Technocracy,democracy, and public policy: An evaluation of public participation in retrospective regulatory review

Retrospective review of existing regulations is an increasingly common aspect of the regulatory policy cycle. As with prospective regulatory policymaking, public participation is a central feature of many retrospective review initiatives. Despite its theoretical and practical significance, participation in retrospective review has received little scholarly attention. This paper presents the first systematic assessment of participation in United States retrospective regulatory review. Utilizing content analysis of an original dataset of government documents and public input produced pursuant to Executive Orders 13563, 13579, and 13610, the paper analyzes participatory institutional design, the level and composition of participants, and participation processes. The results suggest that retrospective review participation processes largely reflected the modes of stakeholder outreach and engagement employed in prospective regulatory policymaking, but resulted in comparatively low levels of participation. Consistent with the purposes enumerated in the executive orders, participation processes facilitated information exchange and were relatively representative of and responsive to stakeholders.     

Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large‐ and small‐scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technology, have paved the way for participatory innovations aimed at effective governance. Deepening legitimation deficits of representative government create opportunities for legitimacy‐enhancing forms of citizen participation, but so far, the effect of participation on legitimacy is unclear. Efforts to increase social justice through citizen participation face the greatest obstacles. The article concludes by highlighting three challenges to creating successful participatory governance: the absence of systematic leadership, the lack of popular or elite consensus on the place of direct citizen participation, and the limited scope and powers of participatory innovations.     

政府公共关系的科学化与专业化探析——基于“新公共管理”的视角

政府公共关系是政府实施公共管理的一项重要职能。随着政府治理和新公共管理实践的发展，迫切需要重新发掘政府公共关系的价值，促进其科学化和专业化。对于处在社会转型和逐步融入国际社会的发展中国家来说，是否具备科学化和专业化的政府公共关系职能，已经成为衡量政府治理能力现代化的重要指标。适时提出政府公共关系的科学化和专业化，是深入贯彻落实科学发展观，提高政府治理效能、转变政府职能、促进公民政治参与、构建和谐社会的需要，也是“新公共管理”实践发展的必然要求。     

法治框架下德国地方治理：权力、责任与财政——以德国莱茵-法尔茨州A县为例的分析

力图在实地调研的基础上,参考德国相关的法律、法规和政策,以公共品供给为线索,描述德国乡村公共品供给的决策、实施与监督的全过程,着力分析公共品供给过程中的权力分配、责任结构和融资途径,以及公共品供给过程中的监督。认为,影响德国乡村公共品供给的因素主要是明确规定不同层级政府权力、责任的法律体系,乡村治理的结构,以及政府间的财政关系。其明显的特点可以归纳为:法治化、辅助性、市场化、公共利益取向、财政主导的融资渠道、健全的监督体制,以及良好的政府间关系。中国地方治理的转型则应该更多地从制度规定、公共财政体制和转移支付制度的建立、地方自主性的发挥、普遍的参与,以及有效的监督等几个方面来思考。     

Promoting good governance in Africa: The role of the civil society as a watchdog

Corruption, maladministration, nepotism, and poor accountability have reached unprecedented levels within the African continent. Consequently, this has impeded the successful and adequate provision of public services and by extension, hampered socio‐economic development and good governance. Undeniably, the entrenchment of civil society is vital for democratic purposes and the consolidation of good governance. For the purpose of this study, Africa is regarded as a unitary entity composed of synchronized autonomous states and governments. As a result, a strict examination of available and relevant literature on the provision of civil society in Africa was applied (were a systematic review of literature irtes was undertaken). The study was able to comprehensively understand the dynamics, challenges, and benefits related to the increasing rate at which is participating in Africa's governance related issues and their overall impact. The study was also able to understand how civil society in Africa has contributed to promoting good governance. It is, however, apparent that the increasing involvement of civil society in governance issues relates to transparency, upholding the rule of law, human rights, and the fight against corruption inter alia. The study also uncovered that the increase in the participation of civil society organizations will have a positive impact on governance as they will have the capacity to act as watchdogs to ensure that governments are effective and serving the needs of the public. Going forward, it will be imperative for civil society to work hand in hand with democratically elected governments in not only fighting corruption and promoting good governance but to also ensure that there is a socio‐economic and by extension political development within the African continent.     

Designing Public Participation Processes

The purpose of this Theory to Practice article is to present a systematic, cross‐disciplinary, and accessible synthesis of relevant research and to offer explicit evidence‐based design guidelines to help practitioners design better participation processes. From the research literature, the authors glean suggestions for iteratively creating, managing, and evaluating public participation activities. The article takes an evidence‐based and design science approach, suggesting that effective public participation processes are grounded in analyzing the context closely, identifying the purposes of the participation effort, and iteratively designing and redesigning the process accordingly.     

公民治理理论析论

20世纪90年代后期产生于美国的公民治理理论代表了一种新的公共行政价值观,它建立在对新公共管理理论某些缺陷的批判基础之上,在一定意义上可以看成是对新公共管理理论的一种超越。本文比较系统地辨析和概括了公民治理的基本观点,公民治理与公民参与之间的紧密关系,并对其实践价值作了简要评析。     

Community engagement and public administration: Of silos,overlays and technologies of government

The public policy process in Australia is changing towards a more interactive, collaborative model, where governments seek to develop partnerships with civil society and private sector organisations to manage complex policy challenges. This article discusses research conducted into a project implemented by a Victorian government department that sought to involve stakeholders in addressing natural resource management issues in the agricultural sector. The research revealed that public administration practices associated with the new public management approach impeded the ability of the project to facilitate participation by diverse stakeholders in the decision‐making process. The article challenges the view that the discourse of collaboration and community engagement takes public administration down a constructivist path and suggests that agencies need to become reflexive about the way in which public administration practices are constitutive of the community engagement process if they are to facilitate genuine participation of other stakeholders.     

OVERCOMING A DECADE OF CRISIS: ZIMBABWE'S LOCAL AUTHORITIES IN TRANSITION

The world's attention has focused on Zimbabwe as the country has moved from the turmoil of the 2008 elections to a tentative democratic transition under the current Inclusive Government. The country's newly elected local authorities and an apparent interest in decentralization have been largely ignored in the process, however. This essay thus provides an extensive, survey‐based examination of local governance in Zimbabwe as of 2009. Four areas are discussed. First, with the growth of the political opposition to the ruling regime, local governance has also suffered from the deep polarization among all the country's institutions. The inexperience of the new local councilors vis‐à‐vis local administration officials also holds significant ramifications. Second, although local officials believe that public participation in decision‐making is strong, citizen involvement is actually quite weak. Third, reeling from the country's 2008 economic crisis, local authorities were operating as best as they could on minimal income and barely functioning in many areas. Financial transfers ended long ago; revenue generation remains poor. Finally, this essay captures the poor state of public services. Achievement of a national democratic consensus, decentralization that actually promotes democratic local governance and strengthening once‐strong local institutional capacity will determine the future progress of local governance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

American Indian Tribal Governance and Management: Public Administration Promise or Pretense?

Research on tribal governance in the United States is scarce within modern public administration scholarship. Nonetheless, tribal governance is a pre‐Columbian practice that predates the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Drawing from several disciplines, John C. Ronquillo of the University of Georgia demonstrates that interdisciplinary sources offer rich information for present‐day public administration research about Native American tribes. Tribal governance literature is definitely not “missing,” but instead is moderately “unassembled” as a subfield of public administration. Building on what is available, the author suggests several key issues within tribal governance in need of urgent academic attention.     

Reassessing popular participation in Uganda

The 1980s saw the emergence of popular participation as a mechanism for promoting good governance in developing countries Good governance was seen as crucial to efforts to improve the welfare of poor people in countries where elites had hitherto benefited disproportionately from policies conceived at the top without reference to ordinary citizens at the bottom. Donor pressure helped accelerate the change. In Uganda these developments coincided with the rise to power of a government that sought to democratise the country's politics. A major plank in the democratisation agenda was the establishment of a participatory system of local administration in which ordinary citizens, facilitated by local councils, would participate in public affairs and influence the way government functioned. These aspirations coincided with those of the donor community and enthusiasts of popular participation. This article is an account of the evolution of village councils and popular participation from 1986, when the National Resistance Movement came to power in Uganda, to 1996. It shows that while at the beginning the introduction of local councils seized the public's imagination leading to high levels of participation, with time, public meetings as consultative fora succumbed to atrophy due to participation fatigue and unwarranted assumptions about the feasibility and utility of popular participation as an administrative and policy‐making devise. It calls for political history and the socio‐cultural context to be taken into account in efforts to promote participation. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

HIV/AIDS,governance and development: the public administration factor

This paper provides an overview of the literature concerned with the impact of HIV on public administration, looking in particular at projections of the impact of HIV/AIDS on public expenditure, the impact of attrition on the health and education sectors and on the civil service as a whole. ‘Success stories’ such as Uganda and Senegal are discussed through their representation in the literature, and ‘political commitment’ is identified as a critical but under‐theorised factor in tackling HIV. Having taken as its starting point the existing work on HIV and governance, the paper then considers the impact of the epidemic in conditions of state vacuum—conflict situations. The paper concludes that governance is both victim of, and part of the solution to, the problems of HIV/AIDS. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘If This Was a Normal Situation’: Challenges and Potentials for Deliberative Democratic Peacebuilding in Kosovo's Emerging Governance Networks

The link between public administration and conflict resolution is traditionally understood through the ‘democratic peace’ thesis, which holds that war is less likely in democracies than in non‐democracies. Limited success with post‐conflict democratisation missions has opened space for renewed research on three strands of ‘deeper democracy’: decentralisation, participation and deliberation. This article reports on the study of deliberative democratic practices in emerging governance networks in Prishtina. Through an investigation of three contentious issues in Prishtina's public spaces, research combines documentary sources with field interviews with governance actors to identify factors that enable and constrain the scope for deliberative decision‐making in governance networks. Case studies point to six main influences: ‘securitisation’, trust building, ‘mandate parallelism’, structural patterns of inclusion and exclusion, network structures and the properties of governed public spaces. In addition, two frames are found to be particularly resistant to deliberative engagement: Kosovo's status and ethnic identities. We formulate a tentative conclusion to be further investigated: in contexts where distrust is high, deliberative governance requires a rigid adherence to an overarching reference framework that can create discursive space within which relative deliberation can take place. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

实验主义治理：公共治理的一个新路径

实验主义治理秉持以现实问题为导向和以经验证据为支撑的实证理念和循证品格,在纵向放权的基础上通过目标设置、差异探索、治理评估、政策迭代和政策扩散等机制探寻政策改进和治理优化的可行路径。作为一种新的治理模式,它的兴起是为了应对治理复杂性的挑战、弥补科层式治理的不足和探寻治理现代化的路径等。实验主义治理模式注重纵向放权、公众参与和多元协作,改善了公共治理主体间的关系,提升了治理的参与性、科学性和有效性,是科层式治理模式的重要补充。但在实践中,实验主义治理也面临着法治困境、创新困境和合作困境等现实难题。在我国推进治理体系与治理能力现代化的背景下,应当协调好实验主义治理中创新与法治的内在张力,完善治理体制与机制,提升实验主义治理的实践效能,从而使其在全面深化改革进程中发挥更大的作用。     

Intersectoral differences in public affairs: the duty of public reporting in public administration

Public reporting is a requirement for public affairs practitioners in public administration because of the democratic context in which government operates. By reporting to the public‐at‐large on agency activities, government agencies contributed to an informed citizenry, the essential foundation of a democracy. For public affairs in business administration and non‐profit administration, public reporting is desirable rather than mandatory. Public reporting was traditionally accomplished indirectly, through news media coverage of government. However, recent research suggests a diminution of interest by the media in fulfilling its role as an instrument of democracy. This means that the public reporting obligation of public affairs professionals in public administration needs to shift to direct reporting, through such products as annual reports, newsletters, TV programmes, Internet websites etc. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Experimentalism in transnational forest governance: Implementing European Union Forest Law Enforcement,Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements in Indonesia and Ghana

Over the past decade, the European Union (EU) has created a novel experimentalist architecture for transnational forest governance: the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative. This innovative architecture comprises extensive participation by civil society stakeholders in establishing and revising open‐ended framework goals (Voluntary Partnership Agreements [VPAs] with developing countries aimed at promoting sustainable forest governance and preventing illegal logging) and metrics for assessing progress toward them (legality standards and indicators) through monitoring and review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default mechanism to sanction non‐cooperation (the EU Timber Regulation that prohibits operators from placing illegally harvested wood on the European market). This paper analyzes the implementation of VPAs in Indonesia and Ghana, the two countries furthest advanced toward issuing FLEGT export licences. A central finding is the reciprocal relationship between the experimentalist architecture of the FLEGT initiative and transnational civil society activism, whereby the VPAs’ insistence on stakeholder participation, independent monitoring, and joint implementation review, underwritten by the EU, empowers domestic non‐governmental organizations with local knowledge to expose problems on the ground, hold public authorities accountable for addressing them, and contribute to developing provisional solutions.     

Private regulation,public policy,and the perils of adverse ontological selection

What problems can private regulatory governance solve, and what role should public policy play? Despite access to the same empirical evidence, the current scholarship on private governance offers widely divergent answers to these questions. Through a critical review, this paper details five ontologically distinct academic logics – calculated strategic behavior; learning and experimentalist processes; political institutionalism; global value chain and convention theory; and neo-Gramscian accounts – that offer divergent conclusions based on the particular facets of private governance they illuminate, while ignoring those they obfuscate. In this crowded marketplace of ideas, scholars and practitioners are in danger of adverse ontological selection whereby certain approaches and insights are systematically ignored and certain problem conceptions are prioritized over others. As a corrective, we encourage scholars to make their assumptions explicit, and occasionally switch between logics, to better understand private governance's problem-solving potential and its interactions with public policy.     

Beyond public administration? HIV/AIDS policy networks and the transformation of public administration in Botswana

What impact has HIV/AIDS had on the structure of public administration and what further lessons do these changes hold for other policy sectors in Botswana? For long, Botswana has had the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, bringing many developmental challenges. An under‐researched facet of HIV/AIDS is the effect it had on the public administration in Botswana. Whereas classical approaches to public administration suggest that it is ‘civil’ service organisations that lead in health administration, HIV/AIDS spawned a particular type of organisation, the policy network. In mitigating HIV/AIDS, the policy environment became more fragmented with networks for treatment, prevention, advocacy and research emerging. These networks are made up of entities from the public, private for‐profit and not for‐profit sectors. They participate in the agenda setting, formulation, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of HIV/AIDS policy. Traditional public administration theories cease to hold sway; private actors become engaged in ‘public policy’ and the other way round. Policy is carried out in horizontal arrangements; linking government, business and non‐governmental organisations in mutual inter‐dependences. Health care professionals share policy spaces with the media, social scientists and politicians. New challenges face public policy‐making including co‐ordination problems, fragmented accountability and shared policy spaces. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Internal audit public sector capability: a case study

Internal auditing is an essential part of governance and can be a valuable asset to public sector institutions. However, for public sector internal auditing to effectively support management, the internal audit function (IAF) should be capable. The question arises as to how the capability of public sector IAFs can be measured. The Institute of Internal Auditors Research Foundation published the Internal Audit Capability Model (IA‐CM) in 2009 to provide a capability self‐assessment tool for public sector IAFs. The main objective of the study is to determine whether the IA‐CM can be used successfully to measure internal audit capability levels, and a secondary objective is to determine whether the tool can be successfully adapted for a specific public sector organisation and/or country. To achieve these objectives, the model was applied in a South African public sector organisation by means of a case study, where the IAF of the case was ranked against the key process areas (KPAs) of the model. The ranking was conducted based on a documentary review and interviews with applicable officials within the case. The model was successfully tested in measuring the internal audit capability level of a South African public sector organisation; however, a total of eight potential feasibility hindrances or considerations have been identified that could negatively affect the implementation of seven of the KPAs of the IA‐CM. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.