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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Central government > Central government policies
While diplomacy is a well-established topic for study, global governance is a relatively new arrival to the conceptual landscape of international relations. At first glance the two exist in separate worlds. This book examines the relationship between these two concepts for the first time in a comprehensive manner.
Ross here presents a comparative historical study of European neutrality policy with special reference to the problem posed to neutral countries by the imposition of international collective sanctions. The study takes the form of an extended and detailed comparative examination of Swedish and Swiss responses to the League of Nation's embargo against Italy in 1935-36 and the United Nation's sanctions against Rhodesia in 1965-79. Through this analysis, the author explores how and why Swedish and Swiss policies toward sanctions have differed over time and what these differences reveal about neutrality policy in general, particularly in relation to collective security actions taken by international organizations. An ideal supplemental text for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in comparative politics, international relations, and international organization, this volume will also be of significant benefit to policymakers interested in reviewing past sanctions cases as a guidepost for determining the feasibility of similar operations in the future. The book is distinguished by its broad historical approach and by its close comparison of the two countries--not only in terms of their sanctions policies but also in terms of their domestic political structures and individual overall formulations of neutrality policy. Ross demonstrates that despite the many background similarities between Sweden and Switzerland, the two states have differed substantially in their responses to sanctions operations. He analyzes the reasons for these differences, challenging traditionally held views that characterize Sweden's policies as changeable and Switzerland's as consistent. Finally, Ross identifies seven explanatory factors, derived from the four case studies, which can be used to determine how other source states--both neutral and non-neutral--might respond to future cases of sanctions.
When did man discover nuclear waste? To answer this question, we first have to ask if nuclear waste really is something that could be called a scientific discovery, such as might deserve a Nobel Prize in physics. In early writings within nuclear energy research radioactive waste appears to be a neglected issue, a story never told. Nuclear waste first seems to appear when a public debate arose about public health risks of nuclear power in the late 1960s and early 70s. In nuclear physics, consensus was established at an early stage about the understanding of the splitting of uranium nuclei. The fission products were identified and their chains of disintegration and radioactivity soon were well established facts among the involved scientists, as was an awareness of the risks, for example the strong radioactivity of strontium and iodine, and the poisonous effects of plutonium. However, the by-products were never, either in part or in total, called or perceived as waste, just as fission by-products. How and where to dispose of the by-products were questions that were never asked by the pioneers of nuclear physics."
This Handbook represents a pioneering effort to consolidate the state of knowledge on policy formulation. An invaluable resource for scholars and students of policy studies, this Handbook provides a set of analytical discussions that help scholars, students and practitioners better understand the multiple dimensions of what policy formulation has come to mean in contemporary public policy-making and governance. In attempting to resolve pressing public problems, governments devise, deploy and develop policy tools in many different ways in different sectors and jurisdictions. Knowledge of these processes has been fragmented, however, spanning a multitude of different approaches, perspectives and case studies. By critically and systematically analysing both the processes and agents of policy formulation, this Handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of the formulation activities that are undertaken by governments in order to match their policy goals with the means of achieving them. The Handbook unites a wide range of expert contributors who examine the roles played by policy actors, institutions and ideas in answering fundamental questions about policy formulation such as who undertakes it, how, when, where and why. Through seven thematic sections this Handbook discusses a wide range of topics related to formulation such as the nature of policy design, instrument choice, policy appraisal, policy advice and the politics of defining and resolving policy problems. Contributors include: C. Adelle, J. Bandola-Gill, R. Burroughs, C. Eichbaum, M. Galizzi, A. Gunn, H. Gunter, M.P. Howlett, H.M. Ingram, D.S.L. Jarvis, G.F. Johnson, P.D. Jorgensen, J. Kohoutek, C. Koski, M. Lehtonen, D. Linders, C. Lyall, L. Ma, M. Maor, C. Matheson, P.J. May, J.G. McGann, I. Mukherjee, S. Nair, M. Nekola, J. Rayner, A.L. Schneider, J. Scott, R. Shaw, A. Simons, N. Stramp, H. Strassheim, M. van der Steen, A. Vesely, J.-P. Voss, S. Weiland, M. Wilder, A.R. Zito
Gendered Policies in Europe examines the policy process, focusing on the shifts in equal opportunities legislation towards measures to help parents combine employment and family life. The authors track the inputs of members states and pressure groups to European policy formation and analyse outputs and outcomes at national levels as they impact on gender issues in law and practice. They draw on examples of the implementation of reconciliation policies to illustrate how the policy process operates in different national contexts.
Spanning diverse current topics in the field of international strategic management, this collection represents the best writings of Peter Buckley, one of the world's leading authorities in the field. The book looks at three main areas in detail: international strategic management and government policy; foreign investment in China, Vietnam and Japan; and trade blocs, foreign market servicing strategies and international transfer pricing. An essential volume for anyone wishing to keep up-to-date with recent developments in international strategic management.
The domestic phase of Washington's war on drugs has received considerable criticism over the years from a variety of individuals. Until recently, however, most critics have not stressed the damage that the international phase of the drug war has done to our Latin American neighbors. That lack of attention has begun to change and Ted Carpenter chronicles our disenchantment with the hemispheric drug war. Some prominent Latin American political leaders have finally dared to criticize Washington while at the same time, the U.S. government seems determined to perpetuate, if not intensify, the antidrug crusade. Spending on federal antidrug measures also continues to increase, and the tactics employed by drug war bureaucracy, both here and abroad, bring the inflammatory "drug war" metaphor closer to reality. Ending the prohibitionist system would produce numerous benefits for both Latin American societies and the United States. In a book deriving from his work at the CATO Institute, Ted Carpenter paints a picture of this ongoing fiasco.
This book explores the ways in which the state and private security firms contribute to the direct and structural harm of asylum seekers through policies and practices that result in states of perpetual destitution, exclusion, and neglect. By synthesising historic and contemporary public policy, criminological and sociological perspectives, political philosophy, and the direct experiential accounts of asylum seekers living within dispersed accommodation, this text exposes the complex and co-dependent relationship between the state's social control aims and neoliberal imperatives of market expansion into the immigration control regime. The title borrows from former Home Secretary Theresa May's pronouncement that the UK government aimed to foster a 'hostile environment' in its response to illegal immigration. While the Home Office later attempted to rebrand its hostile environment policy as a 'compliant environment', this book illustrates how aggressive approaches toward the management of asylum-seeking populations has effectively extended the hostile environment to those legally present within the UK. Through an examination of the expanded privatisation of dispersed asylum housing and the UK government's reliance on contracts with private security firms like G4S and Serco, this book explores the lived realities of hostile environments as asylum seekers' accounts reveal the human costs of marketised asylum accommodation programmes.
This comparative study is the first to center on the key issues of homeownership and control today in a number of industrialized countries. Experts from Canada, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States draw a cross-national and interdisciplinary, informed picture of basic issues and values, current trends, and different policy approaches that have been tested in recent years. This overview of various national policies and programs is intended for students and scholars, policymakers and public administrators dealing with fundamental problems in homeownership and control. Ownership and control has long been a central theme in the heated public debates in different countries over housing policy. How are notions about ownership and control tied to culture? What are some of the basic values about homeownership in western societies? What place has homeownership played in the life cycles of black and white families in the United States? What limitations to privatization exist in housing reform in Russia now? Who benefits or loses from public housing sales in Britain? How are multi-family public housing projects of the 1960s in the United States being converted to community-corporation control? What different kinds of tenant attitudes exist toward tenant management in two U.S. public housing developments? What type of role do nonprofit housing cooperatives in Canada play? These are only some of the questions that the ten chapters set out to answer. Reference lists accompany each of the chapters, adding to the usefulness of this public policy study for text purposes.
This volume focuses on a case where community organizing, academic research and governmental responsibility were successfully mobilized and synchronized to bring about change in educational policy and practice. The focus of this book is the methodology implemented and the results obtained over the course of a year-long action research project on language and education in St. Eustatius, one of the islands of the Dutch Caribbean, commissioned by the educational authorities in both St. Eustatius and the European Netherlands. On the island, the language of instruction is Dutch, however, outside of the classroom most students only speak English and an English-lexifier Creole. The research project was set up to address the negative impact on school success of this disparity. It included a community-based sociolinguistic study that actively involved all of the stakeholders in the education system on the island. This was complemented by a multi-pronged set of research strategies, including a language attitude and use survey, a narrative proficiency test, in depth interviews, and a review of the relevant literature. The resulting report and recommendations were accepted by the government, which is now in the process of changing the language of instruction.
This work looks at competing, overarching, guiding principles for American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, not only by delineating these belief systems but also by linking them to current foreign policy actors in Congress and the executive branch. The book perfects a tool, schools-of-thought analysis, which relates theory to political processes and specific policymakers. It is an attempt to both classify and analyze the intellectual and political nature of the post-Cold War era.
Since 1984, relaxed federal guidelines have allowed the natural gas industry to become far more flexible and competitive. Once gas pipelines were given the option of open access, the barriers to markets and competition dissolved. The success of open access points to the emergence and evolution of a fluid and informationally rich network of regional markets that form today's single national market for natural gas. A broad range of specialists and academics in economics, regulatory economics and economic modeling, industrial organization, and energy and natural resources will find the implications of this work important reading.
By virtue of a quiet revolution over nearly a hundred years, Britain has evolved into a home-owning society. The impact of this on British society has been barely understood, but it has helped to shape the Blair 'workfare' state and to draw Britain firmly towards the English-speaking world while distancing the country from other European nations. Taking a policy-analysis approach and drawing from the burgeoning comparative literature, this textbook explores what has happened to British housing since 1900. Providing more than an account of British housing, the book reinterprets the housing system in a way that is sensitive to the historical and cultural contexts of British policy and society. Examining the nature of 'housing' and how it helps to shape society, Lowe sets British housing in its global context. Written in an accessible style, Housing Policy Analysis leads the reader through the basic concepts to more challenging themes. It will be important reading for students of housing studies, social policy, public policy and applied social studies.
The name "AIDS" is an accusation. It implies punishment for sin--homosexuality and promiscuity. AIDS is a moral judgement masquerading as a scientific name, which is at the very heart of discrimination against the infected. At the bottom are drug users, victims of the War On Drugs, condemned to contract AIDS by using contaminated syringes necessitated by scarcity resulting from restrictive policies. A rational way to control HIV is to liberalize drug paraphernalia policies as in Europe. The U.S. has not taken this simple step, thus unleashing the AIDS epidemic among drug users, their sexual partners, and neonates. While this policy neglect can be understood in the context of AIDS prevention dominated by moral, political, and religious ideologies rather than epidemiological facts, there are critical racial implications. The ethnic divide separating the white researchers and the infected who belong to minorities has fuelled comparisons of AIDS with the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and some preventive strategies have been called genocidal plots. Recent research indicating the ineffectiveness of bleach to disinfect paraphernalia has exposed the deadly consequences of a nonchalant attitude to research and compromises for political expediency.
The focus of this book is to examine the growing impact of globalization on education policy and development in the Asia Pacific region. It analyzes the reaction of selected societies and the strategies that their governments have adopted in response to the tidal wave of marketization, corporatization, commercialization, and privatization. Particular attention is paid to educational restructuring in the context of globalization.
This book traces the growing influence of 'neuroparenting' in British policy and politics. Neuroparenting advocates claim that all parents require training, especially in how their baby's brain develops. Taking issue with the claims that 'the first years last forever' and that infancy is a 'critical period' during which parents must strive ever harder to 'stimulate' their baby's brain just to achieve normal development, the author offers a trenchant and incisive case against the experts who claim to know best and in favour of the privacy, intimacy and autonomy which makes family life worth living. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Sociology, Family and Intimate Life, Cultural Studies, Neuroscience, Social Policy and Child Development, as well as individuals with an interest in family policy-making.
Mark Kleinman's new book explains what has happened to housing policy in Europe over the last two decades, and what housing policy can tell us about welfare development more generally over the period. Housing, Welfare and the State in Europe identifies a divergence in housing policy between, on the one hand, the majority of relatively affluent households and, on the other, an impoverished minority. The legal, financial and economic concerns of the well-housed, owner-occupier majority have preoccupied public policy across Europe, with the impoverished minority often badly housed or homeless. In Britain this has been particularly evident with elections won and lost on the level of the mortgage rate rather than the level of housing output, and still less on the level of homelessness. Housing policy occupies a unique place in public policy at the intersection of social with economic policy, involving a mixed economy of welfare. Consequently, Dr Kleinman's study offers insights into the future direction of public policy as a whole, the balance between economic and social goals, and the relative weighting given to free markets and state intervention in a variety of countries.
Jimmy Carter was an unexpected president. The first Southerner since the Civil War to gain the office, he had pursued the presidency at the grass roots as an outsider. A president who sought to run a government as good as the American people, Carter soon found himself embroiled in system overload as he worked for a domestic agenda to increase park lands, made the federal judiciary accessible to more women and minorities, to better manage the civil service, to devise a rational long-range policy of energy consumption and conservation, and to keep the deficit under control. Deadlock with Congress, special interests, and, ultimately, caught up in the Iran hostage crisis, the outsider president saw many of his programs defeated and himself voted out of office. With a stellar cast of political figures, headed by President and Mrs. Carter, and with leading scholars of the period, this volume is a major document for a better understanding of the period and the development of the presidency.
This book presents an accessible overview of the seven key concepts of city diplomacy (development cooperation, peacekeeping, economy, innovation, environment, culture, and migration). The book discusses its scope and challenges, maps the actors involved along with their interaction and offers suggestions for available tools and outcomes. Each chapter includes an analysis of a selection of best practices. The book successfully combines theory with practical evidence and will be an invaluable reference for students and researchers of international relations and urban studies looking for a comprehensive and updated analysis of the multifaceted international action of cities. The book will also be of interest to practitioners and city officials responsible for the design and implementation of impactful diplomatic strategies.
Leading Kennedy scholars along with a group of younger historians have mined recently declassified documentation in order to reexamine many of the key issues surrounding JFK's time in the White House: Vietnam, Cuban missile crisis, Berlin crisis, space race, and others. Rejecting the idolatry and bitterness evident in so many previous works on JFK, this study adopts an evenhanded, eclectic approach. The result is a less caricatured, more compelling view of the Kennedy presidency.
This text examines the politics and policies of the Major governments from 1990 to 1997. The book includes how and why the Major governments sought to reform the civil service, local government, education, social security and industrial relations, and the extent to which such reform constituted a continuation of Thatcherism. It also considers the problems experienced by John Major in leading and managing the parliamentary Conservative Party, with Europe proving particularly problematic for his premiership.
Examining the debate on quality of jobs in Europe, this book focuses on the work-life balance-a central element of the EU agenda. It addresses tensions between work and private life, examining job quality, job security, working conditions and time-use patterns of individuals and households as well as institutional contexts.
In this intriguing volume, Merrie G. Klapp explains how regulatory decisions in such crucial areas as public health, technological safety, and environmental quality are molded and recast. She finds that scientific uncertainty is a key factor, with agencies, interest groups, Congress, and the courts attempting to shift responsibility of proof or varying the standard of proof according to the pressures brought to bear on the issue. In general, Professor Klapp finds that when citizens or industrialists organize to protest a regulatory decision and when the legislature or the courts take scientific uncertainty into account, then the initial regulatory decision is changed. By contrast with the United States, where scientific uncertainty is used as a public resource and rationale for change, in France and Britain scientific uncertainty is treated as a private resource. French and British scientists do not treat regulatory decisions as opportunities to reveal scientific uncertainty to the public--instead, discussions of uncertainties are held behind closed doors and, when reports are made to the public about regulatory decisions, scientific information is presented as if it were certain. Bargaining with Uncertainty will be a provocative analysis to those scholars and researchers concerned with the making of public policy as well as those concerned with risk assessment in public health, the environment, and technology.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of emerging challenges facing different social groups, policy-makers and the international community related to economic growth, social development and environmental change, social inclusion and regional development. The book undertakes a critical assessment of the tensions associated with the failures of mainstream regulatory approaches and impacts of social and economic policies whilst widening the discussion on the interface between the expansion of the socio-environmental demands, equity and justice. These are crucial challenges, of great importance today and of equal relevance to the Global North and South. The book explores one of the main contradictions of development, the simplification of assessments and narrow consideration of alternatives. Taking this dilemma as its departure point, it goes on to examine the justification, trends and limitations of Western-based development and possible alternatives to fundamentally modify the basis and the rationale of the development process. It considers theoretical and lived experiences of development, paying attention to multiple scales, local realities and economic frontiers. Contributing authors explore policy recommendations and discuss effective practical tools for determining the values different people hold for ecosystem services and territorial resources. They cover the monitoring of change in the provision of ecosystem services that might increase the well-being of vulnerable groups as well as strategies to promote innovation and integrated, equitable and sustainable development. |
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