Ten years ago in Governance (13.2, April 2000), Richard Deeg and Sofia Perez examined the effect of growing capital mobility on the character of corporate finance and corporate governance in major European states. Deeg and Perez challenged the widespread view that liberalization of capital markets would lead to convergence in national policies, arguing that domestic institutional arrangements, and incentives facing state elites, play a critical role in determining each nation’s response. Read more.
From the Governance archives: What shapes national responses to changes in global capital markets?
Published March 6, 2010 Ten years ago ClosedTags: capital markets, corporate finance, corporate governance, globalization
Why regulators expands their role
Published February 24, 2010 Current issue Leave a CommentTags: regulation, United States, Food and Drug Administration
In the current issue of Governance (23.1), Moshe Maor questions the prevailing view that regulatory agencies are “more or less passive actors involving their purview.” Drawing on a study of the US Food and Drug Administration, Maor suggests that regulators will “claim jurisdiction” when new information becomes available about the potential for serious harm from a new technology, or when rival regulators attempt to extend their own jurisdiction over that technology. The underlying concern is to protect organizational reputation. Jurisdictional claiming may not always be rational, Maor argues: “Agency officials do not have all the rational capacity and time to choose the best course of action.” And regulators can act unilaterally, without assurance that political actors will support their jurisdictional claims. Read more: Organizational Reputation and Jurisdictional Claims: The Case of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
New modes of governance for long-term societal challenges
Published February 17, 2010 Current issue Leave a CommentTags: governance, Netherlands, sustainable development
Modern industrialized societies are confronted with immense long-term challenges. But Derk Loorbach of Erasmus University says that two dominant ways of managing those challenges — top-down steering by government or the free market approach — are inadequate. In the current issue of Governance (23.1), Loorbach describes a new governance approach, “transition management,” drawn from experience in the Netherlands. Broad-based innovation networks created under the banner of transition management produce shared visions for social reform while preserving space for short-term innovation. These networks, says Loorbach, “are increasingly influencing regular policies in areas such as energy supply, mobility, health care, agriculture, and water management.” Read more: Transition Management for Sustainable Development: A Prescriptive, Complexity-Based Governance Framework.
Why do governments adopt regulatory impact assessment?
Published February 11, 2010 Current issue Leave a CommentTags: regulation, regulatory impact assessment, political economy
Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is a kind of “meta-regulation,” says Claudio Radaelli, a technique for guiding the rule-making activity of the state. But why do governments adopt RIA? His cross-national study in the current issue of Governance (23.1) examines the hypothesis that RIA is mainly a tool for tightening political control over the bureaucracy. Radaelli finds strong support for the hypothesis in the United States and United Kingdom, less support in Canada and the Netherlands, and little in Denmark or Sweden. The European Union, meanwhile, constitutes a more complex case for interpreting the role of RIA. Read more: Regulating Rule-Making via Impact Assessment.
How experts “do politics” to achieve policy change
Published February 4, 2010 Current issue Leave a CommentTags: Brazil, expertise, policy change, water management
Too many accounts of policy reforms in developing countries discount the role of bureaucrats and experts as agents of policy innovation, Ricardo Gutiérrez argues in the current issue of Governance (23.1). His study of water management reform in three Brazilian states suggests that experts can play the critical role. In these states, reform was not primarily the result of crisis, party or civil society pressure, or intervention by international organizations. Instead, experts drove change. Experts “do politics,” Gutiérrez argues, “when they use expertise as a political resource and broker political, bureaucratic, and social relationships to get their proposals approved and implemented.” Read more: When Experts Do Politics: Introducing Water Policy Reform in Brazil.
How universal healthcare fades away
Published January 26, 2010 Current issue , Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: Canada, healthcare, retrenchment, welfare states
In the current issue of Governance, 23.1, Vandna Bhatia of Carleton University uses Canada as a case study to illustrate the subtle ways in which policymakers in welfare states have undermined health programs. The conventional view that healthcare is protected from retrenchment is misguided, Bhatia says. Discourse has subtly shifted away from the proposition that healthcare is a societal obligation, while governments have relied on “policy drift” — the failure to update programs to meet new needs — to limit their liabilities. The cumulative effect, says Bhatia, is a gradual adjustment of the public to “new realities.” Read more: Social Rights, Civil Rights, and Health Reform in Canada. Free download until January 31.
Fiscal retrenchment in Italy: The collision of imperatives in budget reform
Published January 22, 2010 Current issue Leave a CommentTags: budget reform, fiscal policy, fiscal stress, Italy
Italy was under intense pressure to consolidate its budget in the early 1990s, as it reeled from a currency crisis and struggled to meet requirements for joining the Eurozone. Francesco Stolfi examines how budget institutions were reformed as part of the consolidation effort. A combination of structural and ideological factors shaped the reform, Stolfi says, yielding a budget process that strengthened Treasury power while preserving significant discretion for managers in budget implementation. Stolfi says that his study addresses “the profound epistemological divide” between structuralist and interpretative approaches to the study of policy change. Read the article for free: Testing Structuralist and Interpretative Explanations of Policy Change: The Case of Italy’s Budget Reform.
An apology: The Editors apologize for an error in describing Dr. Stolfi’s institutional affiliation on the first page of this article. Dr. Stolfi now teaches at the University of Exeter.
Governance book reviews: public participation, international political economy, and more
Published January 15, 2010 Current issue , book reviews Leave a CommentTags: book reviews
David Rosenbloom says that Leonardo Avritzer’s book Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil “significantly advances conceptualization and theorizing with respect to participatory democratic institutions,” while Angela Wigger says that a new volume edited by Mark Blyth provides “an erudite and elegantly written” overview of international political economy. Also reviewed in the current issue: Rosemary O’Leary and Lisa Blomgren Bingham on collaborative public management; Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman on the political economy of welfare in the developing world; Rachel Epstein on liberalization in Eastern Europe; and Steven Cohen and William Eimicke on contract management. Read all of the reviews for free in January.
Andrews: “Good government” means different things in different countries
Published January 12, 2010 Current issue Leave a CommentTags: financial management, governance, indicators, World Governance Indicators
In the new issue of Governance (23.1, January 2010) Professor Matt Andrews of Harvard Kennedy School criticizes the “one-best-way model of effective government” that is built into benchmarking projects such as the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators. Examining public financial management structures in thirty-eight nations, Andrews finds substantial variation in practice among countries that are held up as models of effectiveness. “Good public financial management means different things in different countries,” Andrews says. “The good governance version of good or effective government is a hollow one.” Download Andrews’ article, “Good Government Means Different Things in Different Countries” for free.
New book honors SOG Secretary-Treasurer Per Laegreid
Published January 10, 2010 New books by SOG members Leave a Comment
A new book, Change and Continuity in Public Sector Organizations (Fagborkforlaget, 2009), has been published to honor Per Lægreid, SOG’s Secretary-Treasurer. The edited volume includes contributions from Geert Bouckaert, Tom Christensen, Morten Egeberg, Anne Lise Fimreite, Robert Gregory, John Halligan, Bengt Jacobsson, Werner Jann, James G. March, Johan P. Olsen, Ove K. Pedersen and Per Selle. The editors are Paul G. Roness and Harald Sætren of the University of Bergen.
SOG is the Structure and Organization of Government Group of the International Political Science Association, which sponsors Governance. Learn how to join SOG. SOG members receive a subscription to the print version of Governance. New members in the month of January 2010 will receive a complementary copy of Paul Starr’s book Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism.
