The Redeployment of State Power in the Southern Mediterranean: Implications of Neoliberal Reforms for Local Governance - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415835437 ISBN 13: 9780415835435

Publisher: Routledge, 2013

Synopsis

The effects of neoliberal economic reforms in the Southern Mediterranean are now widely regarded as a main underlying cause of the Arab uprisings. An often neglected dimension is that of the reforms’ implications for local governance. The contributions to this edited volume examine how state power is being re-articulated but also challenged at sub-national levels in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. They explore the effects of neoliberal economic and local governance reforms such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, and outsourcing in the area of public service delivery, poverty alleviation, and labor market reforms on local patronage networks, public accountability, and state-society relations. The findings show that such reforms are often subordinated to established patterns of political contestation among actors who seize on the opportunities that reforms offer to advance their political agendas, thereby illustrating the local specificity of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’.

The book thus fills an important knowledge gap by combining public policy and management theories with those on patron-client networks and public accountability at the local level, and situating them within the critical literature on neoliberalism.

This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

About this title

About the Author

Sylvia I. Bergh is a Swedish national, working since 2007 as Senior Lecturer in Development Management and Governance at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She holds a D.Phil. in Development Studies from the University of Oxford and has worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and Morocco.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415835437
• ISBN 13: 9780415835435
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 156
• Editor: Bergh Sylvia I.