This chapter surveys the economic, cultural, and political factors that transformed the Cuban audiovisual landscape beginning in 1989, elucidating the multiple challenges tackled by filmmakers: material shortages, intermittent censorship, and a sometimes tense relationship with the official Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). The chapter demonstrates that, in this richly inventive period, films of all length and genres, drawing on multiple media and replete with Cuban versions of manga, gangsters, and zombies, not only questioned what constitutes state-sponsored, independent, national, or transnational filmmaking, but also carried out a revision of Cuban history into contemporary everyday life. Key factors illuminated include the mentoring role assumed by seasoned director Fernando Pérez; the emergence of women filmmakers for the first time since director Sara Gómez (1942–1974); the entrepreneurial deployment of new technologies; the hybridity of local, international, official, and nonofficial funding sources; the diversification of constituencies and locales represented; and the critical importance of ICAIC’s annual Muestra Joven, or Festival of Young Cuban Filmmakers.

This chapter analyzes the organizational prerequisites for the strategy of instrumentalism, by charting changes in the organizational structure of the National Educational Workers Union (SNTE) of Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. It examines the threats to the corporatist model posed by the dissident movement and the regime response to help the union leadership regain control. President Carlos Salinas sheltered the union from the potentially disruptive effects of education decentralization policies and strengthened SNTE with policies to improve teacher pay. These concessions shaped the union’s internal organization, providing the resources Elba Esther Gordillo needed to build a dominant faction. The consolidation of power in the national union leadership was crucial for the strategy of instrumentalism.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of the Federation of Colombian Educators (FECODE) in the 1980s and 1990s, to show how and why factionalism took hold. It first examines the Pedagogical Movement of the 1980s, a teaching-oriented social movement that reveals a fundamental split between the radical and moderate lefts. This movement sheds light on why the union was initially included in policy negotiations. It then examines broader changes in teacher–state relations that culminated in FECODE’s role in negotiating an education decentralization package that strengthened the national executive committee. The last section analyzes how the political opening contributed to more hierarchical relations and deepening political divisions.

This chapter argues that the organizational structure of the Argentine teachers’ confederation (CTERA), with power rooted in provincial and municipal actors, is crucial for explaining why teachers engaged in ongoing protests. It examines the process of union rebuilding in the wake of democratization, after harsh repression during the military regime. Even if newly elected leaders offered little support to the union because of the debt crisis, union leaders made some progress in consolidating CTERA through their own initiatives. The chapter then turns to decentralization under President Carlos Menem as a point of inflection. This undermined national union leaders, weakening their hold on the base. Once organizational hierarchies were weakened, movementism became the union’s political strategy.

Regional competition in African countries finds expression in tensions, debates, and competition over policy. Regional economic tensions in African countries tend to find expression in four persistently salient issue areas: (a) demand for redistributive policies and social policy, (b) region- and sector-specific development and regulatory policies, (c) land policy, where redistributive tensions and conflicts arise in the building of national land markets, and (d) issues around state structure and design (the territorial division of powers and prerogatives, as under federalism or decentralization). In most countries, regional cleavages trump class-like or interpersonal income inequalities as a driver of national contestation over issues of policy and collective choice. A 2x2 matrix predicts “regional preferences for decentralization and redistribution” based on a region’s relative economic standing and its political alignment with the center. South Africa, where regional inequality is lower and nationalizing institutions are stronger, is an outlier: Redistributive social policy is more developed than it is anywhere else in Africa, and the issue of national land market integration is less salient than it is in many African countries.

In his popular novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), which was first published in Istanbul in 1943, Sabahattin Ali wrote that “for some reason or other people prefer to investigate what they feel sure they will find. It is without doubt easier to find a brave man to descend to the bottom of a well where it is known that a dragon lives than to find a man who will show the courage to descend into a well about the bottom of which nothing is known.”1 This view applies nicely to research into nations and nationalisms, for the bottom of the well is already known: the Ottoman Empire collapsed and was replaced by new nation-states. This collapse has often been taken as the “inevitable” triumph of nation-state over empire, the victory of national identities over other identity constructions.

Leadership in crisis response has traditionally been strongly centralized and hierarchical. Top-down command and control is popular, because a strict hierarchy and clear lines of command enable rapid decision-making and coordinated actions. Critics, however, have argued that centralization is both impossible and undesirable during crises, because leaders lack situational awareness and cannot control frontline responders from a distance. They argue that operational personnel should take charge to ensure an adaptive frontline response, potentially at the cost of efficiency and speed. The operational dilemma of crisis leadership revolves therefore around the tension between centralization and decentralization. To deal with this dilemma, it is useful to study how influence is exercised and power circulates during crises. Rather than a static authority structure, different types and phases of crises require different forms of leadership. Authority structures have to be tested and adjusted throughout the response, so they can be continuously co-constructed by frontline responders and operational leaders, as the complex and dynamic crisis situation evolves.

Chapter 3 starts the chronological review by looking at the role of law during the Early Reform Era (1978–1989). In this era, the Party-state vested economic decision-making authorities with its local governments, giving them a relatively free rein to experiment with and administer economic activity by limiting central law-making. The chapter tracks how such political–economic relations were bolstered by the Party-state’s choices with respect to the use of law. It also shows how, as the era progressed, the law was used to carve out and legitimize politically palatable forms of market activity.

This chapter makes concrete proposals for the design of democratic institutions for platform governance. It proposes a multi-layer series of platform governance entities, drawn loosely from (but greatly expanding on) proposals for social media councils in the extant scholarly literature, and argues that those councils could serve both a quasi-legislative and a quasi-judicial function across the platform economy in order to introduce both popular knowledge and popular control into platform governance.

China’s rapid growth of R&D expenditure has attracted wide attention from the international scientific and policy communities. We try to open the “black box” of China’s central R&D expenditure based on an analytical framework of “funding−performing” in Chapter Four. Specifically, the chapter solves a major mystery regarding China’s central government’s R&D expenditure – who spends how much on what. By using data released by central government agencies with mission in S&T and innovation between 2011 and 2020, we find that the allocation of the central R&D expenditure has become decentralized and diversified, which has posed new challenges for China’s R&D budget management. Much of the public money has financed scientific research, but the nation’s overall R&D funding has been oriented toward development research, thus pointing to a possibility that China’s efforts to build an enterprise-centered innovation system may lack a solid scientific foundation. The findings are helpful for understanding China’s S&T budgeting process and spending patterns as well as funding structure.

Indonesia represents an interesting case for analysis of the relationship between multi-level governance and climate governance for three main reasons. It is a highly decentralized country; it is a major contributor to land-based greenhouse gas emissions; and it is extremely vulnerable to climate change. The chapter first provides a broad overview on Indonesia’s climate governance in the context of decentralization, and then focuses on sub-national governance of climate change mitigation in the land use sector, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Our research suggests that Indonesia illustrates key advantages of highly decentralized polity structures. Political autonomy has facilitated sub-national climate action through direct engagement of provinces with transnational climate initiatives, and the multiplicity of forums for policymaking has allowed certain provinces to champion sub-national engagement in climate change policy. Decentralization has also facilitated experimental policies in the form of innovative sub-national jurisdictional approaches to climate action in the land use sector. At the same time, peculiarities of the decentralization approach in the land use sector have led to perverse incentives that hamper forest-based climate change mitigation action.