This book analyses the impact of participatory governance on cultural development, explaining why cultural participatory practices can lead to positive sustainable effects or to unexpected and controversial ones. It focuses on four projects realized in the two European Capitals of Culture of 2013 - Marseille-Provence (France) and Kosice (Slovakia) - within the Programme 'Quartiers Creatifs' and the SPOTs Programme. By combining different strands of the Democratic Theory and applying the process tracing methodology, the book argues that participation produces cultural developmental processes only when a certain intensity of trust is reached among the various stakeholders. In the presence of fully-fledged trust, participation activates a reinforcing chain of capacity-building and social capital that nurture long-term cultural networks. On the contrary, in the absence of fully-fledged trust, participation can generate contestation movements or isolated cultural production. Uniquely, the book challenges the 'optimistic aura' of participatory governance of culture, showing its conflicting but always productive nature.

This book investigates how the actual dynamics of business-state relations work in a democracy and their changes overtime. The focus is limited to one country because access to high-level sources, who are able to openly discuss the nature of the business-politics nexus, cannot be easily replicated. The study is distinctive in a number of ways. First, its focus on politics and business touches upon a number of academic disciplines - business sciences, political science, public policy and administration. Second, it is not limited to a static picture of a relatively new democracy, but instead examines the dynamics of change over the last twenty years. As such, it talks to situations in a number of other countries, especially those in Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. Third, the methodological approach, which combines anonymous interviews, mass media sources, governmental and non-governmental reports, is not very typical and thus provides a relatively fresh perspective on studying such social phenomena. Finally, the study offers original theoretical and analytical frames that can be conveniently applied and tested in other national/regional contexts. These and other features make it a valuable resource in higher education settings, offering a case study at hand, which can be used in courses on corruption, business ethics, democracy, EU studies, areas studies focused on Central and Eastern Europe or the post-Soviet space.

This book explores violence against the environment within the broad scope of transnational environmental crime (TEC): its extent, perpetrators, and responses. TEC has become one of the greatest threats to environmental and human security today, as well as a lucrative enterprise and a mode of life in many regions of the world. Transnational Spheres of Ecoviolence argues that we cannot seriously consider stopping TEC without also promoting environmental (and climate) justice. The spheres covered range from wildlife and plant crime to illegal fisheries to toxic waste and climate crime. These acts of violence against the environment are both localized in terms of event and impact, and globalized in terms of market drivers and internationalized responses. Because it is so often intimately linked to political violence, coerced labor, economic and physical displacement, and development opportunity costs, ecoviolence must be viewed primarily as a human security issue; the fight against it must derive legitimacy from impacts on local communities, and be twinned wth the protection of environmental activists. Reliance on the generosity of distant corporations or the effectiveness of legal structures will not be adequate; and militarized responses may do more harm to human security than good to nature. A transformative approach to transnational ecoviolence is a very complex task affected by the geopolitics of neoliberalism, authoritarian states, rebel factions and extremists, socio-economic patterns, and many other factors. In this challenging text, the authors capture this complexity in digestible form and offer a wide-ranging discussion of commensurate policy recommendations for governments and the general public.

This book presents new research results on the challenges of local politics in different European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Switzerland, together with theoretical considerations on the further development and strengthening of local self-government. It focuses on analyses of the most recent developments in local democracy and administration.

Why do some developing countries have more efficient health systems and better health outcomes? Contrary to existing theory that posits the superiority of proportional representation (PR) rules on public-goods provision, this book argues that electoral rules function differently given the underlying ethnic structure. In countries with low ethnic salience, PR has the same positive effect as in past theories. In countries with high ethnic salience, the geographic distribution of ethnic groups further matters: where they are intermixed, PR rules are worse for health outcomes; where they are isolated, neither rule is superior. The theory is supported through a combination of careful analysis of electoral reform in individual country cases with numerous well-designed cross-country comparisons. The case studies include Thailand, Mauritius, Malaysia, Botswana, Burma and Indonesia. The theory has broad implications for electoral rule design and suggests a middle ground in the debate between the Consociational and Centripetal schools of thought.

"This timely book provides insight into the changing role of the 'hospital' in the face of technological, organizational innovation and ever-tightening health budgets."James Barlow, Imperial College Business School, UK "This book covers various relevant aspects of the hospital in different states and contexts. Underlining the importance of business models for future hospitals, this publication presents models of care from a historic and a current perspective. All authors possess a deep insight into different health care systems, not only as scholars but as experts working for world-renowned health policy institutions such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank or the European Observatory for Health Systems."Siegfried Walch, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria "For an organisation like mine, representing those involved in the strategic planning of healthcare infrastructure, this book provides invaluable insights into what really matters - now and for the future - in the complex and contentious field of hospital development."Jonathan Erskine, European Health Property Network, Netherlands This book seeks to reframe current policy discussions on hospitals. Healthcare services turn expensive economic resources-people, capital, pharmaceuticals, energy, materials-into care and cure. Hospitals concentrate the use and the cost of these resources, particularly highly-trained people, expensive capital, and embedded technologies. But other areas of health, such as public health and primary care, seem to attract more attention and affection, at least within the health policy community. How to make sense of this paradox? Hospitals choose, or are assigned, to deliver certain parts of care packages. They are organised to do this via "business models". These necessarily incorporate models of care - the processes of dealing with patients. The activity needs to be governed, in the widest senses. Rational decisions need to be taken about both the care and the resources to be used. This book pulls these elements together, to stimulate a debate.

State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

The fully updated fourth edition of this lively and accessible book argues for the central role of media in understanding and shaping globalization. By breaking down the economic, cultural, and political impact of media, and through a rich set of case studies, Jack Lule describes a divided global village, its destiny shaped by strife.

In the volatile post-Cold-War era, the small, vulnerable states of the Pacific Islands region face several challenges to their security and sovereignty. This text focuses on these challenges, as part of an examination of security and defence issues in the region. It considers trends and issues since the mid-1980s, and the uncertain prospects leading into the beginning of the next century. The book emphasizes political, diplomatic and military matters, including the role of external powers, but also considers environmental, economic and resources issues.

This book offers new insights and original empirical research on private military and security companies (PMSCs), including China's negotiation approach to governance, an account of Nigeria's first engagement with regulatory cooperation under the threat of Boko Haram, and a study of PMSCs in Ebola-hit Western Africa. The author engages with concepts and theories from IR, Political Economy, and African studies-like regime, forum shopping, and extraversion-to describe what shapes state choices in national and international fora. The volume clarifies and spells out the needed questions and definitions and proposes a synthesis of how regime formation is shaped by ideas, interests, and institutions, starting from the proposition that regulatory cooperation consists in facilitating the acceptance and use of a single identifier for private military and security companies.

This book explores the institution of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a policy instrument. It argues that after the Cold War the European Union started challenging the unilateral policies of the United States by promoting new norms and institutions, such as the ICC. This development flies in the face of traditional explanations for cooperation, which would theorize institutionalization as the result of hegemonic preponderance, rational calculations or common identities. The book explains the dynamics behind the emergence of the ICC with a novel theoretical concept of normative binding. Normative binding is a strategy that provides middle powers with the means to tie down the unilateral policies of powerful actors that prefer not to cooperate. The idea is to promote new multilateral norms and deposit them in institutions, which have the potential to become binding even on unilateralist actors, if the majority of states adhere to them.

This edited volume analyzes how migration, the conformation of urban areas, and globalization impact Latin American geopolitics. Globalization has decisively influenced Latin American nationhood and it has also helped create a global region with global cities that are the result of the urbanization process. Also, globalization and migration are changing Latin America's own vision as a collective community. This book tackles how migration triggers concerns about security, which lead to policies based on the protection of borders as a matter of national security. The contributors argue that economic regionalization-globalization promotes changes in the social and economic geography which refer to social phenomena, the dynamic of social classes and their spatial implications, all of which may impact economic growth on the region. The project will appeal to a wider audience including political scientists, scholars, researchers, students and non-academics interested in Latin American geopolitics.

This book provides students with the most comprehensive and incisive introduction available to the intricacies of the Italian political system. Written in an accessible and student-friendly style, this up-to-date textbook features: * an introduction to Italian political history from 1943 to the present day * an explanation of the governmental system, the constitutional framework, the core institutions, the electoral system and the key parties * analysis of the role of the contemporary pressure groups and social movements including environmental, labour and anti-globalization organizations * discussion of important topical issues such as corruption, organized crime, the role of the media and freedom of the press * an exploration of Italian foreign policy towards the EU, the US and the 'War on Terrorism' * innovative use of photographs, boxed biographies, figures, annotated further reading and lists of websites to enliven the text. Contemporary Italian Politics is the perfect introduction for students reading Italian politics, Italian studies and European studies.

This textbook examines corruption through a macroeconomic lens, exploring the relationship between corruption, fiscal policy, and political economy. It merges macroeconomic growth models with elements of political economic theory to address important applied topics such as income inequality within and across countries, growth slowdowns, and fiscal crises. Revised and updated to include new research findings and recent policy discussions, the second edition contains 15 new sections and 2 new chapters on topics such as public defaults, the wage elasticity of work and the interest elasticity of saving, and the economic and fiscal impact of the 2020 pandemic. Most of the basic ideas are illustrated using a two-period model of government investment that captures the future cost of policies that favor the present. The more subtle and advanced issues are illustrated and, in some cases, quantified, using the overlapping-generations model of economic growth. The models used to illustrate the mechanisms of economic growth are extended to incorporate politics and the behavior of public official. The text concludes with a thorough discussion of policy reforms designed to address the issues discussed in earlier chapters. Intended for students familiar with intermediate-level economics, the second edition contains a technical appendix, expanded end-of-chapter questions and problems, and a complete solutions manual. The second edition also offers updated resources for instructors, including sample syllabi and over 550 multiple choice questions. Offering a unified explanation for the causes and consequences of government failure, fiscal crisis, and needed policy reforms, this text is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate courses in macroeconomics, political economy, and public policy.

This book provides fresh perspectives in the legal study of the Court of Justice of the European Union. In the context of European studies, the Court has mainly been analysed in light of its central role in the process of continental integration. Moreover, the Court has traditionally been studied by specialists for its important role as an agent of comparative law. This book studies the evolution of the Court itself, rather than that of the EU legal order in its judge-made dimension, and addresses several institutional aspects of its structure and organization, selected and constructed as a complete range of symptomatic figures of judicial institutionalisation. In doing so, the author seeks to showcase how the development and the institutional evolution of the CJEU happened through a selective internalization of comparative influences.

This book explores how public opinion is used to design, monitor and evaluate government programmes in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Using information collected from the media and from international practitioners in the public opinion field, as well as interviews in each of the 4 countries, the author describes how views of public opinion and governance differ significantly between elites and the general public. Bennett argues that elites generally risk more by allowing the creation of new data, fearing that its analysis may become public and create communications and political problems of various kinds. The book finds evidence that recent conservative governments in several countries are changing their perspective on the use of public opinion, and that conventional public opinion studies are facing challenges from the availability of other kinds of information and new technologies. This book is a hugely valuable contribution to a hitherto little explored field and will appeal to academics and practitioners alike.

This study describes and analyzes the significant political events that occurred between the fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence and the coming of the third millennium. It challenges much of the prevailing public image of India based upon the mistaken notion that it is still the country of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru's principle that India should be a secular state has been lost, and it has become a country dominated by Hindu communalism. Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence has been forgotten, and India has built what will soon be the third largest military force in the world, including nuclear weapons. The caste-less society that was identified in its Constitution as one of free India's goals has become a society in which the salience of caste membership is greater today than in 1947.

Dettman examines events during the thirty months from August 1997 to January 2000 on the political, economic, and military fronts. During this period, the continuing skirmishes with Pakistan along the Line of Control in Kashmir escalated into a short, high altitude war that ended with Indo-Pakistan relations at their lowest ebb since the Bangladesh War of 1971. India's decision to allocate vast resources to building up its armed forces and supplying them with nuclear weapons will greatly diminish the government's support for the demographic, environmental, and social welfare programs that are needed to avoid a long-term degradation of its quality of life.

Canadian politicians, like many of their circumpolar counterparts, brag about their country's "Arctic identity" or "northern character," but what do they mean, exactly? Stereotypes abound, from Dudley Do-Right to Northern Exposure, but these southern perspectives fail to capture northern realities. During decades of service as a legislator, mediator, and negotiator, Tony Penikett witnessed a new northern consciousness grow out of the challenges of the Cold War, climate change, land rights struggles, and the boom and bust of resource megaprojects. His lively account of clashes and accommodations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders not only retraces the footsteps of his hunt for a northern identity but tells the story of an Arctic that the world does not yet know.

Legacies of State Violence and Transitional Justice in Latin America presents a nuanced and evidence-based discussion of both the acceptance and co-optation of the transitional justice framework and its potential abuses in the context of the struggle to keep the memory of the past alive and hold perpetrators accountable within Latin America and beyond. The contributors argue that "transitional justice"-understood as both a conceptual framework shaping discourses and a set of political practices-is a Janus-faced paradigm. Historically it has not always advanced but often hindered attempts to achieve historical memory and seek truth and justice. This raises the vital question: what other theoretical frameworks can best capture legacies of human rights crimes? Providing a historical view of current developments in Latin America's reckoning processes, Legacies of State Violence and Transitional Justice in Latin America reflects on the meaning of the paradigm's reception: what are the broader political and social consequences of supporting, appropriating, or rejecting the transitional justice paradigm?

This book establishes a nexus between corruption in public procurement and the prevailing crisis of governance in Africa. The African continent is characterised by the growing concern for the deteriorating human security. In the midst of these woes, African political leaders are known for their stupendous wealth and riches through expropriation of national resources for personal benefits. This growing inequality in the continent has become a major driver for a series of violent and criminal activities, which have added to the worsening governance crisis. Thus, the abuse of public power for advancing private gain constitutes an impediment to effective public service delivery, thereby engendering a crisis of governance. The consequence of this is not limited to the socio-economic growth and welfare of citizens, but it often also jeopardizes the democratic credentials and objectives of the state.

This book assesses the impact of the May 2019 European elections as well as the Covid-19 pandemic on the EU's politics, institutions, and policies. Special attention is paid to the impact of these events on the different political forces as well as on the Union's institutional balance, its priorities and the reform of its budget and policies. Because of the many post-electoral uncertainties, the book also takes into account how the relations between the Parliament, the European Council and the new Commission have developed. Furthermore, it analyses the capacity of the von der Leyen Commission to implement an ambitious programme, especially in the context of an unfolding pandemic. The objective of this book is to study the 2019 electoral sequence (parliamentary elections, appointment of EU institutions leaders, investiture of the Commission, new legislative programme) and determine its influence on the main institutional and political challenges for the 2019-2024 legislature. In other words, the volume deals with the question of who holds the EU's leadership after the 2019 elections and how it handles the 2020-2021 pandemic.

This collection of original essays explores policy perspectives on selected contemporary issues as they relate to black Americans and provides an analysis of recent policy decisions in terms of the resultant benefits and burdens to the black community. The major concern of Contemporary Public Policy Perspectives and Black Americans is to determine whether the current public policy objectives are meeting the needs of America's black population. The issues examined herein include public policies in the areas of urban crisis, Reaganomics, public employment, minority business enterprise, energy, the military, police, affirmative action, health, the economy, and futures and ethics policies. In discussing policy issues and their distributional benefits and results, opportunities for individual advancement are scrutinized. This scrutiny, Rice and Jones contend, is the only way to consider and discuss the equity of policy issues for black Americans.

This book includes collective research by the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which is an important research institution of political science and a think-tank in China. The book was completed by the expert team of "China's Political System" headed by Director Fang Ning for several years and after several changes in their manuscripts. This book covers the core political systems of China, such as the leadership system of the Communist Party of China, the decision-making system of the Party and government in Chinese politics, the system of the people's congress, the relationship between the central and local authorities, the system of officials training and selection, the system of discipline inspection and supervision, the system of consultative democracy and the system of community-level self-governance, etc. This book aims to build a new paradigm of empirical research and introduction of the contemporary Chinese political system by using the description and research method of materialization and dynamics of the political system.

The Politics of Major Policy Reform in Postwar America examines the politics of recent landmark policy in areas such as homeland security, civil rights, health care, immigration and trade, and it does so within a broad theoretical and historical context. By considering the politics of major programmatic reforms in the United States since the Second World War - specifically, courses of action aimed at dealing with perceived public problems - a group of distinguished scholars sheds light not only on significant efforts to ameliorate widely recognized ills in domestic and foreign affairs but also on systemic developments in American politics and government. In sum, this volume provides a comprehensive understanding of how major policy breakthroughs are achieved, stifled, or compromised in a political system conventionally understood as resistant to major change.

"If one wants to understand why, from its modest beginnings, the European Parliament has become a major player in EU decision-making, look no further than this book. It presents, to date, the theoretically most compelling, methodologically disciplined and empirically richest account of parliamentary self-empowerment over time, across key functions and policy areas. This volume will be a main point of reference for work on the European Parliament, the dynamics of inter-institutional politics, and EU integration more generally for years to come."-Berthold Rittberger, Professor of International Relations, University of Munich, Germany "Anyone interested in the rise of the European Parliament as a significant actor in the EU should read this book. It offers a fascinating insight into the strategies used by the Parliament to achieve its aims and the conditions for its success or failure. It ranges widely across time and policy areas to give a comprehensive analysis of the Parliament's changing institutional position."-Michael Shackleton, Professor of European Institutions, Maastricht University, The Netherlands, and former EP official This book analyses the European Parliament's strategies of self-empowerment over time stretching across cases of new institutional prerogatives as well as substantive policy areas. It considers why and how the Parliament has managed to gain formal and informal powers in this wide variety of cases. The book provides a systematic and comparative analysis of the European Parliament's formal and informal empowerment in two broad sets of cases: on the one hand, it examines the EP's empowerment since the Treaty of Rome in three areas that are characteristic of parliamentary democracies, namely legislation, the budget, and the investiture of the executive. On the other hand, it analyses the European Parliament's role in highly politicised policy areas, namely Economic and Monetary Governance and the shaping of EU trade agreements.