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Jenny M. Lewis establishes a set of parameters for social capital that help us examine how policy can increase cooperation between organisations and individuals, and how a social capital framework can also help us understand the public policy process. This is an invaluable text for researchers, policy-makers and students who are interested in how social capital theories can be integrated into grassroots policy making both in Australia and overseas

Jenny M. Lewis establishes a set of parameters for social capital that help us examine how policy can increase cooperation between organisations and individuals, and how a social capital framework can also help us understand the public policy process. This is an invaluable text for researchers, policy-makers and students who are interested in how social capital theories can be integrated into grassroots policy making both in Australia and overseas.

Performance measurement is a particular type of accountability, which might be imposed by governments but is institutionally implemented and individually experienced. Over the last three decades, the emphasis on measuring the performance of publicly funded services has risen, along with concerns about the need to demonstrate a wise use of public funds. This paper examines the dynamic interaction of the institutional and individual levels of accountability, by focusing on research assessment systems. A study of three universities in different nations reveals that the perceived impacts of these systems relate to specific institutional contexts, but that individuals' views from within the same context also vary considerably. Professionals understand and interact with accountability systems in a manner that reflects their own values, and this ensures that they will interpret and react to them in different ways. This makes designing accountability systems without negative affects on individuals a difficult task.

The popularity and scope of network governance research and practice continues to expand from its divergent foundations, assumptions and methodological positions. This paper introduces a symposium of papers on this substantial sub‐field by first summarizing the sprawling research endeavour that comprises it. The main theoretical and empirical approaches that have been used to guide it to date are then briefly described, emphasizing recent debates about interpretivism and decentring. Next, it suggests that a robust and interesting future for network governance requires diversity, rather than adherence to a single approach. It is argued that more sophisticated approaches for examining network governance are fashioned through a synthesis of ideas and methods to create an analysis of networks as networks. This is especially the case where some formal analysis of network structure is used in concert with an interpretive examination of action and process. Finally, the papers in the symposium are introduced.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive examination of Australia's distinctive politics-- both ancient and modern-- across multidisciplinary subjects. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation's Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement.