revolutionary voices: Nordic women writers and the development of female urban prose 1860–1900

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft's travels to Scandinavian cities gave her new perspectives on the English and Continental bourgeois cultures with which she was acquainted. Her notions of the city as a source of inspiration for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are echoed in the epistolary writings of the Norwegian author Camilla Collett (1813–1895) and the novels of her countrywoman Amalie Skram (1846–1905). Collett and Skram were both frequent visitors to different European capital cities, and incorporated their impressions and experiences of these cities. This resulted in innovative texts, with the individual in a new, modern environment, the city, as one of the central themes. For Collett, who can be regarded as a city correspondent avant la lettre, the city was also a yardstick for cultural progress. In her novels, Skram used the European city as a sort of laboratory of the modern era. Nevertheless, Collett's and Skram's ‘city texts’ are not the ones that have ensured that these two authors found their way into the literary canon. Collett became famous as the author of the first Norwegian feminist novel, whereas Skram is known as a Norwegian naturalist. Until recently, the prose texts in which Collett and Skram processed their urban experiences were either not discussed in Norwegian literary historiography, or were labelled as contributions to the morality debate that raged in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, I shall propose that Collett and Skram contribute to a distinctive yet unrecognized genre – female urban prose – which proffers new modes of thinking and writing about women's experience of contemporaneous bourgeois culture.     

Citizens’ Initiatives: How Local Governments Fill their Facilitative Role

In the context of drastic cutbacks many Dutch municipalities consider citizens’ initiatives (CIs) as an attractive alternative for municipal policies aimed at improving the livability and safety in neighbourhoods, simultaneously building responsible citizenship. In this paper we combine different theoretical perspectives to analyse the institutional settings in which CIs are being realised, and how municipalities try to facilitate such initiatives. Municipalities can do this by either trying to structure the relevant networks or by various forms of process management. This analysis sheds light on how municipalities use a variety of instruments to mobilise citizens to participate in CIs. In using such instruments they can influence various factors (like motivations, personal resources, social capital and expected responsiveness; cf. Lowndes et al.’s CLEAR model) that increase the likelihood of civic engagement.     

Intermunicipal Cooperation in the Netherlands: The Costs and the Effectiveness of Polycentric Regional Governance

This article examines the effects of the structure of intermunicipal cooperatives (IMCs) on the perceived transaction costs and benefits of IMCs. Hypotheses based on a polycentric theory of regional governance are tested using data from Dutch municipalities. The findings are mixed. In line with polycentric theory, networks characterized by a multiplicity of territorial scales reduce IMC transaction costs. Contrary to polycentric theory, however, if IMCs are organized under a uniform legal regime, lower costs and higher benefits are reported. Structural factors that dominate the debate between polycentrism and monocentrism prove to be of limited importance. On the other hand, the results indicate support for the hypotheses that intermunicipal trust (as a cultural variable) contributes to perceptions of effective and efficient cooperation.     

Interdependency,beliefs, and coalition behavior: A contribution to the advocacy coalition framework

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), developed by Paul Sabatier, is generally considered one of the most promising theories of the policy process (see, for instance, Parsons, 1995; Eberg, 1997; Schlager and Blomquist, 1996; Grin and Hoppe, 1997). The framework considers policy change as the result of learning processes within and between advocacy coalitions. However, in explaining policy change, the ACF focuses almost exclusively on the structure, content, stability, and evolution of the policy belief systems of advocacy coalitions. There is no attempt to account for how actors with certain policy belief systems develop and maintain these advocacy coalitions.From the literature on interorganizational relations and policy networks, we know that the extent and structure of interdependencies between actors are important determinants of the behavior of the actors in interorganizational relations. Differences in interdependencies are supposed to lead to different types of interorganizational arrangements.In this article, a hypothesis is developed that explains the development and maintenance of advocacy coalitions by looking at both the interdependencies and the policy belief systems of the actors. The importance of this approach is demonstrated by applying it to the debate on oil and gas leasing in the outer continental shelf of the United States. It turns out that the attention for interdependency contributes significantly to the possibilities of explaining the behavior of single actors and advocacy coalitions.