Appropriate Institutions? Traditional Governance and Public Goods Provision in Oaxaca, Mexico

What are the consequences of the adoption of traditional governance institutions among indigenous groups for local government affairs? We study the 1995 Usos y Costumbres traditional governance reform in the state of Oaxaca, which legitimized these structures in a subset of its municipalities. We show that the degree of ethnolinguistic polarization between residents of outlying communities and residents of municipal capitals is an important barrier to the former's political representation in local elections. In terms of public goods provision, villages of ethnic minorities are less likely to gain electric service but more likely to gain sewerage services and public schooling.

Custom Elections and Local Policies: The Case of Canada’s First Nations

We examine the effect of community-designed electoral codes on Canadian First Nation communities. Adopting a custom code for local elections allows for changes such as increasing term duration, creating appeal and supervisory bodies, and incorporating traditional governance elements. To reduce biases due to selective opt-in, we exploit the timing of the electoral reform and a rich set of controls. We find that bands using the custom systems pay lower remunerations to their chiefs, spend more on education and training and less on band development, and have better wastewater services but show no sizable differences in income, population, or employment.

Compositional Stasis and Flexibility in American Indian Tribes

American Indian tribal power has typically expanded since the 1960s. During this period, often referred to as the Self-Determination Era, tribes have regained much of their earlier political centrality. One rarely addressed limitation during this period is the inability of tribal polities to break into smaller units while maintaining recognition as legitimate. This essay identifies the inability of tribes to exercise what the authors call compositional flexibility and fracture to form new polities discrete of the previous tribe. The authors argue the absence of compositional flexibility shapes tribal politics and is at odds with many forms of traditional governance systems.

Ante las metas 230 del convenio de biodiversidad. ¿Es la gobernanza de las áreas protegidas una alternativa a la gobernanza política tradicional?

Decisions on the future conformation of the planet and its biosphere will soon have to be made. About 30% of the globe under different categories will be declared a protected area by 2030. Such determination on international level, perhaps unique in its kind due to its territorial scope, will lead to the re-conformation and resignification of enormous spaces. For a century and a half, protected areas have been changing their purposes; it is now necessary to review their governance and the effectiveness of their management, which should not replicate that of unprotected territories. High social and environmental expectations will fall on marginal public institutions within their governments. Many of them dream that these territories will provide alternative models to those offered by traditional governance, projecting non-environmental political utopias and adding complexity. The objective of this work is to evaluate the challenge and lay out criteria to confront it. To this end, demands and feasibility in the case of Argentina are analyzed through two scenarios, estimating the necessary resources and pointing out possible criteria. It is concluded that many priorities must be reformulated in the country and the world to meet a new territoriality since the environmental governance is a good alternative, which is as much in crisis as the traditional one.

Risk-Intelligent Communities for Lifelong Learners in a Post-Truth Era

After Oxford Dictionaries had announced the word “post-truth” as the Word of the Year in 2016, the concept of post-truth became highly popular in contemporary literacy. Use of the word became more widespread. Post-truth can be simply explained as disappearance of norms for truth. In a society divided by bias, feelings and personal believes are more important than objective facts. In the post truth era, realities don't make a difference. It is a challenging environment for public in this COVID-19 times and within traditional governance structures established around multiple layers of competence where lines of accountability and responsibility are not clear. For the future to come any time soon, we need risk intelligent communities that consist of lifelong learners.

The Governance of Traditional Medicine and Herbal Remedies in the Selected Local Markets of Western Kenya.

Background A lot of emphasis is often placed on modern governance systems and little or no attention is given to traditional governance practices which remain largely undocumented. The study aimed at finding out important traditional and modern governance practices that regulate traditional medicine sector in the Western Kenya. Materials and Methods The study was carried out in selected market centres of Western Kenya where the identified Traditional Medicine Practitioners (TMPs) sell their traditional medicine. All consenting TMPs and Professional Experts were interviewed with the aid of a semi-structured questionnaire. Purposive sampling design with elements of snow ball techniques was employed in tracing competent traditional medicine (TM) experts and relevant professional experts. The data collected was processed in Microsoft Excel and descriptive statistics performed. The Pearson’s Chi square statistics was carried out to determine the significance of the traditional and modern governance data sets using the STATA software. Results Modern governance practices were not significantly different in all the market centres surveyed (p=0.080). Equally, the traditional governance practices were also not significantly different in all the selected market centres (p=1.000). Conclusions Traditional governance practices play an important role in the governance of traditional medicine, and are shaped by the socio-cultural beliefs of the local communities. Modern governance practices, on the other hand, are widely perceived as top down regulation of the traditional medicine growing industry.

TRADITIONAL GOVERNANCE SYSTEM AND THE CONTROL OF INSURGENCY IN BADE EMIRATE, YOBE STATE

Insecurity has remained one of the daunting problems in human organizations since time immemorial. Human beings are in constant search for security to ensure self-sustenance and societal development. The traditional governance system plays an important role in the formation, growth, and development of society. These roles such as maintenance of peace, provision of leadership roles, proprietary to culture and custom of the people and above all ensuring the transitions of the values of the society from one generation to another. In Yobe State the threat of insecurity posed by the rise of the Boko Haram insurgency could be traced to governance issues where governance is defined as the way and manner, including all the institutional arrangements through which a country pursue its internal policies and external relations with ‘development’ at its core. Therefore, given the character of the traditional institutions in Yobe state and Bade emirate in particular in uniting the community to ensure proper security of lives and property. This paper thus intends to interrogate the security challenges in contemporary Bade emirate with emphasis on the role of the traditional governance system in promoting security. The paper adopted the primary and secondary method of data collection anchored on the Mass Society theory. The major findings of the paper reveal that insecurity in Yobe state and Nigeria, in general, can no longer be interrogated from the militarists’ perspective alone, but rather a re-thinking on the traditional governance system to check the persistence of the violations of the traditional political, economic and social relations among citizens that breeds suspicion and distrusts. The paper recommends amongst other things that, the government should as a matter of urgency put in place, policies, and programs that will strengthen the traditional institutions throughout the country so that they can perform their traditional roles as custodians of the values of the society.