Professor
Publishes Commentaries about Problematic Trend in
Governance
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In
two recent publications, Associate Professor
of Public Policy Janine Wedel warns that the
outsourcing crucial government functions to
private individuals and companies is an alarming
trend.
In
the commentaries, one published in the Aug.
11 issue of Financial Times and another in
the Aug. 12 issue of Salon, she uses a recent
U.S. Federal Court ruling to underscore the
dangers of contracting out government functions.
The case involves two contractors, Andrei Shleifer,
a noted Harvard economics professor, and Jonathan
Hay, a legal advisor, who managed a U.S.-funded
flagship project to reform Russia’s economy
in the 1990s.
“Hay
and Shleifer were supposed to be providing
impartial advice to the Russians, but while
doing so they were also making personal investments
with the benefit of insider knowledge,” she
wrote in Salon.
Wedel,
a social anthropologist who has studied informal
systems, networks and governance over several decades,
was working in Eastern Europe when she brought
attention to the contractors by writing about
how their “network” gained influence
in the mid 90s. (Her
latest |
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Janine
Wedel’s latest book, “Collision
and Collusion: The Strange Case of
Western Aid to Eastern Europe,” won
the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas
Improving World Order. |
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book, “Collision and
Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern
Europe,” won
the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.)
Ultimately the court charged
both Harvard and the duo with conspiring to defraud
the government. The
case reveals how U.S. reliance on contractors to
make policy can damage relationships with foreign
nations
and undermine policy goals, according to Wedel.
The current
U.S. government is making the same mistake, she claims
in the articles. “Yet, a decade later,
outsourcing of government functions has accelerated,
driven by the Bush administration’s ideological
preference for markets and, paradoxically, by the increasing
demand for U.S. government services – namely
military, foreign aid and nation-building activities,” she
writes in Financial Times. Supported by the administration’s
current strategy, government contractors have sometimes
made crucial policy decisions in Iraq, she adds.
In the
Salon piece, she blames some of the problems on a
specific group: “The practices that led
to the Boston ruling are not an aberration. In fact,
a group that operates today in ways similar to the
Harvard partners in Russia is receiving much attention.
This is the small, tightknit group of neoconservatives
whose strategizing and lobbying helped thrust the
United States into the war in Iraq.” Wedel has published her analysis and commentaries
in many newspapers and magazines, including the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times,
Boston Globe, The Nation and The National Interest.
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