Urban change and the urban future†

Abstract. This paper is concerned with future urban change in Canada. Part A deals with bringing about urban change. Part B is about knowledge required to make urban change. Part A begins by discussing a model of the urban future and closes with a discussion of the system of public and private organizations for urban management. Part B begins by distinguishing “knowledge roles’ for urban change, and goes on to discuss the role of knowledge in intervention. It closes with a discussion of the knowledge organization (illustrated by the university), and the means by which it might support the making of urban change. Part C relates the first two parts by suggesting how the mutual support of the knowledge organization (e.g. the university) on the one hand, and the system of public and private organizations that manage urban activities on the other, might be improved. Sommaire. Cet article traite du changement urbain au Canada et de son évolution future. Dans la première partie, la discussion porte sur le changement urbain lui-même, tandis que la seconde partie est consacrée au savoir relié au changement urbain. La troisième partie enfln suggère différentes manières de réaliser le lien entre le savoir et l'action en vue d'améliorer la qualité de nos interventions. La première partie débute en proposant un modèle du ‘futur urbain.‘ Cemodèle introduit deux types de planification, la planification projective, quis'appuie sur des extrapolations, et la planification prospective, qui s'appuie sur des prospectives du futur. Ces deux types de planification sont élaborés en relation avec les quatre sous-systèmes du système socio-technique, à savoir les systemes des ressources humaines, des activités humaines, des ressources physiques et des interventions physiques. Le type de relations que l'on perçoit ainsi que la manière de les considérer définissent le processus de planification que Ton adopte. Ce peut être un processus purement projeetif, un processus purement prospectif ou un processus conjoint prospectif-projectif. Des exemples de ces divers processus sont présentés. Dans la deuxième section de cette première partie, diverses manières d'organiser la gestion urbaine sont avancées, et il est suggéré qu'un réseau interorganisationnel à double intéiêt à la fois projectif et prospectif est désirable. La troisième section, enfin, propose un premier pas dans l'établissement d'untel réseau. Ce premier pas serait la création d'un petit réseau d'organisations qui s'engagerait dans le processus projeetif-prospectif suggéré auparavant. Cepetit groupe jouerait un rôle de catalyseur et pourrait stimuler un processus plus vaste si les résultats atteints se révelaient intéressants. La deuxième partie commence par distinguer différents rôles pour le savoir. Après avoir identifé le changement urbain comme un domaine d'études ayant les caractéristiques d'une discipline et d'une profession, elle propose un modèle à deux dimensions, la dimension institutionnelle et celle des connaissances. Ces deux dimensions conduisent à l'dentification de quatre types d'activités ausein du changement urbain: la pratique et les sciences de l'analyse et la pratique et les sciences de l'intervention. La discussion continue ensuite sur l'intervention considérée comme une pratique et un ensemble de disciplines. Il est avancé que l'urbanisation, la globalité, la complexité et le concept de métaproblèmes sont de plus en plus les determinants fondamentaux de l'intervention dans le changement urbain. La troisième section, enfin, propose divers moyens institutionnels pour promouvoir une meilleure intégration du savoir. Des centres et foyers de recherche de natures diverses sont suggérés ainsi qu'une structure nouvelle pour l'université, celle de l'université transdisciplinaire. La troisième partie propose, en guise de conclusion, une meilleure intégration des connaissances et de la gestion urbaine par l'instauration d'une focalisation commune sur le futur qui prendrait place au niveau des laboratoires de dessein de systèmes dans l'université transdisciplinaire et où se concrétiseraient les réseaux interorganisationnels suggérés dans la première partie.     

Recasting Intractable Policy Issues: The Wider Implications of The Netherlands Civil Aviation Controversy

The explosive growth of civil aviation is among the most difficult issues in transportation policy, and nowhere are the fundamental economic and environmental challenges it poses more apparent than in airport expansion. Conventional policy analyses have ineffectively handled these problems, characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and polarization. Increasingly, policy analysts and public managers depend on stakeholder involvement to recast intractable issues into a more tractable format. This article describes a method that supports this recasting process through analysis of stakeholders' policy arguments; and in so doing contributes to the increasing literature on recasting intractable policy issues and to the recent discussion of Q‐methodology in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. The method is applied in a policy analysis of the controversy over the expansion of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. The analysis, which was under‐taken on behalf of the Dutch government and which has wider implications, leads to a new agenda for transportation policy by uncovering and addressing a fuller range of alternatives that move beyond the current polarization and allow the problem to be redefined more tractably. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Elk management and policy in southern Greater Yellowstone: Assessing the constitutive process

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA, is recognized globally as a model for land and wildlife conservation, management, and policy. A major policy problem in the region is the highly contentious winter feeding of elk (Cervus elaphus) on 23 government feed grounds in western Wyoming through cooperative management under several state and federal agencies. Numerous non-governmental groups and concerned citizens are also affected by elk management or seek to contribute to management policies. The long-term controversy shows that this issue centers on how management and policy should be made and who should be involved in decision-making—the constitutive policy process. This paper examines and appraises the constitutive process in this case, including how competency, authority, and control are allocated. It also looks at how institutions, analytic techniques, procedures, and people are structured, selected, and included or excluded in decision-making processes. Our data come from a multi-method approach over the past decade, including participant-observation, historical literature, interviews, media analysis, and technical reports. Our analysis shows that institutional dynamics severely constrain the scope of deliberations, the production of practical problem definitions, and the search for improvements in elk management. We recommend that participants focus on the constitutive level of policy making, i.e., the underlying structure and functioning of policy processes, learn how these elements function and affect processes and outcomes, and learn to configure them in ways that embody democratic principles, serve common interests, and resolve policy problems.     

“In the Best Interests of the Child”: Mapping the (Re) Emergence of Pro‐Adoption Politics in Contemporary Australia

This article seeks to understand, in historical and international perspective, recent governmental initiatives that aim to reinstate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas (2005), and The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families (2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug‐addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti‐adoption attitudes that have characterised the post‐1970s period in response to the Stolen Generations and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.     

Households’ Willingness to Pay for Health Microinsurance and its Impact on Actual Take-up: Results from a Field Experiment in Senegal

Abstract

Community-based health insurance schemes (CBHIS) have been present in the region of Theis, Senegal, for many years. Yet, despite the benefits they offer, take-up rates remain low. This article measures the willingness to pay (WTP) for CBHIS premiums in such a context; our results highlight the role of income, wealth and risk preferences as determinants of WTP. We also provide an analysis of the predictive power of WTP on the actual take-up of insurance following our offering of membership to a sample of 360 households. Results show that WTP has a positive and significant impact on actual CBHIS take-up.     

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REFORM IN ROMANIA

Before the adoption of the Constitution, the whole administration was a unidirectional and hyper-centralized State administration, now we see the prospect of delimiting the functional aspect of the administration of the state administration from one of local communities, to transform public administration at all levels in public services constituted in the interest of the population, being in the public interest the establishment of local government autonomy, characterized by the existence of public authorities arising from the will of local communities, to act in order to satisfy their needs, while fulfilling the duties established by law.     

The architecture of organizations as missed opportunity in political research

Few scholars in political science or public administration deny that organization matters. However, the rare application of an organizational perspective in research suggests otherwise. To revive the awareness of organizations as unit or level of analysis, attributed and generic properties are distinguished. Attributed properties, which dominate research, assign functions and patterns of behaviour to an organization. In contrast, generic properties refer to the constitutive elements of organizations that take effect before attributed properties. This article takes a closer look at four generic properties by examining their often-implicit use in current political science and public administration research. The aim is to demonstrate that the formal dimension, the goals, the expertise of personnel and organizational boundaries exert an independent influence on the output of political or public sector organizations.     

Economic Crises,Crisis of Labour Law? Lessons from Weimar

Labour law has been thrown into turmoil in many large industrialized countries with democratic tradition and market economies. In fact, rapid economic globalization resulted in an irremediable decline in collective bargaining in most of the states that entered into the sphere of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. On a first reading, the financial crisis of 2008 exacerbated this retreat of labour law back to its initial individualist and contractual forms. In analysing the contemporary crisis of labour law, the historical-comparative method can be highly fruitful, especially if one considers the precedent of the economic crisis of 1929. On this basis, I first consider an influential text by Hugo Sinzheimer on the ‘crisis of labour law’ in Weimar Germany and a study by Otto Kahn-Freund on the changing function of labour law in the same context. These works can be connected to the concept of the ‘labour constitution’, which Max Weber notably developed in an empirical sense, and which finds its extension in the later works of Thilo Ramm, a labour scholar of international reputation.