西方社会规制研究关注的主要问题及其启示

当代西方的社会规制研究兴起于20世纪70年代初。研究者们试图追问社会规制过程这个黑匣子中究竟发生了什么。为此,他们深入社会规制行动者内部,借用委托-代理理论、博弈论等研究方法,分析了作为规制者的政府内部的不同层次之间的关系及其对规制实施的影响,作为被规制者的企业内部因素,如雇主的法律意识、雇员在健康安全方面对雇主所施加的压力等,对被规制者行动策略乃至规制效益的影响,提出了一些与旧有规制经济学不同的观点;研究者们还运用流行的制度主义理论探讨了规制制度设计与变迁,规制制度与行动者之间的互动等问题。对以上西方学者们关注的问题进行评介后,指出了它们对中国社会规制研究的启示。     

制度分析视角下我国高校反腐倡廉制度建设实效性探微

在社会学制度主义的分析框架中,制度由规制性要素、规范性要素与文化-认知要素构成,从社会学制度主义的视角来分析我国高校反腐倡廉制度建设具有一定的适用性。高校反腐倡廉制度建设实效性的发挥,主要体现为强制性政策法规的建立与执行、行动者的自律与共同体的他律以及行动者对高校廉洁文化的认同三方面要素共存且互相影响的过程。在现实运行中,存在政策法规不完备与执行效力低下、行动者价值观念偏差与共同体关系不彰以及"潜规则"对高校廉洁文化的消解等现实梗阻,它们造成高校反腐倡廉制度部分失灵。应从完善政策法规与提升制度执行力、形塑行动者价值理念与厘清共同体关系以及破解"潜规则"与培育高校廉洁文化几方面来进行制度补给。     

危害食品安全犯罪立法缺陷及对策

食品安全的极大社会危害性相比其对经济的危害性,更适宜归入危害公共安全犯罪的范畴。我国刑法中没有规制持有不安全食品的相关规定,虽然持有不安全食品暂时不会发生危害后果,但一旦这种食品进行社会流通,为人食用,必然产生不可逆转的危害后果,故持有不安全食品的行为应在刑法中加以规制。我国刑法和《食品安全法》相关规定,完全有可能导致刑事处罚的罚金远低于行政处罚的罚款。建议对食品安全犯罪应以"货值金额"为标准,设定较高的罚金刑限额。     

从食品安全规制看“三鹿奶粉”事件

新近发生的"三鹿奶粉"事件折射出我国食品安全问题的严峻性和政府在社会性规制领域中时食品安全规制的缺位与不当,借鉴美国经验,应该从六个方面重构和完善我国食品安全规制体制:建立与宏观调控相匹配的包括食品安全规制在内的微观规制体系,建立食品从生产到消费整个生命周期的安全风险管理系统,健全食品安全法律法规体系,重构食品安全规制体制,完善食品安全规制体系,设立行政问责制.     

食品安全标准:从双重目标回归安全保障——以生乳新国标为例

作为对商品和斩控制规范,标准是政府广泛采用的工具.我国食品标准体系经历了从《食品卫生法》时代的卫生、质量双体系,到《食品安全法》下的统一食品安全标准体系的演进过程.标准的整合反映了立法对标准所服务的规制目标的调整.     

“成本-收益”视角下公共参与的影响因素分析

公共参与对于社会治理绩效的提升具有重要意义。行动者选择参与与否及其参与动力的高低,取决于行动者对参与成本与参与收益的解读、计算和比较。参与成本包括物质成本、机会成本、交易成本、负面的心里体验、他人不参与而被转移的成本、参与中所承受的参与风险以及"不参与成本"和退出参与的成本。参与收益包括物质上的收益、公共产品的再生产以及对参与过程本身的积极体验。公共参与的影响因素有参与补偿、参与认知、参与效能感、搭便车、选择性激励、共同体社会资本以及参与的制度化和组织化。对公共参与的分析,需要将"成本-收益"的分析框架和公共参与的影响因素结合起来。     

环境经济学:科技创新维度下我国环境规制的症因索解

环境规制不仅关涉一个国家的环境污染治理成效,还关涉一个国家科技创新水平及其激励绩效。文章在分析环境规制对提升企业科技创新及其绩效的经济学机制之基础上,从科技创新维度分析了我国现行环境规制政策之症结,认为:我国现行环境规制以"命令—控制"型为主的规制工具难以形成对企业科技创新的有效激励;直接税收规制的现行政策缺乏对整个社会技术研发投入的有效激励;现行环境规制工具忽视了对环境税生态效应的有效运用。为此,应该对相应政策做出改革,以为我国环境规制体系的后续调整做足功课,夯实基础。     

我国农村反贫困战略中的社会政策转型研究——发展型社会政策的视角

我国农村反贫困战略的基本框架是一种亲市场的经济政策与具有"剩余"特征的选择性社会救助,体现在生产性的开发式经济扶贫和处于"激活"程序中的农村五保与医疗救助政策.长期以来,旨在救助贫困者的社会政策成为经济政策的附属者角色,然而贫困者所面临的生计风险需要传统社会政策在扶贫框架中的转型.本文通过分析经济政策与社会政策在诸多方面的联系和差异比较,结合我国农村贫困的现实,以嵌入性要素来理解我国农村社会政策转型的方向.在这方面,发展型社会政策的视角在反贫困战略中提供了可让我们选择的嵌入性要素.它们是:减少风险管理成本的社会资本、反社会排斥的劳动力政策、农村生计的保护与发展、健康与医疗政策的整合以及资产为本的个人账户建设等五个方面.     

结构规制与行为规制:公用事业反垄断规制的应然逻辑

公用事业是涉及国计民生的公益性行业,在以往西方反垄断法理论和规制理论中,一直被列入反垄断"豁免"制度中。然而,随着社会经济的发展、科学技术的不断进步以及资源的新发现和替代资源的出现,公用事业自然垄断的传统边界也在不断地发生变化。因此,政府规制的范围和方法也应该随之进行调整,就我国公用事业而言,应是结构规制与行为规制并重,注重公用事业的公益性。     

社会合作规制的运作机理与行政法治回应

社会合作规制的兴起不仅是合作治理理论的逻辑推演,而且也为我国社会管理创新的社会实践所验证,理应成为我国规制模式的发展方向.多中心的规制主体、协同合作的规制行为、复合多样的规制责任以及合作高效的规制救济机制等构成了社会合作规制的运作机理.社会合作规制的运作,内在需要行政法治的保障.为此,我国行政法需要从行政法的国家与社会理论的发展、行政法制度根基的重构以及行政法原则和制度的创新等方面进行能动的法治回应.     

Policy beliefs,policy learning,and risk perception: Exploring the formation of local creative Placemaking-catalyzed policy network

This article studies the formation of a local Creative Placemaking (CPM) policy network based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and social capital perspective of policy networks. This article hypothesizes that policy beliefs, policy learning, social capital, and the perceived risks induced by defections, as well as macro-level changes in the broader political and socio-economic system, influence partner selection in the local CPM policy networks. The study collected survey data from policy actors participating in the Franklinton CPM-catalyzed revitalization project in Columbus, Ohio. An exponential random graph model (ERGM) was applied to test the hypotheses. The findings partially support the hypotheses: policy learning, certain secondary policy beliefs, and risk perceptions of changes in economic and political factors are correlated with tie formation. The reciprocity-driven bonding structure underlies the Franklinton CPM policy network, suggesting that policy actors perceive the Franklinton CPM policy network as a high-defection-risk network. This study has implications for policy makers in designing engagement strategies to better involve stakeholders holding different beliefs and occupying different network positions.     

The state of training in public policy management in Ghana

This paper discusses the relevance and state of training in public policy management in Ghana. The author argues that the lack of an institutional base for policy analysis is evident in the abdication and paralysis of policy-making, as well as the inability of the management development institutions to institutionalize training programmes in public policy management. Recognizing politicians and bureaucrats as complementary actors in the policy process, it is argued that organizing training programmes for them could contribute to improved policy-making. The content, methodology, duration, target group and impact of current training programmes in public policy management are analysed. Although the dearth of relevant local reading material on policy issue is identified as a problem in the teaching of public policy in Ghana, reference is made to some available publications on local public policy issues which could supplement Western-biased reading materials. Other problems discussed are the heterogeneous background of course participants and the non-involvement of faculty members in policy making. The paper concludes with recommendations on policy preview workshops; seminars for politicians and senior bureaucrats; development of policy analysts; and complementarity among the local management development institutions.     

Understanding NHS Reform: The Policy-Transfer, Social Learning, and Path-Dependency Perspectives

This paper utilizes three perspectives in analyzing health policy in the U.K. during the formulation of the "internal market" reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s: policy transfer, social learning, and path-dependency. By doing so, it attempts to incorporate the most significant insights from each perspective to construct a framework for analysis that better illuminates the actors, processes, and constraints involved in health policy reform, as well as providing a means of assessing its importance. I suggest that the reform process in the U.K. was considerably more complex than most existing accounts suggest, and that notions such as "conjuncture" require caution in their usage in order to avoid confusion between the contingent and relatively permanent factors that allow reform to occur.     

‘Land grabbing’ or harnessing of development potential in agriculture? East Asia's land-based investments in Africa

Abstract

Large-scale foreign investment in Africa's abundant but largely underutilized arable land has been criticised by international NGOs and social movements as ‘land grabbing’, which limits access of smallholder farmers to land, deprives local people of their livelihoods and threatens local and national food security across the continent. By way of contrast, many host governments and some leading international development agencies regard land-based investments as beneficial for development in terms of providing the necessary capital and technological know-how for modernising the region's neglected agriculture including take-off in agribusiness and agro-industrialisation, which is vital to much needed economic diversification in many African countries. East Asia's participation in the global land rush on Africa is examined from the standpoint of these two different perspectives: while China's growing presence and involvement in trade and investment in mining, energy and infrastructure in Africa is well known, less recognised is its involvement and those of other East Asian countries such as South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam in agriculture through large-scale land acquisitions. The development consequences and policy implications of these foreign land-based investments are analysed from a political economy perspective, which identifies motives, interests and benefits of the different actors and addresses the question of governance in terms of transparency and appropriate institutional arrangements to safeguard land rights and food security. In the bigger picture, the paper argues that the negative consequences of land grab has to be seen alongside the benefits flowing to Africa from growing economic relations with China and other dynamic East Asian economies and learning from the development experiences of those countries. African countries however need to re-assess the current approach and relationship with foreign land-based investors and decide how best this trend can be used to forward their economic and social agendas.     

The fable of policy entrepreneurship? Understanding policy change as an ontological problem with critical realism and institutional theory

How is policy change possible if policy entrepreneurs’ cognition, rationality and identity are conditioned by the very policy institutions they wish to change? To solve this paradox of embedded agency, we must avoid either voluntarism that inflates the role of actors to change policies as by existing policy entrepreneurship applications, or determinism whereby policy changes are decided by contextual forces. Instead, drawing on institutional theory, critical realism sees structures, institutions, and actions that constitute policy dynamics as existing in separate yet intertwined reality domains: structures (e.g., social relationships), and institutions (e.g., formal rules and norms such as institutional logics) in the Real domain, enable and constrain policy actors’ navigation of their social environments; the Actual domain represents the level at which events (actions) happen, as these actors constantly interpret varied institutions to adjust their structurally embedded actions when pursuing policy changes that can be observed in the Empirical domain. Put differently, structures and institutions are mechanisms in the Real domain that affect individual practices and events in the Actual domain, and only some of these events are realized in the Empirical domain as policy changes. We empirically illustrate this critical realist approach with a Chinese example on health care reform.

     

Non-Governmental Policy Transfer: The Strategies of Independent Policy Institutes

Discussions of policy transfer have primarily focused on official actors and networks. The non-governmental mode of policy transfer via foundations, think tanks and non-governmental organizations is a relatively neglected dimension. Accordingly, this paper addresses the role of think tanks in promoting the spread of policy ideas about privatization. The importance of think tanks to policy transfer is their ability to diffuse ideas by (1) acting as a clearing-house for information; (2) their involvement in the advocacy of ideas; (3) their involvement in domestic and transnational policy networks; and (4) their intellectual and scholarly base providing expertise on specialized policy issues. Concepts from comparative public policy and international relations such as "social learning" and "epistemic communities" are used to outline the way think tanks advocate innovative policy ideas. However, not only have think tanks been effective in promoting the transfer of policy ideas, the international spread of think tanks also exhibits organizationaltransfer.     

Cross-border Policy Networks in the Basel Region: The Effect of National Borders and Brokerage Roles

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany.     

Understanding micro-processes of institutionalization: stewardship contracting and national forest management

This paper examines micro-processes of institutionalization, using the case of stewardship contracting within the US Forest Service. Our basic premise is that, until a new policy becomes an everyday practice among local actors, it will not become institutionalized at the macro-scale. We find that micro-processes of institutionalization are driven by a mixture of large-scale institutional dynamics and how frontline decision-makers understand and interpret these dynamics, given the local social and ecological context in which they operate. For example, this paper suggests that a new policy may become institutionalized when it is understood to solve problems that old institutions at once create and demand to be solved. Agency actors cannot be conceptualized as untethered from the institutions in which they operate. Yet, within larger institutional dynamics, field personnel make key choices about whether to adopt a new policy, making them important players in the micro-processes of policy institutionalization. The interplay of actors and institutions turns agencies, such as the Forest Service, into complex systems that cannot be understood as artifacts of their own history or as a sum of the decisions of individual actors. This dynamic also implies that macro-level institutional change will be uneven, incomplete, and gradual, mirroring uneven, contingent micro-level processes.     

保障性住房政策过程的中央与地方政府关系——政策网络理论的分析与应用

为分析保障性住房政策过程中的中央与地方政府关系,找出问题解决的有效框架,采用案例分析方法,分析了保障性住房政策制定过程中中央部门间的讨价还价、政策执行过程中地方政府及其职能部门以及开发商等营利组织间的利益结盟与变通策略、其他参与主体被排斥等现象。在此基础上,引入政策网络理论,分析网络利益主体与网络利益关系。研究发现:保障性住房与民生密切相关,却积累了太多的"历史赊账";中央与地方政府间的非合作博弈是影响保障性住房政策过程以及政策结果的重要因素;非合作博弈问题需置于政策网络结构环境下去思考,政策网络理论能够提供"解释性"和"建构性"框架。论文研究对未来的保障性住房政策过程以及政策结果有重大实践意义。本文将网络利益分析与网络治理结合在一起,实现了政策网络两个理论流派的应用整合,对该领域的理论研究有重要价值。依据研究结论,保障性住房的政策制定与政策执行必须实现从封闭到开放的转变,为未来"十二五计划"做好铺垫。     

Cross-National Transfer of Policy Ideas: Agencification in Britain and Japan

This study seeks to contribute to the policy transfer literature through a comparison of the British "Next Steps" initiative of agencification (i.e., organizational separation of policy implementation from policy formulation in central departments) and the Japanese reform that officially proclaimed to be inspired by the British example. In addition to confirming the crucial role played by domestic structural constraints in producing variant outputs in different countries, this article also shows that the transfer of policy ideas can be a highly proactive political process in which political actors in the learning country interpret and define both problems and solution as they "borrow" from another country.