Innovation and Implementation in the Public Sector: An Examination of Public Entrepreneurship

This article develops an empirical measure of public entrepreneurship and uses it to discover the correlates that distinguish between those participants in a policy domain who are seen as more or less important in the entrepreneurial process. Looking at two rural regions dealing with telemedicine technologies, the authors examine the role of personal attributes and situational attributes in predicting who will emerge as the most mentioned public entrepreneurs on these issues in their community. Status in the local community, membership in the health professions, and strong local focus and ties are the most instrumental variables in distinguishing between those in a policy domain who are more likely to be identified as entrepreneurial. The authors provide an empirical test that can, for the first time, identify in a comparative context the traits that distinguish more entrepreneurial individuals from less entrepreneurial ones (or nonentrepreneurial ones) participating in the same policy domain.     

State Retrenchment and Administrative Reform in Ireland: Probing Comparative Policy Paradigms

Abstract

Policy choices in response to crisis may carry consequences both for distributive outcomes and for the future policy capacity of the state itself. This paper uses conceptual heuristics to interpret policy practice. It examines the underlying policy paradigms shaping Irish government decisions in the aftermath of the European financial and economic crisis. Drawing on comparative political economy literature, it distinguishes between two such paradigms – market-conforming and social equity – and applies them to three reform themes: reconfiguration of public budgets, the public service pay bargain, and the organizational profile of state competences. The findings entail lessons for understanding the malleability of policy choice, and how state policy choices in response to crisis are framed and implemented.     

基层自治:对社区公共事务和文化生活的管理——日本冲绳县言壳谷村区自治会的考察与分析

日本社会基层自治组织的性质、功能和活动内容在富有长期历史传统的基础上 ,又随着国家经济、政治和文化制度的变化而逐步演进发展。本文通过对日本冲绳县言壳谷村区自治会的实地考察和资料分析 ,力图取得一些有益的认识 ,以期对推进我国的基层组织和民主政治建设起到他山之石的作用。     

Autonomy and Control in Australian Agencies: Data and Preliminary Findings from a Cross‐National Empirical Study

This article is developed from data gathered through the analysis of a survey of ‘agencies’ at Commonwealth and Australian Capital Territory (ACT) levels of government, undertaken as the Australian component of a cross‐national empirical study of autonomy and control in non‐departmental public sector organisations. It presents preliminary findings from one part of what is potentially a very important enterprise in comparative research, along with discussion of methodological issues which need to be confronted in many such comparative exercises. The data reveal that Australia agencies have been granted more autonomy than agencies in other countries contributing to this survey, though that autonomy varies markedly across functions such as personnel management and financial management. While the article represents just a snapshot in time in agency autonomy, we believe it provides a robust baseline for future changes in the way agencies are managed in the Australian public sector.     

Innovation Agents in the Public Sector: Applying Champion and Promotor Theory to Explore Innovation in the Australian Public Service

Innovation is critical to organisational success and is a process steered, and potentially thwarted, by individuals. However, despite the importance of public sector innovation given the complexity of policy issues faced and the sector's specific contextual features, our understanding of innovation processes in government requires expansion. This study, using in‐depth case analyses of three Australian Public Service agencies, focuses on understanding the ‘human component’ of the innovation process by drawing on both innovation champion and promotor theories to explore, through the lens of organisational power, how multiple human agents progress public sector innovations. The results highlight the key, and often tandem, roles of individuals at multiple organisational levels who work to inspire and motivate others to progress an innovation (champions) and those with specific power bases who help overcome organisational barriers to innovation (promotors).     

Public Sector Change,Organisational Culture and Financial Information: A Study of Local Government

Local government has undergone substantial change in Victoria, but the reforms have not necessarily resulted in improved financial management practices. This article examines the organisational culture of a sample of local governments, the critical events which have impacted on them, and their use of accounting, budgetary and financial (ABF) information. We find that despite the change process, organisational culture is not focused on competitive practices, although compulsory competitive tendering remains the most influential event. Consistent with the aims of reform, the quality and use of ABF information has improved over the last decade. This article will be of interest to those in government wishing to implement change programs aimed at increasing financial resource use efficiency.     

Confronting the Governance Challenges of Developing Nigeria's Extractive Industry: Policy and Performance in the Oil and Gas Sector1

The issue of economic growth and human development has been a central concern in the oil and gas sector of Nigeria's extractive industry, and this has featured prominently in the agitations and generalized restiveness in the Niger Delta, the oil‐producing region. While many studies have focused on these problems, policies aimed at confronting them have not received much broad attention. This article bridges this research gap by holistically focusing on the solution to the problem. In doing this, the article examines the policies during the Obasanjo administration from 1999 to 2007 in order to critically assess the efficacy or inefficiency of the policies in reversing the general problem now known as the “resource curse,” and to offer a better understanding of the deeper political, social, and economic issues that drive outcomes. The article finds that while significant efforts were made to avoid the boom and bust cycle of oil and lower volatility by de‐linking public expenditure from oil revenue through the “oil‐price‐based fiscal rule,” generally, progress in this area was not matched by improvement in the other areas examined by this study, notably peace and safety of lives and oil/gas installations, the development of the oil‐producing region, environmental security and sustainability, and the transparent and accountable use of oil/gas revenues.     

Dilemmas of Policy Innovation in the Public Sector: A Case Study of the National Innovation Summit

Policy innovation is a significant challenge for the public sector. This article illustrates its magnitude through a case study of the National Innovation Summit. The article concludes that the Summit represented an elaborate process of search and engagement that sanctioned an outcome that was, in most respects, largely pre‐determined. Its outreach and deliberations served the political purpose of mobilising industry and media attention and communicating the government's commitment. But there is no evidence that it exercised any substantive influence on policy development. The obstacles confounding any other outcome are considerable. Strategic thinking is inhibited by various organisational factors including lock‐in to a present successful strategy, the constraints on policy choices associated with multiple veto points and the need to maintain medium term fiscal and policy discipline across a wide range of agencies and claimants. The article explores ways these inhibitions might be overcome.     

Structural Changes to the Public Sector and Cultural Incompatibility: The Consequences of Inadequate Cultural Integration

Structural changes are commonly undertaken to achieve gains, such as enhanced efficiency and performance. In this paper, we explore the cultural issues associated with a structural change in the Australian Public Service. We argue that cultural differences across merged functions were disruptive and challenging to overcome. We posit, however, that these challenges were exacerbated by the lack of systemic effort to integrate cultures, thus impeding synergy realization. Our findings are consistent with the private sector literature that warns mergers and acquisitions undertaken with too much haste and without adequate planning can lead to cultural issues when not managed appropriately.     

Explaining Levels of Local Government Involvement in Service Delivery: The Dynamics of Cross‐Sector Partnerships in Malawi

This study explores how local governments and their development partners—that is, donors, non‐governmental organisations and private companies—structure their partnerships as they work together to provide services to communities. Cases of collaboration between four organisations working in the rural water supply sector and six local governments in Malawi are studied. Using a cross‐case qualitative methodology, we illustrate how power and control translate into practices, leading to different levels of local government involvement in service delivery. This study contributes to the literature on cross‐sector partnerships in particular by developing empirically‐based propositions that help explain the dynamic trajectories that partnerships between local governments and their development partners can take. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Independent Professional Bureaucracies and Street-Level Bribery: Comparing Changes in Civil Service Law and Implementation in Latin America

Using cross-sectional data, studies of the relation between merit-based bureaucracies and corruption usually find that nations with more professional and politically independent bureaucracies have lower corruption. However, cross-section designs cannot test this policy claim. This study adopts a pre-test?post-test design using lagged data comparing changes in civil service laws and implementation in eight Latin American countries from 2004 to 2012 and data reporting subsequent change in bribe requests by the bureaucrats that the laws are intended to affect. Raising questions about the validity of previous results, it is found that improved laws and implementation were associated with no or increased bribe requests.     

Negotiating universalism in India and Latin America: Fiscal decentralization,subnational politics and social outcomes

ABSTRACT

This is the introductory paper for a special issue which focuses on an exploration of how vertical inter-governmental political and fiscal bargains and horizontal variation in political, social and economic conditions across regions contribute to or undermine the provision of inclusive and sustainable social policies at the subnational level in Latin America and India. The papers incorporate both federal, as well as decentralized unitary states, pointing to common political tensions across unitary and federal settings despite the typically greater institutionalization of regional autonomy in federal countries. Jointly, the papers examine the territorial dimension of universalism and explore, in greater and empirical detail, the causal links between fiscal transfers, social policies and outcomes, highlighting the political dynamics that shape fiscal decentralization reforms and the welfare state. This introductory essay reviews existing scholarship, and highlights the contribution of the special issue to understanding these issues beyond OECD contexts.     

Gender and Defence Sector Reform: Problematising the Place of Women in Conflict-Affected Environments

ABSTRACT

While gender-responsive Security Sector Reform (SSR) is increasingly recognised as being key to successful SSR programmes, women continue to be marginalised in post-conflict SSR programmes, particularly defence sector reform. By focussing on developments in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Kosovo and Colombia, this article explores the paradox of women’s marginalisation in defence sector reform and post-reform defence structures in places where women were active combatants during the preceding conflict. This article refers to examples of women’s engagement in combat to challenge some of the reasons given for women’s marginalisation, including reference to women’s skillset, aptitude and interests. The article adopts a feminist institutionalist approach to show how SSR helps security sector institutions construct and reconstruct gender power relations, reinforce gendered dynamics of exclusion, and determine gendered outcomes. It concludes by drawing attention to the transformational potential of SSR to alter gender power relations, and thereby enhance the security of women and the sustainability of peacebuilding efforts.     

Public Value Management: A Case Study of Transitional Change in Disability Sector Reform in Western Australia

This paper contributes to the study of public value management (PVM). PVM is distinguished from other approaches to public administration in its focus on establishing community networks and collaborative capacity building for the creation of public value. We explore PVM through a case study of a public–community sector partnership strategy called the positive behaviour framework (PBF), a state government initiative designed to transform services for people with disabilities. The development and implementation of the PBF is analysed via a transitional change or ‘sector awareness’ model. Each phase of the model is illustrated through ‘positive stories’ that depict key moments in the change process and in the activities that public sector managers employed to raise awareness, build capacity, and promote collaboration. We discuss the implications of the study for disability sector change management and for the further study of the PVM approach to public sector administration.     

Cultural Penetration and Punctuated Policy Change: Explaining the Evolution of U.S. Energy Policy

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) suggests that the policy process is characterized by long periods of incremental change and short periods of punctuated change. The impetus for the latter is usually a focusing event that breaks open policy monopolies, allowing for major changes in legislative decision making. While a burgeoning body of literature, a shortcoming in the PET literature is that it has yet to explain why focusing events and subsequent breakdowns in policy monopolies sometimes fail to result in punctuated policy. We integrate theories on cultural change with punctuated equilibrium to explain why focusing events do not always result in the dramatic policy changes that we might expect. Specifically, we use the context of national energy policy and the lexical database, Google Ngram Viewer, to trace punctuating energy‐related events and the occurrence or lack thereof subsequent policy change from 1952 to 2000.     

Security Sector Reform from a Policy Transfer Perspective: A Comparative Study of International Interventions in the Palestinian Territories,Liberia and Timor-Leste

Security sector reform (SSR), targeting security forces and their management and oversight institutions, has become a major feature of international peace- and statebuilding activities. The article draws on policy transfer research to assess substantive and procedural changes in how international actors intervene in the security governance of fragile or post-conflict states. By comparing transfer processes in Liberia, Timor-Leste and the Palestinian Territories, the article shows that despite variations across political, economic and strategic factors in each domestic context, external SSR interventions showed distinct similarities. SSR interventions expanded their substantive scope over time; less directly coercive mechanisms of persuasion and socialization increasingly replaced the direct imposition of external models of security governance; and the influence of domestic elite actors on transfer processes increased over the duration of interventions.     

The Appointment, Removal and Responsibilities of Public Sector Chief Executives in Australia: Some Recent Developments

In the little over the decade since the publication of Smith's Public Employment Law and McCarry's Aspects of Public Sector Employment Law, much as changed in the law of public sector employment in Australia. This article briefly surveys some of the major developments in public sector employment law in Australia during the 1990s in relation to departmental chief executive departmental heads.     

More than Writing on a Wall: Evaluating the Role that Codes of Ethics Play in Securing Accountability of Public Sector Decision‐Makers

This article argues that the essential factors of a public service code of ethics can be divided into five categories. These categories or principles are fairness, transparency, responsibility, efficiency and conflict of interest. These principles are identified in this article as being the basic elements of democratic accountability in relation to public sector decision‐making. The issues explored are not only the obstacles that the public service decision‐maker faces in internalising these principles but, also, the challenges for a pro‐active management in fostering such internalisation.     

The Nature and Incidence of Workgroup Innovation in the Australian Public Sector: Evidence from the Australian 2011 State of the Service Survey

Using data from a nationally representative survey of all Australian Government employees, we explore the nature of innovation implemented at the workgroup level and assess the multi‐dimensionality of the workgroup's ‘most significant innovation’ (MSI). Of the 10222 survey respondents, 48% reported at least one innovation implemented by their workgroup, with an innovation more commonly reported with an increase in the respondent's age, seniority, and service experience; among men and university graduates. The results reveal that 54% of the reported MSIs incorporate between two and five dimensions of innovation types (policy, service, service delivery, administrative/organizational, and conceptual), and most of these dimensions reinforce each other. Different dimensions of the MSI draw on different sources of ideas (with senior leaders having the broadest impact), face different ‘revealed’ barriers, require different levels of workplace creativity, and produce different beneficial effects. Our findings help strengthen an understanding of the influencing factors and the effects of multi‐dimensional public sector innovations.