Donor Love Will Tear Us Apart: How Complexity and Learning Marginalize Accountability in Peacebuilding Interventions

Complexity theory and systems thinking are increasingly popular in both academic and practitioner discourses to “improve” peacebuilding. Recently, they have also been considered to make peacebuilding interventions more bottom-up and less exclusive. Contributing to the debate in international political sociology on the role of (professional) knowledge in shaping interventions, I examine this claim with an analysis of professional peacebuilding discourse. Drawing on an extensive corpus of operational guidance, policy documents, and interview material, I situate the emerging uses of concepts of complexity in peacebuilding against the backdrop of the power struggles of its actors and institutions. Against the introduction of measures of managerial control, professional peacebuilding discourse has cast its interventions as exceptional and in need of different methods. Thus, learning replaces donors’ standardized measures of accountability. However, the peculiar conflation of accountability as learning that emerges from these struggles legitimizes self-referential expert rule and learning, and marginalizes debates on peacebuilders’ accountability. Rather than “de-colonizing” or making peacebuilding more inclusive, the way complexity concepts have emerged in peacebuilding discourse reproduces—rather than questions—the power structures of international interventions, and denies the people targeted by interventions the status of subjects to be accountable to.

Individual and social commitments of youth on their way to adulthood demonstrated in innovative projects

Having addressed the topic of the preparation of youth to adulthood the author refers to Malcom Knowles concept in which he pointed out several aspects of this process. The author also refers to main components of the European lifelong guidance policy. References to the European guidelines with respect to youthwork lays the background for the review of threes projects. Main assumptions of each project and an outline of their implementation have been laid out in the article. The author puts major attention on the review of achievements of youth on their way to adulthood. They have been illustrated with reflections of the participants who reported on their benefits and transformations which young people experienced.

The Genesis of Voluntary Disclosure: An Analysis of Firms’ First Earnings Guidance

We investigate a firm’s decision to initiate earnings guidance during its first year as a public company following its initial public offering (IPO), which we label “early guidance.” Using a sample of firms with IPOs between 2001 and 2010, we find that almost 60% provide early guidance and that only one-third of the firms that do not provide guidance during the first year subsequently decide to guide. Consistent with the importance of liquidity incentives following the IPO, we find that firms are significantly more likely to provide early guidance when their IPOs are backed by venture capital or private equity investors. Our results indicate that firms with higher-quality IPO information are more likely to provide early earnings guidance. We also find that early guidance has significant implications for future disclosure choices. Firms that guide soon after the IPO are significantly more likely to guide again and to provide regular future guidance (i.e., they establish a regular guidance policy). Finally, we find evidence suggesting that the credibility of initial guidance is lower than that of subsequent guidance, and subsequent guidance credibility relates to both the length of firms’ guidance history and the accuracy of their initial guidance disclosures. This paper was accepted by Shiva Rajgopal, accounting.

Forward Guidance and Heterogeneous Beliefs

Central banks’ announcements that rates are expected to remain low could signal either a weak macroeconomic outlook, which would slow expenditures, or a more accommodative stance, which may stimulate economic activity. We use the Survey of Professional Forecasters to show that, when the Fed gave guidance between 2011:III and 2012:IV, these two interpretations coexisted despite a consensus on low expected rates. We rationalize these facts in a New-Keynesian model where heterogeneous beliefs introduce a trade-off in forward guidance policy: leveraging on the optimism of those who believe in monetary easing comes at the cost of inducing excess pessimism in non-believers. (JEL D83, E12, E43, E52, E58, E65)