Suchergebnisse

An important problem in measuring the impacts of business subsidies is their separation from deadweight, which refers to changes that would have occurred even in the absence of intervention. Both public and private assessments have been used previously to study deadweigh, but so far little is known about how they correspond to each other. To address this issue we conducted a joint evaluation of the private and public assessments of deadweight for Finnish business projects. A unique dataset combines large register data with both public and private information on projects financed in 2000–03. First, our results suggest that the different measures for deadweight are greatly uncorrelated, and thus cannot be used as substitutes. Second, characteristics affecting the public and private measures of deadweight are identified using ordered probit models. We find that the public and private sectors emphasize different factors in their assessment of deadweight. Third, an upper bound for the level of deadweight spending is estimated at 73.8%.

We analyze the effect of occupational safety and health (OSH) legislation in reducing workplace accidents. It is argued that different impacts should be expected in advanced and traditional manufacturing sectors. We test this hypothesis with data on Spanish manufacturing throughout the period 1988–2004. To that effect, we estimate the relationship between the number of serious injuries and the potential risk factors, by means of diverse specifications of the negative binomial regression model for panel data. Our results indicate that, while the adoption of the new OSH regulation did contribute to the reduction in the number of injuries in advanced manufacturing sectors, the accident rates in traditional manufacturing did not show any statistically significant change following the reform.

We explore the theory and practice of participation in EU biodiversity governance, focusing on the implementation of the Birds and Habitat directives and Natura 2000 at the EU and member-state levels in the cases of France and Germany. We identify three shifts in EU biodiversity governance which potentially lead to intensifying participatory processes, but which may also be induced by more participation: (i) a shift from a top-down state-centred administrative understanding of policy making towards more flexible and bottom-up approaches; (ii) a shift towards more democratic, 'postnormal', types of science; and (iii) a shift from a conservation focus towards a more anthropocentric ecosystems goods-and-services approach framed in a normative context of sustainability. We look at whether these shifts happen in practice and also look at the link with participation. At all political levels a big gap remains between the rhetoric on participation and the real-life implementation of participatory processes.

We focus on the governance instrument of partnerships for rural areas, because these have become important for the implementation of rural development policy in Britain. Emergent forms of governance are often assumed to enhance participatory democracy as they facilitate the involvement of nongovernmental actors and citizens. However, governmental policies about partnerships often use 'representation' to democratically legitimise these new forms. Partnership members themselves also use these concepts in their everyday language—they too say that they represent and participate. We explore the different meanings of both being a representative and being a participant, based on a qualitative study of three local rural partnerships in Wales. Our analysis reveals important nuances in how four types of representatives (from the public, private, community, and voluntary sectors) differ in their perceived duties and attitudes towards their constituencies. But, above all, most partnership members see themselves rather as participants than as representatives. However, partnership members can also hide behind being participants in two ways. First, they can downplay their organisational membership and their organisation's self-interest. Partnership members who most actively participate in 'driving the partnership forward' are also those who have the most self-interest in doing so. And, second, they do not have to worry about accountability mechanisms because their individualised participation has been decoupled from responsiveness to 'others'. The neoliberal notions of participation obscure the political nature of working in partnership where decisions over rural development have to be made among members with different and possibly conflicting interests.

We analyse the debate about the culling of elephants in South Africa's national parks. This pits the need to reduce elephant density and grazing pressure to prevent environmental damage against animal-welfare concerns about the killing of elephants. This complex debate is characterised by factual uncertainty and moral complexity. The procull storyline suggests that high elephant densities pose a risk to biodiversity. The anticull standpoint critiques this position as politically and economically motivated and lacking in adequate scientific support. Both procull and anticull positions draw on science as a source of authority, and on the precautionary principle as a framework for making decisions. They differ in their interpretation of the scientific evidence for serious impacts of high elephant densities, the relations between scientific, ethical, and economic arguments, and the way uncertainty and the idea of a precautionary approach are used. A decision to resume culling of elephants in South Africa was made in February 2008, but debate continues.

Beginning in the 1990s, China has completed two phases of emission trading pilots. In this paper we assess China's pilot programme and analyze how it has been constrained by major problems in three areas of governance capacities: state, policy, and administrative capacities. These problems reflect deeper and more profound dilemmas of market transition experienced by the Chinese government in the past three decades. The dilemmas have resulted in the development of a 'state-led' pseudomarket, instead of a full and 'autonomous' market, for emission trading in China. It is evidently clear that China still faces many challenges in establishing a market for emission trading which require strengthening its governing capacity in order to address effectively the issues of the rule of law, independent regulation, information disclosure, and public accountability.

Despite the rapid growth of the small and medium-sized enterprise sector since the 1970s, rates of entrepreneurial activity in the UK remain moderate by international standards. Since its arrival in 1997 the Labour government in the UK has taken steps to tackle barriers to entrepreneurship by addressing economic, political, legal, and cultural issues. Through a review of key literature and policy documents, we seek to shed light on how the Labour government has shaped its entrepreneurship and enterprise-development policy agenda. It is found that, although there has been limited improvement in closing the enterprise gap, the Labour government does appear to have put in place a number of measures that are aimed at harnessing the long-term drivers of future enterprise, particularly catalysing the required cultural changes through the education system. It is suggested that enterprise policy making is diverse and has shifted away from small-business policy into a broader interpretation of entrepreneurship, although there inevitably continues to be significant overlap across the two areas. Furthermore, it is argued that enterprise initiatives are leading to the government taking quite radical routes in shaping its policies, becoming a bigger risk taker, and operating in a quasiprivate sector role. It is concluded that the increasing sophistication and specificity of policy instruments means that further research is required to understand how policies interact with each other.

The growing relevance of local governments in the provision of public services and the implementation of development policies increasingly require an attentive analysis of the determinants of governments' performance at this scale. Among these determinants I analyze the impact of institutional factors in the provision of public goods at the municipal level in Mexico, and more specifically: the institutional capacity (a skilled bureaucracy and local budgets), institutional thickness (civic engagement, corruption), and region size (surface area and population) in the provision of education (literacy), health (child mortality), and housing (electricity, water, and sewerage supply). The results highlight the importance of institutional capacity at the local level, as well as the size of subnational units in the provision of public goods, but there are mixed findings regarding the level of institutional thickness.

In the UK climate change and energy have converged on the policy agenda. We discuss the implications for theories of policy change based on well-defined networks located within single, discrete, policy domains. We suggest that such approaches struggle to account for the dynamics of change in conditions of policy convergence. The issue of climate change has opened up and destabilised the UK energy policy sector, but this process has been surprisingly free of conflict, despite radical policy shifts. To date, convergence of the energy and climate change sectors has largely occurred at a discursive level, and we focus our attention on a number of different, but largely complementary, storylines about solutions to climate change. We draw on ideas about sociotechnical regime transitions, first, to explore why the storylines are not in obvious conflict, and, second, to identify small-scale niches where tensions in storylines do emerge as discourse is translated into material reality.

What geographical and institutional conditions are important for initiating and sustaining climate-change mitigation at the local level? Taking this question as a point of departure, we analyze local climate mitigation as a case of multilevel network governance. This is illustrated by the case of two Swedish cities, which are both involved in city networking in favour of climate-change mitigation. Different business structures and other local conditions in significant ways influence both the level of ambition and the climate-policy strategies of the two cities. The sheer size and intensity of the networking activities clearly illustrate the fact that cities are increasingly becoming arenas of globalization, rather than passive victims of global forces, thus confirming the call for a multilevel network-governance approach in policy and politics as well as in research.

Research into environmental policy integration (EPI) has focused very much on coordination issues associated with the preparation of policies at national and international levels. We instead examine some challenges in implementing EPI at the local level. We look at legal and policy frameworks relating to environmental governance and actual waste management decision making in five Swedish cities. We observe an implementation gap between the high-level policy ambitions relating to environmental governance of the waste sector, as expressed in national policy frameworks, and the local-level decision-making procedures and outcomes. Several discrepancies are identified: between national waste policy and the local decision premises, between local waste planning and project decision making, between knowledge gathering and project decision making, and between the legal mechanism in the development consent process and the national environmental quality objectives framework. Our study indicates that the governance frameworks at different levels are quite different, and at least partly incompatible, which causes important coordination problems across levels. Sectoral developments towards an industrial marketisation of waste have rendered frameworks such as local waste plans obsolete. We also find that the more traditional and coercive forms of governing the sector, such as consent, bans, and taxes, are the ones that have steering power, whereas new procedures, such as management by objectives, lack sufficient institutional and cognitive support structures to be effective.

UK policy makers have increasingly developed area-based employment initiatives. This has culminated in the Working Neighbourhoods Pilot, which targets concentrations of worklessness in twelve deprived communities across Great Britain. Drawing upon detailed case study work undertaken in the Sheffield pilot, I discuss the challenges faced by the Jobcentre Plus agency in tackling such problems. A key finding is that the creation of the agency has placed too much emphasis on the most visible and superficial manifestations of organisational culture. At a deeper level, I find that the culture of the agency limits its ability to respond imaginatively and flexibly to the needs of such communities.

This paper explores the role of coalition building in the implementation of renewable-energy policy. Applying a discourse analysis framework to wind-energy development in the North West of England, two strong coalitions operating within the wind-energy development arena were identified. By combining this framework with a multicriteria assessment, it is revealed that each coalition had very different priorities during the evaluation of wind-energy schemes. Overall, only when offshore wind is evaluated are there elements of common ground. This technology therefore appears to offer a solution to sharp contrasts in discourse. Based on this assessment, it is concluded that the implementation of national energy-policy objectives is contingent upon the regional government developing coherent storylines to attract the support of as broad a coalition of stakeholders as possible.