THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN VOLUNTARY ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMMES: A FUZZY SET QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Voluntary Environmental Programmes (VEPs) have become increasingly popular in addressing environmental risks. While VEPs have attracted much scholarly attention, little is known about how they achieve their outcomes. This article seeks to better understand whether and how the roles of governments in VEPs affect their outcomes in terms of (1) attracting participants, and (2) their contribution to a desired collective end. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this article addresses a series of 31 VEPs in the building sectors of Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Of particular interest is a better understanding of what configurations of five specific governmental roles in VEPs are sufficient to attract participants and contribute to a desired collective end. Three ideal type roles for governments in VEPs, that are positively related to the two outcomes under scrutiny, are uncovered, and the article concludes with lessons on how governments may be best involved in VEPs.     

The micro–macro interactive approach to political trust: Quality of representation and substantive representation across Europe

The relevance of the macro-context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more-educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro–macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual-level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro-level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual-level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro-context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country-year combinations), enriched with country-level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi-level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro–macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more-educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.     

Friends,Enemies, or Strangers? On Relationships between Public and Private Sector Service Providers in Hybrid Forms of Governance

Hybrid forms of governance receive special attention in literature on regulatory reforms. It is often assumed that a combination of public and private sector involvement in a regulatory regime is superior to “pure public” or “pure private” regimes. By paying close attention to such hybrids, this article finds that hybrids have two key dimensions: first, the “amount” of public and private sector involvement in a hybrid, and second, the relationship between these sectors. Contrary to the former dimension, the latter hardly receives any attention in scholarship. This article addresses that knowledge gap. It introduces a typology of hybrids based on these two dimensions. A brief case study is introduced to discuss the value of the focus on relationships between public and private sector service providers.     

CULTURE IN ACTION: THE ‘ROTTERDAM APPROACH’ AS MODERNIZATION THROUGH TRADITION

This article discusses the relation between administrative culture and the capacity to act. It analyses how the Dutch city of Rotterdam radically altered its safety and ‘livability’ approaches in the face of new challenges, and how the city used its cultural make‐up and traditions in doing so. This takes its importance from that fact that local governments are almost continuously confronted with the need to reform policies and methods in the face of challenges such as individualism, cultural diversity, and safety problems. The notion of culture or administrative culture is often invoked to explain why innovations have been unsuccessful. We will argue that this line of argumentation hinges on wrong assumptions about the influence of culture on action. Culture is conceptualized as too static and homogeneous, and too much focused on cognitive aspects. By proposing an alternative, action‐oriented concept of culture, we will argue that administrative culture can be a source of innovation.