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AbstractOne challenge for government administration is to reap the benefits of specialization while minimizing its negative side effects. In this article, I study the factors that motivate departments to contribute to the joint formulation of public policies. I derive testable hypotheses that discriminate between two competing motivations for interdepartmental cooperation. If department managers are concerned for the quality of public policy, I expect cooperation to be efficient. If, by contrast, departments compete for administrative turf, I expect cooperation to be inefficient and resources to be wasted. I test those hypotheses by studying all policy proposals adopted and published by the European Commission between 2015 and 2017—a total of approximately 4,000 cases. For politically salient proposals, I find that departments are more likely to contribute if they expect competing departments to become active, too. By contrast, the preparation of technical, non‐salient proposals is left to the most specialized departments. Overall, my findings suggest that interdepartmental cooperation in the European Commission is significantly motivated by DGs' competition for administrative turf.

Purpose: The research goal adopted in this article is to identify the factors determining remote work, as well as to determine the potential of this form of work in the context of increasing the functionality and efficiency of local government institutions not only in the daily work of these institutions, but above all in crisis situations. Design/Methodology/Approach: The research methodology was based on the construction of a research tool that would allow to collect data on remote work and teleworking in Polish local government administration. The research method used was related to an online survey, which was addressed to all members of the Union of Polish Metropolises (union of the 12 largest cities in Poland). Findings: The main conclusions from the analysis performed include: (1) implementation of tasks in the form of teleworking has not been the object of interest of Polish local governments so far; (2) more than a half of the surveyed local governments assessed positively the preparation of these units to remote work implementation in the period of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic; (3) the experience regarding remote work gained during the pandemic shows that employees no longer fear this particular form of work. Practical implications: The result of the conducted research was to obtain information on the experience of the surveyed organizations in the field of remote work process implementation before the pandemic period, during its duration, as well as to consider this form of work in the future, taking into account the conclusions presented in the article. Originality/Value: The conducted research is the first of its kind carried out in Poland since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The obtained results are undoubtedly a valuable source of information on how to prepare Polish local governments to carry out work remotely. ; peer-reviewed

Nigeria, the world's most populous black nation, faces a major crisis in its federal structure and democratic experience. Despite the allusion to democratic governance of the country, the political class, especially elected state governors, and the bureaucratic elite have turned autocratic, refusing to obey the Constitution which demands compulsory elections into the local government administration, siphoning the statutory allocation to the councils from the Federation Account, generating instability in the polity, and arresting the socioeconomic development at the grassroots. This paper puts in perspective the legitimacy crisis and elite conspiracy in the local government council administration, which has spread rural poverty and discontentment among the citizenry, and recommends concrete steps to arrest the calamitous drift.Keywords: Nigeria, constitution, democracy, development, elite, legitimacy, local government LOCAL

AbstractThe Cayman Islands use some of the increasingly familiar methods of resolving administratively the problems of smallness. The country's development and administrative performance depend on human resources which need to be planned in order to reduce dependence on outsiders, especially among the middle ranks of technical and professional staff. Education and training for the public service in the Cayman Islands is inadequate. Control of the administration is weak, especially among the independent boards and commissions, and there is a need for appeal procedures when the principles of natural justice have been breached. Political manipultion in personnel matters adversely affects performance, and there is a need for an effective civil service association to deal with other abuses. The problems of public administration are solved by scaling down the role of government in favour of private enterprise and against the provision of social welfare.

It has been argued that political entrepreneurship is playing an increased role for public organizations and play a vital role in local government organizations. Political entrepreneurship has previously been studied from the motivations and actions of the individual entrepreneur. We argue that in order to understand why political entrepreneurship occurs in local public administration, these aspects are not enough. Instead, we need to consider entrepreneurship as situated, and analyse contextual conditions which form institutional demands for political entrepreneurship. A tentative framework is presented, which distinguish conditions coming from reformed organizational setting and conditions coming from new policy challenges. Finally, we conclude that the character of the conditions and thus the institutional demands directs political entrepreneurship towards either value-generative or collaborative entrepreneurship.

Agencification was one of the main pillars of the New Public Management reforms in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. The strong increase in the number of agencies and the extension of their autonomy (especially with regard to independent regulatory agencies) significantly changed the organizational architecture of governments. However, the review of organizational reforms implemented over the past two decades in European administrative systems demonstrates a trend towards the rationalization and consolidation of the agency landscape. This article provides insight into major forms and patterns of consolidation, including comprehensive, cross-sectoral agency rationalization initiatives and more selective reforms regarding specific policy areas or types of government functions. It also explores the background of the consolidation reforms, confirming that economic pressures affecting governments in the era of austerity played a crucial role in redefining the position of agencies in governments' organizational set-up.Points for practitionersAgencies remain the main vehicle for policy implementation across Europe but the trend towards de-agencification emerged in the decade of the 2010s, represented by both comprehensive, cross-sectoral initiatives reducing the agency stock, and consolidations in specific policy areas or covering agencies of specific types. De-agencification was triggered by the 2008 global financial crisis that increased the pressure on the reduction of administrative expenditure. To a lesser extent, it was a reaction to the adverse effects of agencification, such as coordination and steering problems, or the ambiguous impact of agencification on the efficiency of the public administration.