New federalism and health policy

The making of health policy in the United States is a complex process that involves the private and public sectors, including multiple levels of government. Five characteristics of the policy process are identified, which establish the means by which policies are formulated and which affect the nature of the policies that emerge. These characteristics include (1) the relationship of the government to the private sector; (2) the distribution of authority and responsibility within a federal system of government; (3) the relationship between policy formation and implementation; (4) a pluralistic ideology as the basis of politics; and (5) incrementalism as the strategy for reform. The article focuses on the impact on health policy of the distribution of authority and responsibility within the federal system, particularly the impact of new federalism policies as they emerged during the past decade. The effects of dual federalism, cooperative federalism, creative federalism, and new federalism are examined in relation to health policies. The article concludes with an examination of the challenge to long-established values and health policies posed by new federalism.     

Policy networks and policy change in organic agriculture: a comparative analysis of the UK and Ireland

This paper takes a comparative case–study approach, located within the literature on policy networks, to organic agriculture policy in the United Kingdom and Ireland since the late 1980s. An examination of policy development for the organic sector focuses primarily on regulatory arrangements. The core of the analysis applies some prominent themes in the policy network literature to the organic sector: the debate about sectoral and sub–sectoral networks, the relationship between networks, context and outcomes, and the role of the state and ideas in promoting policy change.     

The industrial society in transition: Comparative public policymaking - the United States and Sweden

This paper attempts to contrast the industrial policymaking “styles” of the U.S. and Sweden. The study looks past the clutter of economic and trade issues into underlying political culture and institutional regime. The conceptual framework of pluralism versus managed pluralism is employed to examine some complex issues related to economic and industrial management, and to help explain the problem. A strategy to advance the long-term interests of a country must go beyond the “legislative pork barrel” approach, simply to create employment and to keep jobs. Industrial policy must have both institutional and policy linkages. Government-business cooperation at a sectoral level is essential in providing policy loans and tax incentives. The state, to facilitate policy implementation, has to pursue linkage developments between industrial, human resource, economic, and trade policies.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.     

The emergence of policy implementation analysis: The Wyatt v. Stickney decision

In recent years scholars have devoted substantial attention to the “implementation” phase of the policy-making process. Analytical efforts have focused on the identification of variable sets as they are associated with the outcomes of public policies and programs. This article will discuss these program implementation conceptualizations within the context of a landmark court decision. This court decision, Wyatt v. Stickney, impacted to a profound degree the lives of residents in institutions for the mentally retarded. Finally, based on the analysis of this case, the authors cite limitations and propose future directions for social policy implementation analysis as a scholarly emphasis.     

Implementing Regional Policy in Poland: A New Era?

In 2010, Poland launched a new national strategy for regional development which is seen as an assertion of Poland's domestic regional development vision, informed by, but distinct from, EU cohesion policy which has dominated Polish regional policy since accession. A key question is whether a new model of policy implementation is emerging. The strategy includes a commitment to a place-based regional policy model. This implies spatially sensitive policy implementation capable of mobilising the potentials of all territories. However, the concept is vague. Moreover, in Poland this agenda is being launched in a context of entrenched territorial disparities, traditionally constrained policy implementation capacity and institutional change. What are the defining characteristics of place-based implementation systems? What are the challenges to the institutionalisation of the place-based model? Are these evident in delivery frameworks being developed in Poland?     

Simulating commercial policy in a small,open dual economy with urban unemployment: A general equilibrium approach

A two‐sector numerical general equilibrium model calibrated on Kenyan data is used to consider second‐best tariff policy in an economy with a distorted market for urban‐industrial labour and urban unemployment. The results illustrate the sensitivity of second‐best policy to the way the administered urban wage is determined (whether it is fixed primarily in terms of food or the manufactured good), and to the degree of inter‐sectoral mobility of capital. Efficiency gains from moving to a second‐best policy are shown to be small in comparison with the gains from eliminating the wage distortion in the first place.     

SUPRANATIONAL GOVERNANCE OR NATIONAL BUSINESS‐AS‐USUAL? THE NATIONAL ADMINISTRATION OF EU STRUCTURAL FUNDS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND DENMARK

The partnership principle in EU cohesion policy was introduced in order to involve subnational authorities and interest organizations in policy formulation and implementation. In this article we examine how the member states have reacted to this call for a new way of making public policy. We argue that the multi‐level governance literature and the critics of the multi‐level governance framework have not examined implementation structures properly, but have focused on regional influence. We conduct a comparative analysis of the Dutch and Danish implementations of the European Social Fund and the European Regional Development Fund. Our findings show that when examining implementation structures it becomes clear that member states are in full control of the re‐allocation of EU funds. They show that Denmark and The Netherlands have been able to absorb EU cohesion policy within already existing national implementation structures of labour market policies and regional development. One central theoretical implication of our study is that the focus of studies of any fundamental re‐allocation of power resources in cohesion studies should comprise the entire network of implementation rather than the strategies of its individual component actors.     

冷战与美国的大战略、国家安全理念和国家构建

作为政策思想和行为的"大战略"或者"国家战略"反映现代世界的总体战和"总体冷战"的特性和要求,具有内在的扩张性、综合性和政治性。大战略的关键意义既在于协调和统御军事和非军事因素,也在于平衡和整合政策和制度的对内和对外的方面。在冷战时期的美国,"国家安全"理念不仅是对外政策和战略的统御性理念,也连带着国内政府组织改造、国家扩张以及国家和社会的关系重建的重要内容。本文试图突显以往受到忽略的美国冷战大战略与国家建构的历史进程之间的关系,也提示美国冷战战略和政策的历史根源、国家风格和复杂多面的特征。     

Searching for Exits from the Great Recession: Coordination of Fiscal Consolidation and Growth Enhancing Innovation Policies in Central and Eastern Europe

To overcome the Great Recession that started in 2008, the European Union (EU) has opted for a strategy that combines austerity-driven fiscal and experimental ‘growth-enhancing’ research, development, and innovation (RDI) policies supported by different coordination mechanisms. We analyse the experiences of four Central and Eastern European economies—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia—in implementing this strategy. Given the weak policy capacities both in the EU institutions and CEE economies to draft and coordinate such novel RDI policies, we find that the implementation of this strategy is more challenging under the current EU fiscal and economic policy coordination system than assumed by the EU.     

Ideas, bargaining and flexible policy communities: policy change and the case of the Oxford Transport Strategy

Critiques of policy networks have highlighted particularly the inability of concepts such as policy communities to explain policy change. The established construction of policy community places it chiefly as a metaphor for a relatively stable network within the policy process, which emphasizes the resource dependencies between key stakeholders. Typically, a process of bargaining brings about accommodation and a state of negotiated order.
However, a key problem arises in explaining major policy change where an established policy community persists. One solution here is to appreciate that, over time, dominant ideas and associated policy meanings may shift appreciably within an otherwise durable policy community. Thus, even a seemingly insulated policy community, under certain conditions, may not be immune to idea mutation and new policy meanings. Given the central importance of policy communities, these shifts may induce significant policy change.
A case study of this type is provided by the Oxford Transport Strategy (OTS), where a dual process of change took place. On one level of analysis, a challenge to the policy community produced a typical bargaining strategy, with an emphasis on negotiated order. On another level of analysis, however, the terms of the policy debate shifted markedly, and produced a new meaning for the key concept of integrated transport within the policy community. In turn, this process induced significant policy change. The article concludes that, ironically, the survival of a policy community depends on its ability to re-create itself by visualizing a new future.     

Joined-up government and privacy in the United Kingdom: managing tensions between data protection and social policy. Part I

The Labour government that came to power in the United Kingdom in 1997 made much of its commitment to ‘joined‐up working’, by which it meant horizontal integration between policies and co‐ordination across services. The particular manner in which it pursued this commitment has led to growing pressure for the sharing of citizens’ personal information among public service agencies. Yet at the same time, Parliament was engaged in implementing the European Data Protection Directive with a new Data Protection Act and the Government was honouring its manifesto commitment to bring the European Convention on Human Rights – including its enshrined right to private life – into domestic law. Government has therefore been obliged to find ways of managing the potential tension between these commitments. There are two analytically distinct dimensions to the arrangements through which this is being attempted. First, the horizontal dimension consists in initiatives that apply across all policy fields, and includes the establishment of cross‐governmental guidelines for implementing data protection law as well as the development of national policy on sharing personal data between public services. In 2002, the government published a major policy paper on data sharing and privacy. By late 2003, its approach to the need for legislation had changed sharply. The second analytically distinct dimension, the vertical dimension, consists in the laws, codes and norms developed in specific policy fields to govern relationships between data sharing and privacy within those fields. This two‐part article discusses these arrangements. Part I analyses the horizontal dimension of the governance of data sharing and privacy. Part II (published in the next issue) examines the vertical dimension in three fields in which tensions between data sharing and privacy have come to the fore: community safety, social security and NHS health care. Four options for the governance of data sharing and privacy are analytically distinguished: (1) seeking to make the two commitments consistent or even mutually reinforcing; (2) mitigating the tensions with detailed guidelines for implementation; (3) allowing data sharing to take precedence over privacy; and (4) allowing privacy to take precedence over data sharing. The article argues that, despite its strong assertion of (1), the government has, in practice, increasingly sought to pursue option (2) and that, in consequence, the vertical dimension has become much more important in shaping the relationship than the horizontal dimension. The articles argue, however, that option (2) is a potentially unstable strategy as well as being unsustainable.     

Understanding Diversity Management in the Public Sector: A Case for Contingency Theory

Recent diversification in Western populations has led to the implementation of diversity policies like diversity management (DM), a human resource management concept that promotes the hiring, retention, and active participation of a diverse workforce in order to improve organizational performance. This paper seeks to develop contingency theory as a theoretical framework for examining and explaining different DM practices across governments. In contingency theory, there is no one best way to manage all organizations; rather the internal and external environments of each organization create unique situations that require programs tailored to their distinctiveness in order to achieve optimal functionality.     

Analysing policy delivery in the United Kingdom: the case of street crime and anti-social behaviour

For all governments, the principle of how and whether policies are implemented as intended is fundamental. The aim of this paper is to examine the difficulties for governments in delivering policy goals when they do not directly control the processes of implementation. This paper examines two case studies – anti-social behaviour and street crime – and demonstrates the difficulties faced by policy-makers in translating policy into practice when the policy problems are complex and implementation involves many actors.     

Information society policy in the developing world: A critical assessment

The Global Information Society (GIS) has in recent years been high on the political agenda of Western countries. These countries have been concerned with the development of Information Infrastructures in order to achieve the Information Society. In the West there has been a broad consensus about the framework in which the development of the GIS needs to take place. On both national and international levels a framework has to be established which supports competition, encourages private investment, supports flexible regulatory framework and allows for open access to networks. Recently this dominant scenario has been transposed as the appropriate scenario for the development of Information Infrastructures in the developing world. This article sets out to give an overview of GIS policy in a developmental context. It elaborates on recent policy initiatives in the area. At the international level it critically analyses changes in the communications industries and in the global economy. At the national level it critically analyses the assumptions of the dominant scenario and its proposed strategy for achieveing the GIS.     

Beyond social regulation? New instruments and/or a new agenda for social policy at Lisbon?

The consistent failure to match EU market integration with social policies provoked the development of new modes of European governance for welfare provision in the early 1990s. Based on policy co-ordination rather than integration, these new governance modes were consolidated as the 'Open Method of Co-ordination' (OMC) at the Lisbon Summit in 2000. This article analyses the scope and limits of the OMC, locating it in the context of broader trends and tendencies in governance and social provision. Indeed, the perceived 'success' of the OMC may reflect a deeper trend in social policy across western Europe and beyond, towards 'active' welfare policies. In many ways the OMC is consistent with the influential 'regulatory state' vision of the EU. Yet by 'activating' welfare the OMC may challenge market liberal theories of European economic regulation. The first seeks to integrate economic and social policies while the latter is premised on their separation.     

AMBIGUITY IN POLICY LESSONS: THE AGENCIFICATION EXPERIENCE

The policy transfer literature identifies the importance of context in shaping policy selection. However, countries with distinctly different contexts are pursuing the agencification of the public sector. Why? The solution to this puzzle lies in the ambiguity associated with public management ideas, which allows policy adopters room to interpret management doctrines and experience. The result is that public management ideas that carry the same identifying label can mask variation in the understanding of the policy, the motivation for adoption and in implementation outcomes. The process of interpretation allows policy‐makers in different contexts to: (1) adopt superficially similar policy concepts; (2) overlook negative experiential learning that contradicts the policy doctrine; and (3) adopt policies unsuitable to the national context.     

Energy conservation policy in the united states and Sweden: Comparing research and development responses

This study assesses the comparability of public sector responses to energy conservation research and development (R&D) in the United states and Sweden. Using the evaluative criteria of policy objectives, organizational structure, and funding, the extent to which the institutional context for R&D either constrains or fosters conservation as an element of each nation's energy policies is examined. Sweden, unlike the United States, appears to have been successful in achievement consensus primarily through an open, deliberative process of mutual partisan adjustment regarding where specific allocations should be made in the energy R&D budget for optimal conservation results. To a great extent, it is within these differing institutional contexts of policy uncertainly that the content of specific energy conservation policies and strategies should be evaluated.     

How Networks Explain Unintended Policy Implementation Outcomes: The Case of UK Rail Privatization

How a government secures the implementation of its policies is one of the most interesting processes in public administration. The tendency of scholars is to ignore implementation and how it impacts on the form of policy, something which invariably changes once resources have been allocated to implementing agencies and the policy detail is addressed. Traditional 'top-down' (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984, Mazmanian and Sabatier 1981) and 'bottom-up' (Elmore 1979, Hjern and Porter 1981, Hull and Hjern 1983) analytical frameworks give only a partial explanation of outcomes. In making the case for a netwrok approach, a typology of implementation networks is presented. The utility of this typology is evaluated in the context of one of the most complex privatization programmes attempted by any government: the privatization of British Rail (BR) between 1992 and 1997. In the case of the sale of one BR subsidiary train operating company, ScotRail, a variety of agencies with competing interests and acting in a politically-charged climate exchanged essential resources to deliver the policy, though not without generating unintended outcomes in the form of significant change to the policy and the agencies charged with implementing it.     

GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO DO ITS JOB. A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GOVERNANCE SHIFTS IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION SECTOR

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy‐making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education.