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This paper aims to focus on the expectations and predicaments of Cameroonian civil servants two years after the country reached its completion point of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.

In‐depth interviews were conducted with some civil servants in Yaoundé, the provincial capital of the Centre Region and the capital of Cameroon, and Bamenda, the capital town of the North West Region. Newspaper articles were also an important source of data for this paper.

Cameroonians were initially exhorted to understand the government's adoption of the stringent measures prescribed by the Breton Wood Institutions in order to revamp the ailing economy. The austerity measures adopted by the Cameroon government led to immense hardship for civil servants and Cameroonians in general. Cameroonians initially had high hopes for the HIPC programmes, but they were rather seeing their living and working conditions deteriorating further. This led to bribery and corruption and other social vices perpetuated by all categories of civil servants. Because of the deteriorating living conditions, the economy has been marred by continuous strikes, which have led to the massacre of many Cameroonians. Although the future seems to be bright in the long run, it is bleak within the next few years given the enormous challenges facing the country.

This is a useful source of information to Cameroonian diasporas who are not abreast with the happenings in Cameroon.

This paper exposes the hypocrisy of the Cameroon government and the incessant strikes that have bedevilled the country. This paper will be of interest to Cameroonians, especially those in diaspora who are attempting to fight Paul Biya's corrupt regime.

This paper aims to investigate public sector reform (PSR) initiatives in Kazakhstan, and how such reform efforts have helped the government to be more responsive to the needs and demands of the citizens.

The paper examined four key PSR initiatives: decentralization, Civil Service reform, e‐governance, and civil society in improving governance in post‐Soviet Kazakhstan.

In light of Kazakhstan government's efforts to reform the public sector, the study finds that substantial progress has been made in improving its service delivery systems and enhancing good governance.

The study is an investigation of four out of several PSR initiatives aimed at improving good governance.

The study provides insights into how aspects of PSR can be fundamentally useful in promoting good governance.

This paper sets out to argue for rethinking governance through the prism of Montesquieu's model of checks and balances within state powers. It aims to explore the parallel between the eighteenth century concept of division of power and the current need to engage and balance the powers of the state, industry/markets and civil society in governance for global sustainability. It also takes Montesquieu's doctrine of balance of powers beyond static checks and balances into more dynamic innovation.

This is a conceptual paper that translates seventeenth and eighteenth century state theory into twenty‐first century governance. It also explores how models from innovation may be applied to discuss dynamic aspects of governance.

Drawing on the product‐cycle model, the paper shows how governance entrepreneurship may be explored and understood in innovation terms. The paper explores extractive industries' transparency initiative (EITI) as an illustration of governance innovation to address a gross governance and market failure in the extractive industries – the “resource curse”, particularly in developing countries. It shows how much of EITI's remarkable success in building institutional support is due to actors expanding from their traditional domains into new complementary roles. Each of the three powers – civil society, business, and politics – has exploited their comparative advantages in bringing the governance project forward.

Given the limitation of conventional governance models, the originality/value of the paper lie in its launch of new supplementary governance approaches and their application to the EITI case.

This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.

An important agency of the government is its civil service or bureaucracy. The civil service has the potential to empower a government to achieve a country's goals, that is, to improve its citizens’ standard of living. The ability of a civil service to successfully support the government depends heavily on the characteristics of the civil service. In the case of Indonesia, the civil service is slow; lacks transparency, accountability, initiative; and is sometimes corrupt. Therefore Indonesia's civil service is badly in need of reform, both in relation to its institutional aspects as well as in relation to moral issues.

The purpose of this paper is to compare assessment practices for highly visible social initiatives implemented by civil society organizations (CSOs) and businesses in Latin America and Spain.

The paper presents a secondary analysis of field‐based case studies that focused on four dimensions of assessments carried out by companies and CSOs to determine the impact of their social initiatives. The four aspects studied were: definition of the initiative's mission and goals; creation of value for stakeholders; quality of managerial practices deployed in the social initiative; and degree of alignment of mission and strategy. Ad hoc scales were developed and two raters evaluated the cases based on these dimensions.

CSOs made a greater effort than businesses to assess their initiatives, as reflected in the four performance assessment scores.

The main limitations were the limited scope of information available for the analysis – a drawback when using secondary data – and the particular characteristics of the initiatives in this convenience sample.

Businesses implementing initiatives with expected social impacts as part of their CSR efforts should not rule out the possibility of outsourcing management and assessment of those initiatives to CSOs.

The paper sheds light on the relative strengths of CSOs compared with companies with regard to managing and assessing social initiatives. The finding is somewhat unexpected, given the culture of management effectiveness that permeates the business sector. The authors conclude that further study is required to identify the reasons for higher CSO performance and suggest some venues for such studies.

In recent years, the Internet has increasingly served as an important tactical tool for protest campaigns, arguably contributing to a restructuring of the repertoire of contention. This study analyzes a recent case of Internet-backed activism, focusing on the ongoing transnational mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the America's (FTAA) initiative. The Hemispheric Social Alliance, a coalition of hundreds of civil society organizations across the Western hemisphere opposed to the free market underpinnings of the FTAA, has employed Internet technologies to communicate, strategize, educate and pressure state authorities in an effort to promote an alternative social-developmental vision. This case of transnational contention has important implications that go beyond the Americas context. The organization of groups transnationally, combined with Internet communication and coordination strategies, suggests that popular political protest has begun to look considerably different from the time when state boundaries contained much political discourse and action.

This paper aims to compare profiles of social enterprises as they are emerging in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea and to highlight common features across countries allowing the identification of (partly) East‐Asian‐specific model(s) of social enterprise.

The paper first examines the socio‐economic contexts in which new public policies and new NPOs' initiatives were launched to offer innovative solutions to current challenges, especially unemployment. Interactions between Eastern Asia and Western regions (EU, USA) are also analysed as to experiments and conceptions of social enterprise. In order to identify major convergences and divergences across countries in Eastern Asia, we rely on country studies presented in this issue as well as on a broad literature, related more specifically to the development and roles of NPOs and co‐operatives in this region.

Five major models of social enterprise with specific dynamics can be identified in Eastern Asia. State influence and driving forces linked to public policies make these models rather different from the typical US social enterprise; as for the role of civil society, it seems weaker than in Western contexts but is growing significantly. Co‐operative movements also play a significant role in shaping some social enterprise models. Finally, two conditions identified as critical for the development of social economy organisations – a “condition of necessity” and a “condition of shared destiny” – seem to be valid in Eastern Asia as well, provided they are properly reinterpreted.

As in other regions, the concept of social enterprise itself only begins to be used in Eastern Asia, and no specific legislation deals explicitly with social enterprise as such, except in South Korea. So the main challenge was to identify all categories of initiatives which can be described as part of the new “social enterprise phenomenon”. The understanding of the latter may evolve over time and vary across countries.

The present analysis, just like the other four papers in this issue, is a result of a joint research project of the EMES European Research Network and East‐Asian researchers. Country studies were conducted along common broad guidelines, and they were discussed and revised at various stages, which insured a fairly good level of comparability. Moreover, this seems to be the first systematic comparative analysis on social enterprise involving all industrialised countries in Eastern Asia.

In this chapter, the authors argue that the performance and dynamic of civil society in Brazil has been fundamentally guided by local institutions, but that the issues, approaches and political decisions that gained publicity, and thus helped to strengthen civil society mobilization, have been strongly influenced by the agendas of the so-called “global civil society.” It would be wrong to classify them as foreign issues or declassify them based on the argument that they consider largely external interests or the reality of developed countries. The authors will attempt to show how the issues on the civil society agenda that are supported in arenas of public debate in Brazil are filtered by local institutions and are only considered relevant if they mirror the reality of the country and correspond to the aspirations, demands and challenges of certain segments of society.