Reinvigorating the transnational links of sub-national governments between Australia and Japan with special reference to Western Australia–Hyogo sister-state relations

Abstract

The study of transnational links between sub-national governments is a lacuna in the field of international relations yet the issue on inter-sub-national government cooperation has recently gained greater importance at the international level. Since the 1992 Earth Summit recognition of sub-national authorities as key players in global sustainable development strategies, the importance of decentralised cooperation between sub-national governments has been strengthened by a series of international standardisation and domestic incorporation of this principle. Yet our research raises serious questions about the degree to which Australia–Japan twinning of sub-national governments has made progress towards taking responsibility in facing global challenges. Our case study of Western Australia–Hyogo sister-state relationships shows that their 25 year-old cooperation has been suffering from a lack of awareness of the emerging role of sub-national governments. Not surprisingly, national government policy and position has greatly influenced the nature and patterns of their relationships. Australia and Japan twinning, as leading inter-sub-national partnerships in the region, can do more to promote the value of the local dimension in international development cooperation. In light of these challenges, the future of their twinning must lie in a structured long-term commitment for global strategies as well as mutual benefits.     

VIEWPOINT: EXPANDING THE HIGH FRONTIER: SPACE WEAPONS IN HISTORY

A hot topic within national security policy circles involves space weaponization. Concerns about a future arms race, cost, operational capability, and other problems appear to be new. However, past space weaponization efforts have addressed these same issues. Current policy makers can look to World War II German experiments, the Soviet Union's co-orbital anti-satellite system, and the United States' X-20 Dyna-Soar proposals to explore these same challenges. A look to the past might help policy makers to consider many of these same questions that past governments have wrestled with in any attempt to gain an operational status for a proposed space weapon.     

Fight the Youth: Youth Bulges and State Repression

It is generally acknowledged that large youth cohorts or “youth bulges” make countries more susceptible to antistate political violence. Thus, we assume that governments are forewarned about the political demographic threat that a youth bulge represents to the status quo and will attempt to preempt behavioral challenges by engaging in repression. A statistical analysis of the relationship between youth bulges and state repression from 1976 to 2000 confirms our expectation. Controlling for factors known to be associated with coercive state action, we find that governments facing a youth bulge are more repressive than other states. This relationship holds when controlling for, and running interactions with, levels of actual protest behavior. Youth bulges and other elements that may matter for preemptive state strategies should therefore be included in future empirical models of state repression.     

Whole of Government: the Solution to Managing Crises?

The frequency and severity of natural disasters has placed a clear emphasis on the role of governments in responding to these crises. During the past decade, disaster events have had a significant impact on the relevant communities as well as raising questions regarding the role of government and the bureaucratic coordination of planning and response processes. These events have placed a renewed focus on the ability of governments to plan, prepare, and respond in an effective way to crises. They have also tended to indicate that there remain serious challenges to government coordination and that crises create a unique series of challenges for the public sector. At the heart of understanding how governments respond to crises are notions of bureaucratic coordination. It has been suggested that joined‐up or whole of government arrangements may provide an appropriate means in which to approach crisis management. As a result a number of key themes emerge including the nature of crisis management, role of leadership, understanding coordination, impact of organisational culture, and the interactions between individuals and institutions. This paper will consider these issues and provide a review of the relevant literature, to understand the synergies that exist in connected responses to crises.     

Nonprofit Service Continuity and Responses in the Pandemic: Disruptions,Ambiguity, Innovation,and Challenges

This Viewpoint essay examines the service delivery responses of nonprofit organizations that offer homeless support services amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Government mandates and severe human needs have forced nonprofits to adapt quickly. Literature reviews provide little information about how nonprofits should manage service continuity under pandemics. Data collected from websites and interviews with nonprofits executives provide an understanding of adaptations and innovations. The study uses a crisis response model—“Disruptions-Ambiguities-Innovations-Challenges” (DAIC)—to demonstrate how social service nonprofits are responding to challenges under COVID-19. Lessons learned are useful for scholars and practitioners to understand ways nonprofits have remained agile and innovative.     

Reinventing Local Governments and the E-Government Initiative

The Internet provides a powerful tool for reinventing local governments. It encourages transformation from the traditional bureaucratic paradigm, which emphasizes standardization, departmentalization, and operational cost-efficiency, to the "e-government" paradigm, which emphasizes coordinated network building, external collaboration, and customer services. Based on a content analysis of city Web sites and a survey of Web development officials, this article shows that many cities are already moving toward this new paradigm. These cities have adopted "onestop shopping" and customer-oriented principles in Web design, and they emphasize external collaboration and networking in the development process rather than technocracy. The article also analyzes the socioeconomic and organizational factors that are related to cities' progressiveness in Web development and highlights future challenges in reinventing government through Internet technology.     

Assessing the Financial Impact of Natural Disasters on Local Governments

In recent decades, the increase in the frequency and the severity of natural disasters has posed growing challenges to governments’ disaster response activities. Disasters can have a considerable financial impact on local governments, but this impact has not been systematically analyzed. This study assesses disaster impact using 17 years of panel data (between 1996 and 2012) from the city and county governments in New York state. The research examines many aspects of local governments’ financial conditions, including liquidity, fund balance, and debt. It tests whether governments’ financial conditions are affected by disasters and whether fiscal institutions moderate disasters’ impacts. The results show that a local government's unreserved fund balance and disaster reserve significantly affect its financial condition, while financial condition indicators are not significantly impacted by natural disasters when the fiscal institution variables are controlled.     

‘Can Governments Weather the Storm in the New Communications Climate?’

Government policies of privatisation, contracting-out and de-regulation have been major driving forces of globalisation in and through the communications industry. Ironically, however, globalism makes it increasingly difficult for national and state governments to influence the communications industry at national and state levels respectively. This article argues that globalism challenges governments to manage and develop their own communications systems and activities in ways which counter some of the major features of globalism in the communications industry. The article advocates rolling communications strategies at state and federal levels and outlines ways in which such strategies could develop.     

Public choice in the new century

This special issue of Public Choice was designed to afford leading scholars the opportunity to summarize the current state of the public choice literature in key areas of public policy concern and to offer their thoughts about future directions of research. By laying out public choice frameworks for analyzing some of the major challenges confronting democratic governments at the dawn of the 21st century, the issue’s overarching goal is to demonstrate the vibrancy and continuing relevance of the public choice research program.     

Learning from the pioneers: Modernizing local government. Part one

At the end of the century, we are in a position to look back over a decade of restructuring local governments. Our evaluation of the reform movement underway throughout the world indicates a “dialectic of modernization”: considerable progress in some areas, stagnation or erosion in others, and challenges that demand attention. Based on comparative case studies of local governments, this article identifies and discusses several major trends-positive and negative-observed in the experience of reform governments in various countries. It also identifies conditions for lasting success of local government reform. Two companion articles set out the central challenges that now face local governments: making the transition to strategic management, and redefining the interfaces between local administration and its political, social, and economic environment.     

The Rise of Competitive Federalism

This article challenges the prevailing view of increasing political and fiscal centralization in the federal government. Since 1978, the authors argue, the nation has entered a new era of "Competitive Federalism" with federal, state and local governments locked in a competitive struggle for taxpayer resources and support. The new era has emerged largely because of the loss of the tremendous fiscal advantage held by the federal government during its centralization period, 1929 to 1978. Although "deregulated" and free to move into any area of domestic policy, the federal government is constrained by necessary budget pressures and a "reformed" income tax structure. Competitive Federalism has emerged as a new balancing force between Washington, D.C. and the fifty state-local governments and will govern the federal system for the foreseeable future.     

Policy Deliberation as a Goal: The Case of Chinese ENGO Activism

Since it was first introduced in the late 1990s, the concept of deliberative democracy has had policy appeal for both Chinese policymakers and scholars. The Chinese government has recently introduced various deliberative institutions in a top-down manner to address diverse governance challenges. Deliberation at the level of civil society, however, has remained largely limited under the Chinese authoritarian regime setting. This paper illustrates how Chinese civil society actors have increasingly exerted bottom-up pressure to attain a greater degree of deliberation, transparency, and accountability in policymaking, by using the case of a series of anti-dam campaigns conducted by environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) over the past decade. Throughout their campaigns, ENGOs have urged both the central and local governments to adopt more participatory and transparent policymaking and examine the potential social and environmental impacts of large dams. They have done so particularly by invoking the very laws and policies that the government has recently introduced. This study suggests that future research on deliberative democracy in China should pay greater attention to non-state actors and their roles in practicing and promoting bottom-up deliberation.     

Understanding Business Improvement Districts: A New Governance Framework

What is the current state of research on business improvement districts (BIDs)? What is an appropriate framework for analysis? What are key questions for advancing future BID research? BIDs can be understood best within a network governance framework. The research shows, first, a blurring of the line between the public and private spheres as a result of BIDs; second, BIDs are increasingly important actors in urban governance; third, BIDs engage in collaborative, conflictual, and co‐optative relations with local and state governments; and fourth, difficult accountability and management problems are created by their interdependent relationships with local governments. Future research needs to focus on understanding the role of BIDs in urban governance and assessing their impacts on metropolitan areas, as well as their inherently complicated public accountability and management challenges.     

The evolution of an Asia‐Pacific policy community in Australia

Australian Labor governments have, in recent times, become particularly active in shaping the form and content of regional forums where outstanding economic and security issues can be semi‐publicly aired. An increasing number of analysts have characterized this activist role with APEC and CSCAP as a manifestation of ‘intellectual leadership’, and have explained this evident concern with the promotion of common understandings (and hence the possibility of rules) as the natural stance of ‘middle powers’. This paper surveys the means by which Australia's Labor governments came to engage in these regional dialogues; the arguments that have facilitated that engagement; and the individuals who have played leading roles in articulating those arguments. It concludes with brief observations about the possible trajectory of these two regional dialogues, and reference to some of the obstacles they might pose for future Australian governments.     

Diasporan students social entrepreneurship intention: The moderating role of institutional support

The daunting global challenges saddling polities and governments alike have resultantly created a situation whereby governments and corporate civil society have inadvertently reneged on delivering public good and services to citizens. In ensuring and strengthening a public–private actor synergy, with particular emphasis on leveraging acquired knowledge and skills of diaspora‐based students, social entrepreneurship activities could be harnessed to provide sustainable remedies to social challenges such as unemployment, famine amongst others by utilizing social entrepreneurship as a tool. Using the theory of planned behaviour as a theoretical framework, the study elicited data from 322 respondents to empirically investigate determinants of social entrepreneurship intentions of Ghanaian students, with the moderating role of institutional support. Study results revealed that sense of social responsibility and service learning have significant relationship with social entrepreneurship intention. However, social volunteering experience had no significant relationship. Moreover, whereas attitude to social entrepreneurship intention demonstrated a positive relationship, institutional support as a moderator was also revealed to influence the relationship between attitude and social entrepreneurship intention. From the study findings, we discourse on the implications for social entrepreneurship in Ghana to policy makers and stakeholders.     

THE HEARTLANDS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE US STATES

Abstract: Over recent years the American states have re-emerged as centres of policy innovation and reasserted themselves within the federal system. In contrast, at least until Bill Clinton's accession to the presidency, the federal government has lost the initiative. Indeed, Clinton's accession from what in the past would have been regarded as an obscure southern governorship symbolises the shift of the states to the centre stage of American politics. This article considers the reasons for this shift, stressing the generational change among the governors, the new economic and social challenges faced by the states and the increasing withdrawal of the federal government from the state sphere. In terms of the prospects for the future of American federalism, federal government is likely to withdraw further under Clinton, reversing the trend of earlier Democratic presidencies. Indeed, thanks to the efforts of governors like Clinton, state governments are now better equipped than ever before to shoulder new responsibilities. Their tax base has widened, though many states have faced difficult budgetary situations in the early 1990s. The organisation and structure of most state governments have been modernised, if slowly given the obstacles inherent in the separation of powers. The new breed of governor has a more managerial approach than earlier generations, and contemporary governors have sought to centralise their power within the executive branch. As state legislatures have also asserted their influence over the executive branch, gubernatorial influence has usually been enhanced at the expense of other power centres within the executive.     

Assessing the regulatory challenges of emerging disruptive technologies

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of many technologies that have the potential to fundamentally alter our economic, social, and indeed personal lives. The problems they pose are in many ways unprecedented, posing serious challenges for policymakers. How should governments respond to the challenges given that the technologies are still evolving with unclear trajectories? Are there general principles that can be developed to design governance arrangements for these technologies? These are questions confronting policymakers around the world and it is the objective of this special issue to offer insights into answering them both in general and with respect to specific emerging disruptive technologies. Our objectives are to help better understand the regulatory challenges posed by disruptive technologies and to develop generalizable propositions for governments' responses to them.     

Spying on chaos: the Somali model of intelligence on failed states

Failed states pose ongoing strategic challenges for governments concerned with terrorism, poverty and uncontrolled migration. Policy approaches to failed states have ranged from state-building efforts to humanitarian debacles, and outright inaction. This article approaches failed states primarily as intelligence challenges, and uses Somalia as a model of targeting intelligence collection for failed states. This model demonstrates that economic activity offers an approach to intelligence gathering in such environments. In tracing Somalia’s economic successes from the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, this research shows how the business activity produces the needed intelligence opportunities that a strategy for a failed state requires.     

The Limits and Opportunities of Networks: Municipalities and Canadian Climate Change Policy

Research on climate change policy and politics has become increasingly focused on the actions and influence of subnational governments. In North America, this attention has been particularly focused on why subnational governments have taken action in the absence of national leadership, what effect action might have on future national climate policy, and whether the collective action of networks of municipal governments are reshaping and challenging the character of national and global climate governance. This paper examines Canadian municipal climate in light of the absence of a comprehensive and effective climate national strategy. The paper considers various reasons why local governments in Canada have not been central players in national plans, and why their actions have not been more influential nationally. The paper argues that the potential influence of Canadian municipalities on national climate policy is weak, given the loose nature of the network and the long-held structural view that municipalities are not significant units of political analysis in national political and policy debates. The paper concludes by considering the constraints and opportunities of subnational climate networks and municipal network analysis.     

Local Government and Strategies for Decentralization in the "State of the Autonomies"

The convergent forces of democratization, decentralization,the welfare state, and international integration have made Spanishlocal governments similar to their equivalents in other partsof Europe. Nevertheless, local governments are the most poorlydefined part of the post-Franco puzzle of reform. This articletraces the history and development of Spanish local governmentwithin the emerging state of the autonomies, and examines theirambivalent position and uncertain future. Despite the greatertransformative emphasis on building federal arrangements throughthe autonomous communities, local governments play importantroles in establishing self-rule and shared rule.