Suchergebnisse

Frontline bureaucrats are positioned at the interface between citizens and the state. They convert political resolution into action and in effect form the core of many public decisions through interaction and communication with both the recipients of those decisions and upper management levels that initiate them. However, dilemmas often arise when frontline bureaucrats attempt to translate political goals and strategies into local administrative praxis. The case of large carnivore management in Sweden will be used to demonstrate the insuperable difficulties that can arise when managers simultaneously need to balance the bureaucratic tasks of planning, executing, and evaluating performed decisions with attending to calls for increased responsiveness to public values in order to improve the delivery of service. This responsiveness is typically reflected through the new principles of public participation and collaboration, which are added to the bureaucracy to support the integration of broader sets of interests, experiences, and knowledge. In such an environment, the work of frontline managers becomes even more crucial in order to balance and align policy goals with the need to enhance public involvement. Our study reveals that in striving to meet the formal policy requirement to implement and lead collaboration (which in turn creates the central dilemma that concerns us here) managers develop strategies to secure effectiveness rather than responsiveness. Actually, they have few possibilities to do, otherwise when the latest policy edict clearly instructs the authorities to oversee the effective implementation and achievement of goals, leaving little opportunity to pursue genuine collaboration.

The pandemic spread of COVID-19 grew inexorably to be the main topic of global news after it was first identified in 2019 in China. This article analyzes how heads of state and heads of government in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden framed the problems and solutions to the spread of the virus during the pandemic's initial phase. A Foucauldian-inspired method of problematization guides the narrative analysis, complemented by governmentality, risk communication, and taskscape theories. The results of the analysis show how the individual is conceptualized as a central actor and whose practices are framed as crucial to overcoming the crisis. Through invoking a sense of responsibility, sacrifice, and current life during the pandemic as a difficult time, the speeches allude to how people through changed behavior can/sould, contribute to the greater good. The individual is positioned as a key cause of, and solution to the problem; however, construing the individual as an indispensable actor to overcoming the crisis also means that the individual is laid open for reprehension. To facilitate the spread of the containment message and to support individual understanding of overt risk, the four countries' leadership also augment their conceptualization of the crisis with ideas of national identity to inspire the individual to contribute to the 'battle' and 'defeat' of the virus. The leadership does also embrace the important role of the national government in controlling the outbreak and the role of science, and trust in science, are also emphasized. The speeches analyzed in this paper can be understood as governance technologies; the spatial disciplining and self-governance demanded by the regimes create subject positions for individuals or groups. A debate on the rights and responsibilities of the citizen is another aspect that comes to the fore, considering how the containment strategies in all four countries proclaim the individual as a core agent in circumscribing the virus, and hence the individual's activities as ...