Leadership and Institutional Reform: Engineering Macroeconomic Policy Change in Australia

This article seeks to enhance the actor perspective on major policy reforms. It builds upon the literature on "policy entrepreneurs" and addresses its explanatory vagueness by specifying five hypotheses outlining the actions that proponents of major policy change need to take in order to be effective in forging departures from existing, path-dependent policies and to overcome entrenched opposition to reforms. These hypotheses on "reformist political leadership" (after Blondel) are applied to the four attempts to reform key aspects of macroeconomic policy in Australia under the first two Labor governments led by Robert J. Hawke.     

How Adenauer Lost Power: Understanding Leadership Rivalry and Succession Conflict in Political Parties

In this article, we reconstruct and interpret the Adenauer–Erhard leadership rivalry in the CDU. This leadership struggle culminated in Erhard replacing Adenauer in 1963 and Adenauer's continued ‘guerrilla’ warfare against Erhard's leadership, which was one of the contributing factors to the brevity of Erhard's tenure. The case is of intrinsic historical interest but also provides a muster for recent and ongoing leadership succession predicaments in governing parties in Germany and elsewhere. The article presents a conceptual framework of party leadership succession, and zooms in on the (mis)match between the tactical choices made by the incumbent leader and key succession candidates as a key factor explaining the nature and impact of successions. The framework is then applied to the case, and the implications of the findings are placed in a broader comparative context.     

Robust governance for the long term and the heat of the moment: Temporal strategies for coping with dual crises

Today the world is confronted with dual crises: creeping and acute threats unfolding at the same time—for example, the manifestation of extreme weather events such as drought and flooding and the creeping crisis of climate change. To cope with dual crises, this article develops a novel temporal perspective that offers policy actors a repertoire of interrelated strategies for enhancing the robustness of institutional efforts. The repertoire consists of five temporal strategies that policy actors can use to navigate the twin challenges of immediate and latent threats in conjunction: strategic coupling of short-term shocks and creeping crises, crafting time horizons, molding the pace of public problem-solving, mobilizing anticipatory capacity through futuring techniques, and adaptive iteration of policy decisions. We illustrate the practical application of these strategies in an exploratory case study of adaptive water management in the Netherlands.

Samenvatting

De wereld wordt geconfronteerd met duale crises: sluipende en acute dreigingen op hetzelfde moment, zoals extreme weersgebeurtenissen als droogte of watersnood tegelijkertijd met de sluipende crisis van klimaatverandering. Om te reageren op duale crises, ontwikkelt dit artikel een nieuw repertoire van vijf temporele strategieën voor beleidsmakers om de robuustheid van overheidssystemen te vergroten. Dit repertoire bestaat uit de volgende strategieën: strategische koppeling van onverwachte korte termijn schokken en sluipende crises, tijdshorizonnen creëren, het tempo aanpassen van implementatie, het mobiliseren van anticiperende capaciteit door middel van scenariotechnieken, en de adaptieve iteratie van beleidsbeslissingen. We illustreren de werking van deze vijf strategieën aan de hand van een uitgewerkt voorbeeld van adaptief watermanagement in Nederland: de invoering van het programma Ruimte voor de Rivier.     

Governing by Looking Back: Historical Analogies and Crisis Management

This article offers a conceptual framework that broadens and enhances our understanding of the role of 'history' in contemporary governance and the attempts by policy-makers to 'manage' critical issues. Building upon the literature on historical analogies in policy-making, we distinguish three dimensions that clarify how the past may emerge in and affect the current deliberations, choices and rhetoric of policy-makers. We apply this in a comparative examination of two cases of crisis management where historical analogies played an important part: the Swedish response to (alleged) submarine intrusions in 1982, and the European Union sanctions against Austria in 1999. We induce from the case comparison new concepts and hypotheses for understanding the role of historical analogies in public policy-making and crisis management.     

Riots without killings

From 1980 to 1985 serious clashes between police and squatter activists and their supporters occurred on the streets of Amsterdam. This paper describes the series of riots that took place and analyzes five of them in greater detail. Specifically, the investigation focuses on the issue of learning from recurrent crises. Did the authorities learn from one riot to the next? If so, in what ways and at what levels? And how effective did the lessons drawn prove to be — given the fact that the other party may have learned as well. Analyzing the key decisions that have been taken in these cases and confronting them with alternative scenarios that may have been pursued, suggests that learning from crises is a two-edged sword. Its potential benefits must be traded off against risks of overgeneralization or misapplication of lessons. The paper is commented on by Arthur H.W. Docters van Leeuwen, Head of the Dutch Security Service.