Local Government Partnerships in Urban Management: The Case of South Asia

The article examines emerging partnerships in local government in South Asia. It argues that public private partnerships at local authority level tend to emerge where existing service deficiencies are greatest and most often involve the private voluntary sector. These partnerships typically function as 'hybrid' concessions where the private operator performs a service and collects a fee but without responsibility for capital investment. Many of the most successful partnerships have operated at the most localised level involving a coalition of stakeholders under local authority co-ordination. However, few partnerships have developed adequate mechanisms for joint planning, management and monitoring of services.     

The Impact of Environmental Factors on the Measurement of Managerial Efficiency in the Italian Waste Management Sector: Framework and Empirical Evidence

ABSTRACT

The public and private sectors are different in terms of ownership, funding, and control. The degree of publicness influences the decision-making processes, strategies, and actions, thus severely impacting the performance levels. This study contributes to the existing literature on managerial efficiency environmental factors by proposing a framework and methodology for estimating the influence of the “publicness effect.” A new method is tested, relying on the combined integration of three different data envelopment analysis models in the Italian waste management sector. Results show that the “publicness effect” accounts for 33.87% of managerial efficiency for public companies and 11.6% for mixed ones.     

Progrssive Regrimes, Partnerships and the Involvement of Local Communities: A Framework for Evaluation

This paper examines the nature of community involvement in urban politics as it is played out through regeneration partnerships. At a theoretical level, it explores the potential for a community dimension to local governance, that is, a strategic influence for communities within local power structures. It is argued that the nature of involvement can be explicated by considering three concepts: power (as expressed by urban regime theory), participation and partnership. The paper explores these three broad themes and then focuses on the particular issues pertaining to community involvement in partnership working. Building on this frame-work, the paper develops a model – a 'wheel of involvement'– for analysing the effectiveness of community involvement in regeneration partnerships. This model enables the effectiveness of involvement to be 'quantified by the use of a simple questionnaire survey. It provides a tool for academic researchers and practitioners concerned with evaluating partnerships to begin to explore the quality and level of community involvement in the process of urban renewal. The results of an analysis of two regeneration partnerships are presented as an illustration of the efficacy of the evaluative technique.     

Transforming Livelihoods and Assets through Participatory Approaches: The Kudumbashree in Kerala,India

This article explores to what extent decentralized structures can contribute to asset accumulation among disadvantaged groups, and improving livelihood choices. The process of asset accumulation is tied to the wider context of participatory institutions and opportunities within which social actors can transform assets into meaningful livelihood outcomes. Given its level of social development and civil society in the Indian state of Kerala, the Kudumbashree Initiative, an innovative community-based, decentralized participatory structure aims to build meaningful forms of assets at grassroots levels. Such participatory public action, based on social relationships as well as the combined efforts of the state and grassroots community organizations may provide valuable lessons for developing asset accumulation strategies.     

An Integrated Model for the Audit,Control and Supervision of Local Government

This article considers the issue of the audit, control and supervision of local government units in a new paradigm. The author argues that the treatment of audit, control and supervision activities in the present paradigm, in which they are treated separately from each other, or only as a ‘control or audit pyramid’, has so many imperfections that it no longer represents a reliable means of modern good governance. The author presents some ideas for the operation of an integrated system of audit, control and supervision for the local government sector, focusing particularly on small, local government units. Although the author's research is based on the case of Estonia, a small, liberal constitutional democracy with an open economy, his ideas are also applicable to other democratic societies.     

Electoral and Political Changes: the Impact on Political Bureaucratic Relationships in Scottish Local Government

This paper explores a fundamental issue in public administration: the political bureaucratic relationship or political administrative interface. Much of the research and writing hitherto has been at central government level; and while important work on local government exists, relatively little exists on local government. The paper makes an important contribution to the field by researching aspects of the political administrative interface in the context of significant electoral and political changes in Scottish local government, which introduced single transferable voting and multi member wards. The research found an increase in intensity of senior bureaucrats' political management roles, a greater bureaucratisation of political and policy roles, increased scrutiny yet mixed findings about democratic processes. The approach and findings open up the research field and the paper concludes by suggesting some areas of future research potential.     

The Radical Group in Context: 1. An Integrated Framework for the Analysis of Group Risk for Terrorism

On the basis of a systematic expert knowledge acquisition process, a framework has been developed that takes into account critical variables--internal and external, as well as interactions between them and the group under examination--that are understood to increase risk for escalation toward political violence. The indicators identified are grouped within four conceptual categories: (1) External factors, including historical, cultural, and contextual features; (2) Key actors affecting the group, including the regime and other opponents, as well as Constituents and Supporters; (3) The Group/Organization: Characteristics, Processes, and Structures, including an examination of such factors as leadership style and decision making, group experience with violence, and group ideology and goals; and (4) Characteristics of the Immediate Situation, including Triggering Events. A total of 32 variables were identified within the 4 categories to establish the overall integrated framework. This framework provides the basis for the rigorous analysis of a radical group's risk for terrorism.     

The Centre Decides and the Local Pays: Mandates and Politics in Local Government Financial Management in China

Abstract

In China, ‘the centre decides and the local pays’ means the central government decides on policies but requires its local subordinates to provide the financial resources. The politics of this practice implies that local government has to take different strategies to cope with the unfunded mandates with various consequences. As an empirical study framed by Niskanen’s rational choice theory and Dunleavy’s ‘bureau-shaping’ model, this paper examines how the unfunded mandates impact local government behaviour. Its main focus is the question of how the local officials respond, the extent to which they comply or resist and the techniques they use to adapt to these mandates. This paper finds when deciding how to pay the bill for the centre, local officials have to take a number of principles into consideration. They need to stick to the people-orientated principle and to finance money for salaries and operation to the extent that they can; they also have to see if the mandates are strictly implemented or popular among local people.     

Participatory Initiatives and Political Representation: The Case of Local Councillors in Sweden

The health of political parties and the institutions of representative democracy have been extensively questioned during the last decade due to evidence of a widespread decline in voting turnout, political trust, and party membership as well as identification. An often-proposed, but also often-questioned, strategy to strengthen representative democracy is for political institutions to offer alternative forms of political participation through so-called participatory initiatives. The literature suggests that participatory initiatives will have little impact on representative democracy if no adaptation among political representatives is apparent. This paper explores the consistency between participatory initiatives in Swedish municipalities and the attitudes, practices and role-taking of local councillors, comparing pioneer municipalities where extensive numbers of participatory initatives have been executed vis-à-vis hesitator municipalities where few initiatives have been implemented. The study indicates that local participatory initiatives may stimulate political representation by creating new channels for citizen input and communication between citizens and representatives that are supported by local councillors in the pioneer municipalities. However, the core roles of parties and councillors in representative democracy appear not to be challenged by these initiatives, being similar in both groups of municipalities. The article is concluded by a discussion of the implications of these results for the function of participatory initiatives in local democracy.     

增进相互了解 加强政治互信——记第三届中英青年政治家论坛

9月15-16日，中联部副部长刘结一率中共青年干部代表团出席由英国英中协会在英国牛津郡迪切利庄园主办的第三届中英青年政治家论坛。     

Political Entrepreneurs and Public Administration Reform: The Case of the Local Authorities' Unification Reform in Israel

This article examines a specific institutional change in Israel. In 2003 the Israeli Knesset implemented the local authority unification plan, an unprecedented reform in the structure of local authorities in Israel. This article is about a local government reorganization taking place in a unique political culture. This article tries to integrate the role of political entrepreneurs within an Institutionalist and “learning” perspectives to offer an explanation to a local government structure, thus politicians influence and are influenced by a wide range of institutional norms and practices in a complex process of design and determination of institutional change.     

The Politics of Urban Bias: Rural Threats and the Dual Dilemma of Political Survival

Urban bias in government policy is a common phenomenon in many developing countries. Bates (1981) has famously argued that the wish to industrialize, paired with the political clout of urban residents, results in distinctly anti-rural policies. Empirically, however, the strength of urban bias varies substantially across countries and over time. This paper explains this variation by developing an argument about a countervailing force to urban bias: the threat of a rural insurgency. The direction of urban and rural bias is a function of the political threat that geographically distinct groups pose to the survival of the central government. When the rural periphery lacks collective action capacity, urban bias emerges, but if there exists a credible threat of rural violence, urban bias is diminished. I test this proposition and competing explanations using data on net taxation in the agricultural sector, covering up to 55 low- and middle-income countries from 1955 to 2007. The results show a strong relationship between past territorial conflict (which proxies for credible rural threats) and lower levels of urban bias in the developing world. The findings are robust to alternative model specifications, measures, and sensitivity analyses.     

Towards Performance,Quality and Environmental Management in Local Government: the Case of Spain

The search for improvements in the management and quality of public services seems to be a constant in all public administrations, and there is an ever-increasing use of management techniques and models from the business sector. The aim of this paper is to show which management systems are being used by Spanish local governments to improve their management in terms of economy, quality and the environment. Our analysis is based on a questionnaire sent to Spanish local governments about the tools they use and the factors that influence their implementation. The results show that more efforts are necessary to implement performance measurement and total quality management, but they also show some positive aspects, such as the usefulness of performance measurement and its application to decisions in those local governments that have implemented it.     

Maturation of Public Administration in a Multicultural Environment: Lessons from the Anglo-Saxon,Latin, and Scandinavian Political Traditions

Abstract

A comparative analysis is made of three different models of public administration: the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Scandinavian. The purpose of this comparison is to analyze how these ideal-types of public administration handle the issue of power. Our argument is that without understanding and facing the issue of the amount of power that bureaucrats and politicians possess in any society, public administration will continue to be handicapped to understand the dynamics of the real world and therefore grow as a discipline. This is so despite the universalist claims of the currently fashionable ideas of the New Public Management.     

Scrutiny and the Political Party Group in UK Local Government: New Models of Behaviour

The introduction, via the Local Government Act 2000, of political executives held to account by influential overview and scrutiny committees challenges fundamentally the traditional operations of the party group system. This paper uses evidence from a variety of sources (including the experience of Parliamentary select committees) to explore how councillors are managing the tensions between party group loyalty and the expectation surrounding the operation of scrutiny. Four models of party group behaviour are identified with the group acting as partner, arbitrator, filter and Leviathan respectively. These typologies are then used (together with research evidence) to interpret the circumstances in which effective scrutiny may be aided or hindered by party group dynamics. Three alternative scenarios, which illustrate the impact of different political dynamics on the effectiveness of scrutiny, are identified and explored. It is concluded that the success of the overview and scrutiny experiment is by no means assured and faced with the intransigent nature of most party group behaviour, the future of effective scrutiny hangs in the balance.     

研究城管执法中的问题与对策

为了对城管执法目前的主要做法、成效、存在的问题进行分析,从而对完善城管执法工作提出对策建议。然而,城管执法还存在着许多问题,如:执法队伍建设不强、执法水平落后、执法缺乏公众参与、执法机制不健全等,并在此基础上,提出了相关对策,最后对破解城管执法问题提出了几点对策建议,主要是完善城市管理综合执法方面的立法、理顺城管执法体制机制、转变执法理念、改进执法方式、提高执法队伍素质、构建人民满意城管等方面。因此,不断探索城管执法中新的方向和模式,在创新城市管理的路径方面大胆尝试。     

The new diplomacy of the South: South Africa,Brazil, India and trilateralism

In the aftermath of 9/11 surely of great significance is the reassertion of the South – North divide as a defining axis of the international system. In this context the emergence of a coterie of Southern countries actively challenging the position and assumptions of the leading states of the North is an especially significant event. The activism on the part of three middle-income developing countries in particular—South Africa, Brazil and India—has resulted in the creation of a ‘trilateralist’ diplomatic partnership, itself a reflection of broader transformations across the developing world in the wake of globalisation. This article will examine the rise of the co-operative strategy known as ‘trilateralism’ by regional leaders within the South. Specifically it will look at the relationship between emerging regional powers in the context of multilateralism, as well as at the formulation and implementation of trilateralism. As with previous co-operative efforts in the developing world, the prospects of success are rooted in overlapping domestic, regional and international influences on South African, Brazilian and Indian foreign policies. The article will conclude with an assessment of these influences over the trilateral agenda.     

Task Environment Matters for Intra-ministerial Change: The Interaction of International Environment,Organizational and Opportunity Factors

Why, how, and when does intra-ministerial change take place? Previous answers to these questions suggest that political factors, such as cabinet reshuffling, are the most decisive drivers of inter-ministerial change. By contrast, this article begins with a distinction between the mechanism responsible for intra-ministerial and inter-ministerial change of ministries, the latter discusses which of these has been given more attention in previous research. Data covering the intra-ministerial change of 11 ministries in Germany between 1949 and 2006 can demonstrate that environmental as well as organizational factors are decisive in order to explain the timing and type of intra-ministerial change. The main finding is that a clearly definable threshold of tasks, organizational units, and a horizontal dispersion of jurisdictions – all of which react to the international environment – can explain intra-ministerial change in German ministries.