The GOVERNANCE blog

Dalhousie University at Halifax will host a symposium and dinner in honor of Professor Peter Aucoin on November 12-13.  Aucoin, a long-time SOG member and Governance contributor, taught at Dalhousie University for nearly forty years before his recent retirement. More details about the symposium and dinner here.  Aucoin’s article Administrative Reform in Public Management: Paradigms, Principles, Paradoxes and Pendulums (Governance 3.2, April 1990) has been cited over five hundred times, according to Scholar Google. The article examines the collision of two schools of thought in administrative reform — one rooted in public choice theory, and the other in managerialism.  Aucoin was also named to the Order of Canada last year.

The 2010 Levine Book Prize Committee is comprised of Professor Mirko Noordegraaf, Utrecht School of Governance (Chair); Professor Susan Phillips, School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University; and Professor Anthony B.L. Cheung, Hong Kong Institute of Education.  Information about the prize, and directions on how to nominate a book, are provided on the Levine Prize page.   Nominated books must reach all three members of the committee by 31 March 2010.

The number of quasi-autonomous agencies, boards and commissions within British government has grown markedly in the last three decades, provoking anxiety about the re-emergence of a “patronage state.”  In the current issue of Governance, Matthew Flinders challenges the conventional wisdom, arguing that “the recent history of patronage in the UK is a narrative of shrinking reach and diluted permeation.”  This is largely because of the expanding role of the Office of the Commissioner of Public Appointments, a post created in 1995,and the subsequent creation of bodies with similar powers in specific policy fields.  “The creation of OCPA,” says Flinders, “marked the beginning . . . of a period of rapid reform of patronage in the UK.”  Read more: The Politics of Patronage in the United Kingdom: Shrinking Reach and Diluted Permeation, in 22.4 (October 2009).

In the October issue of Governance, Caner Bakir of Koç University explains a “radical policy reform” — the establishment of Turkey’s independent central bank in 2001.  Bakir focuses on the critical role of a policy entrepreneur — Kemal Dervis, a World Bank official newly appointed as Turkey’s treasury minister — and his success in seizing the opportunity presented by Turkey’s 2001 economic crisis, the most severe in its history.  Dervis, says Bakir, built a powerful reform group centered on the Ministry of the Economy, and “was also instrumental in utilizing coercion by conscious manipulation of incentives by the IMF to press for the implementation of the program.”  Read more: Policy Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change: Multilevel Governance of Central Banking Reform.

Paul Starr, the Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, (center in photo) discussed his forthcoming Governance commentary in Boston on 1 October 2009.  The commentary, “The liberal state in a digital world,” will be published in the January 2010 (23.4) issue of Governance.  The workshop was co-sponsored by the journal and the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service at Suffolk University Law School.

Mitchell A. Orenstein of Johns Hopkins University has won the 2009 Levine Prize for his book Privatizing Pensions: The Transnational Campaign for Social Security Reform (Princeton University Press, 2008).  The Levine Prize is awarded annually by SOG and Governance to a book that makes a contribution of considerable theoretical or practical significance in the field of public policy and administration, takes an explicitly comparative perspective, and is written in an accessible style.  The award committee complimented Orenstein for “a penetrating analysis . . . of interest to a wide range of scholars and policymakers.”  The committee also gave an honorable mention to David E. Lewis of Vanderbilt University for his book The Politics of Presidential Appointments. Read more about this year’s prizewinners.

In the current issue of Governance (22.3), Matt Andrews says that Donald P. Moynihan‘s book The Dynamics of Performance Management “breaks new ground in addressing questions about why performance management reforms are often adopted in limited forms, why these reforms seem to deliver different results to those expected, and how the value of these interventions might manifest in unexpected ways.”  Also reviewed in the current issue: Dan Breznitz on the state’s role in nurturing the high tech sector; Jon Kvist and Juho Saari on the impact of EU institutions on national social protection systems; William Nordhaus on the case for carbon taxes; Lucia Quaglia on Europe’s central banks; David Richards on the condition of the Westminster Model; and Einer Elhauge on problems of statutory interpretation.  Read the reviews here.

Professor Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, will contribute a commentary for the April 2010 issue of Governance.  Commentaries are a new feature of the redesigned journal that will appear in January 2010.  Mahbubani, also a Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School, is most recently the author  The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistable Shift of Global Power to the East (PublicAffairs, 2009).

Governance’s new lead commentaries are short, unrefereed pieces designed to cultivate discussion on critical topics.  The first commentary, in the April 2010 issue, will be written by Paul Starr, Professor of Communications and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

In the current issue of Governance, Adrian Kay and Robert Ackrill challenge the view that the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreement was a “singular event in the international governance of agriculture,” marking a sudden leap to liberalization.   Kay and Ackrill provide historical context for the 1994 Agreement, showing that it was proceeded by a decades-long process of learning through bargaining and rule enforcement.  The significance of the Uruguay Round commitments, they argue, is “a matter of nuance and evolution.”  Kay and Ackrill also speculate that the 1994 agreement may complicate further bargaining because it “locked in” a high degree of specificity in trade rules.  Read more: Institutional Change in the International Governance Agriculture: A Revised Account, 22.3 (July 2009).

A new study of privatization decisions by US country governments from 1992 to 2002 challenges the assumption that fiscal stress is a major reason for privatizing public services.  “There is no evidence that fiscal stress induces privatization,” says Roland Zullo in the current issue of Governance.  Nor is there clear evidence that politically conservative regions favor privatization, or that labor-friendly laws impede it.  Surprisingly, says Zullo, “the results suggest that private and intermunicipal contracting expand when government grows . . . this reflects a pragmatic use of external suppliers for trial, temporary and contingent services.”  Read more: Does Fiscal Stress Induce Privatization? 22.3 (July 2009).