ANTICORRP **Call for Papers**
Papers are invited for an international workshop, ‘Understanding Governance Virtuous Circles. Who succeeded and why which will take place in Berlin from 8-11 July 2015.
The workshop is organized as a theory development debate around empirical papers collected from the EU FP7 ANTICORRP project on good governance contemporary achievers: Estonia, Chile, Costa Rica, Taiwan, South Korea, Uruguay and Georgia. In addition to these project papers, the workshop is also open to authors of other papers on successful or ‘borderline’ cases. The latter are countries which made progress, but have not yet managed to change the governance rules of the game, or countries where demand for good governance increased considerably – like India or Brazil, although these countries are still far from any good governance benchmark. While the call is primarily directed to academics working on both contemporary and historical contexts, a few selected practitioners with an outstanding personal experience may also be invited.
The chair of the conference is Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. Several of the advisory board members of the ANTICORRP project will attend, including Robert Klitgaard and Francis Fukuyama. For more information, see the attached concept paper.
The structure of the workshop is as follows:
Day One (Wednesday, July 8)
Roundtable A: Defining Virtuous Circles. What do we actually understand by a virtuous circle? Do virtuous circles really exist or is it only a label for a unique and unrepeatable set of contingencies?
Day Two (Thursday, July 9)
Empirical papers set 1: Good governance achiever cases
Roundtable B: Assessing Virtuous Circles. How do we assess and measure changes from one governance order to another? What kind of data and counterfactuals can we devise to compare across evolutions and understand if some form of agency driven ‘virtue’ is accountable for positive changes and not some alternative complex of factors?
Day Three (Friday, July 10)
Empirical papers set 2: Good governance borderline and rebellion cases
Roundtable C: Lessons Learned. Does the evidence support the existence of virtuous circles, in other words, the existence of linear progress once a significant path was taken? What constellation of actors and circumstances feature in the discussed ‘virtuous circles’ and how do they compare with the ones we find in borderline or high demand countries? What policy lessons can be learned, if any?
Day Four (Saturday, July 11)
Comparative papers and conclusions
**Please send abstracts and a cover letter to Kerry Schorr at (schorr@hertie-school.org) no later than 15 February 2015. A few travel grants might be made available, but as a ground rule we expect participants to cover their own expenses. A registration fee of 250 Euros will be applied to cover joint meals and entertainment.**