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Diversification of strategies in Flood Risk Management (FRM) is widely regarded as a necessary step forward in terms of lessening the likelihood and magnitude of flooding, as well as minimizing the exposure of people and property, and in turn the disruption, economic damage, health impacts and other adverse consequences that ensue when floods occur. Thus, diversification is often heralded as an essential condition for enhancing societal resilience to flooding. However, an inevitable consequence of diversifying strategies and practices in FRM is that it can lead to fragmentation within FRM systems, in terms of the distribution of responsibilities between actors and governing rules enacted within different policy domains. This can prove detrimental to the effectiveness of FRM. Building upon the notion of fragmentation developed in legal and governance literature, this paper introduces the concept of 'bridging mechanisms', i.e. instruments that remedy fragmentation by enhancing interconnectedness between relevant actors through information transfer, coordination and cooperation. This paper develops a typology of both fragmentation and bridging mechanisms and analyzes their relations, partly drawing upon empirical research conducted within the EU 'STAR-FLOOD' project. In turn, this paper outlines a novel interdisciplinary methodological framework for evaluating the degree and quality of the interconnectedness within fragmented domestic FRM systems. A pragmatic, flexible and broadly applicable tool, this framework is both suited for academic purposes, as well as for practically oriented analysis and (re)development of fragmented FRM systems, and potentially other fragmented systems, within the EU and abroad.

Dalian used to have a very favorable modal split (for public transport) and had the honor of being an environmentally friendly city among its peers in China only a few years ago. However, momentous and when it comes to sustainability rather deleterious is evolving in the past five years or so: automobiles have flooded the city along with car-friendly policies being promulgated at both the central and local levels of government. Consequently, the market share of public transport has been substantially eroded since then. Apart from the rapid motorization that weakened Dalian's position as a green city, another factor fueling the downward trend of transit attractiveness has been the growing fragmentation in transit services. Given the fact that the motorization process is irreversible and restricting car purchase and use is unlikely to work out in China, if something needs to be done to maintain Dalian as a clean and comfortable living habitat, then lifting the fragmentation in the transit system is the only way to do this. Therefore, this paper explores where the fragmentation originates, and how it can be counteracted. A mathematical model is thus built to test the effectiveness of reducing fragmentation in improving transit service. And the results show that the modal split after system integration is going to tilt more strongly towards transit, while for service quality levels for users cannot expect much improvement. These modeling results have significant implications for the future public transport administration in Dalian.

How do states regulate drug trafficking? The sale of illicit drugs generates an estimated US$870 billion per year – more than 1 percent of global GDP. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people die annually from drug-related violence and ensuing state repression. While national-level governments establish the normative framework regarding drug trafficking, subnational governments carry out the lion's share of drug enforcement, confiscating drugs, arresting (or killing) dealers and traffickers, or brokering peace bargains with, or extracting rents from drug gangs. Despite the recent immersion of political scientists into the study of drug trafficking, we have yet to explain how and why subnational governments choose the strategies they do when dealing with this organized criminal activity. This dissertation analyzes subnational states' different approaches to drug trafficking, or drug trafficking regulatory arrangements.Most studies of drug trafficking and its associated violence treat the state as a unitary actor and neglect the role of the police, despite the latter's fundamental importance (and discretion) in enforcing legislation related to drug trafficking and organized crime. By contrast, I propose that different types of interactions between subnational politicians, primarily governors, and their police forces influence state responses to drug trafficking, with differing consequences with respect to state and criminal violence as well as police corruption. Understanding the state's regulation of drug trafficking requires incorporating the interests and strategies of police forces –which may well conflict with those of their political superiors- into empirical studies. I argue that subnational patterns of political competition shape the state's regulation of drug trafficking in metropolitan areas by affecting police levels of autonomy. Two aspects of competition are central in shaping police force's autonomy: the extent to which the same party remains in power over time (political turnover) and the dispersal of political power in a given period (political fragmentation). The different combinations of turnover, fragmentation and police autonomy yield four types of regulatory arrangements: tacit coexistence, protection-extraction rackets, particularistic negotiation and particularistic confrontation, which differ with respect to police violence, corruption and criminal violence. Low political turnover reduces police autonomy and generates coordinated regulatory arrangements -tacit coexistence and protection-extraction rackets. Entrenched governments are able to implement and sustain autonomy-reducing police reforms, or gain the necessary leverage to extract cooperation from the force. Fragmentation, in turn, affects the governments' stance toward police rent extraction. Under conditions of low turnover, low fragmentation motivates incumbents to politicize the police and appropriate its rents from trafficking, while high fragmentation compels them to professionalize the force and restrict its rent extraction, as political rivals can either monitor the government's extraction or compete for police rents. With low fragmentation, governments centralize police rents from drug trafficking and control violence through protection-extraction rackets. By contrast, when fragmentation is higher, governments reach tacit coexistence agreements with organized criminal actors, in which police and gangs restrain their mutual confrontation. Both cases exhibit lower state and criminal violence, while differing in their relative levels of corruption. By contrast, frequent changes in administration (high turnover) undermine both governments' capacity to sustain reforms and their leverage over the police, increasing police autonomy and generating uncoordinated regulatory arrangements, i.e. particularistic negotiation or particularistic confrontation. In this situation, high fragmentation might obstruct reformist initiatives or spark political competition for police rents, while low fragmentation is insufficient to reduce police autonomy. These arrangements are defined by either fragmented corruption deals between police officers and traffickers (particularistic negotiation) or dispersed attacks by police squads against drug gangs (particularistic confrontation). Both regulatory types result in high levels of criminal violence while diverging in their levels of state-driven violence. I test this theory with a subnational comparative research design, focusing on the main metropolitan areas of Argentina –the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe- and Brazil –the federal units of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Relying on interviews with politicians, police officers, and actors from civil society, as well as on document analysis of newspapers, NGO reports and government briefs, I conduct process tracing to examine the within-case variation of each subnational case since the return of democracy, a period of over 30 years. This dissertation's findings of how political turnover and fragmentation influence police autonomy and, through it, shape drug trafficking regulatory arrangements have several implications, not just for thinking about the state's response to organized crime but for the relationship between political competition and public security, and the role of police in democracies with weak institutions.

The fragmentation of disciplines into specialized subfields over the last few decades has been followed by the development of hybrid subspecialisms. (SJO)

Partial contents: Fragmentation and divisions; The failure to mobilize; The inadequacy of union tactics; The weakness of political channels and institutional mechanisms.

Comprehensive programs for meeting the needs of the elderly are provided despite handicaps of categorical grants and the resultant fragmentation of service

This thesis describes causes and consequences of urban fragmentation linked to gated communities expansion in Marseille (France). This work is based on 10 years of research and field surveys led by geographers. The dynamics of enclosure is very strong from over 20 years in Marseille, especially in peripherical areas, urbanized all along 20th and 21th centuries. New-built residential projects in urban regeneration areas or existing streets closure are very common now and tends to be more and more. By this enclosure phenomenon, we question another elementary city's object. We analyse street / road in its symbolical (link with public space), functional (enclosure impacts) and juridical (soil law) way. We address enclosure by its origins through a "geohistory" of streets and their private status, local morphogenesis of peripherical road map, marked by an old liberalism politics and informality. Actor's plurality and their evolution through time about roads management and production reveal important governance stakes. It explains the inheritance and reproduction of a large number of private streets too. Lack of planification and public interventions has promoted enclosure dynamics. We analyse its impact on urban environment and urbanities in 3 ways: cut-offs intensity on urban street continuity and pedestrian moves, contradiction with urban public projects, linked to sustainable politics and at last, conflicts emergence between local residents. We built this work as a research-action, we address the impacts and genesis of this deeply embedded phenomenon. ; Le phénomène de fermeture résidentielle a connu en moins de vingt ans un développement considérable à Marseille, notamment dans les périphéries urbanisées à partir du 20e siècle. Les nouveaux produits immobiliers, issus de la promotion récente dans des zones de renouvellement, ou les anciennes rues de lotissements, de copropriétés, fermées au passage, se sont multipliés et la dynamique tend même à s'amplifier. Par la thématique de la fermeture nous interrogeons un ...

Multifaceted social problems such as safety, social inclusion, poverty, mobility, rural development, city regeneration, or labour market integration require integrated approaches to steering. NPM-related fragmentation of policy and fragmentation of implementation lead to unsatisfactory public outcomes and a heightened experienced loss of control on the part of policy makers. Governments are therefore looking for new instruments to address the boundary-spanning nature of many social problems. In their quest for achieving valued social outcomes, they struggle with their new role, and the insufficiency of both markets and hierarchies. In this book, authors explore new organisational mechanisms, arrangements and ideas to deal with this fragmentation. New post-NPM steering and coordination practices come in various shapes and names, and current research suffers from considerable terminological confusion. The book first looks at various new organisational arrangements and mechanisms, including whole-of-government, collaborative governance, network governance, and outcome steering. It then goes on to unpack the outcomes these new steering instruments are supposed to achieve, and explores their effect on democracy, power, and the role of government.

AbstractChina's economic reform since 1978 has turned a shortage economy into an economy of overcapacity. To curb the capacity surplus, the government put forward a sweeping proposal of "supply-side structural reform," although without any specifics of implementation. This vagueness has resulted in fragmentation between China's central leadership and local agents. Based on two rail delivery services – China Railway Express Delivery (Zhongtie kuaiyun 中铁快运, CRED) and China–Europe Rail Freight (Zhong–Ou banlie 中欧班列, CERF) – this article argues that fragmentation in authority has allowed and even encouraged local actors to carve profit-making opportunities out of the excess capacities (including idle assets). In so doing, they give substance to what would otherwise be hollow policy rhetoric. Such subnational entrepreneurialism and the resulting tacit dynamics between state and local-level actors add another layer to the fine-grained theorization of fragmented authoritarianism in China: despite fragmentation, China's authoritarian governance endures, but with outcomes now shaped by a cyclical process of decentralization and re-centralization as well as continuous central–local interplay.