Governance within public–private partnerships and the politics of urban development

Public-private partnerships are the preferred vehicles for the planning, financing and implementation of contemporary urban development. Scholarship on public-private partnerships tends to examine their activities in advancing development. Less attention is accorded to their internal dynamics or governance. While partnerships are intended to build internal consensus and obtain consent in order to carry out urban development, this premise assumes that coordinated public and private interests are in play. This paper examines the internal governance of two public-private partnerships in Rochester, New along three dimensions: conformity to a collective purpose or vision, leadership structure and organizational style.     

Treasury and Economic Policy – Beyond the Dismal Science

‘Treasury advises and assists the Treasurer, and through him the Government, in the discharge of his and its responsibilities in relation to economic, fiscal and monetary matters. The Department's main responsibilities lie in the field of general economic management’, Treasury, Annual Report 1983. ‘The Treasury's mission is to improve the wellbeing of the Australian people by providing sound and timely advice to the Government, based on objective and thorough analysis of options, and by assisting Treasury ministers in the administration of their responsibilities and the implementation of government decisions’, Treasury, Annual Report 2010a . ‘You can't really evaluate the performance of Treasury in terms of “outputs and outcomes” in any formal or public way because most of the time we are dissuading Treasurers and governments from doing stupid things’, Senior Treasury Official 2000. ‘We once had a “Treasury line”, but now we are more pluralistic’, Senior Treasury Official 2010. ‘Treasury's executive board hunts as a pack, they trust each other and they’ve known each other for long times’, Senior Treasury Official 2010.     

Setting the Post War Australian Policy Agenda – Causes and Content

What are the origins of policy agendas and what determines agenda setting? The one robust theory in the literature associates different agendas with different moments in the evolution of the broader party system namely mass, catch‐all and most recently cartel patterns. This article explores Australian evidence for this thesis. It also argues the cartel moment has recently mutated. Agenda setting is now circumscribed by a mismatch between the needs of policy making and the political incentive structure. The media have become primary tissue connecting political elites to their publics. But this traps the system in short term, primarily populist stances. Systemic capacities to mediate agenda setting have thus been corrupted.     

States of Environmental Justice: Redistributive Politics across the United States, 1993–2004

In the 20 years since a president committed federal government agencies to achieving environmental justice (EJ), states have been at the forefront of policy development. But states have varied in the nature and extent of their EJ efforts. We use Guttman Scaling to measure state EJ effort and test hypotheses regarding the relative importance of problem severity, politics, and administrative variables to variation in state policy development. Our analysis offers a novel characterization of state policy intensity and demonstrates its scalability. Income‐based problem severity, environmental group membership, and nonwhite populations were important predictors of state EJ policy intensity during our study period. The political geography of EJ policy also displayed a distinctive southern pattern and the EJ policy intensity model contrasted significantly with a model of environmental policy innovation. The findings suggest that state EJ politics are more indicative of redistributive policy than regulatory.     

Advising Ministers – The Special Problem of Defence

Successive Australian Defence Ministers have been frustrated and occasionally embarrassed by the quality of advice and information provided to them by the Defence organisation. Decades of reviews and reorganisations have failed to find solutions to the special difficulties that Defence faces in providing accurate, timely information and advice to ministers across the broad spectrum of their responsibilities. This article argues that there are multiple explanations for the concerns that are frequently expressed about its policy advisory capacity – most of which are inherent to Defence organisations around the world. While the Defence culture of secrecy is partly responsible, other factors such as the scale of Defence's operations, the multiple cultures that exist within it (military, civilian, and intelligence) that make coherence harder than in more homogenous departments, the long‐time horizons of defence planning as well as the high costs of procurement, must also be considered. The erosion of trust between the organisation and minister has been exacerbated by the intense scrutiny of the media that overburdens ministers and adds another layer of complexity to their role. As history shows, there are push and pull factors that continue to embroil ministers in the minutiae of defence difficulties, while the complexity and scale of operations will undoubtedly continue to impact on the timeliness of advice.     

The Politics of “Entrepreneurial” Economic Development Policy of States in the U.S.

“Entrepreneurial” economic development strategies at the state level in the United States, which focus on nurturing home‐grown, high‐growth businesses, lack immediate payoffs for politically powerful constituencies, a condition that would seem likely to limit their appeal compared to the alternative “locational” strategy of attracting large investments from elsewhere. Nonetheless, many U.S. states have added programs with entrepreneurial attributes to their economic development portfolios in recent years. This paper explores how the political obstacles to such programs have been overcome. In a few cases, an institutional innovation in the policy‐making process drew in new participants who provided ideas for and support to programs with entrepreneurial attributes. More commonly, the preferences of executive branch officials, especially governors, appear to have been critical to the enactment and implementation of such programs. This finding suggests that economic development policy making may be more technocratic than is commonly believed.     

Working with Complexity: Community Engagement and the Murdi Paaki COAG Trial 2002–2007

Achieving improvements in indigenous health and education and reducing the incidence of crime and domestic violence in indigenous communities has proved heartbreakingly difficult. The Murdi Paaki COAG trial in western NSW aimed to break this pattern of failure by tailoring flexible Commonwealth and State government support to indigenous communities, working within a framework of shared responsibility. In this article we assess the trial as a policy strategy by comparing outcomes and patterns of outcomes across the sixteen communities. We found that the strategy worked best where ‘good enough’ governance was aligned with flexibility, rather than with control. This way of working is difficult for governments as it can be a slow process, and requires stability in the policy and engagement framework to deliver results. More broadly, our findings confirm the usefulness of complexity theory to illuminate and to explain the evolution of process in administrative contexts involving networked governance.     

The Multiple Meanings of ‘Resilience’: An Overview of the Literature

‘resilience is in danger of becoming a vacuous buzzword from overuse and ambiguity’ (Rose 2007: 384) ‘Resilience’ is widely used in public policy debate in Australia in contexts as diverse as drought policy, mental fitness in the Australian Defence Force, and in discussion around the Australian economy's performance during the global financial crisis. The following paper provides an overview of the use of the term ‘resilience’ in the academic literature in both the natural and social sciences. The key conclusion from this research is that the term is highly ambiguous, it is used for different purposes in different contexts and in some cases the understandings of the term are diametrically opposed. The malleability of the term suggests that it might be politically risky if employed in policy debate unless clearly defined in each instance.     

Independence and Responsiveness – Re‐tying the Gordian Knot

Striking the Balance: Public Service Independence and Responsiveness ‐ an Institute of Public Administration Australia roundtable in conjunction with the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, 14 March 2008. The roundtable consisted of around 60 participants consisting of former federal and state/territory ministers, ministerial advisers, current and former public servants, media and think tank representatives and a multi‐disciplinary range of academics.     

‘Spending Wisely: Principles for a Good Spending Review': The First Report of the Fabian Commission on Future Spending Choices

This article examines the work of the Fabian Society Commission on Future Spending Choices published in June 2013. The Commission is undoubtedly the most detailed and ambitious attempt by a centre‐left think‐tank to analyse the structure of UK public spending since Labour's 2010 defeat. The Commission makes an eloquent case for a strategic approach to UK public spending, filling the substantial void in thinking on the centre‐left since Labour's 2010 defeat. Inevitably, the proposals raise fundamental questions about the capacity of the British state and the constitutional framework of the UK political system to accommodate a long‐term, future‐orientated approach to public expenditure, which deserve to be properly aired and debated.     

The Commons Select Committee System in the 2015–20 Parliament

The House of Commons select committees witnessed some of the most constructive political theatre of the 2010‐2015 Parliament. Recall Rupert Murdoch's public contrition, Margaret Hodge's assault on MNC tax evasion and Keith Vaz's timely interrogations of G4S, etc. The committees also embraced social media and adopted public engagement as a key task. These developments all reflect a newly emboldened system. In recent months, four reports have been published which reflect on these developments. They also look forward to the further substantial development of committee activity. The system thus sets sail with an abundance of specific suggestions, including ideas that could have far wider and more far‐reaching democratic implications.     

The ‘third way’ and the politics of law and order: Explaining differences in law and order policies between Blair's New Labour and Schröder's SPD

Advocating more repressive law and order policies along the slogan ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ in their election manifesto, Tony Blair in the United Kingdom and Gerhard Schröder in Germany were elected in the late 1990s. Once in power, however, only New Labour substantially toughened law and order policies, whereas the German Social Democrats did not change the legal status quo, to a similar extent, during their mandate. This article tackles this puzzle, arguing that the preferences of the ministers and the formal and informal rules shaping the balance of power in government are crucial to understanding why two governments that initially advocated similar policies adopted a rather different policy stance. The results are based on meticulous process tracing and a series of elite interviews concerning two major topics in the realm of law and order during the 1990s: policies directed at sexual offenders, and policies responding to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.     

The Contingent Public Value of ‘Good Design’: Regulating the Aesthetics of the Australian Urban Built Environment

The proposition that the urban built environment can, and indeed should, be made more visually attractive is a long‐standing feature of the governance of Australian cities. In this vein, this paper examines how ‘good design’ in terms of visual aesthetics is currently pursued including through the development assessment process and the work of government architects. The paper begins by tracing the background of contemporary regulatory practice from long‐standing ideas around beauty and its value through to the urban design movement of today. Next, it considers in more detail various rationales for aesthetic governance and what might be better forms of regulatory practice. In short, it will be argued that while there can be scope for regulation to deliver superior outcomes, this practice must be sensitive to a high degree of contingency in what the public values and that deliberate empirical inquiry into the latter is desirable.     

Assessing the Capacity to Deliver – The BER Experience

This article uses the education sector to explore the ability of successive Commonwealth governments to more directly intervene and engage in areas traditionally the responsibility of state and territory jurisdictions. The APS continues to battle against a lack of street‐level knowledge to help structure delivery, including effective feedback and sense‐making mechanisms. While the overall thrust of policy intent might be achievable and even laudable, the potential for success is undermined by structural imbalances, suspicion and information and power asymmetry. BER exemplifies a growing problem in the capacity of the APS to act as a system manager, able to strategically conceptualise and leverage actors, resources and processes to achieve political outcomes. APS capacity to deliver Commonwealth policy intent reliant on inter‐jurisdictional delivery remains a dilemma for advisory capacity and confounds the interventionist ambitions of Commonwealth ministers and exposes them to serious criticisms about their administrative competence.     

Three Lenses of Evidence‐Based Policy

This article discusses recent trends to incorporate the results of systematic research (or ‘evidence’) into policy development, program evaluation and program improvement. This process is consistent with the New Public Management (NPM) emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness. Analysis of evidence helps to answer the questions ‘what works? and ‘what happens if we change these settings?’ Secondly, some of the well known challenges and limitations for ‘evidence‐based’ policy are outlined. Policy decisions emerge from politics, judgement and debate, rather than being deduced from empirical analysis. Policy debate and analysis involves an interplay between facts, norms and desired actions, in which ‘evidence’ is diverse and contestable. Thirdly, the article outlines a distinction between technical and negotiated approaches to problem‐solving. The latter is a prominent feature of policy domains rich in ‘network’ approaches, partnering and community engagement. Networks and partnerships bring to the negotiation table a diversity of stakeholder ‘evidence’, ie, relevant information, interpretations and priorities. Finally, it is suggested that three types of evidence/perspective are especially relevant in the modern era – systematic (‘scientific’) research, program management experience (‘practice’), and political judgement. What works for program clients is intrinsically connected to what works for managers and for political leaders. Thus, the practical craft of policy development and adjustment involves ‘weaving’ strands of information and values as seen through the lens of these three key stakeholder groups. There is not one evidence‐base but several bases. These disparate bodies of knowledge become multiple sets of evidence that inform and influence policy rather than determine it.     

Managing the Re‐Entry Process of Returnee Government Scholars in an Emerging Transition Economy – An Embeddedness Perspective

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the factors affecting the re‐entry and readjustment process of returnee government scholars in Vietnam. These returnee scholars were originally sent overseas to study as part of changes introduced by the Vietnamese government to develop its domestic talent pool. Using the perspective of home country embeddedness, we find that career and community embeddedness factors, together with readjustment factors, have an effect on returnee scholars’ career and life satisfaction in their home country. These factors subsequently affected their intention to stay or re‐expatriate. The study contributes to public sector change management theory by examining factors affecting the re‐entry process of returnees within an emerging transition economy. It also adds to the limited studies on understanding and managing the re‐entry processes and state‐led diaspora strategies among returnee government scholars from emerging transition economies and their effectiveness.     

On Introducing Proportionality in American Presidential Elections: An Historical Analysis, 1828–2008

It is well known that the President of the United States is elected by the Electoral College and not directly by the population. Every time a candidate who does not win the most popular votes is elected President, detractors of the Electoral College call for its abolishment and supporters extol its undoubtedly merits. This article investigates what would have happened if a solution halfway between both extremes (a direct national election and the current system) had been used in historical Presidential elections; namely, a proportional rule with thresholds to assign electors in each state. This system would generate electoral colleges closer to popular will, reduce the risk of electing a minority president and impose the need of more balanced regional support to be elected, although increasing the risk of a third candidate emerging.     

Branding and Franchising a Public Policy: The Case of the Gateway Review Process 2001–2010

One of the more interesting features of contemporary policy‐making is the way in which certain policies and administrative processes have been branded. While this is not yet a common feature, it does appear to be one that is increasing in importance. This article looks at the phenomenon through a consideration of one particularly interesting case; the Gateway Review Process (subsequently Gateway), a policy with a related set of administrative processes which is both branded and franchised. Gateway also seems a successful example of a much more common feature of contemporary policy making: policy transfer. It has been transferred from the UK to five Australian jurisdictions, New Zealand and Holland. This article examines the extent to which the branding, and indeed the franchising, of Gateway is responsible for the putative success of that transfer. We begin with a very brief consideration of the literature on branding and franchising to situate our discussion, before outlining the ways in which branding and politics intersect. In the main part of the article we focus on the branding of public policy and on the Gateway case.