Tortoises and Hares: The Race to Shared Services Across Australian State and Territory Jurisdictions

All tiers of government in Australia have recently aimed at enhancing service provision, with shared service platforms a recent innovation. To date there has been no scholarly inquiry into comparative shared service performance at the Australian state level. This article evaluates the experience of different state jurisdictions in adopting shared service platforms within “Whole of Government” approaches to public sector reform. It demonstrates that those jurisdictions most eager to embrace shared services have created organizations susceptible to particular adverse outcomes and that, far from implementing shared services programs, they may have installed monopoly-provider conditions for a range of back-office functions.     

Place-Shaping by Local Government in Developing Countries: Lessons for the Developed World

The Lyons Inquiry into local government in Britain represented a significant contribution to the debate on local government reform, with policy ramifications well beyond contemporary Britain. This article considers the Inquiry's concept of “place-shaping” as a mode of local government reform which captures the experience of a number of developing countries in recent years. By way of illustrative examples, we examine these processes in the specific contexts of South Africa and Indonesia. In particular, we consider whether the devolution of functions to municipalities in developmental settings constitutes place-shaping, and how this bears on processes of local government reform in developed nations.     

Resident-Defined Neighborhood Mapping: Using GIS to Analyze Phenomenological Neighborhoods

Using a natural quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design, residents in randomly selected homes in a suburb of Los Angeles were surveyed about their perceptions of their neighborhoods with respect to cohesion and sense of community. Responses from the pretest surveys—administered before the construction of a freeway that would bisect the city—were compared to the responses from the posttest survey six years later, administered two years after completion of the freeway. Respondents living adjacent to the new freeway—residents who experienced a fourfold increase in the average decibel levels in their neighborhoods since the freeway opened—reported both a lower sense of community and smaller neighborhood areas as compared to residents not living adjacent to the freeway and as compared to the results from the pretest. The analysis of the data incorporated geographic information system (GIS) software to allow for the analysis of phenomenological neighborhoods—neighborhoods as defined by respondents. This Resident-defined Neighborhood Mapping methodology permitted us to analyze neighborhoods as the respondents outlined them, not as they were preconceived by someone outside the neighborhood. It is suggested that this new methodology may prove useful in advancing the field of neighborhood research by detecting neighborhood-level change that traditional methods may miss.     

AGRICULTURAL POLICY IN EUROPE

AGRICULTURAL POLICY IN EUROPE
Alan Greer
Manchester University Press, 2005, 238 pp., £55 (hb) ISBN: 071906029X