The Social Market After the Crash

Markets are powerful tools for reform in both the public and private realms. But those markets need careful design and stewardship if they are to work to create value rather than simply becoming a mechanism for distributing rents to private investors. SMF Director Ian Mulheirn examines how the social market framework offers the most cogent analysis of recent events and how it can be a vital guide for future policy.     

Another Opportunity Lost? Victorian Labor's Enactment of Sustainability, 1999–2010

‘Sustainability’ provides the dominant frame for environmental policy debate, even though there is considerable debate to as to what sustainability is, why is it needed, and how can it be progressed. From 1999 through to 2010, Victoria was governed by Australian Labor Party (ALP) led governments that, at times, actively pursued the goal of sustainable development. This culminated in the stated ambition for Victoria to be ‘world leaders in environmental sustainability debate and practice’. This paper explores the way in which sustainability was enacted by Victorian Labor while in government. The evidence indicates that the potential of Victorian Labor's vision was never realized, and that it failed to significantly reform the neoliberal policy settings it inherited.     

Social citizenship and ethnicity around a public sector steel plant in Orissa,India

This article is about a modern public sector steel plant in the state of Orissa and its promise to set standards for post-colonial India's citizenry at large. These steel plants were to provide their workforces with superior social and economic citizenship rights, which in turn were to serve as exemplary industrial relations for the industrialising nation. The steel plants were also intended to forge multi-ethnic workforces into exemplary Indian citizens by transcending their manifold ethnic differences. The trajectory of the public sector steel plant in the town of Rourkela confirms that enhanced social and economic citizenship rights detached public sector steel workforces from labour at large and produced a ‘labour aristocracy’. The trajectory, furthermore, reveals how in Rourkela policies designed to accommodate ethnic differences constantly recreated these differences and hampered the access of large sections of the local population to these enhanced social and economic citizenship rights.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

Knowledge,innovation and sustainability： The implementation of voluntary environmental policies in Greece： The case of environmental management systems

The paper focuses upon the issues of knowledge, innovation and sustainability concerning the implementation of voluntary environmental policies in Greece, and in particularly, through assessing the implementation of environmental management systems （EMS）. The first part of the paper refers to the theoretical background of EMS, presenting selected aspects from the approaches of the new economic geography and the new regionalism and from ecological modernization theory. In the second part, the implementation of EMS in Greece is highlighted, mainly focused on the profile of the enterprises, the sectoral and regional distributional pattern and the main problems during the implementation. The third part presents the main results of the empirical research on the impact of EMS implementation, concerning sustainability （e.g., water and energy savings, alternative renewable resources, sound waste management）, innovation （e.g., product or process innovation） and participation. The role of knowledge, during the process of implementation of EMS, is analyzed in the forth part of the paper. In the last part, recommendations for future policies are described, aiming at promoting strategies of EMS in urban areas and enchasing the role of local government.     

Australian Rural Local Governments and Environmental Sustainability: An Evaluation of Progress

Local government is often characterised as being well-placed to enact a successful agenda for environmental sustainability because of its closeness to both people and the environment. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which this assumption is correct in terms of local government environmental policies and programs in rural Australia. Using case studies with eight local government authorities in Queensland and New South Wales, the article documents three different positions on a continuum of environmental engagement. These are 'disengaged', 'moving towards engagement' and 'engaged'. The article concludes by arguing that the resource constraints facing rural local councils limit their capacity to engage with environmental management.     

Transparency: from Bentham’s inventory of virtuous effects to contemporary evidence-based scepticism

There is growing enthusiasm for transparency in public affairs. Discourses idealising the value of transparency are part of the rhetoric of advocates of ‘good governance’. However, there is little discussion of the justifications for transparency. The view that transparency underpins legitimacy is similar to that of the advocates for ‘publicity’ in the initial era of representative government, when transparency (or publicity) became a crucial issue in political debates. This article identifies the intellectual roots of claims for transparency through a retrospective examination of the initial pleas in its favour. It concentrates on Jeremy Bentham, who provided an extended inventory of reasons for publicity. We examine Bentham’s major arguments and how they are currently analysed. We conclude that the virtuous effects of transparency are today qualified by criticisms in scholarly work which emphasise the possible costs and perverse effects of the search for transparency or demonstrate that it may fail to deliver the expected benefits.     

The Limits of Transparency

Few would disagree that more transparency is generally a good thing for democracy. Indeed so few would disagree that an unthinking consensus has developed where transparency appears to have become the political tonic to cure all ills. Political unaccountability? Let's have more transparency. Economic inefficiency? More transparency. Too close a relationship between politicians and the press? We need more transparency. These six essays by Andrew Murray, John Lloyd, Helen Margetts, Sean Maguire, Aleks Krotosky and Kevin Marsh question the sometimes unthinking consensus about the benefits of transparency. They question it from a legal perspective, from a journalistic perspective, from a governance perspective, from a technological perspective, from practical perspective, and from a civic perspective.     

Mixing business with politics: Does corporate social responsibility end where lobbying transparency begins?

Scholars increasingly have argued that the future effectiveness and legitimacy of firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities are dependent on more transparent forms of lobbying to ensure firms' policy positions are aligned with their CSR commitments. Very little empirical work, however, has systematically analyzed firms' lobbying disclosures or examined how these firms coordinate their lobbying and CSR activities. We address these empirical questions by analyzing the CSR reports of 150 corporations from Germany, the UK and the US over an 18-year period and by conducting interviews with the CSR managers of these firms. We find that corporations have become more transparent about their public policy advocacy over time, thus acknowledging that lobbying is a CSR issue. For most firms, however, this commitment to transparency appears to be largely ceremonial. Few firms disclose the specific policy positions they advocate or sufficiently coordinate the work of their lobbying and CSR units to foster greater alignment of these activities. These modest changes in lobbying transparency appear to be driven by legitimacy concerns and, in a few instances, by governance gaps firms perceive to be relevant to their future business interests.     

The growth effects of sport franchises,stadia, and arenas

This paper investigates the relationship between professional sports franchises and venues and real per capita personal income in 37 standard metropolitan statistical areas in the United States over the period 1969 to 1994. Our empirical framework accounts for the entry and departure of professional football, basketball, and baseball franchises; the construction of arenas and stadia; and other sports related factors over this time period. In contrast to other existing studies, we find evidence that some professional sports franchises reduce the level of per capita personal income in metropolitan areas and have no effect on the growth in per capita income, casting doubt on the ability of a new sports franchise or facility to spur economic growth. We also find evidence that results obtained from estimating reduced‐form relationships, a common practice in the literature, are not robust to alternative reduced‐form specifications. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.