Catastrophe risk,insurance and terrorism

This article empirically investigates how the terrorist activity of September 11, 2001, was addressed by the insurance industry and government in the United States. It shows that the insurance system worked reasonably well in compensating losses suffered, albeit with various tribulations. It also demonstrates that the insurance industry, along with government as the ultimate risk manager, imaginatively reconfigured markets to continue terrorism insurance coverage in many contexts. The findings challenge many of Ulrich Beck’s contentions about catastrophe risks and insurability. At the same time, they indicate the fragility of the insurance system. Insurers’ perceptions and decisions about uncertainty – with potential for windfall profits as well as catastrophic losses – create crises in insurance availability and promote new forms of inequality and exclusion. Hence, while the insurance industry is a central bulwark against uncertainty, insurers can also play a key role in fostering it.     

Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving

Private organizations play a growing role in governing global issues alongside traditional public actors such as states, international organizations, and subnational governments. What do we know about how private authority and public policy interact? What are the implications of answering this question for understanding support for, and effects of, policy development generally? The purpose of this article is to reflect on these questions by introducing, and reviewing, a special issue that challenges explicit claims, and implicit methodologies, that treat private and public governance realms as distinct and/or static. We do so by advancing a theoretical and conceptual framework with which to explore how the contributions to this special issue enhance an understanding about governance interactions across a range of empirical, sectoral, and regional domains. We specifically introduce the concept of governance spheres to capture the proliferation of issue domains denoted by highly fluid interactions across public and private governance boundaries.     

Public Value Accounting: Establishing the Philosophical Basis

Questions of how best to define the ends, justify the means, and measure the performance of governments have preoccupied political economists for centuries. Recently, the concept of public value—defined in terms of the many dimensions of value that a democratic public might want to see produced by and reflected in the performance of government—has been proposed as an alternative approach. This article develops three philosophical claims central to the practice of public value accounting: (1) when the collectively owned assets of government are being deployed, the appropriate arbiter of public value is the collectively defined values of a “public” called into existence and made articulate through the quite imperfect processes of democratic governance; (2) the collectively owned assets include not only government money but also the authority of the state; (3) the normative framework for assessing the value of government production relies on both utilitarian and deontological philosophical frameworks.     

The Evolution and Continuing Challenges of E‐Governance

E‐governance comprises the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support public services, government administration, democratic processes, and relationships among citizens, civil society, the private sector, and the state. Developed over more than two decades of technology innovation and policy response, the evolution of e‐governance is examined in terms of five interrelated objectives: a policy framework, enhanced public services, high‐quality and cost‐effective government operations, citizen engagement in democratic processes, and administrative and institutional reform. This summary assessment of e‐governance in U.S. states and local governments shows that the greatest investment and progress have been made in enhanced public services and improved government operations. Policy development has moved forward on several fronts, but new policy issues continually add to an increasingly complex set of concerns. The least progress appears to have occurred in enhancing democracy and exploring the implications of e‐governance for administrative and institutional reform. ICT‐enabled governance will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future providing a dynamic environment for ongoing learning and action.     

Blame shifting and blame obfuscation: The blame avoidance effects of delegation in the European Union

The delegation of governance tasks to third parties is generally assumed to help governments to avoid blame once policies become contested. International organizations, including the European Union (EU), are considered particularly opportune in this regard. The literature lacks assessments of the blame avoidance effects of delegation, let alone of the effects of different delegation designs. To address this gap in the literature, we study public blame attributions in the media coverage of two contested EU policies during the financial crisis and the migration crisis. We show that the blame avoidance effect of delegation depends on the delegation design: When agents are independent (dependent) of government control, we observe lower (higher) shares of public blame attributions targeting the government (blame shifting effect), and when agents are external (internal) to the government apparatus, overall public blame attributions for a contested policy will be less (more) frequent (blame obfuscation effect). Our findings yield important normative implications for how to maintain governments’ accountability once they have delegated governance tasks to third parties.     

Public Sector Corporate Governance Disclosures: An Examination of Annual Reporting Practices in Queensland

In the public sector, corporate governance is an expression that is yet to be explicitly defined. This paper examines the existing public sector literature in order to derive a set of broad principles of corporate governance in the public sector. These principles are then applied through a content analysis of corporate governance disclosures in a group of government‐owned corporations, state government departments, local governments and statutory bodies. The results indicate the set of principles derived is generally applicable to various forms of public entities. However, due to a lack of an established public sector corporate governance framework, the disclosure of corporate governance is piecemeal. Government‐owned corporations achieved better disclosure practices in most principles than other public sector bodies. The paper aims to stimulate debate on public sector corporate governance and provides a basis for a more extensive survey on corporate governance disclosures.     

县域政府治理绩效的实证研究：公众满意度的视角--基于佛山市 A 区的治理实践

以佛山市 A 区为个案,对如何测量中国县（区）层级的政府治理绩效进行实证探索。在借鉴世界治理指标（WGI)的基础上,构建了一个本土化的地方政府治理绩效指标体系,对 A 区政府的治理绩效水平进行量化评估,并且通过构建一个多元回归模型深入挖掘影响其总体治理水平的相关因素。结果表明：公众对于 A 区政府的总体治理水平处于“一般”到“比较满意”之间;在六个维度的治理绩效中,公众满意度最低的是“腐败控制”和“法治”,最高的是“政府稳定和暴力避免”和“政府有效性”;除了“管制质量”和“政府稳定与暴力避免”之外,其他四个维度的治理绩效对 A 区政府的总体治理水平都具有显著影响,其中,“政府有效性”对总体治理水平的影响最大。     

Can the hidden hand of the market be an effective and legitimate regulator? The case of animal welfare under a labeling for consumer choice policy approach

In Australia, labeling for consumer choice, rather than higher government regulation, has become an important strand of the policy approach to addressing food animal welfare. This paper illustrates the usefulness of “regulatory network analysis” to uncover the potentials and limitations of market‐based governance to address contentious yet significant issues like animal welfare. We analyzed the content of newspaper articles from major Australian newspapers and official policy documents between 1990 and 2014 to show how the regulatory network influenced the framing of the regulatory problem, and the capacity and legitimacy of different regulatory actors at three “flashpoints” of decisionmaking about layer hen welfare in egg production. We suggest that the government policy of offering consumers the choice to buy cage free in the market allowed large‐scale industry to continue the egg laying business as usual with incremental innovation and adjustment. These incremental improvements only apply to the 20 percent or so of hens producing “free‐range” eggs. We conclude with a discussion of when and how labeling for consumer choice might create markets and public discourses that make possible more effective and legitimate regulation of issues such as layer hen welfare.     

Out of tune or well tempered? How competition agencies direct the orchestrating state

This article analyzes the impact competition agencies have on the orchestrating role of states in domestic private regulation. I argue that these agencies can significantly affect interactions in the governance triangle through the way they apply a “logic of the market” to evaluate agreements between firms. The regulatory framework of European Union competition law has increasingly constrained the ability of firms to take into account broader interests when making agreements to foster social objectives. This logic of the market clashes with the ever‐increasing emphasis governments place on enabling firms to enter into such agreements. I analyze this tension through a case study of a pact of Dutch retailers to collectively introduce higher animal welfare standards for poultry. Using regulatory network analysis I trace the governance interactions between the governance triangle on the one hand (government, non‐governmental organizations, and firms), and the Dutch competition authority, Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM) and the European Commission on the other hand. Attempts by the Dutch government to instruct the ACM to be more lenient toward private regulation were blocked twice by the European Commission. As a result, the Dutch government abandoned private regulation as the preferred mode and proposed a bottom‐up process that would generate public regulation as a way to avoid conflict with competition policy. I argue that paradoxically enough the intervention of these non‐majoritarian competition agencies against the “will” of the governance triangle has potentially increased the effectiveness and legitimacy of orchestration processes.     

New Political Governance in Westminster Systems: Impartial Public Administration and Management Performance at Risk

This article examines the phenomenon of increased political pressures on governments in four Westminster systems (Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand) derived from changes in mass media and communications, increased transparency, expanded audit, increased competition in the political marketplace, and political polarization in the electorate. These pressures raise the risk to impartial public administration and management performance to the extent that governments integrate governance and campaigning, allow political staff to be a separate force in governance, politicize top public service posts, and expect public servants to be promiscuously partisan. The article concludes that New Zealand is best positioned to cope with these risks, in part because of its process for independently staffing its top public service posts. The article recommends this approach as well as the establishment of independently appointed management boards for public service departments and agencies to perform the governance of management function.     

Strengthening family planning stewardship with a total market approach: Mali,Uganda, and Kenya experiences

To improve overall market sustainability, governments and their donors are ramping up efforts to strengthen stewardship in developing country health markets. Key stewardship functions include generating intelligence that enable policymakers, ministerial leaders, and program managers to develop evidence‐based policies and strategies to improve the resource management, supply, and use of health products and services. The total market approach (TMA), an analytic and policy framework, generates market intelligence and improves evidence‐based decision‐making, and also strengthens other stewardship functions, such as building and sustaining partnerships, strengthening tools for implementation, aligning government policy with market interventions, and ensuring accountability/transparency. TMA evolved in response to the phase out of donor support for reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP) programs and the need to improve coordination among public, private, nongovernmental organizations, and civil society to achieve greater equity, health impact, and market sustainability. To assess TMA's role in strengthening the stewardship of RH/FP markets, this article reviews three countries that applied TMA principles: Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. It identifies how TMA processes influenced stewardship functions and assesses to what degree these processes have contributed to concrete actions to improve market efficiency and sustainability.     

Navigating collaborative governance in Florida: An analysis of local governments resilience amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

This study investigates the effectiveness of collaborative governance in the context of state and local government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida. Our analysis uncovers how local authorities have successfully adapted to implement policies to increase resilience and address the crisis, despite facing challenges, constraints, and limitations. Our findings underscore the significance of considering unique local characteristics when addressing pandemics and shed light on the potential influences of state-level actors on Home Rule. Notably, research examining the interplay between state decisions and Home Rule during a pandemic is scarce. We utilize Florida as a case study to examine local government responses to COVID-19, employing a qualitative analysis of data from webinars hosted by the Florida League of Cities and media reports on local government actions. To substantiate our findings and encourage further research, we apply the collaborative governance framework in the context of local government administrative responsibilities.     

Non‐Governmental Monitoring of Local Governments Increases Compliance with Central Mandates: A National‐Scale Field Experiment in China

Central governments face compliance problems when they rely on local governments to implement policy. In authoritarian political systems, these challenges are pronounced because local governments do not face citizens at the polls. In a national‐scale, randomized field experiment in China, we test whether a public, non‐governmental rating of municipal governments' compliance with central mandates to disclose information about the management of pollution increased compliance. We find significant and positive treatment effects on compliance after only one year that persist with reinforcement into a second post‐treatment year. The public rating appears to decrease the costs of monitoring compliance for the central government without increasing public and media attention to pollution, highlighting when this mode of governance is likely to emerge. These results reveal important roles that nonstate actors can play in enhancing the accountability of local governments in authoritarian political systems.     

Securing cyberspace: How states design governance arrangements

The functioning of modern societies increasingly depends on secure cyberspace. Given states' lacking capacities to protect this novel domain, governments draw on a variety of third parties for support. Yet, they face a challenge. While imposed control may limit third parties' competence, the abandonment of hierarchical control contradicts the widespread notion of national security. How do states navigate between these functional and national security imperatives to design governance arrangements? We develop a typology that combines cybersecurity problems (risks vs. threats) with governance modes (delegation vs. orchestration). This helps us to explore more than 100 cybersecurity policies across 15 different states. We find one predominant pattern. Governments delegate authority but maintain elements of hierarchical control, when they respond to threatening attacks. In contrast, governments orchestrate intermediaries by soft inducements to address risks and diffuse vulnerabilities in cyberspace. This contributes to both indirect governance scholarship and the debate on cybersecurity.     

The new randomised controlled trials (RCT) movement in public policy: challenges of epistemic governance

Since 2012, a new movement of government departments, think tanks and high-profile individuals within the UK has sought to promote the increased usage of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in public policy. They promote RCTs as an evidence-based corrective for the inappropriate certainties of experts. Recent government reports and public debate around this initiative are reviewed and analysed within a framework for epistemic governance: normative insights into how knowledge for policymaking should be understood and governed drawn from science and technology studies and the policy sciences. The legitimacy of RCT evidence within policymaking is found to rest on the recognition of three key features: (1) how multiple meanings of evidence limit generalisability, (2) ensuring a plurality of evidence inputs, including those from other forms of research and expertise, and (3) building institutions for governing the use of RCTs in the public interest. Producing evidence for policymaking is a hybrid activity that necessarily spans both science and politics. Presenting RCTs as naively neutral evidence of what policy interventions work is misleading. The paper concludes by calling for more work on how the new RCT movement might engage with its own history in social and policy research on the value of experiments for policymaking.     

No Guaranties: The Decline of Municipal Bond Insurance

The credit crisis that roiled the financial and housing markets in late 2007 and early 2008 resulted in well‐publicized budget challenges for state and local governments. Less visible has been a dramatic change in the bond insurance market, which alters how governments issue long‐term debt. Debt issuance data from Texas are used to model bond insurance premiums and examine utilization following the crisis. The results provide evidence that insurance premiums rose dramatically following the fiscal crisis, even when controlling for widening credit spreads and changes in the underlying credit quality of issuers.     

Municipal Debt Issues in Foreign Markets: Managing Currency and Interest Rate Risk

Since the mid-1980s, there has been an acceleration of state and local government interest in the taxable bond market as a source of capital. This has resulted from, among other factors, restrictions imposed on economic and industrial development loan programs resulting from the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Increased state and local government involvement in the taxable bond markets has increased competition for such capital between the public and the private sectors. In turn, the developing capital competition has expanded into overseas securities markets. Private sector corporations have frequently accessed foreign capital markets to take advantage of lower interest rates and reduced financing costs. By contrast, state and local governments have accessed such markets only recently. This article discusses the policy issues considered by a state or local government entity when it decides to borrow funds in foreign markets and discusses the issues involved in managing currency and interest rate risk when issuing municipal bonds in foreign markets. It includes a review of the hedging techniques used by the Kentucky Development Finance Authority (KDFA) to protect against changes in the Yen/Dollar exchange relationship on a recent Samurai bond issue sold by KDFA as an example of such a transaction.     

Grounding transnational business governance: A political-strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South

Recent scholarship on transnational business governance has begun to examine public-private interactions and the active role of governments. We make two key contributions that integrate and expand this literature. First, in juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, we foreground the fundamentally political and often contentious character of these interactions. As private transnational governance schemes and standards “hit the ground,” private-public interactions, we argue, are embedded in national political arenas and tied to domestic distributional struggles among competing regulatory coalitions. Building upon multiple empirical streams of research, we develop a political-strategic framework that maps the diversity of Southern government responses (substitute, adopt, repurpose, replace, or reject) to transnational private governance. Our framework shows that government responses are a function of both strategic fit with domestic industrial capabilities and structures, and strength of developmental state capacity. Second, our proposed framework adopts the vantage point of Global South governments and industries, particularly how development challenges and strategic options within global value chains affect their understanding of, and responses to, transnational schemes and standards. This is an important corrective to a Northern bias in the private governance literature.     

Fukuyama Is Right about Measuring State Quality: Now What?

Much has recently been written about how to best measure governance or “state quality.” Should we evaluate government performance by looking at what government achieves (outputs) as Robert Rotberg and Craig Boardman recently suggested? Or should we focus on measuring state capacity and bureaucratic autonomy, as Francis Fukuyama concludes? This commentary argues in support of Fukuyama's approach by using a public administration lens to disaggregate the public sector into two domains: upstream bodies at the center of government and downstream delivery bodies that deliver, commission, or fund services under the policy direction of government. It goes further by recommending a measurement framework that focuses on identifying indicators that are behavioral and action worthy in relation to five public management systems ultimately owned and operated by the central, upstream agencies.