Melbourne School of Government - Theses
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ItemThe political economy of contestation over land resources in Cambodia( 2016)In the social movement literature, scholars have proposed that the success or failure of social movements is shaped by several factors, including: social movement strategies and organisational arrangements; cost-benefit calculations informing government responses to social movement demands; the openness of political opportunity structures; and capacity of social movements to mobilise resources and access transnational networks to support their demands. Influenced predominantly by the experiences of social movements in the global North, the propositions of these scholars fail to adequately account for the performance of social movements operating within certain political regime types prevalent in the global South. As a contribution to bridging this gap, this thesis explains why some movements of civil society organisations (CSOs) in Cambodia fail while others succeed, within a context of struggle for political survival by the neo-patrimonial patron of the regime. The thesis focuses on CSO movements engaged in contesting economic land concessions granted to foreign companies in Cambodia and, in so doing, substantiates new empirical and theoretical links between social movements and the political survival of varying regime types. The study employed a qualitative process-tracing method to examine two cases of CSO movements targeting subordinate government institutions (e.g. provincial offices and ministries) and foreign companies investing in agro-industrial land. The CSOs in the two cases demanded remedy for similar adverse social, economic and environmental impacts caused by large-scale land acquisition for agro-industries. However, they achieved substantially different degrees of success and failure. The thesis argues that a primary factor explaining this variation is the choice of ‘balancing strategies’ employed by the regime’s patron to secure its own political survival by manoeuvring between concessive and repressive responses. To survive politically, the patron tends, on the one hand, to employ repressive measures to deal with opposition, including CSOs that challenge the members of the winning coalitions (influential supporters of the regime’s patron); on the other, it deploys concessive measures to co-opt and circumvent opposition. These strategies illuminate the patron’s calculation of risks and rewards, embodied as the maintenance of political support from the winning coalitions’ members and the placating of aggrieved communities through the relative use of concessive or repressive responses. The way in which the patron calculates risks and rewards is contingent upon their perception of whether or not the movements put the regime and its winning coalitions at risk. The main reference point in making such calculations of risk is the regime’s survival. These strategies to cope with different CSO movements are adopted not only by the central patron, but also by its subordinate institutions. In one case involving a land concession held by a senator who is also known as a sugar baron, although the CSO movements employed strong strategies, such as: an escalation from domestic to international strategies; the creation of a formal organisational arrangement; external networking; and the adoption of a stance aligned with some political elites, they failed to achieve most of their demands. They were relatively unsuccessful because the subordinate institutions, especially the provincial office, chose to repress the CSO movements due to influence from the sugar baron, a member of the winning coalitions. In contrast, CSO movements targeting a European company employed relatively weak strategies (i.e. weak networking, an informal organisational set-up and the seeking of support from institutions within the government), but they achieved most of their demands. They were relatively successful because the subordinate institutions conceded to regulate the European company to address most of the CSOs’ demands. Due to the European company’s lack of connection to the patron of the regime, the subordinate institutions held strong autonomy and thus could concede to the CSOs. The interactions explained in these case studies suggest that the relative success or failure of CSO movements is not contingent primarily upon their strategies, but rather upon the concessive or repressive measures of the central patron. These measures, adopted as they are for the political survival of the regime’s patron, shape the responses of the subordinate institutions. In essence, CSO movements are more likely to fail when they pose a high risk to the survival of the regime’s patron. The thesis concludes that, while the strategies orchestrated by the CSO movements are important in explaining the dynamics of their movements and outcomes, these strategies are not primary factors in determining the degrees of success or failure. Thus, scholars in this field should take into account the survival strategies adopted by political leaders in the particular regime type within which a social movement operates.
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ItemFalse economy: New Public Management and the welfare-to-work market in Australia( 2016)In 1994 the Australian Government opened case management services for the long-term unemployed to the market, laying the foundation for its now fully privatised employment services system. The system was a pioneering exemplar of New Public Management and it is widely hailed as a successful model of outsourced service delivery. However this thesis argues that the system’s measures of success, focused on aggregate employment outcomes and service delivery costs, mask the adverse impact of its marketisation on ‘hard to place’ jobseekers and ignore the flow-on economic and social costs of their persistent unemployment. Going beyond the existing literature and drawing together multiple sources of data, this thesis presents an in-depth analysis of the context, process and effects of providing employment assistance to people facing multiple and significant barriers to work in Australia. Its findings reveal the complex and multi-disciplinary nature of interventions encompassed in activating those jobseekers; the challenges of coordinating those interventions in contestable funding environments and thin markets; issues in assessment of those jobseekers’ barriers to work and how they are streamed for employment assistance; and individualisation of the problem of long-term unemployment. The findings also reveal that, counter to predictions and despite calibrated incentives, the prospects of the long-term unemployed in Australia moving from welfare to sustainable work have not significantly improved through two decades of radical institutional change underpinned by market-based instruments. This thesis challenges the ‘choice and contestability’ doctrine driving reform of human services. It argues that in the authorising environment, the symbolic value of market-based reform within policy and budgetary siloes trumps evidence of the cumulative impact of competition and explicit measures of performance in public services accessed by citizens vulnerable to exploitation or neglect in the market. In particular, it argues that much of the effort and investment devoted to helping the long-term unemployed overcome barriers to work through individual case management in the employment services system is misdirected, and that the real cost of failing to move the most disadvantaged jobseekers in Australia into work is not adequately factored into policy design, service provider incentives or system metrics in the welfare-to-work market.
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ItemRadical Transparency in Democratic Governing: Democracy unbound within a networked society?( 2016)This thesis considers the extent that (digitally) mediated projects of transparency afford new modes of democratic governing. It puts forward the concept of ̳radical transparency‘ to describe shifts in the technologies and rationalities of government due to acts of disclosure. It approaches these claims through a collective case study of radical transparency apparatuses that employ new media as part of their materialisation of democratic governing, ranging from 18th Century Hansard to beyond WikiLeaks. The apparatuses are purposively selected on criteria of disruptive mechanics, extra-organisational position, and paradigmatic shifts of governing expectations. The resulting comparative analyses falsifies axiomatic understandings of what transparency is and does, as well as claims that democracy is bound to a singular ideal (of governance). Instead, the work considers how transparency apparatuses constitute and are constituted by deeply pluralistic theoretical frameworks of responsive agonism and diverse expectations of the conduct of conduct within a media ecology. The thesis finds a plurality of political affordances emanates from the digital transparency projects, and these create - and predict - complex implications for future evolutions of democratic governing.