Transparency without Democracy: The Unexpected Effects of China's Environmental Disclosure Policy

This article examines the impact of transparency regulations enacted under authoritarian conditions, through a study of China's environmental transparency measures. Given China's decentralized administrative structure, environmental disclosure ends up being weakest in the most polluted cities. However, the measures have allowed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to affect environmental governance through unusual pathways. Multinational companies (MNCs) have used NGO pollution databases to monitor Chinese suppliers, whereas local governments have responded to a transparency index with greater NGO engagement. That said, these civil society initiatives have had limited impact on key stakeholder behavior. For the environment ministry, enforcement costs remain high. Local government behavior depends on their economic priorities and the nature of their relations with enterprises. Chinese enterprise behavior depends on the character of their relations with government and MNCs. Given China's authoritarian structure, improved governance does not translate into stronger accountability, challenging common assumptions about the relationship between transparency and accountability.     

Evidence Based Policy: Principles of Transparency and Accountability

This article provides a practical guide for improving the quality of evidence‐based policy. Rather than adopting an approach that gives priority to particular types of research methodologies, this paper argues that evidence drawn from any methodology will improve if standards of transparency and accountability are followed in the process of gathering, analysing, interpreting, and presenting evidence for policy. The papers details what these standards of transparency and accountability mean in practice, how these standards can be achieved, and possible limits to their adoption.     

The GATT and Environmental Policy: An Analysis of Potential Conflicts and Policy Reforms

The emergence of a worldwide environmental movement in the early 1960s accompanied an international expansion of economic activity and applied technology. The principal medium through which this expansion progressed was trade. In 1947, following World War II, a series of international agreements were negotiated to regularize international relations in finance, monetary policies, and trade. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was negotiated without anticipation of an international environmental movement and new policies at the national level that did not reflect, and might be inconsistent with, economic values. Conflict between policies for freedom of trade and environmental protection did not immediately emerge. With the adoption of numerous environmental protection measures in the United States and many other countries after 1969, the incompatibility of some trade and environmental policies became political issues. Trade policies are not confined to economic changes. Policy issues developing around the agreement and environmental protection are complex, and frequently involve technological issues, as in the Mexican tuna controversy discussed in this paper.     

Transparency and Openness: A Reform or Education Policy?

Current policies are developed through complex and dynamic historical processes and conflicts originating in these processes. In 2002 a new Act on Transparency and Openness in education was put into effect in Denmark. The Act is a formalised system of performance measurement, and introduced a new feature to the governing of the Danish education system. All educational institutions are obliged to publish on the Internet average grades of final examinations. The historical institutional concept of path dependency shows how the outline of the Act is made at an earlier stage. The Act is layered as a new institutional arrangement on top of pre-existing institutions. By focusing on how institutional and political processes interact and are combined, new contributions to historical institutionalism are further developed without considering institutional reproduction and innovation as opposites. It is elaborated how the Act, with respect to certain dimensions, respectively reproduces, breaks with and combines two formerly outlaid paths of education policy and reform policy.     

Integrated Impact Assessment as Environmental Policy: The New Zealand Experiment

The scope, complexity and interrelatedness of environmental problems presents a difficult challenge to policymakers. To date, public policies have been responsive largely to particular matters of public concern. They have typically been ad hoc, sectoral and segmental. Their administration has been charged to various agencies, each with its special mission. In consequence, governments have often acted to cross purposes; small results have often been ineffectual and, as often, unnecessarily expensive. Incremental innovation is seldom able to affect significantly the tendencies of the larger system of public policy and administration within which it is undertaken. Inasmuch as no country has had long experience with administration of environmental policy, a comparison of different approaches to environmental problems is useful. Direct transfers of method from one country to another may seldom be practicable, yet there may be lessons learned from the diverse experience of governments addressing similar problems. A comprehensive and radical institutional experiment in environmental policy has been initiated in the government of New Zealand. The New Zealand experiment may illuminate the effects of institutional structure on the implementation of policy. The relationships between constitutional principles, policy priorities and administrative structures have never been clear. The problems of coping with multiple environmental trends, their causes and their consequences justify efforts to find more effective methods of policymaking.     

Potential Effects of Federal Policy Devolution on Local Housing Expenditures

As 1994 came to a close, the future of the U.S. Department ofHousing and Urban Development (HUD) and the continued role ofthe federal government in low-income housing assistance washighly uncertain. The agency was targeted for elimination bycongressional leaders, its budget was the object of recissionattempts, and agency officials proposed a radical reinventionto alter housing programs and the delivery system for federalhousing assistance. Given the likelihood of either more budgetcuts (resulting in greater reliance on nonfederal sources offunds) or the devolution of policy responsibility through blockgrants, there is heightened concern for how local governmentsallocate housing funds. This article examines housing expenditurestrategies of large U.S. cities. The analysis describes factorsrelated to a greater use of nonfederal housing revenues by cities,and examines the impact of funding source on program and beneficiarytargeting. The data suggest that reduced federal spending ora shift to block grants is likely to result in more housingbenefits directed to moderate-income households and to homeownersand homebuyers.     

Transparency by Conformity: A Field Experiment Evaluating Openness in Local Governments

Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on one another. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. This article presents a field experiment testing whether a county government's fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. The authors propose that knowledge of peer compliance should induce competitive pressures to comply and resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. Findings indicate peer conformity affects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.     

Hazardous Waste Management: An Emerging Policy Area Within an Emerging Federalism

This article examines the manner in which hazardous waste, alreadybeing labeled the major environmental issue of the 1980s, isbeing accommodated in a period of evolving intergovernmentalrelations. Hazardous waste is a technological problem with economicovertones and political consequences. The governmental mechanismsset up to tackle the issue are understandably complex and, someobservers argue, fall short of the mark. Special attention isgiven to the pivotal role played by state governments. Devolutionof operational responsibilities as well as policymaking authoritymake the states important. Thus far, the evidence regardingstate performance is mixed. Instances of policy innovation existalongside of functional evasion. Interstate competition andlimited financial resources remain confounding factors. Reconfiguredfederalism may emerge.     

Politics of Disclosure: Organizational Transparency as Multiactor Negotiation

Transparency is in vogue, yet it is often used as an umbrella concept for a wide array of phenomena. More focused concepts are needed to understand the form and function of different phenomena of visibility. In this article, the authors define organizational transparency as systematic disclosure programs that meet the information needs of other actors. Organizational transparency, they argue, is best studied as an interorganizational negotiation process on the field level. To evaluate its merit, the authors apply this framework to a case study on the introduction of open data in the Berlin city administration. Analyzing the politics of disclosure, they consider the similarities and differences between phenomena of visibility (e.g., open data, freedom of information), explore the transformative power of negotiating transparency, and deduce recommendations for managing transparency.     

Policy Transfer as a Form of Prospective Policy Evaluation: Challenges and Recommendations

This article focuses on policy transfer as a form of prospective policy analysis, which we define as policy makers' attempts to assess the effect of a policy or program before it is put in place. Despite a burgeoning literature on cross-national policy transfer, there has been little systematic comparison of cases to identify either common problems or potential strategies in the practice of policy transfer. This article sets forth a rational model of policy transfer and examines, in light of that model, case studies of cross-national policy transfer spanning different policy domains. Taking into account the constraints faced by policy makers, we relax standard rational decision-making criteria and make recommendations for improving the process of policy transfer as a form of prospective policy evaluation.     

The Effect of Transparency on Trust in Government: A Cross‐National Comparative Experiment

Transparency is considered a key value for trustworthy governments. However, the effect of transparency on citizens’ trust across national cultures is overlooked in current research. This article compares the effect of transparency on trust in government in the Netherlands and South Korea. The effect is investigated in two similar series of three experiments. The authors hypothesize that the effect of transparency differs because the countries have different cultural values regarding power distance and short‐ and long‐term orientation. Results reveal similar patterns in both countries: transparency has a subdued and sometimes negative effect on trust in government. However, the negative effect in South Korea is much stronger. The difference in the magnitude of transparency's effect suggests that national cultural values play a significant role in how people perceive and appreciate government transparency.     

Penetrating the Performance Predicament: Communication as a Mediator or Moderator of Organizational Culture's Impact on Public Organizational Performance

The role of communication in public administration has been emphasized over time in public administration theory. Nonetheless, communication—with the exception of political communication—has been neglected in scholarship. Garnett's performance predicament posits the difficulty of showing linkages between communication and performance. This paper explores the role that communication plays in achieving organizational performance through a review of research that bears on communication's direct and indirect influences on performance. The primary thrust is communication's indirect role in achieving performance by mediating or moderating the effects of organizational culture on performance, thereby adding another perspective on the culture–performance relationship. Adapting the typology of Zammuto and Krakower, two types of organizational culture—rule-oriented culture and mission-oriented culture—are examined to explore how the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance is influenced by communication. The analysis supports the claim that communication acts as a meta-mechanism for shaping and imparting culture in mission-oriented organizational cultures, thereby influencing performance. In particular, task orientation, feedback, and upward communication have positive effects on perceived organizational performance in mission-oriented organizations but potentially negative effects on performance in rule-oriented cultures.     

Measuring and Promoting Budget Transparency: The Open Budget Index as a Research and Advocacy Tool

Transparency in public budgeting has been a recognized principle of sound governance for a long time. Yet, reliable measures of budget transparency are hard to come by. This article introduces the Open Budget Index (OBI), a new tool based on surveys by independent researchers that compares key budget information published by governments across the world. Data from the latest survey, published in 2010 and covering 94 countries, reveal that on average, the state of budget transparency around the world is poor. Countries with lower incomes, weaker democratic institutions, and higher dependency on foreign aid and hydrocarbon sales tend to be less transparent. However, a number of countries have improved the quantity and coverage of the budget information that they publish, in some cases following civil society pressure based on OBI findings. More generally, OBI data help identify easy steps that governments and other actors could take to further improve budget transparency.     

Policy termination as a political process

The problem of how to terminate ineffective or outdated public policies, programs, or organizations is increasingly important. This paper argues that it is helpful to conceive of termination as a special case of the policy adoption process: there is a struggle to adopt a policy A, the substance of which is to eliminate or curtail policy B. The main distinguishing feature of this class of policy contests is the activity of vested interests who are able to advance a peculiarly powerful moral claim concerning the inequity or unfairness of change.     

Policy analysis as a hermeneutic activity

Any piece of policy analysis must be appropriate to the context of its intended use. Social science often fails as policy analysis due to insensitivity to context. This paper explores a number of different modes of policy analysis to determine the circumstances in which the application of each is appropriate. It is argued that each mode is appropriate only under a fairly limited set of conditions; many of the problems policy analysis encounters are a result of attempts to apply a mode outside its niche. Greater use should be made of what is developed here as a hermeneutic model of policy analysis, appropriate in a residual set of conditions which none of the traditional models of policy analysis copes with adequately.     

Environmental Policy as a Political Problem

The politics of the environment may not be unique, but they present some distinctive characteristics. In undertaking policy analyses and administrative strategies an appreciation of concepts, assumptions and circumstances, and underlying environmental policy issues is needed. To ignore these fundamentals is to risk superficiality in analysis, and error in findings and conclusions. Yet getting down to basics is often rejected as diversion from the goal of analysis. It deviates from a "straight to the point" approach, adds cost and time to investigation, and seldom interests practical-minded analysts. Even so, this paper will be prefaced by a concise reminder of some basic factors that make environmental policy problematic. Among these are: (1) incompatible concepts of man-nature relationships—notably conflict between perceived facts and values, (2) inadequate comprehension of the complexities of nature, (3) sectoral subdivisions of knowledge, (4) assumptions, situations and motivations in environmental politics, (5) fractionated structure of laws and administration, and (6) short-range perception of time. In addition to these conceptual factors the widely varied subject-matter of environmental politics narrows the scope of generalization for policy purposes.     

Area Poverty Effects on Local Health Care Costs: An Analysis of Mississippi

This article examines the relationship of area medical costs and poverty in Mississippi. Using a fixed‐effects model and Medicare expenditures, the results indicate that an addition of one percentage point in area poverty increases expected per enrollee expenditures by 0.90%. These figures imply that successful poverty amelioration efforts could yield substantial reductions in medical costs over time. The estimates suggest that a one‐percentage‐point reduction in poverty could accrue to a statewide savings of $510 million in medical costs over a 5‐year time period.