Practical vs. identity regionalism: Australia's APC initiative,a case study

On 4 June 2008 Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced his ‘vision for an Asia Pacific community’ (APC). Though failing to win support among Asian countries, the initiative offers a useful case study. This article does not focus on the motives and interests of the various governments responding to the proposal but rather on the different (and sometimes conflicting) understandings of regionalism that underpinned those responses. In its diplomatic advocacy of the APC, the Australian government stressed ‘practical regionalism’ – emphasizing the capacity of such a new ‘community’ to deal with security, economic, environmental and other challenges faced in recent times in the Asia-Pacific region. The Australian campaign gave little attention, however, to the influence of cognitive and emotive factors in community planning: it neglected ‘identity’ regionalism. In particular, it did not seem to take seriously the possible role of non-Western perspectives in shaping the development of post-colonial inter-state relations. Through the investigation of key Asian-language terms – relating to the English terms for ‘region’ and ‘community’ – this article seeks to demonstrate the importance of the identity dimension in both policy development and academic analysis. It argues for an analytic and diplomatic skillset that goes beyond the disciplines of international relations and economics and draws upon expertise in linguistics and regional political cultures.     

学术研究与政策研究相脱节的症结与出路

2009年6月27—28日，北京大学国际战略研究中心以“国际问题研究的学术性与政策性”为主题举办了一次青年论坛。与会者围绕“国际问题研究中的理论与政策”和“中国国际问题研究的发展方向”两个议题，对学术研究与政策研究之间的关系、存在的问题及解决的思路等问题进行了讨论。本刊“主题讨论”特刊载部分与会者为此次论坛所提交的书面发言。本刊主编暨北京大学国际关系学院院长王缉思为此组讨论文章写了引言。此外，研讨会上，约瑟夫·奈等美国学者的相关文章引起了与会者的广泛关注。经作者及原载刊物授权，本刊将约瑟夫·奈及李侃如的两篇文章译成中文。一并刊发，以飨读者。     

The Journey to September 12th: A 9/11 Victim's Experiences with the Press,the President,and Congress

Carie Lemack, the co-founder of Families of September 11, alongside other 9/11 family members, had a unique perspective working with Congress, the White House, and the media after her mother was killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. This article outlines some of those experiences and looks at the organization, execution, and effectiveness of the 9/11 families in changing their government, enacting new counterterrorism policies, and interacting with the press. The author shares her perspective on the post—9/11 legislative events that have taken place between 2001 and 2004 and offers lessons she learned in the process.     

Ideas, bargaining and flexible policy communities: policy change and the case of the Oxford Transport Strategy

Critiques of policy networks have highlighted particularly the inability of concepts such as policy communities to explain policy change. The established construction of policy community places it chiefly as a metaphor for a relatively stable network within the policy process, which emphasizes the resource dependencies between key stakeholders. Typically, a process of bargaining brings about accommodation and a state of negotiated order.
However, a key problem arises in explaining major policy change where an established policy community persists. One solution here is to appreciate that, over time, dominant ideas and associated policy meanings may shift appreciably within an otherwise durable policy community. Thus, even a seemingly insulated policy community, under certain conditions, may not be immune to idea mutation and new policy meanings. Given the central importance of policy communities, these shifts may induce significant policy change.
A case study of this type is provided by the Oxford Transport Strategy (OTS), where a dual process of change took place. On one level of analysis, a challenge to the policy community produced a typical bargaining strategy, with an emphasis on negotiated order. On another level of analysis, however, the terms of the policy debate shifted markedly, and produced a new meaning for the key concept of integrated transport within the policy community. In turn, this process induced significant policy change. The article concludes that, ironically, the survival of a policy community depends on its ability to re-create itself by visualizing a new future.     

Strengthening Public Administration Research: Identifying Boundaries and Horizons

Since the early days of the field, public administration research has been a work in progress. Many authors have struggled to find the proper role of research in the field. Interest in the topic intensified over the last couple of decades, as a perception developed that the quality and usefulness of work had fallen decidedly behind other academic disciplines. While a rich literature has developed debating the merits of public administration research, the resulting product does not provide a clear direction for reform-minded researchers to follow. In this article, we seek to organize this material in ways that will make it more useful. Our analysis identifies hard and soft barriers preventing progress and examines three dilemmas facing public administration researchers: theoretical versus conceptual research, academically sophisticated methods versus widely accessible methods, and an academic versus a practitioner focus. Through our discussion of these dilemmas, we seek to clarify the issues facing researchers and help them make more informed choices.     

An empirical analysis of municipal choice in Portugal

Processes of European integration and growing consumer scrutiny of public services have served to place the spotlight on the traditional French model of public/private interaction in the urban services domain. This article discusses recent debates within France of the institutionalised approach to local public/private partnership, and presents case study evidence from three urban agglomerations of a possible divergence from this approach. Drawing on the work of French academic, Dominique Lorrain, whose historical institutionalist accounts of the French model are perhaps the most comprehensive and best known, the article develops two hypotheses of institutional change, one from the historical institutionalist perspective of institutional stability and persistence, and the other from an explicitly sociological perspective, which emphasises the legitimating benefits of following appropriate rules of conduct. It argues that further studying the French model as an institution offers valuable empirical insight into processes of institutional change and persistence.     

MPA as management education

The central theme of this article is that we have not adequately addressed the question of teaching management. The academic community has done a better job of preparing persons for technical/professional positions in personnel, budgeting and policy analysis. This failure to address the problem of teaching management leaves students (particularly mid-career students) without a foundation for understanding their role as managers. Given that so many MPA students aspire to be managers, it is time we faced this failure and sought means to correct it.

The article suggests a framework to understand and promote public management education. The central argument is to direct management education toward those factors which reflect the public values which underlie the concept of governance. Toward that end public management education must reflect three elements:

1) the political and ethical foundations of publicness,

2) the examination of the practice of management in public organizations, and

3) the skills needed to accomplish the task of management.

An MPA program should reflect all three of these elements if it is to provide an adequate management education. Nevertheless, it must also be recognized that career-long learning is the ultimate goal. Further, management education is but one task of an MPA program. The development of technical competencies in the other aspects of government, such as in budgeting and policy analysis are similarly important goals for MPA programs. A curriculum that accommodates both the management skills and technical competencies needs of students should be our goal.     

A Cold War Creature which Sat out the War

A substantial body of literature argues that government funding motivated by the Cold War shaped (or distorted) the content of the American academic disciplines. This article tests the impact of such funding on the academic study of the Soviet economy, a small field created to help fight the Cold War. It documents the amount of attention given by researchers to the military sector of the Soviet economy, the topic of central importance for the Cold War, and finds that their publications largely ignored it. Considerations other than the interests of the sponsors determined the choice of topics in the discipline.     

Progrssive Regrimes, Partnerships and the Involvement of Local Communities: A Framework for Evaluation

This paper examines the nature of community involvement in urban politics as it is played out through regeneration partnerships. At a theoretical level, it explores the potential for a community dimension to local governance, that is, a strategic influence for communities within local power structures. It is argued that the nature of involvement can be explicated by considering three concepts: power (as expressed by urban regime theory), participation and partnership. The paper explores these three broad themes and then focuses on the particular issues pertaining to community involvement in partnership working. Building on this frame-work, the paper develops a model – a 'wheel of involvement'– for analysing the effectiveness of community involvement in regeneration partnerships. This model enables the effectiveness of involvement to be 'quantified by the use of a simple questionnaire survey. It provides a tool for academic researchers and practitioners concerned with evaluating partnerships to begin to explore the quality and level of community involvement in the process of urban renewal. The results of an analysis of two regeneration partnerships are presented as an illustration of the efficacy of the evaluative technique.     

PUBLIC POLICY

Public policy is not simply a subset of public administration, but draws on and contributes to a number of aspects of public administration, political science and other disciplines. This article traces the growth of interest in a policy focus in Britain during the 1970s and early 1980s, and its subsequent partial displacement by the emphasis on public management. Despite this partial displacement, the policy focus is now institutionalized in academic research, textbooks, journals and teaching. The recent lack of interest in generic policy analysis by British central government is reflected in the way in which the policy aspects have been an afterthought to managerial and organization changes. There is plenty of scope for further refining the skills of those who research, teach and are taught in public policy.     

A Failure of Imagination (Intelligence,WMDs, and “Virtual Jihad”)

Intelligence estimates based on models keyed to frequency and recency of past occurrences make people less secure even if they predict most harmful events. The U.S. presidential commission on WMDs, the 9/11 commission, and Spain's comisión 11-M have condemned the status quo mentality of the intelligence community, which they see as being preoccupied with today's “current operations” and tactical requirements, and inattentive to tomorrow's far-ranging problems and strategic solutions. But the overriding emphasis in these commissions' recommendations is on further vertically integrating intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Such proposals to further centralize intelligence and unify command and control are not promising given recent transformations in Jihadist networks to a somewhat “leaderless resistance” in the wake of Al Qaeda's operational demise. To defeat terrorist networks requires grasping novel relations between an englobing messianic moral framework, the rootless intellectual and physical mobility of immigrant and diaspora communities, and the overarching conceptual, emotional, and logistical affordances of the Internet. Britain's WWII experience provides salutary lessons for thinking creatively with decentralized expertise and partially autonomous approaches.     

PUBLIC LAW

Traditionally, both the academic study and the practice of UK public administration have drawn very little inspiration from the discipline of public law. In contrast to most other European countries, in which public services are subject to extensive administrative-legal codes, and in which administrative disputes fall under the jurisdiction of separate and specialized administrative courts, UK administrative law remains – recent reforms notwithstanding – significantly undeveloped. There is a marked contrast also with the United States, where the founding scholars of the discipline of public administration saw it as being firmly rooted in public law. There is no codified British constitution and no counterpart of the US Supreme Court; and there is no British counterpart of the US Administrative Procedure Act 1946. However, there are three factors which underline the urgent need in the UK for greater collaboration and convergence between the disciplines of public law and public administration: first, the accumulation in recent years of a substantial body of research-based, academic literature on public law, which provides important insights into the changing landscape of UK public administration; secondly, the continuing development of machinery for the redress of citizens’grievances against the state – in particular, the substantial growth of judicial review proceedings and the development of ombudsman systems; thirdly, the continuing transformation of the agenda of UK law and politics by developments in the European Union.     

How to grow a public executive: The federal executive institute experience

The symbol of excellence for executive development and managerial education throughout the world is The Federal Executive Institute (FEI) in the United States. In fact, the FEI became the model laboratory for growing public executives in the 1970s, as hundreds upon hundreds of visitors from around the world came to see the ”mecca of applied executive development.“ The FEI became a distinct culture and a genuine learning community that others attempted to model throughout the world. And yet, the failure of the ”FEI imitations“ was due mainly to academics who failed to understand the need for a ”PRAXIS, pracademic model of development,“ rather than a ”theory, academic framework of education.“ Hence, an analysis of this noted executive development success may help others to avoid the pitfalls that academics too often encounter when they attempt to train, develop, and/or educate the public administrators who do the work.     

DEVOLVED RESPONSIBILITY AND CENTRALIZATION: EFFECTS OF EEC ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

The European Community is still a community of nation states in the sense that the obligations created by Community legislation fall on the member states who then have to implement them.
A point much commented upon is that this involves a loss of sovereignty or power for national parliaments and governments. What is less frequently noticed is that it can also centralize into a national government's hands some powers that had previously been devolved to local and other authorities. Since the Community deals largely with national governments, what had previously been local functions have to become national government functions the moment they fall within a Community policy.
This process can be seen at work as a result of the Community's environmental policy. In Britain a variety of administrative agencies have exercised considerable discretion in handling pollution matters. Some functions are handled by district councils, some by county councils, some by specialized regional authorities, eg water authorities, and some by specialized national agencies, eg the Industrial Air Pollution Inspectorate. As a result of the Community's environmental policy, the central government now has greater powers. If the erosion of the tradition of devolved responsibility is not to be resented, it must be justified on the grounds that some larger purpose is being served.     

Managing civil society: democratisation and the environmental movement in a Russian region

The stalling of civil society development within the Russian Federation and its attendant causes have been a focus of academic study since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Alongside the emergence of a fragmented and chronically under-funded community of advocacy groups, the literature points to a rejection of democratic structures by the Russian populace and an absence of active civil engagement. Consequently, the international community has sought to bolster the growth and development of the Russian third sector by funding projects and organisations with a view to increasing public participation.Utilising research undertaken in Samara oblast of the Russian Federation, this paper examines the role played by overseas donor agencies within the Samara Environmental Movement (SEM). In examining both the quality and quantity of donor assistance received, it reveals a number of dysfunctions arising from this aid, and in particular, a lack of contextualisation and mis-direction of the assistance offered vis-à-vis citizen participation, alongside other behavioural impacts of donor funding within the SEM itself.     

Beyond humanitarian intervention: the new politics of peacekeeping and intervention

This article reviews patterns of peacekeeping and military intervention in the post-9/11 world. It argues that while Western states have become increasingly reluctant to engage in the types of humanitarian interventions they undertook in the 1990s, a new model of peace operations is emerging that lies in the middle ground between traditional United Nations peacekeeping and classical humanitarian intervention and combines elements of both. The emergence of this new generation of peace operations indicates that, despite the post-9/11 reluctance of Western states to intervene militarily for humanitarian purposes, there is continued momentum behind the normative shift away from an absolutist conception of state sovereignty and towards the view that the international community has a right and a duty to intervene in internal conflicts and crises.     

Purpose and practice in public administration education: The place of substantive public policy areas

Public administration's early identification with the concept of a strong executive has resulted in an emphasis on staff functions in its graduate education programs. In the practicing world, staff functions are viewed as tools employed in the actual practice of public administrators, namely the delivery of substantive public services. Although public administration is characterized as an applied field, it does not focus its theory building and educative efforts on that which practicing public administrators actually do. The field necessarily imports other disciplines, but it does not provide the unique focus that would justify this borrowing; its current research agenda and training curricula are available in other disciplines. Public administration graduate students should concentrate in individual substantive policy areas, and the field should focus on optimizing organizational arrangments for delivering societal knowledge as public services. Interorganizational theory can provide the common theoretical framework necessary to mitigate the centrifugal effects of a variety of “administrations” within the field. The approach developed by J. Kenneth Benson is outlined; it provides a unique theoretical niche for public administration, yields a framework for comparative analysis, and defines the field's relationship to political science.     

Search for identity: the impact of the “great books” in public administration

Do public administration scholars build upon seminal works by scholars in the field or do they still rely heavily upon other disciplines? This question is addressed by assessing the impact of the “great books” in public administration on research published in academic journals. It is found that the 1980's are characterized by an increasing importance of those classic books that are generic management in orientation, suggesting that scholars still rely heavily on other fields for theoretical direction. Implications for an interdisciplinary approach to public administration and the training of doctoral students is discussed.