Big change,little change? Punctuation,increments and multi-layer institutional change for English local authorities under austerity

This paper draws on new institutionalist theories to consider how we might characterise the process and outcomes of change occurring in English local government as a result of the UK’s austerity policies. It uses national and local empirical data to argue that changes are best understood as multi-layer processes, whereby radical ‘punctuated’ shifts in national funding can be mitigated to incremental adjustments in service delivery at a local level. However, the paper also suggests that the incremental appearance of change may be temporary, and that diminishing institutional resilience and emergent discursive shifts potentially prefigure a paradigm change in local governance.     

Meeting development goals: evidence from the Civil Society Education Fund

In recent years, the Civil Society Education Fund has supported national education civil society coalitions (NECs) in low-income countries so that they put pressure on governments and donors to implement the Education for All agenda and the Millennium Development Goal on education. This article draws on literature on global governance as well as on an extensive evaluation of the CSEF to explore the actual contribution of this initiative to the activity of NECs. The article highlights the achievements and shortcomings of the CSEF and includes a set of practical recommendations on the role of global civil society in international development processes.     

Innovation Policy as Performativity—the Case of Sweden

This article analyzes how the idea of “innovationism” in Sweden has generated a new kind of idea-driven policy around the creation of innovative regional policy. In contrast to similar policies in this area, this policy does not manifest itself through traditional instruments, but evolves through symbolic and ritual performances, in particular through events and conferences. The article asks how this emerging idea has changed the existing institutional formation of sponsoring industrially relevant research. The vision of concerted action between decision-makers within modern innovationism reinforces territorial identity, but it also tends to devolve responsibility to the regional level since concerted action on the national level is hard to obtain. What emerges is a system of governing at a distance where different actors perform their roles according to often academic ideas of innovationism. The study is based on two qualitative studies in Sweden entailing both documentary sources and semi-structured interviews.     

Policy Analysis,International Relations,and European Governance – Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries

ABSTRACT

The article highlights the rationale of the special issue in terms of its objectives and guiding principles. It maps different evolutions and challenges within three analytical streams (1) regarding the field of policy analysis, (2) concerning the interaction between domestic and international affairs, and (3) with regards to the transformation of European Union governance in troubled times. These three research avenues highlight how not only European governance itself has evolved in a changing world, but also how the analysis of interests, institutions, and policy-making has morphed, oftentimes transgressing disciplinary and methodological boundaries.     

Addressing Information Needs in Employment Services Provision in Italy: The Role of Codesign Networks

This article examines how coproduction can contribute to information quality in support of labor-market decision-making. Data was gathered on different types of Labor Market Intelligence (LMI) as decision-support systems for stakeholders, and subsequently by analyzing a specific program, with a focus on the role of information within its coproduction process. Results confirm the importance of information systems to support employment services design, but highlight the limitations of existing channels, and outline the types of information needed for policy effectiveness: those that are gathered through continuous relations with employers and jobseekers, and that often derive from participation in policy networks.     

Explaining Informal Policy-Making Patterns in the Eurozone Crisis: Decentralized Bargaining and the Theory of EU Institutions

ABSTRACT

During the Eurozone crisis, the so-called ‘Merkozy duumvirate’ emerged as an informal, but highly visible EU policy-making pattern. This article asks why such forms of decentralized bargaining emerge and what this implies for the theory of EU institutions. According to an approach based on negotiation theory, the article argues that Merkozy is a strategic tool used by Germany to realize its preferences on EU crisis management. Based on an incomplete contracts theory of EU institutions, instead, the article analyses Merkozy as an informal institution created by France and Germany to avoid being discriminated by supranational institutions. Both approaches are employed to assess Merkozy’s role in the decision-making process leading to the adoption of the Fiscal Compact.     

Arguing deep ideational change

ABSTRACT

How do actors come to contest previously uncontested background ideas? This is a difficult question to ask. On the one hand, deep backgrounds seem to be too foundational for actors to transform. Their political efficacy appears to end where ideas constitute their efficacy in the first place. On the other hand, ideas must not be reified. Even deeply taken-for-granted ideas do not always stay the same, and agents have a lot to do with these changes. In order to answer this question, we draw from social theory and rhetorical studies. We conceptualize the deep background as nomos, and the more easily accessible background as endoxa. We then proceed to identify three sets of conditions that make nomic change possible. These relate to opportunity, message, and messenger. Nomic change becomes possible when the need for something new has become widely established and a supply of new nomic ideas is easily available (opportunity); new nomic ideas are ‘smuggled’ into more orthodox and widely resonating arguments (message) as well as rhetorical encounters in which these arguments are made; and advocates are widely recognized as interlocutors (messenger). A plausibility probe of nomic contestation about nuclear governance provides evidence for this framework.     

Stealing into the wild: conservation science,plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures

Faced with pressing climatic changes, scientific and industrial interests are vying to develop crops that can survive drought, floods and shifting pest regimes. Increasingly, they look for solutions in an unlikely place: the gene pools of wild plants. Crop wild relatives (CWR) – species closely related to crops, including their ancestors – offer breeders the allure of retracing the domestication bottleneck, infusing genomes of modern crops with ‘lost’ genetic variety. Yet wild relatives also confront threats from climate change, urbanization and expansion of industrial agri-food. Thus, CWR, seen as both salvational and threatened, have become an international conservation and food-security priority. It is my contention that, in their common project to harness wild-relative potential, conservation and breeding science are co-evolving to extend seed commodity relations into new spheres. I examine enclosures along two fronts: first within ‘systematic CWR conservation’, where ‘in situ’ approaches, typically regarded as empowering and sustainable alternatives to ‘ex situ’, instead may support a complementary system of value extraction; second, in breeding and biotechnology research, which produces new value for CWR while profoundly shaping upstream conservation priorities. An important finding is that although today’s ‘ex situ-centric’ complementarity favors dispossession, an ‘in situ-centric’ approach could foster democratic renewal of biocultural diversity.     

Designating Safety,Denying Persecution: Implications for Roma Refugee Claimants in Canada

In response to the arrival in Canada of thousands of Hungarian Roma asylum seekers, a new and restrictive refugee regime was installed. Legislation included Designated Countries of Origin or “safe” countries from which refugee claimants were stripped of some entitlements. Acceptance rates fluctuate in loose reticulation with several factors. When negative decisions are made on refugee claims, conditions of persecution in Hungary are denied even though they are clearly demonstrable. Inclusion of claimants' voices substantiates a normalized violence. When decision makers parse the criterion of persecution and when political leaders dismiss claims as “bogus,” the consequence is the reconfiguration of the Roma as essentially nomadic.     

Prospect theory,operational code analysis,and risk-taking behaviour: a new model of China’s crisis behaviour

Integrating prospect theory and operational code analysis, this paper introduces an innovative approach to studying the decision making of Chinese leaders during crises. The unique contribution of this paper is to adopt the methodology of operational code analysis to measure the domain of actions of policy makers in the application of prospect theory. We suggest that leaders’ operational code beliefs can help us to identify in which domain of actions (gains or losses) leaders are located during crises. Xi Jinping experienced two notable foreign policy crises in 2014, the ‘oil rig’ crisis with Vietnam and the ‘P-8 crisis’ with the United States, which are examined in detail to illustrate Xi’s operational code beliefs and risk-taking behaviour of ‘confident accommodation’ behaviour during crises. To test the process validity of integrating operational code analysis and prospect theory, Hu Jintao’s operational code beliefs and crisis behaviour in 2011–2012 are then compared to Xi’s beliefs and decisions in this study of China’s crisis behaviour.