader set of research questions regarding the 'how'. In this book we use 'policy circulation' as an expedient umbrella term that signifies this emergent zone of common ground. We intend the notion of policy circulation to be largely agnostic (in ontological, epistemological and methodological terms), but it is inescapably oriented toward the work involved in moving policy and the ongoing nature of such efforts. It provides a loose conceptual and empirical space in which Policy Diffusion Policy diffusion emerged as a distinct area of inquiry in the 1960s, put to the task of studying patterns of intra-national policy adoption in the context of United States federalism. Policy diffusion studies seek to map and explain sequential patterning related to the uptake of 'policy innovations'-defined by Walker (1969, p. 881) as 'a program or policy which is new to the state adopting it'-to understand when and why certain jurisdictions adopt policies from other jurisdictions (see Simmons and Elkins, 2004; Levi-Faur, 2005; Simmons et al., 2006). Although the term 'policy diffusion' is often invoked to describe 'a process through which policy choices in one country affect those made in a second country', Marsh and Sharman (2009, pp. 270-71) argue that those researching policy diffusion more often have in mind 'a process of interdependent policy convergence'. Here, the choices of governments are not just interdependent, whereby 'the choice of a government influences the choices made by others and, conversely, the choice of a governmen...

show abstract

Capacity development or new learning spaces through municipal international cooperation: Policy mobility at work?

Cited by 71 publications

References 20 publications

The Other Side of the Coin: NGOs, Rights‐Based Approaches, and Public Administration

The Other Side of the Coin: NGOs, Rights‐Based Approaches, and Public Administration

City-To-City Learning for Urban Resilience: The Case of Water Squares in Rotterdam and Mexico City

Introduction: the centrality of arenas, agents and actions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About