Ideas and Coordination in Policymaking: The Financial Crisis of 2007–2009

Policy change occurs because coalitions of actors are able to take advantage of political conditions to translate their strong beliefs about policy into ideas, which are turned into policy. A coalition's ability to define a problem helps to keep policies in place, but it can also cause coalitions to develop blind spots. For example, policy subsystem actors will often neglect the need for coordination between governmental actors. We examine the financial crisis of 2007–2009 to show how entrenched policy ideas can cause subsystem actors to overlook the need for policy coordination. We first analyze the prevalent idea that policymakers should aim to keep inflation low and stable while employing light touch regulation to financial markets. We then demonstrate how this philosophy led to a lack of coordination between monetary and regulatory policy in the subprime mortgage market. We conclude with thoughts about the need for coordination in future economic policy.     

China- the World＇s Trade Locomotive

CHINA has overtaken the United States to become the world＇s largest goods trading na- tion. Indeed, since the beginning of the inter- national financial crisis, increases in China＇sforeign trade have been larger than those of the Unit- ed States, EU and Japan combined.     

‘RENEWING DEFRA’: EXPLORING THE EMERGENCE OF RISK‐BASED POLICYMAKING IN UK CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Risk‐based policymaking is a form of reflexive policymaking that uses risk analysis to address both the primary objects of policy interventions and their secondary adverse consequences. As such, it has become central to debates about efficiency, control and accountability in UK government. To better understand the factors shaping its emergence, this article studies the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (Defra) adoption of risk‐based policymaking. In‐depth interviews with Defra staff suggest that risk‐based policymaking serves conflicting objectives and struggles to perform its ostensive functions. The article concludes, first, that risk understandings can be organizationally filtered in ways that reinforce rather than challenge entrenched policy practices. Second, that using risk‐based policymaking for audit purposes can undermine policymaking reflexivity. Third, that the value of risk ideas in reconciling competing accountability and blame‐avoidance pressures leads to risk ‘colonizing’ increasing dimensions of policymaking.     

Why China’s Economy Will Grow Strongly in 2012

THE start of 2012 is a suitable moment to look at China’s economic prospects for the New Year. The overall outlook is clear-China’s economy will continue to grow strongly,remaining the world’s fastest growing major economy and outperforming Western pessimists’ predictions.     

Regulatory Capitalism and the UK Labour Government's Reregulation of Commissioning in the English National Health Service

Today, policy analysts and regulatory governance scholars are sceptical about the capacity of the regulatory state hypothesis to describe change at the institutional level. For many, the hypothesis is a convenient oversimplification that fails to account for the hybridity of institutional arrangements within individual policy sectors and also for the divergence of reform trajectories across different national and sector‐based policy contexts. This article assesses the influence of the key themes of the regulatory state on the UK Labour government's reregulation of National Health Service (NHS) commissioning organizations. Following the critics, it argues that these themes are only partially evident in the programme. While the government has codified previously informal relationships with policies like Patient Choice and has also subjected commissioning organizations to metaregulatory techniques, its reforms have neither displaced public ownership and the direct supply of commissioning services with markets and new mechanisms for rule making and standard setting, nor have the reforms divided labour within the state by creating an independent agency to regulate NHS commissioning organizations via technocratic means. Under the reforms, NHS commissioning continues to take place within a structure of bureaucratic relationships. However, the article suggests that the hybridity of regulatory techniques at work within the UK Labour government's reregulation of NHS commissioning lends weight to the claim that the current era is one of regulatory capitalism. It concludes with a discussion of the consequences of this finding for the public policy and regulatory governance literatures.     

Reassessing Power

<正>Fukushima accident increases global concern over nuclear safety The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan has had an immediate impact on resurgent interest in nuclear power worldwide.Numerous governments have announced plans to re-examine nuclear energy policy and review the safety of their reactors and the adequacy of their regulatory frameworks.     

Double Bind: Governing the Economy in an ICT Era

The recent financial debacle was preceded by a long complex evolution in the way firms created value and organized. The fragmentation of production, intense global competition, and the information and communication technology (ICT)‐enabled transformation of services are all part of a story that was framed by, and in turn further framed, ideologies of deregulation and self‐regulation. In the aftermath of the crisis political leaders worldwide find themselves in a heightened double bind. On one side, the demands for rules allowing experimentation and innovation are sharpened as growth and job creation are needed; on the other side, the demands are heightened for the state to act and regulate markets to prevent future crisis. The article focuses on the development of ICT, the main general‐purpose technology of our time, and how the the ways it allows value to be created interacted with the politics regulating uses and defining the winners and losers.