Efficiency and legitimacy in collaborative public management: Mapping inter-local agreements in England using social network analysis

English councils have long aspired to be ‘self-sufficient’, providing services within single jurisdictions with limited inter-local collaboration. However, by 2017 almost all local councils (97 per cent) participated in one or more frontline or back-office ‘shared service’ involving 338 distinct partnerships. We analyse this new-found enthusiasm for inter-council collaboration by performing exploratory social network analysis on organizational and financial data for all 353 English councils. We examine factors predicting collaboration and the characteristics of the service networks that result, focusing on resource, organizational and political considerations. Propensity to collaborate was found to be unpredictable, but partner choice was rational, driven by geographical proximity and similarity in organizational and resource characteristics. We argue that, according to the institutional theory of organizations, both efficiency and legitimacy influenced these reform choices, and the risks of fashionable collaboration were mitigated by careful partner selection. We highlight implications for future quantitative research into symbolic (non-instrumental) forms of collaboration.     

Issues and Options for the Post-2012 Climate Architecture – An Overview

This article provides a background for the Developing post-2012 scenarios project, an international study which looks at a range of scenarios that countries may wish to consider for a post-2012 framework to tackle climate change. The purpose of the article is threefold. Firstly, it provides a review of the literature for the future climate regime. Secondly, it provides a set of criteria that are used in order to evaluate whether the scenarios provided in the other articles in this Special Edition are likely to be effective. Thirdly, the article spells out some of the more general policy implications rising from these scenarios.     

Humanitarian mine action and peace building: exploring the relationship

Focusing on the humanitarian mine action (hma) sector, this article argues that rooting peace building in concrete activities carries considerable promise, diversifying the repertoire and enhancing the robustness of peace building. However, the assumption that mine action necessarily contributes to building peace is problematic and permits the neglect of harmful effects and a failure to capitalise fully on the potential for positive ones. If peace building is seen in terms of three major domains—security, development and politics—the current tendency is to emphasise security primarily, development secondarily, and the political only marginally when addressing the impact of hma on peace building. Several examples indicate that mine action may have a significant impact on the political aspects of peace building, including confidence building, conflict resolution and reconciliation. At the same time, linking mine action to peace building creates certain dilemmas, and a rigid subordination of mine action initiatives to a centrally directed peace building strategy is unlikely to be productive. Ultimately, a focus on the peace building role of mine action carries a dual promise for the sector: it documents impacts that are currently unacknowledged, while encouraging new and refined practices.     

Book Reviews

Andrew Levine, Arguing for Socialism—Theoretical Considerations (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

Irving Howe, Socialism and America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).

Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism (London: Verso/American distributor: Shocken, 1986)

Joanne Barkan, Visions of Emancipation: the Italian Workers’ Movement Since 1945. (New York City: Praeger, 1984)

Carlos M. Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution: National Liberation and Social Transformation in Central America, trans. Judy Butler (New York City: Monthly Review Press, 1986)

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism—Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social thought (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist. (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Anthony Giddens, The Nation‐State and Violence: Volume Two of The Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985)

Bob Jessop, Nicos poulantzas. Marxist theory and political strategy, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985).     

Conquest and Regime Change: An Evolutionary Model of the Spread of Democracy and Peace

Whereas the literature on the democratic peace tends to treat the phenomenon as a causal law, we follow Immanuel Kant in interpreting it as a macro-historical process that expanded from a small number of democracies to about 50% of all states. In order to account for this development, we introduce an agent-based model that combines a natural-selection logic with an adaptive mechanism of regime change. The latter is implemented as an empirically calibrated, contextual rule that prompts democratization as an S-shaped function of the democratic share of a state's immediate neighborhood. A similar transition rule governs regime change in the opposite direction. The computational results show that regime change and collective security are necessary to produce realistic trajectories of democratization at the systemic level.     

Forensic typing of autosomal SNPs with a 29 SNP-multiplex—Results of a collaborative EDNAP exercise

We report the results of an inter-laboratory exercise on typing of autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) for forensic genetic investigations in crime cases. The European DNA Profiling Group (EDNAP), a working group under the International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG), organised the exercise. A total of 11 European and one US forensic genetic laboratories tested a subset of a 52 SNP-multiplex PCR kit developed by the SNPforID consortium. The 52 SNP-multiplex kit amplifies 52 DNA fragments with 52 autosomal SNP loci in one multiplex PCR. The 52 SNPs are detected in two separate single base extension (SBE) multiplex reactions with 29 and 23 SNPs, respectively, using SNaPshot kit, capillary electrophoresis and multicolour fluorescence detection. For practical reasons, only the 29 SBE multiplex reaction was carried out by the participating laboratories. A total of 11 bloodstains on FTA cards including a sample of poor quality and a negative control were sent to the laboratories together with the essential reagents for the initial multiplex PCR and the multiplex SBE reaction. The total SNP locus dropout rate was 2.8% and more than 50% of the dropouts were observed with the poor quality sample. The overall rate of discrepant SNP allele assignments was 2.0%. Two laboratories reported 60% of all the discrepancies. Two laboratories reported all 29 SNP alleles in all 10 positive samples correctly. The results of the collaborative exercise were surprisingly good and demonstrate that SNP typing with SBE, capillary electrophoresis and multicolour detection methods can be developed for forensic genetics.