Suchergebnisse

Since 2012, a new movement of government departments, think tanks and high-profile individuals within the UK has sought to promote the increased usage of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in public policy. They promote RCTs as an evidence-based corrective for the inappropriate certainties of experts. Recent government reports and public debate around this initiative are reviewed and analysed within a framework for epistemic governance: normative insights into how knowledge for policymaking should be understood and governed drawn from science and technology studies and the policy sciences. The legitimacy of RCT evidence within policymaking is found to rest on the recognition of three key features: (1) how multiple meanings of evidence limit generalisability, (2) ensuring a plurality of evidence inputs, including those from other forms of research and expertise, and (3) building institutions for governing the use of RCTs in the public interest. Producing evidence for policymaking is a hybrid activity that necessarily spans both science and politics. Presenting RCTs as naively neutral evidence of what policy interventions work is misleading. The paper concludes by calling for more work on how the new RCT movement might engage with its own history in social and policy research on the value of experiments for policymaking.

AbstractThis article examines the transformation of state power in urban China by investigating how the state governs a newly emerging type of neighborhood organization connected with housing privatization, the homeowners' association (HA). Based on a series of extensive field research visits in Shanghai from 2006 to 2012, it analyzes the contradictory rationales behind HA policies in Shanghai, and elaborates the debates between state actors and non‐state actors on the boundary of state intervention. It finds that the state in Shanghai has engaged multiple goals in its governance of the HAs: regularizing the real estate market, promoting self‐organization at the neighborhood level, and channeling homeowners' participation in urban politics. The neoliberal rationality of governing through subjects' autonomy and a tradition of the socialist discourse on party leadership co‐exist in the state's toolkit for governance. But the state's capacity to coordinate these different governing techniques varies across fields. I highlight the dilemma a non‐liberal state confronts in cultivating self‐organizing and self‐responsible individuals. This contrasts with some of the studies on 'China's neoliberal state', which argue that the bureaucratic system has been resilient in coping with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism.

This article demonstrates that party‐political orientations within governance communities can have strong effects on policy implementation. Empirical evidence is drawn from the Academy conversion scheme for secondary schools in England that was recently pursued by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. The opt‐in nature of the reform makes it possible to discern the impact that nominally apolitical school governors have on the implementation of the policy. Academy conversion is disproportionately found in more Conservative‐voting constituencies due to varying school‐level propensities to apply to convert, rather than varying propensities for the Department for Education to authorize conversions. Further, applications to convert are significantly more likely from schools in Conservative parliamentary seats that are under the control of Labour local authorities. Thus, nominally apolitical policy participants appear to act in rather political ways, which has implications for our understanding of the involvement of civil society in the provision of public services.

AbstractRecent spikes in commodity prices, the growing appetite for primary commodities among emerging economies, growing interest in biofuels and speculations over future returns to land and its products have led to a renewed interest in farmland in the global South. With highly publicized risks and polarized "win‐lose" narratives, so‐called "land grabbing" has become an important focus of transnational governance activity. In juxtaposition to those seeing large‐scale land acquisitions as inherently risky or undesirable, some argue for the potential opportunities they engender—provided risks can be mitigated through improved governance. This paper explores this argument through a systematic analysis of the formal features of the multi‐sited governance mechanisms in place to guide agricultural investment and govern its social and environmental effects. The intent is not to discount the importance of informal norms and practices or the so‐called "lived experience of governance," nor the argument that such land acquisitions are inherently flawed irrespective of the "discipline imposed on them." Rather, the paper aims to explore the merits of the arguments advanced by the pro‐investment camp, and to explore the extent to which the emerging global governance architecture is set up to deliver on the purported benefits of large‐scale agricultural investment. Results suggest that serious weaknesses in the substantive scope, reach and/or implementation mechanisms in all of the reviewed governance mechanisms pose a serious risk to the likely effectiveness of the emerging governance architecture in minimizing risks and leveraging benefits. Addressing these weaknesses is an obvious first step for bolstering the credibility of those advocating that governance is the solution.