Chinese dragon or toothless tiger? Regulating the professional competence of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners

The escalation in popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has begun to stimulate regulatory responses to ensure the safety and efficacy of different modalities. The Therapeutic Goods Authority in Australia oversees a scheme of listing and registration, said to lead the world. Established CAM courses now confer recognised bachelor degrees. Victoria has recently regulated Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners, through the Chinese Medicine Registration Act 2000 (Vic), modelled on legislation regulating medical practitioners. CAM is being integrated into conventional medical (especially general) practice, and calls for the "mainstreaming" of CAM are increasing. Integrating CAM, however, involves a critical incoherence, well illustrated by the Victorian legislation. Clinical competence can only be properly assessed against standards established through scientific validation. If CAM systems, which purport to offer alternatives to science-based medicine, are regulated through conventional instruments, they may well be relinquishing the very identities which set them apart.     

District planning and local government in Kenya

In many ways the autonomy of local government in Kenya has declined in the last twenty years. After reviewing the various tendencies towards centralization which can be observed and looking at some of the reforms which have occurred, the current district planning approach, known as the District Focus for Rural Development Strategy, is analysed in order to explore the roles played within it by local government. Policy documents and other official statements are discussed, as are the attitudes of political and administrative leaders. Whilst the new strategy is supposed to bring about greater decentralization, it has led to a continuing reduction of local government autonomy especially for the county councils. However, pessimistic conclusions can not be easily drawn. Local government is not likely to be abolished, the new approach may enable it to play a more effective planning role—even if a less autonomous one—and there are other forms of local participation (especially through community development) which partly compensate for the erosion of formal local government.     

The National Press and Party Voting in the UK

The difficulty with resolving the classic problem of whether newspapers influence voting patterns is self-selection: readers select a paper to fit their politics, and newspapers select particular types of readers. One way round this chicken-and-egg problem is to compare the voting behaviour of individuals whose politics are reinforced by their paper, with those who are cross-pressured by their paper, and to compare both with those who do not regularly read a paper. Using the British Household Panel study to analyse voting patterns in 1992 and 1997, this study suggest that newspapers have a statistically significant effect on voting, larger for Labour than Conservative sympathizers, and larger for the 1992 than the 1997 election. The broader implications of these findings for British politics and democracy are discussed.     

Change leadership and change embeddedness in public organizations: Connecting macrolevel reform to microlevel implementation

Governments initiate major public sector reforms for various reasons. Although change leadership appears crucial, its role in implementing reforms in public organizations receives scant attention. Insights from public administration and change management literature help to bridge the gap between these macrolevel and microlevel perspectives. Our multilevel study of two youth care organizations addressing public sector reform explores how leadership behavior—and in interaction between top and middle managers—contributes to the concept of what we call change embeddedness among front-line employees. The use of leadership behaviors during the reform that are leader centric (shaping) appear to be associated with greater ambiguity and worse change embeddedness. However, leadership focused on engaging employees and boundary spanning with external organizations seems to support the embeddedness of the reform, especially when these behaviors are connected to a clear sense of purpose around the change.     

A Dominant SNP in a Unionist Scotland? The 2019 UK General Election in Scotland

The UK general election in December 2019 produced a resounding victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, returning a majority government and the mandate for Brexit that he had campaigned for. The picture was less rosy for the Conservatives in Scotland, where his party lost half its seats to the SNP. This article reviews the election outcome in Scotland, considering the fortunes of each of the main parties, and projects forward to the devolved election in 2021, when the parties will once again debate the key constitutional question in Scotland.     

The United Kingdom’s Economic Relations with New Zealand and Australia after Brexit

This article examines the current state of economic relations that the United Kingdom has with New Zealand and Australia, in light of the former’s decision to leave the European Union. Although there are prospects for future trade between these countries post-Brexit based on the three countries’ current comparative advantages, perhaps the greatest scope is for greater trade in services along with greater investment flows. Trade in food produce would be affected by changes in trade policy post-Brexit but other goods such as forestry, mineral and manufacturing products would be more affected by changes in general economic conditions and the relative competiveness of the industries in international markets. Already these aspects of trade are important and are expected to grow and develop over time. Much of the future negotiations between the three countries will take up a range of issues associated with investment and the trade in services and much of the future prospects for growth in trade might depend on the success of these negotiations.