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In this chapter, we assess the link between scaling, control and organizational achievements. We argue that control is essential to coordinate organizational members towards a common and shared goal and to provide guardrails for scaling. We use the experience of the Aravind Eye Care System, a non-profit organization based in India providing eye care services to poor people to specify the mechanisms employed by Aravind underpinning three popular organizational scaling modes—branching, affiliation and dissemination. Our objective is to show how control and scaling can be combined in order to protect the value base of a social enterprise and at the same time ensure growth.
The crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic has required rapid and strong action. It also entails key choices, including on how the EU could help mitigate the impact of Covid-19, foster the economic recovery and support the dual green and digital transitions. In September 2019, before the crisis, the Directorate General for Economy and Finance of the European Commission organised a workshop on strengthening the institutional architecture of the EMU. This eBook presents the main ideas discussed at the workshop.
This chapter argues that the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in 2004 and its subsequent ratification by more than 180 parties indicates universal agreement on the norms of quality of government, putting an end to moral relativist arguments. While UNCAC does not define corruption, it defines good governance and sets ethical universalism as its key benchmark. The chapter then follows the intellectual history of this concept and its remarkable success, with the norm of equal, fair, and nondiscriminatory treatment of every citizen present in every current constitutional contract. Ratification does not necessarily mean implementation when corruption is concerned, and the chapter surveys limitations to the practice of ethical universalism in governance and existing approaches to narrow the gap between norm and practice.
Keywords: corruption, quality of government, equality of opportunity, ethical universalism, good governance
This contribution takes Turkey’s use of the derogation mechanism in the aftermath of the failed military coup of 15 July 2016 as a springboard to critically address the operation and the fallacies of the contemporary European derogation regime. The assessment will reveal whether the European system of human rights protection has succeeded in adopting an adequate and viable approach that can counterbalance the increased leeway accorded to derogating states, and formulate safeguards to mitigate human rights abuses. The contribution concludes by providing a road map proposal for adequate oversight marked by rigorous scrutiny of derogation claims that can be described as a ‘consultation and cooperation process’. This process would place the Secretary General of the Council of Europe in a more active and operationally focused position to influence state decisions, to counterbalance the increased leeway accorded to derogating states, and to formulate safeguards to mitigate human rights abuses.
With its constitutional separation of power between the executive and administration, over the years Sweden has frequently been held up as a shining example of modern state governance. However, recent decades of internationalising politics, EU membership and growing public-sector complexities have placed greater demands on the Swedish executive. In recent years, the established governance system has changed in several respects. First, the previously highly decentralised system has become more centralised and central-local relations remain tense. Second, at the central level, the government has sought to increase control through politicisation. Third, Swedish pandemic policy highlighted the promises and pitfalls of ‘Swedish dualism’. And fourth, government communication has become ever more mediatised. In consequence, the chapter concludes that what from the outside looks like an exemplar of meritocratic democracy is rather a tactically flexible realpolitik built on interpretive ambiguities in the constitution—providing the Swedish executive with much-needed responsiveness in times of significant change, but also the veil for greater centralisation and control from afar.
Neo-liberalism has had one central message for the state: scale back, cut back, cut out, transform. This brings to mind Winston Churchill's reply to an opponent who asked, ‘How much is enough?’ to Churchill's repeated push to spend increasingly more on defence in the 1930s. Churchill's rejoinder came in the form of a story about a Brazilian banker with whom he had just had lunch. The banker had received a cable informing him of the death of his mother-in-law and asking for instructions. He cabled back: ‘embalm, cremate, bury at sea; leave nothing to chance’.
This take on neo-liberalism – as burying the state – is certainly exaggerated because neo-liberalism comes in many different forms with many different policy applications. Only the recommendations of the most radical strands come close to the Brazilian banker's response to his mother-in-law's death. Yet the story as a metaphor for neo-liberal views of the state nonetheless somehow rings true. This is largely because neo-liberals have been more anti-state in their rhetoric than in their actions.
The state has been neo-liberalism’s bête noire, as its main focus of attack, because neo-liberals – whatever their differences – have viewed the state as consistently doing too much in the wrong ways with the worst consequences not only for the markets but also for democracy, by endangering individual freedom through its interventions. As a provider of public goods, the state had to be scaled back to leave room for the market, which would assure more efficiency. However, the state has also been neo-liberalism’s greatest conquest, as its main locus of action, because it has been primarily through the state that neo-liberals have been able to realize their vision(s).
From the outset, the media in Turkey have developed as a political institution rather than a market and media owners perceived themselves primarily as political actors. This has caused the media to be divided between proponents and opponents of the political establishment. Initially, media polarisation was characterised by ideological divisions. With the changes brought in the ownership structure after the 1980s, however, where news outlets were transferred from family firms to large corporations, the proximity (or distance) of media owners to government became no longer indicative of political (dis)agreement; rather it was primarily driven by economic interests. Accordingly, the journalistic profession was transformed from a self-driven political class to an instrument of power for the state and the private capital.This chapter aims to provide an analysis of the multi-faceted and inter-connected sources of pressure - the military, the government, courts, media owners and journalists themselves - on the journalistic profession in Turkey. These sources reinforce each other in sustaining various types of pressures on the media of a political, legal and financial nature. The constraints produced by these power mechanisms gain particular weight and become all the more effective in view of the absence of a collective professional identity and the lack of solidarity among journalists. The deeply entrenched socio-economic inequalities that characterise the journalistic profession, professional hierarchies and ideological polarisation deepen journalists’ vulnerability vis-à-vis political and economic power, as represented by the state and media ownership.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between the prohibition on refoulement under human rights law (in particular under the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR)) and protections under international refugee law. It illustrates that the two systems, human rights and refugee law, develop their protections in different modes. I illustrate this divergent development as a riposte to the claim that non-refoulement under human rights law effectively broadens the protection against refoulement in refugee law. Of course, in some ways, that claim is correct, but in other respects human rights non-refoulement is highly limited, particular as regards which rights violations will lead to protection against return. Currently, it tends to focus on Article 3 ECHR, the right not to be subjected to torture, inhuman and degrading treatment. The chapter critiques the outer edges of human rights non-refoulement, in particular the ECtHR’s ‘flagrant breach’ caselaw.