In the past decade, ironically, at the very moment that the victory of democratic states over rival forms of political organization was being widely celebrated, severe concerns about the quality of democracy in these same states were also gaining an unprecedented level of prominence. The signs of these concerns were varied: street protests against globalization and corporate rule; worries in the European Union about democratic deficits; political theorists questioning the assumption of their field that democratic politics is organized nationally (Held, 1995); and an increased emphasis on questions of legitimacy by those involved in global policy processes (Porter, 2000). Common to these concerns is the feeling that key aspects of policymaking have become more distant from the mechanisms that traditionally have ensured democratic accountability at the domestic level, including elections and legislatures. Elsewhere, Coleman, I, and others have identified four competing sources of authority that are undermining traditional democratic mechanisms (Coleman and Porter, 2000; Porter 2001; Cutler, Haufler and Porter, 1999). These are supranational authority (the migration of policymaking capacity to international institutions); private authority (involving business associations and practices); technical authority (involving scientific and technical expertise) and

In the 2000/2001 World Development Report, the World Bank offered a new approach named ‘social risk management ’ for poverty reduction. The World Bank documents present the aim of social risk management as to provide instruments to the poor and the vulnerable to decrease the impact of being exposed to risk. The empirical focus of this project is the Social Risk Mitigation Project (SRMP) in Turkey, which is a World Bank project that depends on the social risk management framework. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this study considers the World Bank’s implementation of the ‘Social Risk Mitigation Project ’ by locating it at the intersection of the broad bodies of literature on development, globalization, risk, neoliberalism, and neoliberal governmentality. Here, by doing an ethnographic study, I explain what kind of activities the World Bank executes under a social risk management project, how different actors (World Bank consultants, state institutions and officials, NGOs, scholars, etc.) get involved in the implementation, what kind of power relations take place between these different actors, in which directions institutions are changed, what kind of subjectivities are formed, how local factors and processes intervene, and what kind of (especially unintended) consequences emerge as a result of project implementation. Although

1. From social contract to market contract Ethical liberalization: liberation from obligation? Economic liberalization versus national communities?

This paper builds on a literature review I undertook during the fall of 2001, covering the experiences and efforts of national governments in the South West Asian region (Middle East and the Gulf states) in fostering “good governance 2, ” especially in the way it relates to the empowerment of local authorities. The paper seeks to present some of the main findings

Abstract: In the last two decades of the 20th century Asia stumbled from miracle into crisis. The crisis not only had manifold social consequences but also demands a reconsideration of the multiple explanations offered for Asia’s miracle years. This paper examines these explanations in the light of the crisis and briefly discusses the ways in which scholars of different orientations have adapted and refined their views. In particular the paper looks back on the influential East Asian miracle report of the World Bank, how it was interpreted at the time of publication, and how the report did (or did not) reflect the dominant Washington consensus. The paper then offers a discussion of the post-Washington consensus concluding that the crisis has seen some convergence of the revisionist developmental state and neoliberal positions. However, this convergence should not be seen as a paradigm shift but rather as a reworking of existing positions in the light of debates that predated the economic crisis.

This paper seeks to develop a theoretical contribution to studies in the areas of ICT in developing contexts by reviewing how the notion of context has been understood to date, before offering a rethinking of how it is handled in the IS and development studies literature. To do this we draw a case study of M-PESA a mobile banking initiative in Kenya, on science and technology studies ideas and specifically Cooper and Law’s (1995) distal and proximal perspectives, to argue that we need to better attend to the multiplicity of practices which take place within development arenas, and also to better consider the processes by which context is represented. The paper concludes by addressing some of the implications for information systems research and development.