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Highlights • The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness didn't change donor behavior consistently. • Overall aid concentration generally declined and selectivity weakened. • The poverty orientation of most bilateral donors strengthened slightly. • The allocation of aid did not become more merit-based. • The importance of donor exports for aid allocation did not generally decline. Abstract In the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005 and related initiatives donor countries promised to render foreign aid more effective, inter alia, by increasingly concentrating aid on particularly needy recipient countries with relatively good governance. In this study, we re-consider the question of whether bilateral and multilateral donors have adjusted their aid allocation accordingly. We track the changes in different margins of Theil indices of aid concentration between 1995–2004 and 2006–2015. We do so for the aggregate aid of the two groups of bilateral DAC donors and multilateral donors as well as for nine major individual DAC donors. According to our findings, the Paris Declaration did not change donors' aid allocation systematically and consistently. Overall aid concentration has declined for the two donor groups as well as for the majority of individual DAC donors. In contrast to multilateral aid, bilateral aid has become slightly more concentrated on poorer recipient countries. Still most donors have become less selective in granting aid to higher income countries. Furthermore, the Paris Declaration did not help improve the merit-based allocation of aid. Finally, there is no compelling evidence suggesting that donors have become less self-interested in using aid as a means to promote their own exports. These results suggest that commitments to reward better governed recipients and not to misuse aid as an export-promotion tool appear to be particularly hard to enforce. Overall, the gap between donor rhetoric and actual aid allocation persists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract It has been controversial whether incumbents are punished more for a bad economy than they are rewarded for a good economy due to mixed results from previous studies on one or handful number of countries. This paper makes an empirical contribution to this lingering question by conducting extensive tests on whether this asymmetry hypothesis is a cross-nationally generalizable phenomenon using all currently available modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey from 122 elections in 42 representative democracies between 1996 and 2016, as well as macro-economic indicators and individual-level economic perception. In general, this paper finds little support for the asymmetry hypothesis; although the evidence of such asymmetric economic voting is found in some subpopulations using certain economic indicators, these conditional effects are largely inconsistent, suggesting that it is still safe to assume a linear relationship between economic conditions and support for the incumbent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Zhengzhou is one of the fastest growing cities in China, but has attracted comparatively little international attention. This paper charts the contemporary transformation of Zhengzhou and highlights some of the challenges that arise from its recent growth. It demonstrates the rise of Zhengzhou from small town to megacity. This transformation has occurred in less than seven decades with Zhengzhou benefiting from its geographic importance and its position as a provincial capital in China's hierarchical system of government. While western accounts typically focus on the role of market forces and agglomeration economies in explaining the rise of megacities, we show the role of political decisions in explaining the growth of Zhengzhou as an international centre for manufacturing, commerce and logistics. The paper concludes that innovation and reform in regional governance, particularly to deal with emerging challenges, are necessary, if it is to develop a well-functioning megacity. Highlights • Zhengzhou is one of the eight great capitals of ancient China benefiting from its geographic importance; • Zhengzhou's contemporary transformation highlights the importance of political decision-making in shaping urban development in China; • Zhengzhou is leading the way of e-commerce cross-border trade and logistics industries. • Challenges facing Zhengzhou call for paradigm change in the governance of urban development [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster recovery efforts form an essential component of coping with unforeseen events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and typhoons, some of which will only become more frequent or severe in the face of accelerated climate change. Most of the time, disaster recovery efforts produce net benefits to society. However, depending on their design and governance, some projects can germinate adverse social, political, and economic outcomes. Drawing from concepts in political economy, political ecology, justice theory, and critical development studies, this study first presents a conceptual typology revolving around four key processes: enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment. Enclosure refers to when disaster recovery transfers public assets into private hands or expands the roles of private actors into the public sphere. Exclusion refers to when disaster recovery limits access to resources or marginalizes particular stakeholders in decision-making activities. Encroachment refers to when efforts intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation. Entrenchment refers to when disaster recovery aggravates the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsens concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community. The study then documents the presence of these four inequitable attributes across four empirical case studies: Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in the United States, recovery efforts for the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, and the Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand. It next offers three policy recommendations for analysts, program managers, and researchers at large: spreading risks via insurance, adhering to principles of free prior informed consent, and preventing damage through punitive environmental bonds. The political economy of disaster must be taken into account so that projects can maximize their efficacy and avoid marginalizing those most vulnerable to those very disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study an age-old question in political economy: does government spending on welfare ensure peace? This question was at the heart of the European Welfare State model of the early 20th century, and remains relevant today in face of rising inequalities and political conflict. Yet there is limited empirical evidence about this question. We make use of a panel of 12 Latin American countries over the period 1970–2010 to show that welfare spending has led to substantial reductions in conflict across the region. This effect is more pronounced when associated with reductions in inequality and increasing social and institutional trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the political economy of pricing access to downtown commercial districts, using curbside parking fees as the main example. A spatial equilibrium model is embedded in a political economy framework in which special interest groups (urban and suburban retailers, local residents) lobby the city government. We have the following results. If downtown and suburban stores sell a homogeneous good, the local government underprices downtown parking if suburban stores operate with low enough markups. If goods are heterogeneous and some consumers engage in multiple-stop shopping (i.e., shop both downtown and in the suburbs), suburban stores will not lobby at all; lobbying by downtown retailers leads to parking fees below the social optimum. Furthermore, local residents do not necessarily lobby for high parking fees on downtown shoppers. If a decline in urban stores leads to negative externalities (urban blight) they may join forces with downtown retailers and lobby against high parking fees on shoppers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional differences in economic growth have been observed within many countries. Our story emphasises three region-specific factors driving growth—capital, labour and political factors. Conditional on differences in production factor ( i.e. , labour and capital) variations across democratic states, what role do differences in underlying “political factors” across regions play in accounting for regional growth disparities? We build a political economy model of endogenous growth where regions have the same political institutions, but experience different (and estimable) distributions over voter political biases ( i.e. , our “political factors”). In our model, political factors affect regional productivity as a consequence of politico-economic equilibrium . We discipline our regional growth accounting exercises by calibrating/estimating each model to American state-level economic and political-survey data. We show that the capital factor is the predominant driving force behind growth in American states. Nevertheless, regional variations in distributions of voter's political biases also account a great deal for regional growth disparities. We also evaluate how much politics would have distorted agents' welfare and regional growth, were regional economies given the opportunity to live under an efficient social planner's allocation system; and, if agents were to live under the same democratic system but where all voters have equal voting influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that notions such as ecosystem services and strong sustainability can be best understood and developed within the theoretical framework advanced by the classical political economists, in which a circular conception of the economy is provided. I also argue that the development of notions such as ecosystem services and strong sustainability has been constrained by the dominance of neoclassical economics, which provides a linear conception of the economy and leads to an emphasis on weak sustainability, which in turn springs from an emphasis on substitutability and aggregate capital. When assessing the relevance of classical political economy for studying ecosystem services and strong sustainability I consider not only the contributions of the classical political economists, but also more recent contributions which draw upon the classical perspective, such as Piero Sraffa's and Amartya Sen's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research focusing on the relationship between the economy and satisfaction with democracy often presents mixed results. This article argues that this uncertainty is mainly due to model specification, number of surveys and measurement. After discussing why the role of the economy should not be overlooked, by using an empirical strategy that applies Bayesian cross-classified mixed models to 572 national surveys in 28 European countries from 1973 to 2013 drawn from the Eurobarometer, it is shown that objective macro-economic indicators and a subjective indicator seem to substantially affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in Europe. The findings are robust when controlling for various institutional and political variables and using alternative model specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture, that for long had been a neglected concept in resilience thinking, has gained prominence in recent times, especially in the notion of ecocultures/ecocultural resilience to be achieved through transdisciplinary projects. In this paper, I conceptualize the relation of science with society and culture that resilience scholars propose as part of a larger agenda of the integration of science with different knowledge and epistemologies. In order to understand how resilience thinking relates to culture, I investigate the culture of resilience itself. Using the lens of cultural and science studies, I go back to the history and context of resilience and transdisciplinarity, examine some of the central tools and concepts in resilience thinking and its entanglements in the politics of the past and present. In light of the discussion, I argue that we need to ‘situate’ rather than ‘integrate’ our knowledge production. This entails not only recognizing our own culture but also being open to different ways of knowing and to be able to transgress resilience. Moving away from integration and embracing ambivalence and humility can open up to experimental practices and ‘trading places’ in order to engage with nature and others justly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical literature assessing whether crisis begets reform has paid little attention to the role of the origin of crises. This paper considers seven dimensions of financial reform, as well as an aggregate index of these dimensions, and focuses on crises defined as sudden stops in financial flows. Recent work on gross financial flows provides a suitable strategy to distinguish between domestic crises (sudden flight) and external crises (true sudden stops). While the origin of the crisis plays no role in explaining the likelihood of reform in the case of the aggregate index of financial reform, different origins of crises affect different individual dimensions of financial reform. Thus, the origin of the crisis matters when assessing the nexus between financial crisis and financial reform. The evidence is particularly compelling for the case of sudden flight and reform of capital account restrictions, and more tentative for the case of true sudden stops and reform of banking regulation and supervision. These findings underscore the need to pay greater attention to the origin of crises in empirical work focusing on the relationship between financial crisis and financial reform, and also in theoretical models of the political economy of financial reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiscal unions often use fiscal transfers to counter asymmetric shocks, but such transfers may be politically controversial. I present a model of a two-region fiscal union with region-specific shocks where the threat of secession imposes a limit on fiscal redistribution between regions. I show that both correlation of shocks across regions and their persistence over time are important for political support for integration. The gains from inter-regional risk sharing are potentially large when shocks are negatively correlated and temporary. In contrast, unions with negatively correlated permanent shocks are likely to be fragile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spatial competition, public infrastructure plays a crucial role in determining product market outcomes. In our model, consideration of infrastructure's impact on the product market drives the preferences of consumers in their dual role as voter/taxpayers. The spatial heterogeneity of consumers produces conflicting political interests and in many cases inefficient outcomes. However across both exogenous and endogenous market environments product market competition consistently leads to higher levels of publicly funded infrastructure than monopoly/collusion. Furthermore, competition's boost to the popular support for infrastructure investment is often excessive while monopoly leads to underinvestment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the canonical causal claims in political science links individuals' evaluations of the national economy with their votes. Yet there are reasons to expect that these economic perceptions are endogenous to vote choice, meaning that existing cross-sectional models cannot provide a valid test of the causal retrospective voting claim. Using an instrumental variables approach, we assess the effect of sociotropic evaluations on the decision to vote for the incumbent president or his party's candidate in eight recent U.S. presidential elections. In contrast with prior work, our results reveal that while there is a correlation between sociotropic evaluations and vote choice, individuals' subjective evaluations only exert a causal effect on votes when there is not an incumbent president on the ballot. These results suggest that, when incumbents are on the ballot, individuals' economic perceptions are particularly clouded by appraisals of the incumbent and thus do not operate as an exogenous influence on votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new approach to use qualitative information for investigating central banks' monetary policy strategy. Quantitative assessment indicators which are generated from a central bank's public statement with the balance statistic method are used to estimate Taylor-type rules. This procedure allows to directly capture a policymaker's assessment of macroeconomic variables which are relevant for the decision making process. As an application of the proposed method, a novel real time data set consisting of assessment indicators for the Bundesbank is generated to re-investigate its monetary policy. The analysis provides evidence that (i) the Bundesbank was a flexible monetary targeter and (ii) that the proposed indicator variables contain information beyond that of standard macroeconomic variables used in monetary policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether aid contributed to institutional development in transition economies. We find that aid flows have a positive effect on democratization, especially on constraints on the executive and political participation. At the same time, total aid has no effect on overall quality of governance, while US aid appears to have a negative impact on some dimensions of governance. Aid’s differential impact on democracy and governance is consistent with uneven development of institutions and the democracy consolidation hypothesis. We also find that aid has a non-linear effect on democracy. Openness has a positive effect on both democracy and good governance. Oil resources have an adverse effect on democracy. Adult mortality, civil war and adherence to Islam are all detrimental to good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze free-riding behavior of Finnish municipalities prior to voluntary municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, because of a delay from the initial decision to the actual merger during which municipalities stay autonomous. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the stronger free-riding incentive a municipality faced the more it increased its debt and spent its cash reserves. These funds were spent mostly on investments and current expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central government bailouts of local governments are commonly viewed as a recipe for local fiscal indiscipline, as local governments learn that the center will come to the rescue in times of trouble. However, little is known about the consequences of bailouts granted conditional on local governments first making efforts to improve the situation. We examine a case in which the Swedish central government provided conditional grants to 36 financially troubled municipalities. We use the synthetic control method to identify suitable comparison units for each of the 36 municipalities. To compare the development of costs and the fiscal surplus of admitted municipalities to that of their most similar counterparts during the decade after the program, we then estimate fixed effects regressions on the resulting sample. The analysis suggests that conditional bailouts did not erode, and may even have improved, fiscal discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate a case of political favoritism in which members of the Bavarian parliament hired relatives as office employees who were paid using taxpayers' money. The family scandal was a much-discussed issue in the German media because of upcoming state and federal elections. Being involved in the scandal had no apparent effect on re-election prospects or voter turnout: for example, the total vote share of the reigning CSU increased from 47% in the 2008 election to 50% in the 2013 election in districts whose representatives were revealed to have hired relatives, resembling party gains elsewhere. Voters did not appear to punish the incumbent government. The CSU embodies Bavarian identity and was able to overcome the family scandal, as also had been the case in previous scandals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piketty's influential book Capital in the Twenty - First Century and its prominent review by Milanovic in the Journal of Economic Literature both assert the inevitability of an increasing share of capital in total income, given a higher rate of return to capital than the rate of growth in income. This paper shows by a specific example, a logical argument and its intuition that the alleged inevitability is not valid. Even just for capital to grow faster than income, we need an additional requirement that saving of non-capital income is larger than consumption of capital income. Even if this is satisfied, the capital share may not increase as the rate of return may fall and non-capital incomes may increase with capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of a large incumbency advantage in the winner-takes-all plurality system of the United States is well documented. It is unclear whether incumbents in proportional systems should enjoy such a large advantage. Multi-seat constituencies make it difficult for individual incumbents to claim credit for the provision of local public goods and services. Moreover, multiple incumbents may dilute media attention thereby limiting name recognition advantage. We use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of incumbency using election data from Ireland’s system of proportional representation with a single transferable vote (PR-STV). Incumbency causes an eighteen percentage point increase in the probability that a candidate in Ireland’s lower house of parliament wins a seat in the next election. Our results indicate that the protection of vulnerable incumbents from intra-party competition may be a source of incumbency advantage in multi-member district elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-corruption laws forbid selling public job nominations. Even if bribing is ruled out, those interested in the nominations may invest in good relationships with the nominators. This provides a legal way to influence the decision. Such networking is costly, however. Thus, rent-seeking results in excessive networking. We present a simple model featuring such effects and show that efficiency may be improved if political parties interfere with the nominations. Political parties may reduce wasteful networking, thanks to exclusive membership contracts. Parties can require that politicians belonging to the party promote the nomination of other party members, thus, reducing incentives to cultivate inter-party connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses an important source of variation within democracies — the degree of institutionalization. The concept of institutionalization describes the extent to which politics takes place, and is believed to take place, via formal political institutions. Countries vary in their degree of institutionalization, hence, in the degree to which political actors pursue their goals via conventional politics or via “alternative political technologies”. This paper postulates that if politics is conducted largely outside of formal channels, the structure of the formal channels should not matter much as a determinant of policy outcomes. To address this issue this paper proposes a new index of institutionalization and with it revisits seminal work regarding the impact of constitutions on public spending. The findings show that the effect of constitutional rules on policy outcomes is conditional on the degree of institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ancient Athenian democracy emerged in 508 (all dates BCE), became a dominant naval power, fought a multitude of external wars and ended in 322 after it was defeated by Macedon and was replaced by oligarchy. The paper employs a political economy framework to examine the demise of democracy. It illustrates that war was a means of redistribution, benefiting the majority of poorer Athenians at the expense of the rich elite, who bore a disproportionate burden of its cost. A model of conflict is set up to study the incentives of the poor majority to go to war. After analyzing a dynamic setting it also investigates the circumstances when after defeating Athens her enemy chooses to impose oligarchy that disenfranchises the poor. As victory at war is probabilistic it is concluded that the fall of the democracy was neither unavoidable nor inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of voting in undisputed, yet scholarly works attempting to understand the causes and consequences of incorrect voting are relatively scarce. Building on the works of Lau and Redlawsk (1997, 2006; Lau et al., 2008), I design and implement a new survey method measuring incorrect voting I call Self-identified Incorrect Voting (SIV). This method allows survey respondents to determine for themselves if they voted incorrectly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I conducted the SIV survey of a national sample of voters and use the results to test traditional hypotheses regarding the value of partisanship and the economy as cues to help low-information voters behave in the same manner as high-information voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the political institutional features of developing democracies influence how violence occurs? Building on research showing that ‘hybrid democracies’ are more prone to social violence, this article argues that elite competition for power in the context of limited institutional oversight plays an important role in explaining violence. The framework here presents possible mechanisms linking subnational political dynamics and rates of social violence in poorly institutionalised contexts. It highlights how political competition, concentrated political power, and constraints on cooperation can create opportunity structures where violence is incentivised and the rule of law is undermined. This is examined empirically using sub-national homicide data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2010. Findings suggest violence is greater in contexts that are highly competitive – where political actors face credible challenges and have a more tenuous grip on power – and those where power is highly concentrated – where political actors have held power for longer periods or face limited credible challenges. Findings also suggest violence varies depending on whether interactions between state and municipal government are likely to be constrained or cooperative; and are consistent with literatures emphasising the importance of structural explanations of social violence. In light of on-going democratic transitions across the globe, the article highlights the value of understanding links between institutional context, contentious politics and social violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is widespread agreement within academic literature that the NSDAP systematically and effectively targeted the rural areas beginning with the Agrarian Crisis in 1927/8. However, one issue is left unresolved: were specific levels of agricultural strata differently attracted to the Nazis, and if so, how? In light of the economic and political incentives offered to German peasants with differing farm sizes, we expect that regions characterized by middle peasants were most likely to have electorally swung in a distinct, asymmetric and relevant way towards the Nazis. In order to test this hypothesis, we have used a country-wide data set, which includes the original categories of ‘parcel peasants’ (0–2 ha), ‘small-sized’ (2–5 ha) and ‘medium-sized’ farmers (5–20 ha). These specific classifications were introduced and behaviorally legitimated by the Statistical Office of the Weimar Republic at that time. We present the first analysis applying generalized additive models (GAM) for the assessment of ecological relations. In order to account for the construction of political spaces – and therefore of spatial dependencies, we offer a new mechanism based on stipulations of the electoral system. Even after controlling for pre-established impact factors (Protestantism, urbanization, etc.) and for spatial effects, we identify a clear impact of the agrarian middle classes (5–20 ha) on the Nazi vote beginning with the election in July 1932. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we attempt to derive and test the role of energy prices on economic growth. We first developed a two-sector endogenous growth model, based on J Polit Economy 1991; 99:500–521. We modified the model such that consumption goods sector uses energy as an input along with capital. The model allows us to show that the growth rate of energy price has a negative effect on the growth rates of energy use and real GDP. Following this, derived theoretical relationships between energy prices and economic growth and energy consumption were tested empirically using error-correction based panel cointegration tests and panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. We applied this methodology on data of composite energy prices, GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita for sixteen countries for the period between 1978 and 2011. We found significant cointegration between energy prices and real GDP per capita, as well as between energy prices and energy consumption per capita. Moreover, long-run estimates reveal negative and significant effects of composite energy prices on both GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita. We suggest that increasing the share of renewable energy sources in energy consumption would help policy-makers to control permanent long-term increases in consumer energy prices, in turn leading to an increase in economic growth, and hence in welfare. This paper contributes to the literature by highlighting the existence of a previously neglected welfare-improving channel of renewable energy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the face of continuing financial and economic crises, the European Investment Bank (EIB) has been criticized for being overly-conservative in its loans to Europe. Critics in particular have called on the EIB to vastly increase its investment in utilities as a counter-cyclical measure. To take stock and, in order to evaluate the role of the EIB in financing utilities over time, we compile and analyze an original database of all EIB utilities project loans from 1958 to 2004. We find the EIB started out by functioning as a regional development bank, prioritizing utilities finance in its members' poorer zones; however, energy crises in the 1970s marked a shift whereby the logic of EIB finance to utilities became more politically-oriented. By the 1980s, utilities projects supported by the EIB were intimately related to those required for the Single Market. The origins of the EIB's current conservative approach to utilities loans was born in the 1970s and fully consolidated by the 1990s. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In country after country, economic voting analysts have found that voters react sociotropically rather than egotropically. However, in a series of papers Nannestad and Paldam have found the exact opposite result for Danish voters – a result which challenges the scope conditions of economic voting. Changing only a few minor aspects of Nannestad and Paldam’s design, including the introduction of a standard sociotropic item in their models, though, reproduces the standard result: strong sociotropic and weak egotropic effects. The challenging results thus seem to be methodological artefacts; a finding that strengthens confidence in the generalizability of the basic mechanism of economic voting. Voters are not necessarily altruists, however. Sociotropic voting may be driven by both egoistic and altruistic considerations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: How do national social programs influence local voting? This study utilizes the experimental set up of a conditional cash transfer program to show that small, targeted cash transfers can have large electoral effects. The Honduran PRAF program allocated an average of $18 per capita per year to poor households within municipalities that were randomly assigned to receive the program. Although the program was administered at the national level, the program increased an incumbent mayor's re-election probabilities by 39%, without significantly influencing voting behavior in presidential elections. Moreover, the evidence suggests that transferring cash to poor households were more effective at increasing political support than interventions providing public goods for poor villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses whether economic voting plays any role in a parliamentary, decentralized polity. Decentralization is argued to blur lines of responsibility and confuse voters about whom to blame for poor economic performance at the national and regional levels. National and Regional Economic Voting (NEV and REV, respectively) are tested in Catalonia (Spain). The initial empirical test suggests that only NEV takes place in this region. Four hypotheses are considered to explain REV’s absence: blame-shifting, blinding nationalism, coalition government, and misinformation regarding Policy Responsibility Distribution across tiers of government. Using reasonable counterfactuals and Bayesian techniques, the first three hypotheses are dismissed, whereas the last is confirmed. The results emphasize the informational requirements behind the economic voting theory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Transformation needs to be considered as part of resilience if issues of equity and social justice are to be addressed. • Tacloban offers an example of deliberate transformation through an integrated development and disaster risk reduction plan. • Political capabilities places focus on underlying conditions, attending to narrative, voice, authority and subjectivity. • Planning overlooked histories of marginalization, reflecting instead the interests and values of powerful stakeholders. • Political capabilities are found to be significant in directing transformation, reinforcing or challenging subjectivities. There are increasing calls for transformation to be considered as a means to address the effects of social, cultural and political conditions on vulnerability when resilience is applied in practice. Yet transformation does not necessarily lead to more equitable social conditions. Here, we draw on the analytical framework of political capabilities to reveal aspects of the underlying politics of transformation. Our focus is on the relocation of communities in Tacloban, Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, as an example of a deliberate transformation enacted as part of an integrated development and disaster risk reduction plan. A household survey, focus group discussions and individual interviews are applied to rank households in terms of their perception of household resilience four years after the disaster. Analysis of the drivers and consequences of differentiation reveals an uneven distribution of resilience among residents, with many facing difficulties despite a focus on livelihoods embedded in the relocation plan. While some were able to leverage pre-existing human and social capital, others found that the shift from coastal livelihoods left them struggling to find a valued role. Relocation reinforced underlying subjectivities with new layers of meaning, reflecting experiences of success and failure in adjusting to a more commercial culture and cash economy. The plan sought improvement through commercial opportunities, reflecting the authority and worldview of dominant city and international stakeholders. While the deliberate transformation that followed sought to be just in the distribution of risk and opportunity, poorer residents lacked the political capability to influence the relocation narrative, which in turn overlooked histories of marginalization and the lived experience of the poor. The case highlights the significance of engaging political capabilities if transformations are to support those in vulnerable communities to make valued life choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of COVID-19 has raised difficult questions that interrogate the pandemic as a public health emergency, an economic crisis and a disruptor of consolidated governance forms. While addressing the public health emergency must be the main priority, we also need to track the ways in which the crisis is reconfiguring economic and political ordering and diverse actors are renegotiating relations in the exceptional circumstances the pandemic has created. These dimensions can have far-reaching implications in wide-ranging policy areas, both as the crisis unfolds and in the longer term. Based on a review of developments concerning land governance, this Viewpoint discusses continuities with longstanding patterns as well as ruptures and distinctive features that outline the initial contours of an agenda for research and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• COVID-19 has exposed major faultlines and fragilities in current systems. • A structural-unruly duality characterises emergence, progression and impact. • Mainstream development thinking and practice are part of the problem. • Transformations are needed in science-policy, economies and governance. • Resilience, equity, diversity, care and inclusive politics are required. COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited 'big one': a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 – as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic require analysis that addresses both structural political-economic conditions alongside far less ordered, 'unruly' processes reflecting complexity, uncertainty, contingency and context-specificity. This structural-unruly duality in the conditions and processes of pandemic emergence, progression and impact provides a lens to view three key challenge areas. The first is how scientific advice and evidence are used in policy, when conditions are rigidly 'locked in' to established power relations and yet so uncertain. Second is how economies function, with the COVID-19 crisis having revealed the limits of a conventional model of economic growth. The third concerns how new forms of politics can become the basis of reshaped citizen-state relations in confronting a pandemic, such as those around mutual solidarity and care. COVID-19 demonstrates that we face an uncertain future, where anticipation of and resilience to major shocks must become the core problematic of development studies and practice. Where mainstream approaches to development have been top down, rigid and orientated towards narrowly-defined economic goals, post-COVID-19 development must have a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics at its core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern economics attributes importance to spatial inequality: yet in studying discontent with politics, existing research has mostly neglected local contexts and attitudes people hold about them. I use British Election Study data to investigate the factors leading people to believe their community is ignored by the political process. Firstly, real economic contexts play a role, since residents of low-income communities tend to take more negative views about how well their community is represented. Secondly, negative perceptions of the local economy are associated with more negative views of community representation, whereas equivalent 'egotropic' measures of people's personal economic situation have no such effect. Thirdly, I observe a 'grievance' effect wherein people are particularly negative about community representation when they believe that the national economy is more successful than that of one's local community. • Perceived 'community representation' (CR) different to more generalised system attitudes. • Low-income places have more negative views of how their communities are represented. • Views of local economy linked to views of community representation. • Seeing local economy as worse than national linked to negative views of CR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]