Suchergebnisse

"This book offers comprehensive coverage of various aspects of financial accountability around the EU budget - how it is spent via policies, how institutions engage in checking policy performance (what taxpayers' money actually delivers), and therein, the issues of monitoring, controlling, auditing, scrutinising and communicating budgetary expenditure. Presenting conceptual and theoretical approaches including financial accountability, learning, multi-level governance, implementation and throughput legitimacy, it looks at EU institutions (European Parliament, European Court of Auditors, European Ombudsman, European Public Prosecutor's Office) and national bodies (supreme audit institutions at the national level), examining their contact with the EU budget. It details the historical development of accountability mechanisms (the 'statement of assurance', financial corrections, and parliamentary oversight by the Budgetary Control committee (CONT)), and examines policy areas such as Cohesion, Structural Funds and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), exploring the challenges of financial accountability in practice. Given the recent introduction of non-budgetary financial instruments and tools only partly financed by the EU budget, it sheds light on new burgeoning areas such as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) and the challenges they bring for ensuring the accountability of public money. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of audit and evaluation, budgetary spending and financial control, and more broadly, public administration, public policy and EU institutions and politics."

This study analyses challenges related to the establishment of the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) as enhanced cooperation among the current 22 Member States and discusses possible solutions for coping with them. Complexity is identified as a main challenge owing to the EPPO's specific multilevel structure, the relationship between the EPPO and non-participating Member States, and the fact that the EPPO Regulation leaves many procedural rules to the law of the Member State in which an investigation takes place. Depending on the nature of the challenge, the suggested strategies to cope with complexity encompass legislative, administrative, and monitoring measures.

Making Spaniards. Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 192330, Alejandro Quiroga (2007) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 234 pp., ISBN-13 978-0-230-01968-3 (hbk), 45.00


The Spanish Civil War, Andy Durgan (2007) Houndmills and New York,
Palgrave Macmillan, xx + 156 pp., ISBN 9781403995162 (pbk), 14.99


The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain War, Loss and Memory, Tom Buchanan (2007) Sussex Academic Press: Eastbourne, x + 267 pp., ISBN 1-84519-126-9 (hbk), 49.95; ISBN 1-84519-127-7 (pbk), 16.95

Children's participation and accountability to children are increasingly common aspirations of child-focused organisations; development agencies and research institutions frequently use young people's advisory councils as one path to participation. A key challenge is to not only find meaningful ways to institutionalise children's views as part of organisational decision making, but also to identify and address barriers to participation. This article presents the findings of a commissioned landscape assessment to identify good practices and lessons learned from child-focused agencies, in order to inform the operationalisation of children's requests on programme improvements and accountability to children. The study was exploratory and qualitative. It included primary and secondary data collection, including a desk review, key informant interviews with adults and young people, and focus group discussions with young people. The findings showed common elements of organisational models of child participation and insights from children and young people on the types of decisions they want to influence, reasons why they should be heard, and how-to approaches to support their meaningful participation. Other findings focused on key challenges of children's participation in governance, including adult mindsets, low capacity, and structural restrictions, and lessons learned on enabling factors, such as organisation-wide buy-in, and space and inclusion for children and young people. Further inquiry could inform the purpose, scope, and appropriateness of child participation in governance structures within child-focused organisations.

AbstractAlthough systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy "effectiveness" (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making.