Two new journal publications by Sylvia I. Bergh

Two new journal publications by Sylvia I. Bergh, Senior Lecturer in Development Management and Governance, published in Open Access with the support of the ISS Open Access Fund

Sylvia Bergh is the guest editor for a Themed Section on 'Neoliberal reforms and the Reconfiguration of State Power in the Southern Mediterranean: Implications for Local Governance' in the journal Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 17 No. 3,November 2012.
 
Download Sylvia Bergh's introductory article entitled 'Introduction: Reshaping the effects of neoliberal reforms on local governance in the Southern Mediterranean'

Sylvia I. Bergh also authors another article in the same issue, entitled 'Inclusive' Neoliberalism, Local Governance Reforms and the Redeployment of State Power: The Case of the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) in Morocco

The support of the ISS Open Access Fund to buy the copyrights for these two articles is gratefully acknowledged.

All eight articles in this Journal Issue will be published by Routledge in 2013 as an edited book volume (also by Sylvia I. Bergh) under the title 'The Redeployment of State Power in the Southern Mediterranean: Implications of Neoliberal Reformsfor Local Governance'.

Summary of special journal issue and forthcoming book

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.

About the author

Sylvia I. Bergh is Senior Lecturer in Development Management and Governance at ISS

Her forthcoming publications include:

• 'Governance Reforms in Morocco - Beyond ElectoralAuthoritarianism' to be published on 13 December 2012 in 'Governance in the Middle East and North Africa: A Handbook', edited by Abbas Kadhim and published by Routledge.
• 'Democracy and Development in Morocco: Local Governance and Political Participation in North Africa', monograph to be published in 2013 by I. B.Tauris