INSTITUTIONAL REFORM IN ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE SYSTEM OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA: Service Organizations as an Alternative for Administrative Enhancement

The economic reform in the PRC inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 has changed the landscape of the regime's environmental governance by putting it in a more market‐oriented context. As a strategy to strengthen administrative capacity in a situation heavily circumscribed by the limited resource support from local governments, the environmental protection authorities at all levels have established a sizable number of service organizations to provide them administrative support. These service organizations have to sponsor their own operation by engaging in revenue‐generating or fund raising activities. This has led to the emergence and proliferation of service organizations in the environmental governance system in the last decade. This article will examine, from a state capacity perspective, institutional reform in the environmental governance system of the PRC¹.     

The Information Have-Less: Inequality, Mobility, and Translocal Networks in Chinese Cities

The “information have-less” is a social, economic, and political category for millions of rural-to-urban migrants and laid-off workers, who populate the vast gray zone of China's digital divide. Disengaged from institutions of agricultural and industrial production, the information have-less make use of such inexpensive ICT services as Internet cafés, prepaid phone cards, and Little Smart mobile phones. These low-end digital technologies are critical to enhancing labor mobility (both physical and social) and to the formation of “translocal networks”. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary assessment of ICT usage in, key city-regions in China and consider the consequences of translocal network formations for evolving information inequality in China. These networks raise key theoretical issues related to regionalism, mobility, and state-firm relationships that impinge on low-end service provision, and stratified patterns of information access and utilization within the have-less populations. We view translocal networks an important socio-economic asset of the information have-less and an arena for the articulation of labor mobility in China’s industrialization process and latest wave of urbanization. Carolyn Cartier is associate professor of geography at the University of Southern California. She is the author ofGlobalizing South China (Blackwell, 2001) and the co-editor with Laurence J.C. Ma ofThe Chinese Diaspora: Place Space, Mobility and Identity (Routledge, 2003). Manuel Castells is Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His current, research focuses on the social and economic implications of the Internet and the debate on new development strategies for the Information Age. Jack Linchuan Qiu is assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He co-founded and moderates the Chinese Internet Research Group, a network of researchers from the academic, policymaking, journalistic, and activist communities.     

Approval voting in practice

Several leading professional associations have recently decided to use approval voting (AV). The largest of them, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), with more than 300,000 members, adopted AV in response to practical political problems with conventional plurality elections of precisely the sort that AV was designed to solve. This paper analyzes results of the first three multicandidate elections conducted by the IEEE using the new system. Issues examined include participation rates, use of multiple votes, patterns of shared support, majority rule, AV-dominance, effects on outcomes, and encouragement of candidate entry. In general, AV appears to have had a successful test.     

Decision games applied to police decision making -an exploratory study of information usage-

An analysis of police decision making is presented using the decision board technique developed by Leslie Wilkins. This method assumes that decision making can be measured by observing a subject's response to stimuli presented in the form of pieces of information. A board was created and employed with fifty municipal police officers. Findings suggest that police demonstrate individualized preferences for varying amounts and kinds of information. The nature of the offense was considered most frequently. The attitude of the offender was also an important determinant of the decision outcome; and the offender's attitude then influenced the amount and type of information subsequently used.     

Implementation evaluation: A future direction in project evaluation

The problem of implementation failure is an important component in the evaluation of criminal justice projects. In general, the issue of project implementation has been neglected by organizational researchers and evaluation specialists as well as by policymakers and program developers. In direct contrast to the existing pattern, we stress the importance of organizational factors and the relationships between individuals and organizations for the successful implementation and institutionalization of criminal justice projects.