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It has long been acknowledged that the various burgeoning problems inflicting the world are deeply rooted in human behaviour. Governance often entails policy formulation and strategies that initiate behavioural change to alleviate such problems and foster sustainability. However, this often appears as a strenuous endeavour, especially at the macro level. For this reason, implementing the behavioural spillover mechanism is deemed befitting. Few studies have directed their attention towards the relationship of individuals' sustainable behaviour across different settings, and such a perspective could indicate the way forward required within various future policy frameworks. Hence, the following intervention study attempts to examine behavioural spillover, which entails the transfer of attitudes from one domain to another, in this case, from a work-home perspective. This chapter builds upon such notion through a case study from the Maltese islands, the smallest EU member state, by providing insights from public officers. Such sampling population was selected as these individuals work closely within governmental structures and should act as agents of change in this regard. The methodological framework employs a positivist paradigm, based on a quasi-experimental design through an identical pretest and posttest Likert-scale questionnaire distributed to 14 public officers who undertook an educational module about sustainability at the University of Malta. These tests aimed to examine whether spillover of sustainable behaviour occurs within a spatio-temporal context – across the two different domains and during the entire intervention adopted. Quantitative findings are utilized to address two core research questions, from which various trends have been identified. Results show that positive spillover occurs for those behaviours which involve the least time, cost, and effort. It transpires that respondents are not willing to adopt drastic lifestyle changes. Such findings lay the foundation for the recommendations delineated in the current study, which might be helpful to other practitioners in public policy, management, and sustainable development. ; peer-reviewed

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the process that occurs within public employment offices (PEOs) and its consequences for unemployed people. Specifically, it analysed some practices needed to implement activation programmes developed in some PEO in Lombardy (Italy) and the role of front-line officers, promoting a dialogue between the literature on activation policies on one hand and the literature on street-level bureaucracy on the other.Design/methodology/approachThe fieldwork has been conducted in Lombardy, which is one of most economically developed areas both in Italy and in Europe. The empirical research integrated quantitative and qualitative research tools; specifically a CATI survey of 994 persons; participant and non-participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and an analysis of documents in four PEOs.FindingsThe paper describes and analyses both practices needed to implement activation programmes and the perceptions of the social actors (unemployed people and front-line officers) who build and address these practices daily. Specifically, the attention is focussed on the different forms of discretion used by PEOs' front-line officers and a mix of technical, relational and psychological support received in the PEOs. Moreover, the authors noticed that the front-line officers' discretion seemed to be more limited in those parts of the activation process in which it should be more relevant, that is, the identification of training courses aimed at increasing unemployed workers' skills. Notwithstanding these limits, many users expressed positive opinions of these courses, which could be explained by secondary functions of training courses.Research limitations/implicationsThe qualitative portion of the fieldwork has limited generalisability because it focussed on few PEOs.Practical implicationsThe findings are relevant to policy makers who deal with activation policies and to public and private organisations that implement those policies.Originality/valueMany studies have analysed the implementation of the welfare-to-work model that has oriented the reforms of labour market activation policies in most countries, focussing on the more tangible outcomes (essentially their efficacy in terms of re-employment rates). A growing stream of recent literature has begun to place more attention on the non-economic consequences of activation programmes, focussing mainly on countries with quite a long tradition of activation policies while remaining scant in countries where the implementation of activation programmes is still fragmented and more recent (like Italy). This paper aims to begin filling this gap by improving the knowledge on some non-economic consequences of activation programmes, focussing on user-officer relations and on daily practices in PEOs.

Governments are investing considerable time and resources in the field of collaborative governance as it proliferates throughout many sectors, and how public officers choose to respond to these developments therefore becomes an important question. The increased public involvement that collaborative governance brings is often more costly than traditional forms of governance, while the outcomes are highly uncertain. For these reasons, it is important that collaborative governance is only used when really warranted, and the various forms that it can take should be carefully designed. In this study, we apply a typology of collaboration strategies to examine firstly, the circumstances under which leading officers at four county administrative boards in the Swedish mountain region decide to lead collaboration, and secondly what collaboration strategies they then apply. This study is based on 20 interviews with key officers, and 39 interviews with project leaders of public-private collaborations in the area of natural resource management in the region. We find that officers should take trust levels into account when designing collaboration strategies, not least the lack of official trust. Strategies are found to be not mutually exclusive but complementary, and officers employ several at the same time. Interestingly, the results of this study show that – somewhat counter-intuitively – distrust is a driver for officers to initiate collaboration, a conclusion which questions the common view that more trust unequivocally translates into more participation.

In sub-national governments, elected public officers can exercise considerable influence on the regulation of local water services, in such ways as, for example, contributing to the design of local regulatory institutions, to the formulation of tariff rules, and to the supervision of water firms. Relatively little we know, however, about how elected public officers think about the regulation of local water services. This Q methodology study provides some evidence of the variety of opinions held on how local water services are delivered, how well they perform, and how they should be regulated among elected public officers in local governments in Italy. The study shows that the policy discourse on water regulation in Italy is highly fragmented into alternative and partially conflicting views. These findings bear some relevance for better understanding sources of stability and change of water regulatory regimes at the local level.

We performed an empirical analysis based on data from a questionnaire survey that Korean government officers participated in about the effects of worklife balance (WLB) on job satisfaction in order to whether unpaid labor such as housework had a moderating effect on job satisfaction. The subjective balance of an individual's time input in work and life was used to measure WLB. We find that WLB has a positive and significant effect on job satisfaction and that there is no statistically significant gender difference. However, the WLB effect on married female officers is smaller than that on single female officers, while it is not significant for male public officers. Child-rearing has a negative moderating effect on women's job satisfaction, although this was not statistically significant. This result suggests that the effect of the household work burden that marriage as well as child care brings is a variable that policy makers should be keep in mind in developing WLB policies.

The post-independent Kenyan constitution ushered in the issue of vetting of Public Officers before assumption of service in government. Despite this constitutional milestone, Kenyans are still grumbling as to whether this exercise has taken off effectively to meet the Citizens expectations in terms of ethics. This subject of ethical issue in governance has been a hot debate in Kenya not only in the recent past but prior to 2010 Kenyan constitution. Though the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has been formed, its efforts in clearing candidates for government positions seemed to have met bottlenecks and challenges. The paper seeks to look at highlights on the practice of ethics and context of vetting Public Officers in Kenya, the imperative of the constitution in mainstreaming the issues of ethics and governance in Kenya, and the challenges of the practice of ethics under the new constitutional order. In achieving these, this paper relied on qualitative study method in finding out if there are gains on ethical issues in governance while determining whether they are legal or political. This paper found out that the post 2010 vetting processes in Kenya have not balanced the legal and political issues thus undermining the ethics in governance. It has especially experienced lack of political will (the spirit of the 2010 constitution), again, it ideally should be a legal aspect but the expertise of the vetting committees have been lacking.Key words: Vetting, Governance, Ethical Issue, Constitutionalism, Public Service, Politics

OBJECTIVES: The work of public officers involves repeated and long-term exposure to heavy workloads ; high job strain and workplace violence ; all of which negatively impact physical and mental health. This study aimed to evaluate and compare the incidences of diseases among different categories of public officers in Korea ; in order to further understand the health risks associated with these occupations. DESIGN: A cohort study using the National Health Insurance data. PARTICIPANTS: We collated claims data between 2002 and 2014 for 860 221 public officers. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Age-standardised rates were calculated using the direct standardisation method ; and HRs were calculated using the Cox proportional hazard regression models. RESULTS: Overall ; we found that police officers and firefighters had a higher incidence of a range of diseases when compared with national and regional government officers (NRG). The most prominent HRs were observed among police officers for angina pectoris (HR: 1.52 ; 95% CI 1.49 to 1.54) ; acute myocardial infarction (HR: 1.84 ; 95% CI 1.77 to 1.92) and cerebrovascular disease (HR: 1.36 ; 95% CI 1.31 to 1.40). Firefighters were more susceptible to physical ailments and were at a significantly higher risk for traumatic stress disorders (HR: 1.40 ; 95% CI 1.26 to 1.56) than NRGs. CONCLUSION: Compared withNRGs ; police officers had higher HRs for all measured diseases ; except for traumatic stress disorders. While firefighters had higher HRs for almost all diseases examined ; public education officers had a higher HR for traumatic stress disorders ; when compared with NRGs. ; open