Designing Health Service Organization in the UK, 1968 to 1998: from Blueprint to Bright Idea and ‘Manipulated Emergence’

Four sets of reforms of the National Health Service are employed to illustrate the changing character of policy making in this sector over a thirty year period, from the production of a carefully developed technocratic blueprint for its organization to the promulgation of a series of bright ideas accompanied by incentives for local actors to develop them into concrete organizational arrangements consonant with these ideas. We term this latter approach ‘manipulated emergence’ and relate it to the literatures of organizational culture and of post-Fordism. The approach adopted by the 1997 Labour government is largely, though not wholly consistent with this, and it remains to be seen whether the high-water mark of manipulated emergence has passed.     

Is cooperation the answer? Canadian environmental enforcement in comparative context

In recent years, a number of authors have been critical of the adversarial U.S. “regulatory style,” and have expressed interest in more cooperative regulatory approaches common in Western Europe. They have argued that the inflexible, deterrence-based approach that has characterized enforcement of U.S. health, safety, and environmental laws is not only inefficient in treating minor and significant violations equally, but counterproductive in fostering antagonistic relationships between regulators and the regulated. This article examines the effectiveness of the cooperative Canadian approach to enforcement of environmental regulations, using the pulp and paper industry as a case study. The resulting levels of compliance are compared with rates of compliance in the United States for the same industry. Significantly lower rates of compliance in Canada cast doubt on the growing consensus in favor of cooperative regulatory approaches.     

Melancholia in Vita Sackville-West’s Hogarth Press Novels

Author Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) has been understood as an author who celebrates in both prose and verse the institution of the English country estate, in part because of her personal attachment to her family’s Kentish house, Knole. The four popular novels that Vita Sackville-West published with the Hogarth Press during the early 1930s—The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), Family History (1932), and The Dark Island (1934)—are no exception, save for their particular focus on the agnatic inheritance of both aristocratic title and estate along with the female subject’s exclusion from that system. While the first pair of novels entertain the possibility of mediated success in obtaining the loved object, either the estate itself or an effective substitute, the latter works become melancholically resigned to the restrictions that effectively disinherit the aristocratic eldest daughter. This escalating melancholia, often Freudian in its narrative presentation, directs the novels’ successive focus less toward the act of mourning the loss of the country house, of some version of Knole either real or imagined, and more to the vexing inability to both acknowledge the disinheritance and mourn the loss. In fact, the melancholic dynamic threatens to erase each of Sackville-West’s protagonists, and as her novels detail the advancing impact of this disinheritance, the female characters face literal extinction. Thus, the celebratory stance so often attributed to Sackville-West is, in these works, a far more critical and essentially abject perspective that demands compensation.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.     

Canada's voluntary ARET program: Limited success despite industry cosponsorship

The Accelerated Reduction/Elimination of Toxins (ARET) Challenge was a voluntary program initiated in 1994 by the Government of Canada. Unlike the U.S. 33/50 Program, ARET involved industry partners in negotiation and cosponsorship of the program, with the intention that early involvement would yield stronger commitment to voluntary reductions. We review the program's self‐reported success in delivering emissions reductions. For 17 ARET substances that were also covered by Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory, we employ treatment effects regressions to control for self‐selection bias. We find evidence that ARET accelerated emission reductions in five cases, slowed reductions in two cases, and had no discernible effect in ten cases. Industry cosponsorship apparently did not have the intended effect and instead resulted in program features such as data confidentiality that significantly undermined the program's credibility. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott

Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott. By Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2015), pp.277. AU$29.99 (pb).