European Climate Policy: Toward Centralized Governance?

The EU emissions trading system (ETS) is the first large-scale international emissions trading system and a "cornerstone" in EU climate policy. A key element in the ETS implementation process is deciding upon the ceiling ("cap") for the emissions included in the ETS. Over time, a significant change and centralization of this model has taken place. In order to understand this development, we need to acknowledge the increasing acceptance of stronger centralized governance among the member states due to ETS pilot phase problems; take into consideration frustration in the European Commission over complex and differing National Allocation Plans; and add the fact that the Kyoto Protocol target was getting nearer and a good performance of the "flagship" ETS was becoming increasingly important. Hence, although the case supports the importance of acknowledging the multilevel character of the EU, it still emphasizes the key role of changes in member states' interests and positions for understanding outcomes.     

European Cooperation on Future Crises: Toward a Public Good?

As crises grow more transnational in origin and effect, managing them effectively will require international cooperation. This article explores the dilemmas inherent to producing common crisis management capacities across national governments. Drawing on the literature related to "international public goods," the article builds an approach for understanding these dilemmas through the lens of collective action and the perverse incentives associated therein. The article applies this approach to cooperation in Europe on an issue that typifies the transnational crisis—the spread of communicable disease—and highlights obstacles to European Union ambitions to build a robust system for disease surveillance and control. Having isolated the obstacles, the article then identifies solutions to facilitate cooperation toward more effectively producing the good in question.     

Reforming the World Health Organization: what influence do the BRICS wield?

The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently undergoing fundamental reform that is intended to impact its programmes and priority setting and its financial and governing structures. Within the reform debates, new relations of powers are emerging among traditional donors and emerging economies such as the ‘BRICS’: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. These five emerging economies have formally committed ‘to strengthen and legitimise the WHO as the coordinating authority in global health’ through the principle of multilateralism. In this paper, the results of a qualitative study – based on 21 key informant interviews – that seeks to better understand BRICS’ engagement in this organisation and the extent to which their action enables these countries to influence the reform process were presented. The results show that individual BRICS countries found natural pairings with each other on both particular elements of the reform, notably governance and WHO financing, and specific health issues. While numerous examples of individual BRICS countries seeking to raise the profile of specific health issues were found, some evidence of a coordinated effort to influence reform as a bloc was also found. Although this was largely limited to rhetorical announcements of support in formal Declarations and Communiqués, it nevertheless articulates a vision of the WHO as an organisation with a broad mandate delivered with sufficient, predictable funding.     

Generating global health governance through BRICS summitry

While global plurilateral summit institutions (PSIs) of the world's most powerful countries have long generated effective global health governance, the most recent summits of the Group of Eight (G8) and the Group of 20 (G20) have largely abandoned their earlier concern with health, especially outside its specialized food and nutrition link. However, since its start in 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, the annual summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China and now South Africa (BRICS), a new PSI arising has substantially addressed health and started to lead in some ways. The BRICS summit-level health governance has been reinforced by the advent of a BRICS health ministers' forum, other health-related ministerial institutions (notably for agriculture and trade) and official and multi-stakeholder bodies. This article provides the first direct, disciplined empirical analysis of how and why the BRICS summit system has governed global health, based on the models developed for and applied to G8, G20 and United Nations summit governance.     

Spurring Vaccine Development for the Developing World: A Collaborative Governance Perspective on Product Development Partnerships

Collaborative governance has emerged recently as an alternative to the traditional sector-based, single-actor approaches for addressing complex governance challenges. However, previous research has given little attention to collaborative governance within international policy contexts. To address this gap, an integrative collaborative governance framework is used to analyze product development partnerships (PDPs) that seek to develop vaccines to prevent the spread of devastating diseases within the developing world. The analysis indicates that PDPs are helping address acute governance challenges and are emblematic of the increasing importance of nonprofit organizations in collaborative governance regimes. Implications for research on collaborative governance are also discussed.     

Theorising state–narco relations in Bolivia’s nascent democracy (1982–1993): governance,order and political transition

Conventional policy and academic discourses have generally held illicit drug economies in Latin America to be synergistic with violence and instability. The case of post-transition Bolivia (1982–1993) confounds such assumptions. Applying a political economy approach, this article moves beyond mainstream analyses to examine how the Bolivian drug trade became interwoven with informal forms of governance, order and political transition. I argue that state–narco networks – a hangover from Bolivia’s authoritarian era – played an important role in these complex processes. In tracing the evolution of these interactions, the article advances a more nuanced theorisation of the relationship between the state and the drug trade in an understudied case.     

Bureaucratic Readiness in Managing Local Level Participatory Governance: A Developing Country Context

Participatory governance in developing countries is broadly viewed as an essential prerequisite for successful implementation of public projects. However, it poses many challenges for public bureaucrats in terms of their skills and willingness to engage citizens. Despite the growing evidence of the pervasiveness of participatory governance, research to date has not explored bureaucratic readiness to adopt participatory practices. This research presents findings of a bureaucratic readiness assessment for participatory governance in Bangladesh by exploring how public bureaucrats perceive the value of participation; how they are educated to collaborate with stakeholders; and the extent to which their attitudes are amenable to enhancing participatory governance. Our findings suggest that we can classify readiness in terms of both motivational and educational factors. The study has implications for how readiness can be developed in public officials that may assist in fostering participatory governance in Bangladesh and be informative to other countries experiencing similar issues.     

Diffusion of Corporate Risk‐Management Characteristics: Perspectives of Chief Audit Executives through a Survey Approach

This study examines how corporate risk‐management characteristics in Australian public universities have diffused under an environment of conflicting management cultures. The findings reveal that corporate risk‐management characteristics have diffused in a pluralist form to satisfy stakeholders of different management approaches across its governance levels as opposed to a unilateral form aligned to the corporate approach. The accepted practice of this adapted version challenges the existing notion that the adoption of corporate control processes in the public sector is problematic, and provides insights into the emergence of a hybrid control process to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. These findings have policy implications for defining a new hybrid governance‐control paradigm for the public sector as an alternative to the corporate‐influenced control paradigm, and provide avenues for further research to confirm the phenomenon with other corporate control processes, public‐sector entities, and if so its impact on effective governance.     

Norfolk Island as Region: A Pacific Puzzle

Commonwealth‐enforced changes to the constitutional status of Norfolk Island through 2014–2016 have removed the island's autonomous identity as a self‐governing Australian territory. Its conversion to what is effectively a part of New South Wales, with the main instrument of governance titled ‘regional council’, is said to be based on a NSW local government model. However, it is difficult to view Norfolk Island as a region, and difficult also to trace the thinking that bestowed the form of the regional council on its governance. This article briefly summarizes the Norfolk changes. It then considers how the concept of the regional council has been used in NSW, and moves on to Queensland where the concept is better defined. It notes particularly how it has been applied in the case of the Torres Strait Islands, and asks whether that application might have relevance for Norfolk. It concludes with speculation about what might be a better approach in designing a system of governance suitable for Norfolk conditions.     

Europeanisation and social movements: The case of the Stop TTIP campaign

Over the past years, the economic crisis has significantly challenged the ways through which social movements have conceptualised and interacted with European Union institutions and policies. Although valuable research on the Europeanisation of movements has already been conducted, finding moderate numbers of Europeanised protests and actors, more recent studies on the subject have been limited to austerity measures and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has been investigated more from a trade unions’ or an international relations perspective. In this article, the TTIP is used as a very promising case study to analyse social movements’ Europeanisation – that is, their capacity to mobilise referring to European issues, targets and identities. Furthermore, the TTIP is a crucial test case because it concerns a policy area (foreign trade) which falls under the exclusive competence of the EU. In addition, political opportunities for civil society actors are ‘closed’ in that negotiations are kept ‘secret’ and discussed mainly within the European Council, and it is difficult to mobilise a large public on such a technical issue. So why and how has this movement become ‘Europeanised’? This comparative study tests the Europeanisation hypothesis with a protest event analysis on anti‐TTIP mobilisation in six European countries (Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria) at the EU level in the period 2014–2016 (for a total of 784 events) and uses semi‐structured interviews in Brussels with key representatives of the movement and policy makers. The findings show that there is strong adaptation of social movements to multilevel governance – with the growing presence of not only purely European actors, but also European targets, mobilisations and transnational movement networks – with a ‘differential Europeanisation’. Not only do the paths of Europeanisation vary from country to country (and type of actor), but they are also influenced by the interplay between the political opportunities at the EU and domestic levels.