Suchergebnisse

Discusses food policy controversies in the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on emergence of tiered regulation, private and public interest regulation, and implications for a Food Standards Agency. Summaries in French and Spanish.

Origin and implementation of a 1988 report of the Prime Minister's Efficiency Unit, "Improving management in government: the next steps"; Great Britain.

How China copes with the deep-rooted challenges of improving its environmental quality raises questions about how economic and environmental tensions arise, whether they can be reconciled, and if so, how that might be achieved. In this paper, we critically examine evolving environmental governance challenges at the city level since it is here that much public policy delivery takes place. In major urban areas, problems of poor waste management, and air and water pollution have been experienced by citizens for some time. What is novel is that municipal governments now have some capacity to act to improve local environmental conditions. Moreover, municipal governments are being assisted, to some extent, in their rethinking of environment–economy relations by a central government policy agenda that is moving from an overwhelming preoccupation with development to taking on board welfare and environmental concerns. This is demanding a reconceptualisation of the local state from being one that is almost wholly development oriented to one that recognises environmental imperatives. The paper outlines key perspectives on the local state, particularly the ideas of a developmental, entrepreneurial and green state. It draws on these accounts to produce a more nuanced analysis of the multi-faceted nature of environmental governance. We call this the Protean Environmental State. To put these debates into a local context we analyse how one early industrialising city, Dongguan, is facing up to its polluted environment and seeking to steer its way towards a new, more ecologically friendly development pathway.

The National Assembly for Wales is unique amongst all levels of modern government in the UK in that it is legally required under section 121(1) of the Government of Wales Act 1998 to make a scheme setting out how it proposes, in the exercise of its functions, to promote sustainable development. This requirement represents a significant challenge for the Assembly in terms of establishing institutional structures and operational processes that will facilitate and promote sustainable development across all of its areas of responsibility. This article explores the background to the duty placed upon the Assembly and the different models that the Assembly may pursue in trying to achieve its goal of sustainable development. It explores the potential for joined-up government within the Assembly and the prospects for new forms of governance in its external links and the interactions between its internal and external processes. The article concludes that the Assembly will be a powerful force for collaborative government and that the requirements of section 121 should reinforce this move towards a new style of collaborative government but that there remains a risk that pragmatic pressures may prompt a return to the traditionally dominant form of economic governance that characterised the former Welsh Office.

Although current studies into Chinese food supply and quality provide explanations for the causality of food problems, there is limited inquiry into the role of the county government. This is a serious omission for two main reasons: first, because county governments perform a key role in providing support for farmers through agricultural extension services and farmers' cooperatives, and second, because county-level administrative divisions are central to developing novel instruments to manage supply chain relationships, such as food production standards. We investigate the key players involved in standard making and delivery at the county level. We also analyse how and why the county government engages in standard-setting activities. We use Lin'an's bamboo shoot production industry as a case study to understand how the local state implements "hazard-free," "green" and "forest food" production standards. The paper concludes that traditional conceptualizations of the local state do not sufficiently address how nature, knowledge of standards and state authority co-produce institutional capacity to control food supply and quality in China. In practice, the local state engages with non-state actors to achieve superficial environmental efforts, such as developing food production standards to throw a "green cloak" over a productivist model. (China Q/GIGA)

This book examines the development of food policy and regulation following the BSE (mad cow disease) crisis and traces the changing relationships between three key sets of actors: private interests, such as the corporate retailers; public regulators, such as the EU directorates and UK agencies; and consumer groups