Interorganisational Relations and Goal Consensus: An Exploratory Study in Two Local Dutch Service Delivery Networks

The present study explores how similarity in policy preferences within pairs of organisations in service delivery networks (that is, goal consensus) is related to existing bilateral interorganisational relations. We distinguish between different types of interorganisational relations and hypothesise that stronger relations are positively associated with goal consensus. A social network analysis is performed using data on 546 ties in two complete service delivery networks in a medium-sized city in the Netherlands. Results indicate that the strongest association is between goal consensus and types of interorganisational relations that imply more strategic information exchange between members of the organisations – especially managerial interaction.     

Inside the Matrix: Integrating the Paradigms of Intergovernmental and Network Management

Abstract

The basic research concepts of intergovernmental and network management are examined with regard to blending the two into a unified theory of collaborative management. A substantial literature in both fields has emerged and is ripe for conceptually enhancing interorganizational management in the public sector. The collaborative management concepts forwarded emanate from the authors' comprehensive study of collaborative public management in 237 cities. The major concerns that are found to be ready for knowledge unification include: (1) multiple network complexity and the emergence of governance through policy networks, (2) strategic behavior and its implementation through networks, (3) the role of government institutions in network governance, and (4) the use of myriad policy instruments and multiorganizational activity. Each of these research arenas are representative of the kind of knowledge base that can be blended and extended to help public managers understand how to operate in the vertical/horizontal matrix of intergovernmental network management.     

DETERMINANTS OF NETWORK OUTCOMES: THE IMPACT OF MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

The literature on network management is extensive. However, it generally explores network structures, neglecting the impact of management strategies. In this article we assess the effect of management strategies on network outcomes, providing empirical evidence from 119 urban revitalization networks. We go beyond current work by testing a path model for the determinants of network outcomes and considering the interactions between the constructs: management strategies, trust, complexity, and facilitative leadership. Our results suggest that management strategies have a strong effect on network outcomes and that they enhance the level of trust. We also found that facilitative leadership has a positive impact on network management as well as on trust in the network. Our findings also show that complexity has a negative impact on trust. A key finding of our research is that managers may wield more influence on network dynamics than previously theorized.     

Cyberdemocracy or Potemkin E-Villages? Electronic Governments in OECD and Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

The dramatic increase in the use of the World Wide Web and the Internet in government may foreshadow important changes in the nature of governance. A number of theorists have posited that the adoption of networked information systems is accompanied by inevitable shifts toward democratic government. Others argue that technologies are secondary factors in changes in levels of democracy or types of governance. Our article examines the openness of cabinet-level websites in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and post-communist countries as a measure of an important aspect of governance that has only recently been operationalized. It provides a brief review of other studies in this field and the directions in which they are heading. The article analyzes the effects of political, cultural, economic, and technical factors on openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. The question is whether the level of democracy and cultural legacies affect openness of electronic governments. The study employs statistical analysis of a comparative database of national-level public agency websites that is produced by the Cyberspace Policy Research Group (CyPRG). The dependent variable is based on transparency and interactivity scores and availability of cabinet-level websites. The independent variables include Freedom House and Polity indexes of democracy, historical legacy, religious tradition, and the GDP per capita and number of Internet users per 1,000 people. Regression analysis shows that democracy, historical legacies, level of economic development, and religious tradition affect openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. This study demonstrates need to distinguish between cyberdemocracy and “Potemkin e-villages,” that is, window-dressing, in electronic governments.     

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: Procedural mechanisms of accountability,transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi‐level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi‐level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multi‐level governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria—accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness—and points towards substantive institutional reforms.     

Pathologies of Development Practice: Higher Order Obstacles to Governance Reform in the Pakistani Electrical Power Sector

Development actors are regularly aware of the shortcomings of governance interventions before, during, and after development assistance is introduced, yet those programmes continue and are even revisited. Why? This paper uses the Pakistani experience with power sector reforms to illustrate how the donor-led reform agenda had readily apparent shortcomings. A new wave of development thinking responds to such failures by drawing on complexity theory and moving toward more local, iterative and experimental approaches. However, by highlighting how the awareness of problems with reforms isn’t sufficient to avoid them, this paper points to a higher order of obstacles which remain unaddressed.     

Co‐production as a route to employability: Lessons from services with lone parents

Policy‐makers claim to support personalized approaches to improving the employability of disadvantaged groups. Yet, in liberal welfare states, mainstream activation programmes targeting these groups often deliver standardized, low‐quality services. Such failures may be related to a governance and management regime that uses tightly defined contracting and performance targets to incentivize (mainly for‐profit) service providers to move people into any job as quickly as possible. This article draws on evidence from third sector/public sector‐led services in Scotland to discuss an alternative approach. These services co‐produced personalized support in partnership with disadvantaged service users (in this case vulnerable lone parents). We suggest that, in this case, street‐level co‐production and personalization were facilitated by co‐governance and co‐management in the design and organization of provision. We conclude by identifying lessons for future employability services.     

Multilevel Governance: Framing the Integration of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Policymaking

Scholars embrace multilevel governance as an analytical framework for complex problems, such as climate change or water pollution. However, the elements needed to comprehensively operationalize multilevel governance remain undefined in the literature. This article describes the five necessary ingredients to a multilevel framework: sanctioning and coordinating authority, provision of capacity, knowledge co-production, framing of co-benefits, and engagement of civil society. The framework’s analytical utility is illustrated through two contrasting case examples—watershed management in the United States and air quality management in China. The framework balances local and central actors, which can promote a more effective governance regime.     

Linkages between Globalisation,Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

This study investigates linkages between environmental degradation, globalisation and governance in 44 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa using data for the period 2000–2012. The Generalised Method of Moments is employed as empirical strategy. Environmental degradation is proxied by carbon dioxide emissions whereas globalisation is appreciated in terms of trade openness and net foreign direct investment inflows. Bundled and unbundled governance indicators are used, namely: political governance (consisting of political stability/no violence and “voice & accountability”), economic governance (encompassing government effectiveness and regulation quality), institutional governance (entailing corruption-control and the rule of law) and general governance (a composite measurement of political governance, economic governance and institutional governance). The following main finding is established. Trade openness modulates carbon dioxide emissions to have positive net effects on political stability, economic governance, the rule of law and general governance.     

MANAGING PUBLIC CONSULTATION: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND EMPIRICAL FINDINGS FROM BELGIAN CASE STUDIES

This article addresses the question of how governments can set up and manage, in an increasingly complex policy environment, processes of public consultation that lead to good outcomes. Drawing upon insights of democratic theory and literature on network and interactive governance, the article discusses the organization and outcomes of public consultation processes. The analysis of four Belgian cases shows that the absence of open process rules does not prevent good outcomes. Second, the level of managerial autonomy is positively correlated with the intensity of process design and management. Third, cases with intensive process design and management have better overall results. These findings question some normative assumptions in the literature, positing the need for open process rules regarding entrance, scope of discussion, and interaction. Intensive process design and management with rules properly accommodating the policy situation is possibly a better means of achieving good results than rule openness. These findings challenge the need for legislation stipulating in detail who needs to be consulted, about what, and how.     

Energy and Environmental Governance under Ecological Modernization: a Comparative Analysis of Nordic Countries

In this study of energy and environmental governance in four Nordic countries, we aim to shed further light on the question of organization of political governance under transition to ecological modernization. Our findings are that, in spite of a number of similarities, the Nordic countries seem to be pursuing programmes of ecological modernization under rather different regimes of political governance. However, we do not find the diversity of national energy-environmental governance regimes by reference to national policy-making styles. Instead, our analysis indicates that a more plausible explanation of the variety may lie in differences in their industrial and resource-based structure. Given diverse industrial structures, similar policy measures may have very different effects on national economies, and hence, motivate distinct governance measures. The paper concludes that a lock into a standardized ‘first-best’ mode of environmental governance may prove detrimental to environmental modernization in practice, since it might expose economies to unacceptable consequences and then to a fallback to traditional industrial strategies.     

Energy and Environmental Governance under Ecological Modernization: a Comparative Analysis of Nordic Countries

In this study of energy and environmental governance in four Nordic countries, we aim to shed further light on the question of organization of political governance under transition to ecological modernization. Our findings are that, in spite of a number of similarities, the Nordic countries seem to be pursuing programmes of ecological modernization under rather different regimes of political governance. However, we do not find the diversity of national energy-environmental governance regimes by reference to national policy-making styles. Instead, our analysis indicates that a more plausible explanation of the variety may lie in differences in their industrial and resource-based structure. Given diverse industrial structures, similar policy measures may have very different effects on national economies, and hence, motivate distinct governance measures. The paper concludes that a lock into a standardized 'first-best' mode of environmental governance may prove detrimental to environmental modernization in practice, since it might expose economies to unacceptable consequences and then to a fallback to traditional industrial strategies.     

Culture Governance: Governing Self‐Reflexive Modernity

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self‐reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self‐transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for self‐and co‐governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003; Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top‐down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self‐disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined‐up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non‐strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.     

Political Recentralisation and the Diffusion of Solar Energy in China

Abstract

This article uses principal–agent theory to examine the governance of solar energy in China and question the notion of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ in Chinese governance. It demonstrates that the governance of solar energy in China operates on two levels, with ‘police patrol’ control and monitoring mechanisms at the meso- or sectoral level combined with ‘fire alarm’ modes of political control at the micro-level. Drawing on original interview material, we argue that this two-level model and distinct set of supervisory institutions have allowed China, as a relatively late entrant into the solar energy sector, to address the growing environmental emergency within China and catch up technologically with the West.     

The Dynamics of Multi-organizational Partnerships: an Analysis of Changing Modes of Governance

Multi-organizational partnerships are now an important means of governing and managing public programmes. They typically involve business, community and not-for-profit agencies alongside government bodies. Partnerships are frequently contrasted with competitive markets and bureaucratic hierarchies. A more complex reality is revealed once partnerships as an organizational form are distinguished from networks as a mode of social co-ordination or governance. Data from studies of UK urban regeneration partnerships are used to develop a four-stage partnership life cycle: pre-partnership collaboration; partnership creation; partnership programme delivery; and partnership termination. A different mode of governance - network, market or hierarchy - predominates at each stage. Separating organizational form from mode of governance enables a richer understanding of multi-organizational activity and provides the basis from which theory and practice can be developed. The key challenge for partnerships lies in managing the interaction of different modes of governance, which at some points will generate competition and at other points collaboration.     

Network tasks and accountability: A configurational analysis of EU regulatory networks

Intergovernmental networks have become a prominent cooperative mechanism to deal with trans-boundary and interdependent problems. Yet, we still have limited knowledge of how these collaborative endeavours are governed, which is crucial to properly understanding how they function. This article empirically examines the structural governance configurations of rule-enforcing networks in the European Union. The article relies on data from 37 networks with rule-enforcing tasks and conducts a qualitative comparative analysis. We find three basic governance structure configurations used by rule-enforcing networks: first, a configuration with legal accountability, which is characterized by having a board of appeals; second, one with administrative accountability that, in addition to a board of appeals, has powerful executive boards and professional experts in the network plenary; and a third one with democratic accountability that incorporates legislative representatives in the network plenary. We argue that these results show how network tasks are related to accountability and governance.     

Economic orthodoxy and the East Asian crisis

It is increasingly apparent that the Asian economic crisis has also led to a serious ideological crisis in the West. Before the collapse there was broad agreement among Western orthodox economists that developing countries should pursue a set of economic policies, often referred to as the 'Washington consensus', which included financial sector liberalisation, privatisation of state-owned enterprises, fiscal discipline and trade, exchange rate and foreign investment deregulation. Since the collapse, however, this consensus has broken down. This paper examines the emergence of the new so-called post-Washington consensus, with its emphasis on governance and social capital. The lexicon of the new policy paradigm underlying this new consensus includes civil society, safety nets, and, especially, governance, to be added to the conventional Washington terminology of open markets, deregulation, liberalisation and structural adjustment. Our central thesis is that this new post-Washington consensus is an attempt to place more emphasis on the political and institutional foundations for programmes of structural reform. However, it is also a kind of politics of antipolitics that attempts to insulate economic institutions from the process of political bargaining.     

Social Network Effects on Mobile Money Adoption in Uganda

This study analyses social network effects on the adoption of mobile money among rural households in Uganda. We estimate conditional logistic regressions controlling for correlated effects and other information sources. Results show that mobile money adoption is positively influenced by the size of the social network with which information is exchanged. We further find that this effect is particularly pronounced for non-poor households. Thus, while social networks represent an important target for policy-makers aiming to promote mobile money technology, the poorest households are likely to be excluded and require more tailored policy programmes and assistance.