Patchwork Leviathan

Patchwork Leviathan
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 312
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780691197364
ISBN-13 : 0691197369
Rating : 4/5 (369 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Patchwork Leviathan by : Erin Metz McDonnell

Download or read book Patchwork Leviathan written by Erin Metz McDonnell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Drawing on the Hobbesian image of the state as Leviathan, Erin Metz McDonnell argues that many seemingly weak states actually have a wide range of administrative capacities. Such states are in fact patchworks sewn loosely together from scarce resources into the semblance of unity. McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness. Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail—and how they can do better.


Patchwork Leviathan Related Books

Patchwork Leviathan
Language: en
Pages: 312
Authors: Erin Metz McDonnell
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-03-03 - Publisher: Princeton University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effec
A Philosophy of Cinematic Art
Language: en
Pages: 339
Authors: Berys Gaut
Categories: Performing Arts
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-01-14 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A wide-ranging and accessible study of cinema as an art form, discussing traditional photographic films, digital cinema, and videogames.
The Patchwork Quilt
Language: en
Pages: 34
Authors: Valerie Flournoy
Categories: Juvenile Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 1985-03-29 - Publisher: Penguin

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Twenty years ago Valerie Flournoy and Jerry Pinkney created a warmhearted intergenerational story that became an award-winning perennial. Since then children fr
Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality
Language: en
Pages: 466
Authors: Eric Watkins
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context.
Pages from Grandma’s Notebooks: Selected Essays and Poems
Language: en
Pages: 146
Authors: Leona Flowers
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-02-21 - Publisher: Lulu.com

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Pages from Grandma's Notebooks is a collection of personal essays/memoirs. Within its pages she hopes to present to the reader through her own epiphanies and ga