Comparative Analysis of Sweden’s Wind Energy Policy: The Evolution of “Coordinated” Networks

Abstract

In search of an appropriate institutional structure for successful environmental policy, many researchers focus on network governance. And while it provides the flexibility and adaptability needed for climate change initiatives, the paper argues that many networks collaborate too loosely to have the capacity to reach strategic goals or mobilize local players. There is often a disconnect between national policy goals and on-the-ground dynamics. Instead, government should adopt a network perspective which does not eliminate state action, but involves network management institutions at arm’s length of government. As an example for this mode of network governance, the research looks at the Swedish “National Network for Wind Power”, which was initiated by government and is now led by four wind coordinators managing the development of on- and off-shore wind electricity. The paper compares Swedish performance before and after the introduction of the wind network and shows how these government efforts have transformed Sweden from a weak performer to being a frontrunner in Europe.     

State and Local Governance Fifteen Years Later: Enduring and New Challenges

This article draws on the contributions to this issue and related evidence to assay the extent to which the states and larger local governments have moved in directions endorsed by the Winter Commission in 1993 . The commission’s recommendations targeted (1) the political context of state and local governance, with a particular focus on executive leadership, campaign finance reform, and citizen engagement; (2) the specifics of public administration, with primary emphasis on empowering managers through internal deregulation and bolstering human resource capacity; and (3) the nature of the relationship between the national government and the states in a key policy arena. Significant changes in the fabric of state and local governance have occurred in each of these three areas over the last 15 years. Many of these modifications are consonant with the thrust of the Winter Commission report, but the evidence also points to the limits of state and local reform. Further reform initiatives should be built on systematic efforts to advance knowledge concerning the origins, nature, and outcomes of the array of institutions and processes present at the state and local levels.     

SUB‐NATIONAL GOVERNMENT CAPITAL SPENDING IN INDONESIA: LEVEL,STRUCTURE, AND FINANCING

Sub‐national government capital spending is important for both public service delivery and economic development. Currently, Indonesian sub‐national public capital spending appears barely sufficient to cover the annual depreciation of its fixed assets. A substantial proportion of local government investment spending goes to create relatively unproductive assets, such as administrative office buildings. Sub‐national governments finance their capital acquisitions out of gross operating budgets and have thus far not used, to any great extent, either borrowed funds or their significant cash reserves for such purposes. Indonesian sub‐nationals need to spend more on capital than they do now and also need to focus that spending on more useful types of infrastructure. The major constraints to increasing capital spending at the sub‐national level are not related to a dearth of finance, but regulatory rigidities in budget preparation and implementation and, most importantly, a lack of capacity to plan, design and implement investment projects. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In Defence of Competition: The Successful Application of Competition Policy in NSW Rail

This paper argues that recent rail reform in NSW has been successful. NSW rail is now not only more cost effective, but also offers improved service and safety levels to its customers. As such the NSW rail reforms have been of benefit to the community as a whole, and have laid the groundwork for a resugence of the rail sector. Despite the criticism surrounding recent job losses, it is argued that the reforms have reinvigorated an industry that had been caught up in an ever decreasing vicious circle. The success of the 1996 reforms have been dependent upon a reform model that mixes factors such as vertical separation and independent regulation with government provision of targeted community service obligation payments. This paper argues that the most important ingredient for rail's future is the removal of the enormous bias in government tax and user charging policy against rail and towards road transport. In addition to keeping faith with the traditional National Competition Policy agenda, nothing is more important than that Australian governments address this continuing and debilitating bias against rail transport.     

The practice and effect of development planning in Bangladesh

Development planning in Bangladesh has not been conspicuously successful. Neverthless it is essential for the nation to continue to plan its economy. Bangladesh's plans must be explored within the context of the economic and sociopolitical constraints that are placed upon the plan and its implementation. The First Five Year Plan (FFYP) was prepared within the framework of a socialist economy but not implemented accordingly. The attitude of the government was a major factor in the eventual distortion of this plan. The mobilization of national resources and their allocation, land reforms, subsidy measures, and industrial policies pursued by the government appeared to protect group interests rather than following recommendations of the plan. A bitter triangular relationship emerged among the politicians, the bureaucrats and the planners. This can explain why the implementation of the plan fell short of what was minimally expected. Subsequent plans, unlike the FFYP which placed high priority on social sectors, have been formulated in favour of the more productive sectors of agriculture and manufacturing. The outcome has been a modest increase in economic growth, but inequality and poverty have tended to perpetuate themselves. To achieve growth with social equality, planning in Bangladesh appears to need strong public commitment and bureaucratic support, the absence of which may prove to make national development planning ineffective, if not counterproductive.     

The Hart-Rudman Commission: Starting Point for Rethinking American National Security

Overtaken by a post-crisis atmosphere generated by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, The Hart-Rudman Commission (formally the US Commission on National Security/21^st Century) offered a thoughtful, systematic approach to aligning American national security instruments to a modern environment unlike that of the Cold War. More than a decade later, such a review – and such an approach – remains sorely needed.     

Whatever Happened to Integrated Transport?

This essay examines the record of the Labour government on transport since 1997. It argues that Labour's plans have been overtaken by events, notably the fuel tax protests and the Hatfield train crash, and that the government has lost sight of its ambitions for an integrated transport policy. Transport is not an end in itself but a means to the end of wider objectives such as social equity, environmental sustainability and quality of life. Measured in these terms, the government's ten-year transport plan is modest in scale and regressive in impact, and lacks and effective demand management strategy. The government should return to the principles of integrated transport. This requires a reformation of the ten-year plan around the objectives of accessibility, liveability and sustainability, and new measures on both the supply side and the demand side of transport.     

Bureaucrats and Markets in China: The Rise and Fall of Entrepreneurial Local Government

Local government entrepreneurship in China in the reform era is argued to have been, on balance, instrumental to growth and market-oriented reform.¹ Economic factors are emphasized in explaining both its rise and anticipated decline. Undeveloped markets and established local state trading networks favored agencies of the local state in exploiting business opportunities arising from deregulation. However, market development and increasing autonomy of firms are now reducing the advantage of local government business agencies, and they face a diminished and changed role.     

Representative bureaucracy and seconded national government officials in the European Commission

The bureaucratic arms of modern international organizations increasingly consist of staff with ambiguous organizational affiliations. This article analyses the implications of this trend from the perspective of representative bureaucracy – using seconded national experts (SNEs) in the European Commission (Commission) as the empirical laboratory. Using a variety of datasets, we unveil Commission SNEs' profiles (to assess their passive representativeness) and link these profiles to their role perceptions (to evaluate their potential for active representation). This illustrates that Commission SNEs' background characteristics do not match those of their constituent population (i.e. the EU27 population) – suggesting a lack of passive representativeness. However, we also find that SNEs from countries favoring stronger national rather than European regulatory and policymaking powers are more likely to see themselves as a representative of their home country government. This suggests a potential for active representation in terms of SNEs' home country's policy preferences.     

The Australian National Commission for Unesco: Some Proposals for Reform

Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) was established in 1946, and the Australian government organisation responsible for advising on the implementation and coordination of Unesco policies and programs in Australia is the Australian National Commission for Unesco. Working from a Rawlsian notion of a public institution, a range of reforms are suggested for the commission: development of a charter, publication of an Annual Report, widening the membership of the commission, funding reforms, training of the membership of the commission, establishing a right of appeal against Commission decisions, and developing programs for public participation. It is suggested that the above reforms may assist in establishing and strengthening the Australian Commission for Unesco as a significant and independent public institution in Australia, and thus assist in the implementation of Unesco programs and projects in the future.     

Can We Plan Too Much? – The Case of the 2010 Metropolitan Strategy for Adelaide

With a Labor government in power in South Australia since 2002, a series of interlocking plans for the state have been developed of which the most important are the strategic plan for the state, the strategic infrastructure plan for the state and the metropolitan strategy for Greater Adelaide. The metropolitan strategy of 2010 reflected the ambitious population and employment targets of the state strategic plan and provided a liberal supply of residential land for urban expansion together with ambitions for a more compact city with higher densities. There are inconsistencies in these objectives which have not been resolved and reflect the optimistic forecasts of the state strategic plan and the nature of the metropolitan planning process with strong input from the development industry. Preliminary evidence is that the plan is not tracking as proposed and more attention needs to be paid to short‐ and medium‐term prospects, and community involvement particularly in strategic localities.     

Economic globalization and regional penetration: The failure of networks in Baden-Württemberg

Abstract. This paper explores the emergence of direct linkages between the international economy and the state government of Baden–Württemberg, Germany. In the early 1990s Baden–Württemberg embarked on a plan in which the laender government took the lead in organizing a large–scale, high technology project for the development of interactive television. Creating a 'network' between itself and major economic actors the laender government sought to enhance the economic development of the region. However, as the economic actors involved in the project questioned the economic viability of interactive television, they began to withdraw from the project. The project's failure demonstrates the incompatibility of political objectives with the economic goals of actors in a globalized economy. We conclude that as attractive as the network approach may be for regional and national governments, it is likely to be successful only where both sets of actors see the outcome as enhancing their respective priorities (political legitimacy and economic gains).     

The Munich Olympics Massacre and the Development of Counter-Terrorism in Australia

Counter-terrorism is a product of government, identifying as its target a kind of violence defined as terrorism. This article explores a particular moment in its development, as an intersection of international, national and bureaucratic responses to the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972. Australian understandings of the development of counter-terrorism have been dominated by a number of themes – principally by the Hilton Bombing of 1978 and the subsequent acceleration of security restructuring during the Fraser years, by the collapse of the Cold War focus of the security and intelligence agencies at the end of the 1980s and then by the ‘war on terror’ following 9/11 and the Bali bombing. Counter-terrorist planning was however an emerging business of government in the 1970s, in Australia as in its alliance partner the United States. While the Hope Royal Commission into intelligence agencies (1974–7) has dominated attention in later accounts of the development of counter-terrorism, a 1972 Interdepartmental Committee on Terrorism and Violence in Australia anticipated many of its concerns. In this developing concern with terrorism, the role and interest of the domestic intelligence agency (ASIO) at this time was limited. This paper contextualizes the Munich massacre as one of the factors shaping a rethinking of security and policing strategies in the early 1970s, a moment in the emergence of a modern government of terrorism.     

Does government ideology influence deregulation of product markets? Empirical evidence from OECD countries

This paper examines how government ideology has influenced deregulation of product markets in OECD countries. I analyze a dataset of non-manufacturing regulation indicators covering energy, transport and communication industries in 21 OECD countries over the 1980–2003 period and employ two different indices of government ideology. The results suggest that government ideology has had a strong influence on the deregulation process: market-oriented governments promoted the deregulation of the energy, transport and communication industries. This finding identifies remarkable differences between leftist and rightwing governments concerning the role of government in the economy and basic elements of political order.     

The organization of influence on the EC's common agricultural policy: A network approach

Abstract The common agricultural policy of the EC with its market regulations is decided at EC level by a multilevel system of government, in which the Commission and the parliamentary parties of the European Parliament play the supranational role and the national ministries of agriculture act as parts of the intergovernmental system of the Council of Ministers. National interest groups have thereby three major access routes to the EC system, first through their national governments, or second indirectly, transmitted by their European peak organizations, or third directly to the supranational EC actors. The network approach is applied to study empirically the densities of access through these various routes. The links between actors in the agricultural policy domain are conceptualized as links for the exchange of resources, the most important resource of a policy domain being the final control of policy decisions. The political actors of the governance system originally hold full control of this valuable resource which they exchange for influence resources possessed by the interest groups, as public support or expert knowledge. Empirically, answers to the network questions depend on the type of resource and the viewpoint of the interviewed actors. An index is developed which indicates the resource flows between actors and the distribution of equilibrium control of policy decisions. It is shown that the national ministers of agriculture depend very much on the support and expertise of their national farmers' lobby, whereas the Commission relies more on contacts within the political sector itself. Multilevel systems need a lot of political coordination, so that the political actors within such systems, especially at the supranational level, seem to deal first of all with each other and not so much with the demand side of politics, compared to the national ministers of agriculture.     

State and Territory Government Strategic Plans: Exercises in Managing,Monitoring and Marketing

All but three of the Australian States and Territories have whole‐of‐government, jurisdiction‐wide strategic plans in place and the three exceptions had previously established a state plan in the decade after the first such plans were introduced by Tasmania and Victoria in 2001. Scholarly attention to date has been directed towards discrete aspects of state plans, such as the extent to which they can be seen as exercises in participative democracy or sustainability, rather than with examining state plans for what they explicitly purport to be – strategic plans originating in the core executive of government. We propose that there are three key strategic orientations for Australian state plans: to holistically manage, monitor and market government administration. These orientations may be competing, complementary or overlapping, and can vary over time. The article also proposes that state plans are a significant development in public management and warrant further and more detailed examination.     

European Commission merger control: Combining competition and the creation of larger European firms

The article examines the European Commission's use of its legal powers over mergers. It discusses and tests two views. One is that the ‘neoliberal’ Commission has ended previous industrial policies of aiding ‘national champion’ firms to grow through mergers and instead pursues a ‘merger‐constraining’ policy of vigorously using its legal powers to block mergers. The other is that the Commission follows an ‘integrationist policy’ of seeking the development of larger European firms to deepen economic integration. It examines Commission decisions under the 1989 EC Merger Regulation between 1990 and 2009. It selects three major sectors that are ‘likely’ for the ‘merger‐constraining’ view – banking, energy and telecommunications – and analyses a dataset of almost 600 Commission decisions and then individual merger cases. It finds that the Commission has approved almost all mergers, including by former ‘national champion’ firms. There have been only two prohibitions over 20 years in the three sectors and the outcome has been the creation of larger European firms through mergers. It explains how the Commission can pursue an integrationist policy through the application of competition processes and criteria. The wider implication is that the Commission can combine competition policy with achieving the ‘industrial policy’ aim of aiding the development of larger European firms.     

THE INTER-STATE COMMISSION*

Abstract: The Inter-State Commission (ISC), although required by Australia's Constitution, has been in existence from 1913 to 1920 only. In 1975 the Labor government introduced a bill to set up the Commission. The bill was passed in a heavily amended form, but the legislation was not proclaimed by the incoming coalition government. A brief history of the "first" ISC raises the question of whether the High Court would ever have accepted the regulatory powers that the Labor government wished to invest in the late Commission. The ISC envisaged by the Labor government's bill would have had strong powers of regulation, arbitration and investigation over interstate and overseas transport. The Senate left it with weakened investigative powers only. Our Federal system encourages many government practices which are not in the interests of the community as a whole. However, while the ISC's role in curbing these practices would have been beneficial, the States have shown themselves too powerful politically to accept such policing, even if the High Court had allowed the ISC to do so. The ISC as conceived by Labor's bill would not have been politically viable, but the ISC as provided for in the Act would be worth setting up, as it would have several advantages over existing investigative mechanisms. It would have more experience and competence than ad hoc inquiries, and its continued existence would make it difficult to shelve its reports. Its statutory basis, broader terms of reference and its ability to force organizations to divulge information would all serve to make it a better investigative body than the Bureau of Transport Economics.     

The organization of influence on the EC's common agriculturalpolicy: A network approach

The common agricultural policy of the EC with its market regulations is decided at EC level by a multilevel system of government, in which the Commission and the parliamentary parties of the European Parliament play the supranational role and the national ministries of agriculture act as parts of the intergovernmental system of the Council of Ministers. National interest groups have thereby three major access routes to the EC system, first through their national governments, or second indirectly, transmitted by their European peak organizations, or third directly to the supranational EC actors. The network approach is applied to study empirically the densities of access through these various routes. The links between actors in the agricultural policy domain are conceptualized as links for the exchange of resources, the most important resource of a policy domain being the final control of policy decisions. The political actors of the governance system originally hold full control of this valuable resource which they exchange for influence resources possessed by the interest groups, as public support or expert knowledge. Empirically, answers to the network questions depend on the type of resource and the viewpoint of the interviewed actors. An index is developed which indicates the resource flows between actors and the distribution of equilibrium control of policy decisions. It is shown that the national ministers of agriculture depend very much on the support and expertise of their national farmers' lobby, whereas the Commission relies more on contacts within the political sector itself. Multilevel systems need a lot of political coordination, so that the political actors within such systems, especially at the supranational level, seem to deal first of all with each other and not so much with the demand side of politics, compared to the national ministers of agriculture.     

On Trojan Horses and revolving doors: Assessing the autonomy of national officials in the European Commission

National officials working in international bureaucracies regularly invoke the fear that member states strategically use such officials for influencing decision making and agenda‐setting to their advantage. This article theoretically analyses conditions under which the autonomy of national civil servants in international bureaucracies might become compromised. The ensuing predictions are then tested using a unique survey among seconded national experts (SNEs) in the European Commission (N ≈ 400). Finally, evaluating the characteristics linked to reduced autonomy among SNEs in the Commission, the article illustrates that these officials are, in practice, likely to be relatively independent from member state influence.