Volumen 66 (2018): Edición 3 (August 2018)

Northern Ireland has now moved from ‘negative’ peace (the absence of violence, largely) to ‘positive’ peace (confidence-building measures to consolidate gains in voting practice and in reducing discrimination against the minority community in employment and housing allocation). This transition has involved funders at the European, regional and local levels investing in peace and reconciliation measures to consolidate political gains made since the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement in 1998. This paper examines the achievements made to date, the extent to which they have resulted in a peace dividend for those most impacted by the violence, and whether the focus of peace-building interventions should shift away from the traditional community relations model. It finds that the reformed local authorities in Northern Ireland and the border regions could play a pivotal role in making a significant difference to peace-building through new legal powers in community planning.

The publication of a far-reaching public value framework for central government in the UK presents an opportunity to consider how this or a similar framework could be a useful tool for public management in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The concept of public value represents an evolution beyond some of the weaknesses of New Public Management, as it goes further to measure the holistic public benefit compared with pure monetary valuation. Examination of the current programmes for government in Ireland and Northern Ireland leads to the conclusion that a public value framework could be useful to advance their agendas. Lessons from social value legislation in England, Scotland and Wales indicate how a more comprehensive public value framework might be implemented in Northern Ireland and Ireland.

The adverse gender outcomes associated with post-conflict power-sharing arrangements contrast starkly with the socially transformative promise of the framework peace agreements which produce them. Scholarship that has sought to analyse the adverse gender outcomes which occur on imple - mentation has largely focused on the complexities of power-sharing institutional architecture and the role of elite political actors within it. This article makes the case for a new research direction. Parallel research in the field of post-conflict public administration indicates that the complexity of power-sharing institutional arrangements may provide increased opportunity structures for the use of bureaucratic discretion. While use of bureaucratic discretion among elite bureaucrats in Northern Ireland was found to be grounded in core public service values (O’Connor, 2015), feminist institutional analysis exposes those ostensibly benign values (neutrality, objectivity and impartiality) as distinctly gendered phenomena when mediated through the prism of gendered organisational culture (Chappell, 2002, 2006). This article considers the history and specificity of the Northern Ireland civil service and in particular its elite cohort of decision-makers - the senior civil service (SCS) - with a view to excavating the particular institutional legacies which may imbue SCS values and culture. In doing so it asks whether gendered institutional legacies have the potential to function as structural inhibitors to formal provisions for gender equality and socially transformative policy in Northern Ireland’s post-conflict dispensation.