Business economic impacts: The new frontier for corporate accountability

Economic issues associated with poverty are complex and require holistic responses in order to realise the goals of sustainable development. While business alone may have significant economic impacts, the link between business-level behaviour and macro-level development aspirations is unclear. By developing a sound grasp of how companies understand and manage these impacts, we are better placed to understand how corporate responsibility clusters, or partnerships with other companies, civil society organisations, and governments, can harness corporate impacts to bring about more sustainable development at the macro level.     

Whose Europe is it anyway? The 1998 Stein Rokkan lecture

Abstract. This article addresses the issue of whether a model of deep European integration might be envisaged in a continent–wide process that might accompany eastern enlargement of the European Union. The paper argues that deep integration in Western Europe has been built on three dimensions: the functional; the territorial; and affiliational. The articulation of these three dimensions has evolved through not only the EU, but also a dense pattern of other transnational linkages, including those between immediate neighbours. Moreover, different west European countries have been linked into this process through varied patterns for 'domesticating' Europe. Efforts to develop an EU polity require the interplay of all three dimensions of integration, a tough goal for post–cold–war Europe in the western part of the continent, let alone in 'pan–Europe'.     

The Solitary Center: the Core Executive in Central and Eastern Europe

This article discusses the coordinative capacity of Centers of Government (COGs) in several Central and Eastern Europe countries. In formal terms, COGs are at the heart of the executive process; but their contribution to coherence in executive policymaking has remained limited. This observation applies both to coordination within the executive, and between the executive and other key participants in the political process. In important respects, the "solitary centers" operate in isolation from their political and institutional environment. In part, this weakness of linkage reflects the particular features of the post-Communist political systems; in part, it can be explained by a lack of nodality, authority and policy expertise at the COG. There are good reasons to assume that, as policy systems mature, problems of linkage will decline in significance. But this outcome cannot be taken for granted. Instead, we might be witnessing the emergence of a "new administrative type" in some Central and Eastern European countries.