Community‐based environmental management in Vietnam: the challenge of sharing power in a politically guided society

The article presents the challenges of introducing a ‘shared‐power’ community‐based management approach in the socialist society of Vietnam. The Portland State University (PSU)'s Oregon Environmental Management Alliance partnered with Vietnamese organisations in a shared‐power pilot project aimed at strengthening stakeholder participation in environmental improvements in two communities along the Tan Hoa‐Lo Gom (THLG) canal in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The Oregon Solutions model, a community‐based environmental management (CBEM) approach, was adapted for the shared‐power project. This article analyses three core ingredients of the shared‐power CBEM approach: multiple stakeholder structure, dispersed authority arrangements and diverse policy instruments. Critical reflections are offered on the meaning and appropriateness of these shared‐power ingredients when they are reinvented in Vietnam's politically guided governance system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

WHAT ROLE FOR GOVERNMENT? THE PROMOTION OF CIVIL SOCIETY THROUGH FORESTRY‐RELATED CLIMATE CHANGE INTERVENTIONS IN POST‐CONFLICT NEPAL

This study examines rationales behind the choice of local interlocutors by forestry‐related climate change projects in post‐conflict Nepal. In their stated objectives, all projects claim to involve the government, and most project decision makers are in favor of government involvement, yet project resources overwhelmingly favor civil society institutions. Project decision makers' choices are shaped by a combination of donor conditionalities, contextual constraints, and beliefs about which institutional attributes matter and how to address historical marginalization. The projects' empowerment of civil society sidesteps opportunities to strengthen the local government, which is described as weak, disinterested, and lacking legitimacy owing to the absence of elections due to the unsettled post‐conflict situation. Through the choices made and their justifications, projects and donors further marginalize the local government materially and discursively and thereby entrench its perceived deficiencies. We argue that this privileging of civil society may have implications for government legitimacy and post‐conflict reconstruction and call for donors and the intervening institutions they fund to critically and collectively reassess the role of forestry‐related climate change projects in the larger process of post‐conflict reconstruction in Nepal. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evidence‐Based Policy‐Making: The Elusive Search for Rational Public Administration

Evidence‐based policy making has been criticised as a revival of the ‘rationality project’ in which democratic politics is regarded as rent‐seeking and a deadweight loss to society. In response, the evidence‐based policy movement has failed to articulate a defence in which the rationality animating the policy process is situational and contextual rather than unique and authoritative. This article traces the movement's motto –‘what works?’– to the American pragmatist movement, whose influence on Harold Lasswell and New Labour in the UK was substantial. This article argues that the ambition for evidence‐based policy‐making should be seen in terms of the transition from a single, unique and universal rationality toward multiple rationalities that vary according to different policy making contexts. Interpreted in such terms, evidence‐based policy making can avoid several of the main criticisms, and offer strong potential to contribute to solving policy problems.     

Implementation: Making Hard Work of Something Simple

Early in 2012 the Rural Property Addressing Project in South Australia announced that it had substantially met its outcomes, and that the whole of the project was soon to be completed. In 2003, one of the recommendations to cabinet from the South Australian Premier's Bushfire Summit was to endorse the development of a standard property addressing system for rural properties across the state. This was formally endorsed by cabinet, and was a direct response to the fact that essential services such as ambulance, medical and social care were hindered in providing services to the residents of Eyre Peninsula during and after the bushfires. Overall, this was not a controversial decision, nor was it a huge implementation challenge, yet it took nine years to come into effect. This is a classic case of the tyranny of small decisions. This article outlines some of the implementation challenges faced by this apparently simple project, and provides some thoughts for implementation challenges of the future. The take‐away message is that if something so comparatively simple was made so complex, how can we adapt our public services to the cross‐cutting challenges of the future?     

Australia's Political Institutions and the Corruption of Public Opinion1

This article explores structural causes for the decline in the quality of Australia's political and policy conversations. Three are nominated. The first concerns the changing role of the major party organisations. These no longer contribute to agenda setting; they are no longer forums for activist and interest mobilisation; they no longer mobilise and cue a mass base. The second structural change concerns the rise in the role of the media. This is now the primary bridge between the formal political system and the surrounding society, a role for which it is singularly ill‐equipped. The third change concerns the misalignment between the formal political system and Australian society. The formal system was formed in the early twentieth century when Australian society was broadly divided by class allegiance. Those days are long gone. Class has decomposed. A variety of new concerns differentiate and pluralise social attitudes. Possible remedies are then discussed.     

Does Deployment to War Affect Public Service Motivation? A Panel Study of Soldiers Before and After Their Service in Afghanistan

Exposure to the extreme stress of warfare may affect soldiers’ perceptions of others and society. Using panel data from two companies on a tour of duty to Afghanistan in 2011, this article analyzes how different dimensions of soldiers’ public service motivation are influenced by deployment to war. As expected, soldiers’ compassion decreased and commitment to the public interest increased, while self‐sacrifice did not change systematically. Deployment to war was expected to affect inexperienced soldiers more than their experienced colleagues, but this hypothesis was only partially satisfied. The key contribution of the article is the use of panel data and the examination of motivational changes. Moreover, studying soldiers’ public service motivation enables us to connect public administration and military sociology and thereby to establish a better understanding of motivation in extreme settings.     

Pillarisation in perspective

‘Verzuiling’ (pillarisation) was originally a methaphor launched in the media in the 1930s for the recurring four‐fold division in Dutch contemporary society in an orthodox Protestant, a Roman Catholic, a Social Democratic and a ‘neutral’ or liberal section (population groups as well as complexes of organisations). Since the 1950s it has also been a key concept in several scholarly works on Dutch society. A research project of historians and social geographers at the University of Amsterdam analysed ‘verzuiling’ on the local and regional level. None of the many theories and interpretations of ‘verzuiling’ proved to be tenable in these analyses. Maybe it is better to reduce the term to a metaphor again and to analyse the processes that together resulted in this four‐fold division in Dutch society on their own terms.     

New Executives from Inside or Outside? The Effect of Executive Replacement on Organizational Change

This article investigates how executive succession influences the comprehensiveness of structural changes pursued by public organizations. Executive successions are important events for organizations that provide salient opportunities for introducing organizational change, yet little research has analyzed this relationship. The author argues that the less familiarity a new executive has with the organization and the field in which it works, the more likely it is that comprehensive organizational change will take place. Empirical results from quantitative analyses of executive succession events in Danish municipalities from 1984 to 2000 confirm this. Interestingly, the degree to which new practices are legitimized moderates the findings. Inside successors are more likely to conduct comprehensive structural changes after new practices receive normative and regulatory legitimacy. The article contributes to the literature on executive succession by highlighting how it is an antecedent to different types of organizational change. Contributions to practitioner and public management research are discussed.     

People must change before institutions can: a model addressing the challenge from administering to managing the maltese public service

The Maltese public service is currently undergoing major organisational changes to enhance its efficiency and effectiveness in its service delivery. The great majority of these changes have focussed on re‐organising the macro‐level, namely strategy, processes and structures. This is not an easy feat as local external power forces leave their impact in the process. It is argued, however, that one way to circumvent these resisting forces is to empower the real agents of change: the administrators of the public service. For some reason, the micro‐level has been neglected and has been generally absent from the agenda of the major change programme with a few exceptions. This article throws light on this level by proposing an intrapersonal, psychological and pedagogical model for change that may complement and accompany the larger macro changes. The authors suggest that the model can be developed in a practical way to motivate change from within the person and not just push change around the person. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Incrementalism in Appropriations: Small Aggregation,Big Changes

U.S. federal budget dynamics, as a major attribute of the legislative and bureaucratic decision‐making processes, increasingly calls into question the scholarly focus on incrementalism. What constitutes a “small” change is largely unspecified in previous research that has also been unable to assess incrementalism across multiple levels of aggregation. Using a unique budgetary database, this article analyzes whether budgetary changes are in fact “small” at different levels of aggregation. Surprisingly, a low proportion of changes are small by any logical standard. During most years, more than one‐fifth of budgetary changes are greater than 50 percent, and nearly half are more than 10 percent. The level of aggregation is also important for assessing whether political variables influence incrementalism. A salient finding: change in party control reflects greater influence within micro‐level budget decisions, while divided government manifests more impact on aggregate‐level budget decisions.     

Love Thy Neighbour: A Social Capital Approach to Local Government Partnerships

While controversy surrounds compulsory consolidation as a means of improving the operational efficiency of local government, the literature suggests that gains can accrue to groups of local councils which form voluntary alliances as platforms for shared service delivery. However, real‐world experience has demonstrated that voluntary alliances in local government are difficult to establish and do not always endure in the longer term. After reviewing the limited extant scholarly literature on shared services and local council voluntary alliances, as well as applications of the social capital approach to inter‐organisational endeavour, such as the Weber and Weber (2010) venture capital model, this article argues that the social capital approach can offer insights into local council cooperative alliance and shared service models.     

Reimagining civil society in conflict: Findings from post-2001 Afghanistan

What is the meaning and role of civil society in Afghanistan? And what contribution could civil society actors make to promoting peace and political reform? Drawing on a research and dialogue project conducted in 2009–2012, this article explores local understandings and practices of civil society in Afghanistan, and examines their relationship to security and social change. It argues that studying civil society can help shed light on the changing dynamics of political authority and security in the country, as well as offer new avenues for promoting progressive change. The article addresses some of the conceptual and analytical limitations of dominant narratives about civil society in conflict-affected environments, demonstrating how they tend to neglect certain forms of agency that have the potential to be transformative.     

Savings from integrating administrative systems for social assistance programmes in Russia

Russian local governments now have primary responsibility for the administration of social assistance programmes thanks to a combination of decentralization of some responsibilities from higher levels of government and the transfer of certain administrative functions from state enterprises to municipalities. Over the past few years, there has also been a distinct shift to means‐testing of social assistance. This article reports on the results of a pilot project undertaken to improve the efficiency of programme administration conducted in the city of Arzamas (pop. 110,000). The municipal administration promotes it as a programme to ease client burden and improve access to benefits. Specifically, the pilot introduced a unified application form for all the major social assistance programmes in the city and required, regardless of how many programmes are applied for, that applicants visit only one office and supply one set of documents verifying their eligibility for assistance. Benefit processing is also consolidated. Staff efficiency improvements are substantial: under the one‐window system, 127 benefits are processed per month per staff member, while 85 benefits were processed per month per staff member under the old administrative system. Impressive time savings for clients were also observed: the statistically average client saves between 1.3 and 2.4 hours, depending on the degree to which a client was able to coordinate documentation collection and trips to the benefit agencies under the old system. The total potential time saved by clients as a result of the one‐window reforms is between 4100 and 7600 person hours per month. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Next generation engagement: Setting a research agenda for community engagement in Australia's infrastructure sector

The global infrastructure sector is thriving. But community opposition to major projects is also rising. Australian examples demonstrate the policy backflips, reputational pitfalls, and financial costs of project delays and cancellations. Failures to engage communities are surprising, given the widespread adoption of community engagement (CE) principles and the increasing professionalization of CE roles. If acceptance of the need for CE in infrastructure is more widespread than ever, why are we not seeing smoother project delivery, reduced protest, and cost savings? This paradox is the driving force behind the Next Generation Engagement project. This article offers a practitioners’ perspective to introduce the project and present key findings from its 12‐month pilot study aiming to establish a transdisciplinary, industry‐led research agenda for CE in Australia's infrastructure sector. The article contributes to our understanding of CE literature and research codesign. It maps out the top five priority themes for future research to support infrastructure selection, planning and delivery. The research agenda provides guidance for policy, and practice, offering consolidated, research‐based insights for policymakers and practitioners.     

LGBTQ “selves” in films from the Reel-Lives project as signifiers of political and social change,and of personal value

To accurately reflect the complexities of unusual sexual or gender identifications in non-stereotypical ways, film documentarians are challenged to represent people as both sexual/gender identities and as subjectivities engaged in personal experiences. This imperative is explored through a semiotic lens focused on films produced through the Reel Lives youth media training project, which aims to give voice to marginalised youth, and which presents their stories on the Reel Lives website through two consequent layers of signification that successfully represents LGBTQ people in complex ways. On the one hand, the search function reflects a typology of shared characteristics associated with identity categories that speaks to political change. On the other, the film grammar showcases shared circumstances within communities in ways that redirect focus from political change to a more durable and transformative socio-cultural change. The films in turn serve a third function: to reflect gender and sexual identification as a personal resource on which participants might subjectively call for the positive recognition and re-presentation of their value as individuals.     

In Defence of British Politics Against the British Political Tradition

This article explores some of the current themes round the perceived crisis in British politics in supposed an age of ‘anti‐politics’. Drawing on Bernard Crick's In Defence of Politics, it offers a critique of what is referred to as a dominant British political tradition and in so doing seeks to challenge ‘demand‐side’ accounts that ostensibly defend the traditional arena politics of the Westminster system. Instead, it argues that developments around issues such as big data, social media and freedom of information have led to a more open society in recent years. It concludes by suggesting that if traditional political institutions wish to restore a greater degree of legitimacy, they need to ‘do’ or, more particularly, ‘supply’ politics differently, adapting to these changes by seeking out new modes of openness, engagement and accountability.     

Varieties of contemporary democratic breakdown and regression: A comparative analysis

The goal of this article is to understand which combinations of explanatory conditions account for the qualitative differences within forms of democratic breakdown (i.e., transition from democracy to a hybrid or authoritarian regime) and democratic regression (i.e., transition within democracy through a loss of democratic quality). The analysis focuses particularly on the specific features of those processes of change ending up with a transition from democratic rule, compared to those producing a simple loss of democratic quality within the democratic regime. Applying two‐step fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), the study aims to integrate different types of explanatory factors, offering a fresh and comprehensive perspective on this phenomenon.     

Ideas and Policy Change

Peter Hall's 1993 article came at the same time as a parallel body of literature was developing, some building explicitly, some only implicitly, on similar ideas. I review some literature on policy communities, ideas, and the nature of policy change before exploring the statistical distribution of budget changes at three levels of aggregation. The similarity of these results suggests that a single process may be at work rather than different processes for first‐, second‐, and third‐order change, as Hall's original formulation has it. As Hall suggests, these processes typically generate only marginal adjustments but occasionally create fundamental change. The degree of discredit to the status quo may be an important unexplored variable in explaining the ability of policy reformers to enact marginal, substantial, or fundamental policy changes. In sum, this article shows the similarities and mutual value of Hall's approach with others that would appear to be starkly contrasting.     

Policy and Organizational Change in the Federal Aviation Administration: The Ontogenesis of a High‐Reliability Organization

Although the high‐reliability organization (HRO) literature identifies several attributes that differentiate HROs from other types of organizations, these studies do not explain how an HRO comes into being, nor do they provide a means to gauge or measure the extent to which an organization exhibits the specified features. This article reports the results of a 97‐year longitudinal case study tracking the emergence and continuation of HRO characteristics in the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control operations to answer the following questions: how do HRO functions emerge in public organizations, and do policy changes lead administrative changes, or is there little relation between policy and organizational change? The analysis shows that (1) HRO characteristics emerged incrementally over an extremely long period of time, and (2) policy changes preceded organizational changes early in the process of HRO development, but the relationship of policy change to organizational change decreased in later stages.     

Does the Motivation for Market‐Based Reform Matter? The Case of Responsibility‐Centered Management

Organizational theorists have long examined the implications of market‐oriented policies for public agencies. Current research often aims to understand the effects of policies imposed on organizations by external stakeholder groups, but few studies have attempted to gain a better understanding of what mechanisms cause agencies to select into these strategies. The purpose of this article is to understand, first, which factors make an organization more likely to adopt a decentralized, market‐based budgeting system—termed “responsibility‐centered management (RCM)—and, second, whether this type of system has implications for organizational performance. Using data on doctorate‐granting public and private nonprofit four‐year universities in the United States, the authors find that mission, resource dependence, and state party control influence the take‐up of RCM. In terms of effects, RCM creates winners for graduation rates (white students) and degree production (science, technology, engineering, and math departments), which raises questions of equity across groups.