ONLY GOOD FENCES KEEP GOOD NEIGHBOURS! THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF MINISTRY–AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS AT THE SCIENCE–POLICY NEXUS IN GERMAN FOOD SAFETY POLICY

This article makes a further contribution to opening the ‘black box’ of micropractices in ministry–agency relationships. We argue that the mechanisms that come into play in the course of institutionalizing agencification reforms – such as renegotiating mutual roles and rules in ministry–agency interactions – are only poorly covered in the existing literature. To adequately address the negotiated and contingent nature of de facto agency autonomy and political control, we develop an interpretive approach based on the concept of ‘boundary work’. The empirical focus is on ministry–agency interactions at the science–policy nexus in the contested policy field of food safety. By studying actors' stories about the institutionalization processes following the fundamental reorganization of the German food safety administration in the wake of the BSE crisis from a longitudinal perspective, we show how actors manage boundary conflicts via increasingly differentiated backstage coordination.     

TRANSPARENCY IN PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS: NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL?

Scholars' criticism of transparency in public–private partnerships (PPPs) often focuses on ‘external’ transparency, that is, the extent to which internal information is visible to the outside world. However, to achieve external transparency, internal transparency – the availability and inferability of information for the public procurer and the private party – is crucial. In this article we analyse input, process, and output transparency from three different perspectives (institutional, cognitive, and strategic) in four PPPs in the Netherlands. We conclude that input transparency is high, but process and output transparency less so. Moreover, output transparency has gained importance in PPPs. Whether this is problematic depends on the PPPs' institutional environment. In some partnerships the desired output is uncontested and predetermined by clear standards in the institutional environment, whereas other PPPs deal with contested output norms, decreasing the partnerships' transparency. These results nuance the current debate on the lack of transparency in PPPs.     

The Fight Against Government Corruption in Romania: Irreversible Results or Sisyphean Challenge?

The fight against political, especially government, corruption has dominated Romanian political discourse for many years. However, the vast majority of the political elite have continuously opposed the prosecution and conviction of defendants of corruption crimes. After a long constitutional conflict that seriously inhibited the fight against government corruption between 2006 and 2009, law enforcement agencies finally began to experience some success. Nevertheless, the extent of government corruption has remained consistently high. This article analyses the struggles that have occurred between 2004 and 2013 in the fight against government corruption in Romania and particularly examines the interplay between formal and informal factors in this field.