Rural governance and livelihoods systems diversification in the Western Balkans: comparative case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia

Agriculture is still important for socio-economic development in rural areas of Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia (BMS). However, for sustainable rural development rural economies should be diversified so attention should be paid also to off-farm and non-farm income-generating activities. Agricultural and rural development (ARD) processes and farm activity diversification initiatives should be well governed. The ultimate objective of this work is to explore linkages between ARD governance and rural livelihoods diversification in BMS. The thesis is based on an extended secondary data analysis and surveys. Questionnaires for ARD governance and coordination were sent via email to public, civil society and international organizations. Concerning rural livelihood diversification, the field questionnaire surveys were carried out in three rural regions of BMS. Results show that local rural livelihoods are increasingly diversified but a significant share of households are still engaged in agriculture. Diversification strategies have a chance to succeed taking into consideration the three rural regions’ assets. However, rural households have to tackle many problems for developing new income-generating activities such as the lack of financial resources. Weak business skills are also a limiting factor. Fully exploiting rural economy diversification potential in BMS requires many interventions including improving rural governance, enhancing service delivery in rural areas, upgrading rural people’s human capital, strengthening rural social capital and improving physical capital, access of the rural population to finance as well as creating a favourable and enabling legal and legislative environment fostering diversification. Governance and coordination of ARD policy design, implementation and evaluation is still challenging in the three Balkan countries and this has repercussions also on the pace of rural livelihoods diversification. Therefore, there is a strong and urgent need for mobilization of all rural stakeholders and actors through appropriate governance arrangements in order to foster rural livelihoods diversification and quality of life improvement.

A New Symbiosis: Municipalities, Private Contractors and Non-Governmental Organisations for the Provision of Local Public Services"

This project considered the second stage of transforming local administration and public service management to reflect democratic forms of government. In Hungary in the second half of the 1990s more and more public functions delegated to local governments have been handed over to the private or civil sectors. This has led to a relative decrease of municipal functions but not of local governments' responsibilities, requiring them to change their orientation and approach to their work so as to be effective in their new roles of managing these processes rather than traditional bureaucratic administration. Horvath analysed the Anglo-Saxon, French and German models of self-government, identifying the differing aspects emphasised in increasing the private sector's role in the provision of public services, and the influence that this process has on the system of public administration. He then highlighted linkages between actors and local governments in Hungary, concluding that the next necessary step is to develop institutional mechanisms, financial incentives and managerial practices to utilise the full potential of this process. Equally important is the need for conscious avoidance of restrictive barriers and unintended consequences, and for local governments to confront the social conflicts that have emerged in parallel with privatisation. A further aspect considered was a widening of the role of functional governance at local level in the field of human services. A number of different special purpose bodies have been set up in Hungary, but the results of their work are unclear and Horvath feels that this institutionalisation of symbiosis is not the right path in Hungary today. He believes that the change from local government to local governance will require the formulation of specific public policy, the relevance of which can be proven by processes supported with actions.

The Redistribution of Property Rights, Corporate Governance and Company Restructuring after Privatisation"

The project covered the main issues of privatisation, corporate governance and company restructuring after privatisation in Hungary and in the Russian Republic, together with a summary of the broader picture of company-level changes in Central and Eastern Europe, discussing the issues of micro-financial restructuring in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The two countries selected as the focus of research can be regarded as the two most widely differing cases of the economic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary began its transition very early in 1989, while Russia was very late in doing so. Hungary first implemented a series of institutional and systemic reforms before stabilising its public finances, while Russia has struggled with financial stabilisation for years without great success. Company restructuring and the introduction of new forms of governance only began in Russia in the mid-1990s. Hungary opted for "traditional" western methods of privatisation and invited a large amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) while in Russia the bulk of state-owned property was privatised either by free distribution or by a strange blend of ESOP-MBO schemes. FDI in Russia remained modest because of the high risk and uncertainty surrounding economic transactions there. Hungary was a forerunner in privatising public utilities, while Russia has moved cautiously in this area. The group's studies show that the Hungarian economy is now over the "transformation recession" and its economic success is largely due to its successful privatisation and to the dominant participation of foreign investors in company take-overs and in the restructuring process. The study of Russia provides a comprehensive account of the main factors in the so-far modest results in Russian privatisation and economic transformation.

Moving from sustainable management to sustainable governance of natural resources: The role of social learning processes in rural India, Bolivia and Mali

The present paper discusses a conceptual, methodological and practical framework within which the limitations of the conventional notion of natural resource management (NRM) can be overcome. NRM is understood as the application of scientific ecological knowledge to resource management. By including a consideration of the normative imperatives that arise from scientific ecological knowledge and submitting them to public scrutiny, ‘sustainable management of natural resources’ can be recontextualised as ‘sustainable governance of natural resources’. This in turn makes it possible to place the politically neutralising discourse of ‘management’ in a space for wider societal debate, in which the different actors involved can deliberate and negotiate the norms, rules and power relations related to natural resource use and sustainable development. The transformation of sustainable management into sustainable governance of natural resources can be conceptualised as a social learning process involving scientists, experts, politicians and local actors, and their corresponding scientific and non-scientific knowledges. The social learning process is the result of what Habermas has described as ‘communicative action’, in contrast to ‘strategic action’. Sustainable governance of natural resources thus requires a new space for communicative action aiming at shared, intersubjectively validated definitions of actual situations and the goals and means required for transforming current norms, rules and power relations in order to achieve sustainable development. Case studies from rural India, Bolivia and Mali explore the potentials and limitations for broadening communicative action through an intensification of social learning processes at the interface of local and external knowledge. Key factors that enable or hinder the transformation of sustainable management into sustainable governance of natural resources through social learning processes and communicative action are discussed.

Governance of Massive Multiauthor Collaboration – Linux, Wikipedia, and Other Networks: Governed by Bilateral Contracts, Partnerships, or Something in Between?

Open collaborative projects are moving to the foreground of knowledge production. Some online user communities develop into longterm projects that generate a highly valuable and at the same time freely accessible output. Traditional copyright law that is organized around the idea of a single creative entity is not well equipped to accommodate the needs of these forms of collaboration. In order to enable a peculiar network-type of interaction participants instead draw on public licensing models that determine the freedoms to use individual contributions. With the help of these access rules the operational logic of the project can be implemented successfully. However, as the case of the Wikipedia GFDL-CC license transition demonstrates, the adaptation of access rules in networks to new circumstances raises collective action problems and suffers from pitfalls caused by the fact that public licensing is grounded in individual copyright. Legal governance of open collaboration projects is a largely unexplored field. The article argues that the license steward of a public license assumes the position of a fiduciary of the knowledge commons generated under the license regime. Ultimately, the governance of decentralized networks translates into a composite of organizational and contractual elements. It is concluded that the production of global knowledge commons relies on rules of transnational private law.

Street-level bureaucrats and new modes of governance - How conflicting roles affect the implementation of the Swiss Ordinance on Verterinary Drugs

Lipsky’s seminal concept of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) focuses on their role as public servants. However, in the course of new modes of governance, private actors have gained an additional role as implementation agents. We explore the logic of private SLBs during the implementation of the Swiss Ordinance on Veterinary Medicinal Products (OVMP) where veterinarians are simultaneously implementing agents, policy addressees, and professionals with economic interests. We argue that, because of contradictory reference systems, it is problematic for the output performance if an actor is simultaneously the target group of a policy and its implementing agent.

A Process Model of Complementarity and Substitution of Contractual and Relational Governance in IS Outsourcing

This paper develops a process model of how and why complementarity and substitution form over time between contractual and relational governance in the context of information systems outsourcing. Our analysis identifies four distinct process patterns that explain this formation as the outcome of interaction processes between key elements of both contractual and relational governance. These patterns unveil the dynamic nature of complementarity and substitution. In particular, we show that the relationship between contractual and relational governance oscillates between complementarity and substitution. Those oscillations are triggered mainly by three types of contextual events (goal fuzziness, goal conflict, and goal misalignment). Surprisingly, substitution of informal control did not occur as an immediate reaction to external events but emerged as a consequence of preceding complementarity. Thus, our study challenges the prevailing view of an either/or dichotomy of complementarity and substitution by showing that they are causally connected over time.

Potentials and constraints of modeling for transdisciplinary co-producing strategies for sustainable water governance

Both climate change and socio-economic development will significantly modify the supply and consumption of water in future. Consequently, regional development has to face aggravation of existing or emergence of new conflicts of interest. In this context, transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge is considered as an important means for coping with these challenges. Accordingly, the MontanAqua project aims at developing strategies for more sustainable water management in the study area Crans-Montana-Sierre (Switzerland) in a transdisciplinary way. It strives for co-producing system, target and transformation knowledge among researchers, policy makers, public administration and civil society organizations. The research process basically consisted of the following steps: First, the current water situation in the study region was investigated. How much water is available? How much water is being used? How are decisions on water distribution and use taken? Second, participatory scenario workshops were conducted in order to identify the stakeholders’ visions of regional development. Third, the water situation in 2050 was simulated by modeling the evolution of water resources and water use and by reflecting on the institutional aspects. These steps laid ground for jointly assessing the consequences of the stakeholders’ visions of development in view of scientific data regarding governance, availability and use of water in the region as well as developing necessary transformation knowledge. During all of these steps researchers have collaborated with stakeholders in the support group RegiEau. The RegiEau group consists of key representatives of owners, managers, users, and pressure groups related to water and landscape: representatives of the communes (mostly the presidents), the canton (administration and parliament), water management associations, agriculture, viticulture, hydropower, tourism, and landscape protection. The aim of the talk is to explore potentials and constraints of scientific modeling of water availability and use within the process of transdisciplinary co-producing strategies for more sustainable water governance.