Trilateral relations in a globalizing world. ASEM and the United States

Europe, the United States and East Asia are linked together through bilateral relations as well as a kind of trilateral relationship. There are three legs: Looking from a European perspective, the strongest relationship is the transatlantic relationship; secondly, there is a growing relationship between the United States and East Asia; and thirdly, the weakest link is the European-East Asian relationship.In this article I will focus, first, on this global triangle between East Asia, Europe and the United States. Secondly, I will discuss the question whether ASEM, APEC and ASEAN are competing or cooperating. Thirdly, I will analyze the question how the US looks at ASEM. Concluding I will argue that the US should take ASEM more seriously – not least because of US interests.This paper was written as part of a project on Backlash against Globalization that is supported by the Otto Wolff Foundation, Cologne, and The German Marshall Fund of the United States, Washington, DC.     

Information, Interests, and Environmental Regulation

This study contributes to the understanding of informational approaches to bringing about compliance with environmental regulations with particular attention to differences in the influence of information provided by different information sources. Based on theorizing from a combination of information processing and interest group literatures, we develop hypotheses about regulatees' reliance upon and the influence of different sources of information. We test these hypotheses for Danish farmers' compliance with agro-environmental rules. Our findings show that information plays a role in bringing about regulatory compliance, but its influence is not as strong and is less direct than might be thought to be the case. In addition, we show that not all information sources have the same influence. The findings demonstrate that interest groups have important roles in information provision and legitimization of policies that have often been assumed in the literature but have rarely been empirically examined.     

Regulatory enforcement and compliance: Examining Danish agro‐environmental policy

This study of municipal enforcement of agro‐environmental regulations in Denmark provides an empirical understanding of how enforcement affects compliance. A key contribution is sorting out the relative influence of inspectors' different styles of enforcement and choices made by enforcement agencies. The latter are shown to be more important in bringing about compliance than are inspectors' enforcement styles. Municipal agencies are shown to increase compliance through the use of third parties, more frequent inspection, and setting priorities for inspection of major items. The findings about enforcement styles of inspectors suggest it is necessary to get tough up to a point, but beyond that the threat of coercion can be counterproductive. These findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of overly legalistic enforcement styles, particularly for the Danish culture with its strong emphasis on cooperation and consultation in regulation. But the findings also advise us to be cautious about the use of cooperative styles of enforcement in that we find evidence for capture of the enforcement process by agricultural organizations. This leads to a more nuanced view of enforcement rather than the broad generalizations found in the literature concerning legalism and cooperation. © 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. <@:>     

Coercive versus cooperative policies: Comparing intergovernmental mandate performance

Cooperative policies hold out promise of an improvement over coercive mandates as ways to enhance implementation of intergovernmental programs. By treating subordinate governments as regulatory trustees and emphasizing substantive compliance, the cooperative mandates avoid the onerous aspects of heavy-handed regulatory federalism. Our comparison of state hazard-mitigation policy in Florida and in New South Wales, Australia addresses procedural and substantive compliance under the two forms of intergovernmental policies. When local governments are not committed to state policy objectives, the coercive policy produces better results as evidenced by higher rates of procedural compliance and greater effort by local governments to achieve policy objectives. When local government commitment exists, the cooperative policy produces substantive results that are at least the equivalent to the coercive policy. Moreover, over the long run cooperative policies may have greater promise in sustaining local government commitment. The dilemma is to figure out how to motivate lagging jurisdictions that seem to require a coercive policy, while not straightjacketing leading jurisdictions that are capable of thriving under a cooperative regime.     

Reconsidering Styles of Regulatory Enforcement: Patterns in Danish Agro‐Environmental Inspection

This study addresses enforcement styles of regulatory inspectors, based on an examination of the municipal enforcement of agro‐environmental policies in Denmark. Our findings make three contributions to the regulatory literature. One contribution is to add empirical support for theorizing about inspectors' enforcement styles as consisting of multiple components, rather than a single continuum. We show that inspectors' enforcement styles comprise the degree of formalism and the degree of coercion that they exercise when carrying out inspections. A second contribution is in showing the relationship of different types of enforcement styles to the two underlying dimensions of the concept. A third contribution is an examination of the ways in which inspectors' enforcement styles relate to their enforcement actions. The consistency of our findings with those of other studies suggests that the dimensions and types of inspectors' enforcement styles that we observed in Denmark can be generalized to other settings.     

MPP programs emerging around the world19

This paper examines public policy and management programs in Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and makes comparisons with similar programs in the United States. Our study of public policy programs shows that there are many challenges ahead in terms of making good decisions on the form and content of programs that will add value to governments and citizens. Appropriate choices in terms of program design and pedagogy will reflect different economic, social, environmental, and cultural influences and will be shaped by history, values, and the roles of public policy and management professionals within a particular governmental context.