Control,Historic Pitfalls,and the UK Nuclear Renaissance

In September 2015, the UK government announced that future taxpayers will underwrite the construction of two European-designed nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Partly financed by Chinese utility companies, this announcement presents a fait accompli with little democratic input. Few, if any, historic lessons evident from previous attempts to manage its nuclear industry appear to have been learnt. This paper discusses the announcement with reference to the governance of the UK’s historic nuclear legacy—specifically dealing with control, stakeholder engagement, and transparency—and its implications for a nuclear renaissance.     

Different Seeds in the Same Plot? Competing Models of Capitalism and the Incomplete Contracts of Partnership Design

This article explains the differing nature of UK government and European Commission approaches to partnership, drawing on the ‘competing models of capitalism’ debate. Comparative studies have typically considered the impact of the same institutional arrangements across different territories – the ‘study of identical seeds sown in different plots’(Putnam 1993, p. 7). However, this article is concerned with the study of different seeds sown in the same small plot: an area within the city of Sheffield. The different approaches to partnership enshrined in UK and EU regeneration programme documents structure different prospective outcomes. However, regeneration programme requirements must be understood as ‘incomplete contracts’ and as such, policy implementers play a key role in shaping policy outcomes.     

Self-determination and the Use of Referendums: the Case of Scotland

The Scottish Nationalist Party’s majority in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections opened up a wide and interesting debate on the variety of options for Scotland’s constitutional future (ranging from the status quo through a variety of intermediate options to full independence), and with it, also the innovate possibility of a multi-option referendum, reflecting the preferences of the people of Scotland. However, while the UK Government agreed that the future of Scotland’s place within the Union was for the people of Scotland to vote on, it strongly contested the Scottish Parliament’s competence to legislate for the referendum, thus ensuring a role for itself and the UK Parliament in its design. After a period of negotiations, the UK and Scottish Governments signed the Edinburgh Agreement on the 15th October 2012, enabling the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a single question referendum, and expressing their commitment to work together in the interests of all involved. This article begins looking at the background, legal framework and negotiations leading up to the Edinburgh Agreement. It then argues that, while the Agreement is notably significant and has allowed for the smooth and fast development of the process so far, by excluding the possibility of including a third option of ‘more devolution’ on the ballot paper, it is having a series of negative consequences for the current debate, namely that it is more limited, confusing and uncertain, and largely unbalanced in favour of the ‘no’ side.     

ORGANIZATIONAL STATUS A PERFORMANCE: SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS

Hypotheses derived from the public choice and other literatures on the relationship between ownership and performance were tested on ten UK organizations which had undergone status change, within the public sector or between the public and private sectors, in the last twenty years. Results on tests of performance in productivity, employment, and financial ratios against change in status, competition and internal management failed in most cases to support the thesis that change in ownership improves enterprise performance, even in its more sophisticated form where ownership change is assumed to be accompanied by increased competition and improved managerial incentives.     

The legacy of subalternity and Gramsci’s national–popular: populist discourse in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Drawing on Laclau’s concept of populist discourse and Gramsci’s ‘national–popular collective will’, and using the case of Iran, this article puts forward the idea of the legacy of subalternity in the context of post-revolution governments. The concept of ‘national–popular collective will’ facilitates an understanding of how the popular subject is constructed and the meanings embedded in that process. It is argued that Islamic Republic elites articulate a populist discourse that constructs the ‘self’ (the Islamic Republic) as synonymous with ‘the people’. Embedded in this discursive construction is a legacy of subalternity that goes back to the 1979 Revolution’s populist discourse.     

Performance Management,Evaluation and Learning in ‘Modern’ Local Government

Public sector reforms throughout OECD member states are producing a new model of ‘public governance’ embodying a more modest role for the state and a strong emphasis on performance management. In the UK, the development of performance management in the context of the ‘new public management’ has been primarily ‘top‐down’ with a dominant concern for enhancing control and ‘upwards account‐ability’ rather than promoting learning and improvement. The development of performance management and evaluation in local government in the UK has been conditioned by external pressures, especially reforms imposed by central government, which have encouraged an ‘instrumental–managerial’ focus on performance measurement. The new Labour government's programme of ‘modernizing local government’ places considerable emphasis on performance review and evaluation as a driver of continuous improvement in promoting Best Value. However, recent research has indicated that the capacity for evaluation in local government is uneven and many obstacles to evaluation exist in organizational cultures. Local authorities need to go beyond the development of review systems and processes to ensure that the capacity for evaluation and learning is embedded as an attribute of ‘culture’ in order to achieve the purpose of Best Value.     

COMPULSORY COMPETITIVE TENDERING FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES: THE EXPERIENCES OF LOCAL AUTHORITIES IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND 1988-1992

This article examines the response of a sample of local authorities in the North of England to the introduction of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (Cm) following the 1988 Local Government Act. It analyses the Organizational implications of CCT and highlights how officers, councillors and trade union representatives viewed the changing nature of management within local authorities in the period following the award of the first service contracts. In particular, it examines the different reactions to the development of a more commercial approach to the management of services and ends by assessing the specific impact of CCT in the context of other important changes in local government.     

Divergence in Community Participation Policy: Analysing Localism and Community Empowerment Using a Theory of Change Approach

The last two decades have witnessed a significant turn towards community participation in public policy around the globe, raising concerns that states are resorting to ‘government through community’, shifting responsibilities onto communities. In order to unpack the ambiguous rhetoric of policy statements, this article employs ideas from evaluation methodology to develop a generic theory of change for community participation policy. The model is then utilised to analyse and compare the UK Coalition Government’s Big Society/Localism agenda and the Scottish Government’s Community Empowerment approach, demonstrating the ways in which these represent a clear example of policy divergence, and potentially significant alternatives to state–community relations in the context of austerity. The article also demonstrates the potential wider applicability of ‘theories of change’ methodology for policy analysis.     

Explaining Informal Policy-Making Patterns in the Eurozone Crisis: Decentralized Bargaining and the Theory of EU Institutions

ABSTRACT

During the Eurozone crisis, the so-called ‘Merkozy duumvirate’ emerged as an informal, but highly visible EU policy-making pattern. This article asks why such forms of decentralized bargaining emerge and what this implies for the theory of EU institutions. According to an approach based on negotiation theory, the article argues that Merkozy is a strategic tool used by Germany to realize its preferences on EU crisis management. Based on an incomplete contracts theory of EU institutions, instead, the article analyses Merkozy as an informal institution created by France and Germany to avoid being discriminated by supranational institutions. Both approaches are employed to assess Merkozy’s role in the decision-making process leading to the adoption of the Fiscal Compact.     

Ownership or Competition? An Evaluation of the Effects of Privatization on Industrial Relations Institutions, Processes and Outcomes

This paper examines whether privatization and exposure to product market competition leads to changes in labour management and industrial relations. Three sets of propositions are examined: privatization will lead to lower changes in industrial relations institutions and processes; privatization will lead to lower average levels of remuneration relative to public sector firms; and privatization will lead to relatively higher levels of efficiency. In each instance it is hypothesized that competition will add to ownership effects. These propositions are examined drawing on data derived from the UK bus industry.     

Ownership or Competition? An Evaluation of the Effects of Privatization on Industrial Relations Institutions,Processes and Outcomes

This paper examines whether privatization and exposure to product market competition leads to changes in labour management and industrial relations. Three sets of propositions are examined: privatization will lead to lower changes in industrial relations institutions and processes; privatization will lead to lower average levels of remuneration relative to public sector firms; and privatization will lead to relatively higher levels of efficiency. In each instance it is hypothesized that competition will add to ownership effects. These propositions are examined drawing on data derived from the UK bus industry.     

The place of corporate ownership and management in local government anti‐poverty strategy in Britain

Since devolution in 1999, the Welsh Government has developed a distinctive approach to the management of local government policy. Alongside an emphasis on welfarism and partnership, local authorities have been exhorted to put the citizen at the centre of public service delivery. Drawing on the notion of assemblage, developed in the governmentality literature, this paper identifies two different rationalities running through Welsh Government policy documents. On the basis of a series of interviews with government officials and their counterparts in the Welsh Local Government Association we find evidence of important tensions in the Welsh approach. While the emphasis on the citizen has worked in building a ‘political rationality’, the evidence from our interviews suggests that it works less well as a ‘government technology’.     

Critical Misunderstandings: Ineffective International Governance and the UK Nuclear Industry

In 2017, significant media and political interest was sparked by the UK decision to leave Euratom, the European Atomic Energy Community. While such interest in nuclear matters has to be welcomed, the apparent lack of knowledge displayed in the regulatory governance of the UK nuclear industry is disquieting. This article therefore offers an overview of the publicly funded UK nuclear industry and its regulatory governance including its links with European and global nuclear agencies to inform the debate and to identify critical issues in need of resolution.     

Transparency for Results: Testing a Model of Performance Management in Open Government Initiatives

Government transparency continues to challenge existing frameworks for understanding organizational performance. Transparency has proven difficult to measure and results assessing its impacts are mixed. This article sets forward a model of performance-based accountability in open government initiatives. Data come from the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) database of over 1,000 transparency initiatives across 50 countries in 2013. Ordered logistic regression estimates the effect of management practices on three different measures of transparency performance, and the results broadly support the model. Expert interviews from two country cases offer insight into how performance management is used in the context of transparency reforms.     

EXPLAINING RADICAL POLICY CHANGE: THE CASE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENERGY POLICY UNDER THE BRITISH LABOUR GOVERNMENT 2006–10

An innovative framework combining the ‘multiple streams’ (MS) and ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (PE) models of agenda‐setting is used to explain the transformation of UK climate change and energy policy under the Labour Government between 2006 and 2010. The coupling of the problem, politics and policy streams by policy entrepreneurs (MS), and changes in policy image and institutional venues (PE), were critical in opening a policy window, disrupting the existing policy monopoly and enabling radical policy initiatives. The case study suggests two revisions to the models: (1) policy windows can remain open far longer than either model typically predicts; and (2) party politics, especially where party competition generates a ‘competitive consensus’, can be important for both initiating and prolonging policy change in parliamentary systems. An important factor typically overlooked by both models is the significant policy entrepreneurship role that government ministers can play, particularly when an issue becomes part of their ‘narrative identity’.     

From aid negotiation to aid effectiveness: the case of food and nutrition security in Ethiopia

This paper looks at aid ownership through the lens of negotiations that take place between a country and its development partners (DPs). Based on the case of Ethiopian food security policies, it combines a structural analysis of the negotiation capital of both parties with an actor-oriented analysis of the institutional setting through which negotiations take place. First, it shows that the growing influence donors have come to have in the shaping of Ethiopian public policies results from the relative loss of legitimacy the government has experienced after the 2005 political crisis and its greater need for external economic assistance. Second, the more recent creation of a negotiation platform between the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) and its DPs has allowed the GoE to enhance donor’s alignment with its development policies and regain some control over its development agenda, while giving them more room to contribute to several food and nutrition security policy reforms which have been positively evaluated. The paper stresses the need for donors to better recognise the centrality of politics in any aid intervention.     

'Enabling' And The 1993 Local Government Act In New South Wales

Different conceptions of 'enablement' provide a framework for the analysis of the reform of local government in New South Wales. The enabling local authority is one that contracts out to the commercial and not-for-profit sectors, adopts a consumerist approach to the recipients of services, engages in strategic planning, influences other organizations, stimulates pluralist collectivism, and facilitates participation. In New South Wales the Local Government Act of 1993, though potentially enabling, especially in the delegation of a general competence, has had less effect than might have been expected. However, local government has traditionally been enabling in the narrow sense as well as in the sense of employing interesting forms of participative community management and in seeking to influence the decisions of other organizations which are part of local governance. Some councils are developing community plans to strengthen these relationships.     

BEYOND POLICY NETWORKS: POLICY FRAMING AND THE POLITICS OF EXPERTISE IN THE 2001 FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE CRISIS

For the past decade, the policy community/issue network typology of pressure group interaction has been used to explain policy outcomes and the policy‐making process. To re‐examine the validity of this typology, the paper focuses on the UK government's response to the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) crisis, and in particular the decision to pursue contiguous culling rather than vaccination to overcome the epidemic. Rather than illustrating the emergence of an issue network in agricultural policy, the decision‐making process of the FMD outbreak demonstrates continuity with prior crises. In addition, the politicization of scientific expertise is identified as an emerging trend in crisis management. Policy framing is used to explain the impetus behind the contiguous cull decision, concluding that the legacy of previous policy choices conditioned the crisis response to a far greater degree than contemporaneous pressure group action.