Archive Page 3

Subscribe to Governance, get a free copy of The New Asian Hemisphere

Published April 4, 2010 Subscription offer , commentary Closed

Individuals who take a new subscription to the print version of Governance in April 2010 will receive a complimentary copy of Kishore Mahbubani‘s book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, published by PublicAffairs in 2008.

Subscribe online here. Subscriptions are $30 in the Americas, €32 in Europe, and £21 in the rest of the world. This offer does not apply to renewals. Books will be sent to new subscribers in May 2010.

Free download: New Asian perspectives on Governance

Published March 31, 2010 commentary Closed
Tags: Asia, financial crisis, neoliberalism

The lead commentary for the new issue of Governance (23.2, April 2010) is available as a free download for the next sixty days. New Asian Perspectives on Governance is written by Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

“There is no doubt that the great global financial and economic crisis of 2008-2009 had a profound impact on Asian policymakers,” says Mahbubani. “The first real result of this crisis is the loss of any lingering faith that Asian policymakers may have had with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in governance and economic philosophy.” Read more.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes Governance commentary

Published March 11, 2010 commentary Closed
Tags: accountability, corruption, India, responsiveness

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, writes the lead commentary for the July issue of Governance (23.3). “Indian politics,” says Mehta in his July commentary, “has been undergoing two subtle but pronounced shifts that may have larger lessons for the politics of democratic accountability.” Mehta is the co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (Oxford University Press, 2010); co-author of Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design (Oxford University Press, 2005); and author of The Burden of Democracy (Penguin Books, 2003).

From the Governance archives: What shapes national responses to changes in global capital markets?

Published March 6, 2010 Ten years ago Closed
Tags: capital markets, corporate finance, corporate governance, globalization

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.

Why regulators expands their role

Published February 24, 2010 Current issue Leave a Comment
Tags: Food and Drug Administration, regulation, United States

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 Comment
Tags: 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 Comment
Tags: political economy, regulation, regulatory impact assessment

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 Comment
Tags: 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 Comment
Tags: 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 Comment
Tags: 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.