This book is an analysis and exploration of the relationship between peasants and policies within the process of reform in China. After examining the long term rural policies, either before or after the reform, it was found that all these polices have been expected to promote peasants' interests and claimed to take enhancing peasants' happiness as their goal. Nonetheless, the history and current reality of rural development have demonstrated that the same policy starting point had lead to very different policy designs. Even today, quite a few institutional arrangements with good intentions have ended up with opposite results and have even become bad policies that do harm to people. This book argues that the reason for such serious deviation, between political intentions and institutional arrangements, as well as between policy goals and its results is: as a political force, the peasantry itself has not effectively engaged with the political process of the country.

The book examines the conditions for successful high-technology policy from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It enhances the predominant national systems of innovation approach to innovation policy with concepts based on new developments in the governance of complex systems and processes. The conceptual framework of complex networks and systems is used to examine national policy approaches in countries that have created environments conducive to high-technology industries as well as individual high-technology sectors, such as biotechnology, alternative energy, and aerospace. Theoretical and empirical contributions are synthesised into lessons for high-tech policy and further research.

This volume analyses Kirchnerismo in Argentina and the developmental regime approach in the political economy of development in Latin America. It shows the systematic way in which relationships between state-market, state-society, and national-international dichotomies can be characterised within a developmentalist paradigm.

This book describes 11 "great policies" - strategic innovations designed to deal with problems that transcend normal boundaries of government action. Examples range from the Marshall Plan in the U.S. to the "reverse brain-drain" policy in China, and from the financing of land reform by the distribution of industrial bonds in Taiwan to exploration of community natural resource management in Latin America. These actions did not emerge incrementally from existing policies, but represented departures from conventional organizations and sectoral responsibilities. Although such strategic innovations are rare, these examples suggest that when they occur, they are recognizably different from policies that develop incrementally. They create new paradigms of public action, they generate new expectations and demands, and they require extraordinary processes of implementation. Such "mega-policies" imply the possibility of developing transferable lessons from otherwise unique cases. These "mega-policies" range from economic growth strategies to social initiatives and from international economic transactions to technical exchanges. This work will be of great interest to scholars and policy makers involved with economic and social change, and Asian/Pacific and Third World Studies.

It is well established that the race and gender of elected representatives influence the ways in which they legislate, but surprisingly little research exists on how race and gender interact to affect who is elected and how they behave once in office. How do race and gender affect who gets elected, as well as who is represented? What issues do elected representatives prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation takes up the call to think about representation in the United States as intersectional, and it measures the extent to which political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced. Specifically, the book examines how race and gender interact to affect the election, behavior, and impact of all individuals. By putting women of color at the center of their analysis and re-evaluating traditional, "single-axis" approaches to studying the politics of race or gender, the authors demonstrate what an intersectional approach to identity politics can reveal. Drawing on original data on the presence, policy leadership, and policy impact of Black women and men, Latinas and Latinos, and White women and men in state legislative office in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, each chapter shows how the politics of race, gender, and representation are far more complex than recurring "Year of the Woman" frameworks suggest. An array of race-gender similarities and differences are evident in the experiences, activities, and accomplishments of these state legislators. Yet one thing is clear: the representation of those marginalized by multiple, intersecting systems of power and inequality is intricately bound to the representation of women of color.

This book presents a detailed exploration of continuity and change in the British debates and policies relating to ethnic diversity since 9/11, focusing in particular on key policy areas which include the prevention of terrorism and citizenship, forced marriage, and the resentment of the 'white working class'. It offers an original perspective, which assesses the evolution of multiculturalism as a policy guideline in the United Kingdom and suggests that, while the rhetoric of multiculturalism has been toned down by successive governments since 2001, British debates and policies have continued to reflect a specific sensitivity to ethnic diversity.

This book challenges readers to recognise the conditions that underpin popular approaches to children and young people's participation, as well as the key processes and institutions that have enabled its rise as a global force of social change in new times. The book draws on the vast international literature, as well as interviews with key practitioners, policy-makers, activists, delegates and academics from Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States and Italy to examine the emergence of the young citizen as a key global priority in the work of the UN, NGOs, government and academia. In so doing, the book engages contemporary and interdisciplinary debates around citizenship, rights, childhood and youth to examine the complex conditions through which children and young people are governed and invited to govern themselves. The book argues that much of what is considered 'children and young people's participation' today is part of a wider neoliberal project that emphasises an ideal young citizen who is responsible and rational while simultaneously downplaying the role of systemic inequality and potentially reinforcing rather than overcoming children and young people's subjugation. Yet the book also moves beyond mere critique and offers suggestive ways to broaden our understanding of children and young people's participation by drawing on 15 international examples of empirical research from around the world, including the Philippines, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, North America, Finland, South Africa, Australia and Latin America. These examples provoke practitioners, policy-makers and academics to think differently about children and young people and the possibilities for their participatory citizenship beyond that which serves the political agendas of dominant interest groups.

Long overlooked, transport is emerging as an important policy area for the European Union and is a growing source of political tension. This broad-based analysis of the European transport industry includes an in-depth examination of the four major modes: rail, road, air, and shipping, also the EU's growing cross-border transport links. Ross frames this discussion with a look at the role of transport in the overall European political economy--past, present, and future.

Government supported junk social science-or sanctified snake oil as Sarnoff terms it-exists in all policy arenas along the entire political spectrum, as policy advocates seek to justify the continuation of ineffective programs and to block alternative solutions. This form of junk science is particularly dangerous and wasteful in terms of tax dollars because professional confirmation, media investigation and government support lend it an unwarranted imprimatur of validity. Sarnoff argues that it confuses the public and convinces them to support programs as ends in themselves, rather than determining whether or not such efforts actually achieve purported goals.

Ineffectiveness, incompetence, lack of technology, ideology masquerading as policy, and even outright fraud serve to perpetuate the general confusion. This situation is exacerbated by the proliferation of media attention, much of it unmonitored for accuracy or bias. Sanctified snake oil, Sarnoff contends, spawns industries that drain public resources and attention from real, serious cases and distort public perceptions of the magnitude of the issues involved. This study sheds new light on this muddle and offers recommendations which will make it more difficult for junk science to represent itself as legitimate social policy.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the political environment in Europe has changed dramatically, and security requirements for NATO countries have undergone a radical transformation. Yet, as illustrated by the recent bombing of Kosovo, restructuring of the defense industrial sectors in Europe lags behind the United States. The most egregious example is the armored vehicle sector, particularly in Britain, Germany, and France. Identifying five conditions necessary for restructuring the armored vehicle industry, this book looks at the absence or presence of these economic conditions in each of these countries and analyzes the impact on the armored vehicle industry.

Comparing these countries to the United States, where the armored vehicle industry has restructured as fully and as ruthlessly as the defense aerospace and electronic industries, the author shows private ownership, flexible capital and labor markets, a profitable scale of production, a lack of commercial diversification, and an active state defense industrial policy to be necessary prerequisites. All five factors exist in the United States, whereas two or more are missing in the European countries, retarding development of this industry.

Based on the empirical analysis of the effectiveness of four provincial centres for the diffusion of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a market mechanism for emission reductions, Miriam Schroeder scrutinizes the strengths and weaknesses of hybrid actors' performance on the local Chinese carbon market.

Challenging the Emerging Aid Paradigm critically examines central aspects of Western international aid policy, while at the same time exploring non-western especially Chinese aid and assesses to what extent these may be competitive or complementary.

"Policy Horizons and Parliamentary Government" introduces a new hypothesis concerning the formation and survival of coalition governments in Western European parliamentary democracies, the policy horizon hypothesis. Although the hypothesis itself is very simple, it implies a fundamental change in our understanding of how parliamentary systems function in the absence of a majority party. The book finds support for the hypothesis in a wide array of evidence, including findings based on a new survey of experts in West European political systems.

Farazmand, a former bureaucrat in the Pahlavi state administration, argues that the latter functioned more to maintain the state and to control society than to provide its population with services and with help for development. In the long run, such a self-serving thrust proved destructive and was one reason for the state's final collapse in the 1979 revolution. "Choice"

Covering the period from 1950 through 1988 this book examines the role of a large bureaucracy under the Shah and post-revolutionary changes in that bureaucracy under the Islamic Republic. It focuses on the role of one of the most powerful bureaucracies in Iran, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD). The author explains how the MARD transformed rural Iran from a feudalistic social system to a capitalistic system of economy. It helped maintain and enhance the Pahlavi regime under the Shah by developing and guarding capitalism in rural Iran. These two objectives were achieved through rural bureaucratization and extension of the State's control to the remotest areas of Iran. The author also discusses the impact of the Revolution of 1978-79 on Iranian bureaucracy.

Iran has been one of the oldest historical bureaucratic empires the world has ever known. During the Pahlavi regime, bureaucracy was the main instrument of policy formulation and ligitimation. This book fills many of the gaps in our present knowledge of Iranian bureaucracy, particularly in relation to agrarian reform and regime politics. Ali Farazman has based his study on primary data including 150 interviews, the examination of numerous government documents, and, as a former Iranian administrator, direct observations. MARD was chosen as this book's focus for several reasons. It was central to the Shah's regime during the 1960s-1970s. Until the 1960s three quarters of Iran's population lived in rural areas under a feudal system. During this period MARD grew at an unprecedented rate. Through land reform it created a new class of allies for the Shah. It was instrumental in the destruction of Iran's agriculture, making it dependent on foreign imports. It contributed nine million rural migrants to the cities ultimately fueling the Revolution of 1978-79. The author has chosen MARD as representative of a powerful Iranian bureaucracy.

The author of this work argues that if Harold Wilson's government in the late Sixties has pursued a different policy the province might have been spared The Troubles. Wilson had promised the Catholics that they would be granted their civil rights. However, new evidence suggests that Westminster was deliberately gagged to prevent MPs demanding that the Stormont administration ended discrimination in the province. Had the government acted on intelligence of growing Catholic unrest, it could have prevented the rise of the Provisional IRA without provoking an unmanageable Protestant backlash. The book draws upon recently released official documents and interviews with many key politicians and civil servants of the period to examine the failure of British policy to prevent the troubles.

This work analyzes the weaknesses in the established political approaches to reform of the provision of justice, judging them as being either too overtly concerned with inappropriate free market structures, or too wedded to legal procedural rules. It argues that the most efficient solution is an adapted version of legal aid as a kind of welfare state benefit and more integrated public services aimed at providing justice for the citizen. The discussion traces the history of the Labour Party's legal affairs policy and examines some of the fault lines in the programme put forward by Lord Irvine, in particular, the tension between combatting social exclusion with a rights-based rhetoric and a policy based on crude cost management initiatives. The analysis applies emerging political concepts of globalization, hegemony and a closed legal system to this debate, while considering the conflicting principles of community, individual autonomy and public service accountability, to conceive both of the nature of the Blair project and the feasibility of creating the "just society" set out in Labour's new constitution. A model for an integrated justice is proposed, centred on a Ministry of Justice administering legal aid through a community legal service, activating technological and structural reforms through a law foundation, and providing advice to citizens through a national advisory service.

Ever since President George W. Bush limited federal funding for stem cell research, the topic has been top of mind for many, including the organized patient population representing every major disease now afflicting approximately 100 million Americans. In May 2005, the president vowed to veto a compromise that 50 Republicans and 188 Democrats in the House of Representatives supported. The compromise, if matched by a Senate measure, would have repealed the 2001 limits on funding. Action at the federal level remains stalled, but states have stepped into the void to do what they can to support stem cell research. Only six states have reinforced the federal ban, and 60 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and 36 percent of Republicans support lessening or eliminating the federal restrictions on funding. As long as such restrictions remain in place, the issue promises to be one of the most divisive in any campaign season. How did scientific and medical research on something smaller than a period at the end of a sentence come to such prominence in American political life? Embryonic stem cells are a cluster of about 150 cells that form after the joining of an egg and a sperm. The stem cells at the center of the cluster have the potential to become specialized cells that could one day benefit millions of Americans. Few areas of public policy have such far-reaching implications. This fact alone accounts for the remarkable level of information and sophistication by the broad general public. Confounding the traditional polarized politics of the country previously dominated by anti-abortion and pro-choice politics, the politics of stem cell research may be redrawing the contours ofpublic life. New political partnerships have been formed across party and ideological lines. Unusual and remarkable collaborations between scientists and patients have created a deeply informed constituency as advocates for the research. Rarely has a so-called cultural or value issue broken through the reflexive ideologies of left and right, conservative and liberal, as has the politics of stem cell research.

Globalization and New Public Management pose major challenges to the policy capacity of the state. Challenges to State Policy Capacity offers the most timely and comprehensive coverage of contemporary state policy capacity. Drawing on the work by international leading scholars in political science and public administration, the book is indispensable to anyone interested in policy capacity, administrative reform and the state.

Using an interdisciplinary social-science approach, Temporal Horizons and Strategic Decisions in US-China Relations: Between Instant and Infinite takes on the challenge of understanding the foreign policy decision process through the lens of the temporal horizon. A temporal horizon is the distance into the future a decision-maker prioritizes when evaluating outcomes and considering possibilities. By looking at a number of recent key moments of US-China relations that have immediate, short-term, long term, and far-reaching implications, the book considers which are predominant in the policy process. Looking at the role of time as a factor in the decision-making process is not new to political science, but this book attempts to break down and articulate the process by looking at a range of specific time frames. The book places special attention on future considerations in a variety of ways, combining the insights of psychology, economics, and future studies to consider political science in a new manner.

Recent assessment of progress in coastal management at the national level shows an impressive growth of efforts after the 1992 Earth Summit, particularly in Europe and the Mediterranean. This book contains regional surveys of coastal management progress in Europe and the Mediterranean since 1992, discussion regional trends, development sin decision making, and cooperative activities. It then goes on to assess national progress towards coastal management, including the development of national coastal management systems, efforts at coordinated planning and management, and the development and use of environmental codes of practice. It then examines selected priority issues in the Northern Adriatic: economic integration and regional economic development, international scientific and technological cooperation in marine affairs and coastal tourism. Finally, the book covers the use of GIS in coastal environments and coastal engineering, the role played by scientific information in coastal policy, and the importance of free trade agreements.

Federalism has generally been characterized as a system of government that is friendly to liberty. It is not obvious, though, why this should be so. Federalism is a form of government where citizens simultaneously reside in at least two governments, each of which has independent authority to tax and to regulate. By contrast, in a unitary form of government citizens face only one government with independent authority to tax and regulate. At first glance, it would seem a bit strange to claim that liberty is more secure when citizens are members of two governments with independent authority than when they are members of only one such government. The relationship between federalism and liberty turns out to be a complex one, and one that is capable of working in either direction. Whether federalism supports or erodes liberty depends on importantly on the institutional framework within which federalist governance takes place. The essays in Federalist Government in Principle and Practice examine this institutionalist theme from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Transport has remained high on the British political agenda as gridlock on the roads and the aftershocks of rail privatization have forced continual modifications and developments in the approach of the Labour government, which came to office in 1997, and pledged to establish an integrated transport policy. This comprehensively revised and updated new edition of the leading text in the field provides full coverage of the historical, political and European context of British transport policy, of the new financial and regulatory regimes of the Twenty-first century and of the impact of such major new initiatives as London's congestion charge.

This book investigates key aspects of the development of engaged and entrepreneurial universities. Reflecting the complex and dynamic nature of changes in higher education institutions (HEIs), multi-level perspectives in the field are taken into account, namely the ecosystem, relationship, organisational and individual perspective. The book highlights the entrepreneurial and the social orientation of HEIs by focusing on both primary economically focused (entrepreneurial) universities and primary socially focused (engaged) universities. It challenges the understanding of the role universities and its individual stakeholders play today. The book explores a multitude of facets and perspectives on the topic and addresses both what we already know and what knowledge still needs to be acquired.

Among the many ways the world has changed in recent decades, using technology for city planning has become one of the most innovative. Using new, pioneering methods that are reshaping the world into a more efficient and effective society has become the new reality. Citizen-Responsive Urban E-Planning: Recent Developments and Critical Perspectives is a collection of innovative research that presents and discusses various perspectives on facets of citizen engagement in open urban policy processes, all of them based on the widespread use of information and communication technologies in the field of urban/spatial planning. The book offers an updated outline of recent advances in this field as well as a critical perspective of the challenges with which citizen e-participation in urban e-planning is confronted. While highlighting topics including smart ecosystems, urban development, and global intelligence, this book is ideally designed for urban planners, IT consultants, government officials, policymakers, academicians, researchers, students, and industry professionals.