Arab Socialism and Ecumenical Tendencies in Egypt 1962–1970

During the 1960s in Egypt, a group of intellectuals and publicists with left-leaning tendencies sought to base their socialist views on Islamic principles by reading early Islamic history as a repository of heroes and villains to fit their model of Arab socialist society. Beyond political aggrandizement of Nasserism, this article claims that these intellectuals described Islam as socialist, which led them in unexpected directions. First and foremost, such study led several to make surprising claims regarding the leaders of early Islam that ipso facto brought them closer to the Shi?i view of this formative period of Islam. Rather than merely translating socialism into Islamic terminology, these scholars imbued early Islamic history with fresh and revolutionary meaning. The process of making Islam more relevant to twentieth-century Muslims meant re-examining age-old rivalries, which had the potential to change the relations between Sunni and Shi?i Islam dramatically.     

Many Hands Make Light Work: The Role of Collaborative Management in Improving Environmental Information Management by Local Authorities

ABSTRACT

What is the role of collaborative management (CM) in enhancing environmental outputs? Does CM enable local municipalities to be better environmental performers? The present article addresses these two questions by means of a study of all urban localities in Israel (80% response rate). The aims of the study are to contribute to current research in two main ways. First, by addressing the question: Does CM enable local municipalities to be better environmental performers? In doing so, the study expands the very small number of studies conducted to date that examine performance and policy outputs of collaboration versus collaboration processes and procedures. Second, the study contributes to enlarging the very small number of relatively large N studies on collaborative public management that examine policy outputs. The main finding of this study highlights the important and positive role of CM in regard to local authorities’ environmental outputs.     

Policy Stalemate and Policy Change in Israel's Water Sector 1970–2010: Advocacy Coalitions and Policy Narratives

This paper seeks to explain policy stalemates that persist despite recognition of their risks and damages, as well as the factors and processes that enable a breakthrough and lead to policy change. The paper seeks to fill a gap in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) theory by supplementing it with Narrative Analysis (NA). We claim that NA provides a link missing in the ACF that is required for the transformation of “necessary” conditions—like external and internal shocks to the system—into “sufficient” conditions for policy persistence or change. We use the ACF to delineate coalition members and their belief systems and policy positions, as well as external, internal, and structural shocks to the system. We rely on NA to analyze the narratives employed in the public arena, which turn conditions necessary both for hurting stalemates and for policy change into sufficient conditions. We illustrate the benefits of combining the two approaches through a study of Israel's water policy during four decades (1970s–2000s) based on government records and on information from interviews with key players.