The GOVERNANCE blog

Governance co-sponsored a roundtable on “public governance after the financial crisis” at University College London’s School of Public Policy on May 28.  Academics and policymakers from over twenty institutions participated in the day-long discussion, which was a follow-on to a similar session held at Suffolk University Law School in Boston last November.  Papers prepared for the roundtable are being compiled for a forthcoming special issue of Governance.  Photo below: Paul Posner of George Mason University discusses the capacity of democratic systems to deal with fiscal crises.

In Public Management Policymaking in Spain: The Politics of Legislative Reform of Administrative Structures, 1991-1997, Raquel Gallego and Michael Barzelay examine the tumultuous process that led to the adoption of two important laws on administration by the Spanish government in 1997.  The article also illustrates a more rigorous way of mapping how policies about public management evolve.  Gallego and Barzelay conclude that key ministers often made decisions that reflected lessons they had drawn from the experience of their predecessors, and well as their relationships with regional political elites.  In early phases of reform, the evolution of policy was often affected strongly by the conduct of top officials; but at later stages, events were heavily shaped by the “flow conditions of politics.”

The number of libraries providing access to Governance in print or electronic form increased by fifteen percent between 2008 and 2009, according to statistics released this week.  Governance is now available in three thousand libraries around the world.  As the following chart shows, the journal’s readership was broadly distributed around the world in 2009.

In the current issue of Governance (23.2), Valentina Mele of Bocconi University challenges the widely held view that Italy’s legalistic administrative tradition suppresses reform.  The reality, she says, is more complicated.  Mele tracks a prolonged effort to promote government innovation that actually succeeded in “normalizing” novel management policies and practices.  Policy entrepreneurs created space for reform by first ensuring that older traditions “were actively discredited.”  Mele says the case study illustrates why there is a need for closer attention to the social mechanisms that guide change even in politically unstable contexts.  Read more: Innovation Policy in Italy (1993-2002): Understanding the Invention and Persistence of a Public Management Reform.

A watershed in public management reform in France was crossed in 2001 with the adoption of new legislation for the planning and control of public expenditure. In the current issue of Governance (23.2), Anne Corbett provides an original account of the process that led to adoption of the Organic Law on Laws of Finance, or LOLF — an outcome that many of the players involved considered “miraculous.”  Corbett says that the case study reinforces the view that “political leadership and policy entrepreneurship are important characteristics” of key episodes in reform.   Read more: Public Management Policymaking in France: Legislating the Organic Law on Laws of Finance (LOLF), 1998-2001.

SOG member Raj Chari has a new book, co-authored with Gary Murphy and John Hogan, published by Manchester University Press: Regulating Lobbying: A Global Comparison.  Frank Baumgartner calls it “the single best resource for anyone interested in the topic of the regulation of lobbying or political transparency.”  Learn more about the book, and read the first chapter, at regulatelobbying.com.  Chari is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin.