Editorial

Richard Batley, Willy McCourt and Claire Mcloughlin

Public Management Review, 2012, vol. 14, issue 2, 131-144

Abstract: Politics and governance have become central to explanations of the widespread under-provision of public services in developing countries. Political analysis offers an understanding of what might otherwise appear to be exclusively managerial or capacity problems. The articles in this special issue of PMR contribute to three main aspects of this new literature on the political economy of service provision: how the incentives of elites are formed and affect whether, to whom and how services are provided; how top--down and bottom--up systems of accountability may act and also interact to affect incentives; and the effect of service provision on state--society relations. The analysis in this and the following articles suggests that the politics of service provision should be understood as a cycle of causation: politics affect the policy, governance and implementation of services, but in turn service provision is a theatre of politics and affects citizen formation and the development of state capacity and legitimacy. Taken as a whole, the articles suggest that a political perspective enables new insights into the causes of weak service provision, and how it can be improved.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14719037.2012.657840 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:pubmgr:v:14:y:2012:i:2:p:131-144

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPXM20

DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2012.657840

Access Statistics for this article

Public Management Review is currently edited by Professor Stephen P. Osborne, Jenny Harrow and Tobias Jung

More articles in Public Management Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().