Why do business organisations contribute to climate change governance in areas of limited statehood? In many countries, governments are too weak and often also not willing to set and enforce climate change regulations. While companies have the capacities to fill the resulting governance gap, conventional wisdom expects them to take advantage by relocating their production sites in order to escape strict national regulation. Studies on South Africa, Kenya and Germany demonstrate that business contributions to the mitigation and adaptation to climate change vary significantly between countries, sectors and firms. In order to explain these variations, the contributors bring together two important literatures that rarely speak to each other - governance and business management - arguing that the threat of public regulation has an important role in motivating business efforts.

An interdisciplinary group of scholars from the global North and South critically explore the global deepening of market economy models. In case studies including Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, they examine the associated tensions of livelihood and ecology in the current context of global economic crisis, considering issues of natural ecology, water use, health, childcare, technology and work, migration, and economic growth. The analysis of the complex connections between domestic and global dynamics across diverse cases and issues helps reveal that state-centric approaches are still hovering over the politics of restructuring through which conformity to economic growth is addressed.

This book describes the institutions and process through which the Georgia General Assembly adopts a budget, the executive-legislative branch politics that transpire during the process and the tax and spending policies that the process produces. It argues that the state's budget is developed by fiscal conservatives within a culture of fiscal conservatism that is conducive to low taxes and low spending. It identifies the patterns and trends of taxing and spending over several decades and during the administrations of nine governors. Its chapter on the line-item veto illustrates the nature of executive-legislative budget relationships in the state. It concludes with an examination of the important milestones in the evolution of Georgia budgeting and a comparison of Georgia with other states on several dimensions. The book offers insights and assessments that will be of interest to budgeting scholars, students of state government, and citizens who want to know more about how government taxing and spending decisions are made.

This book examines comparatively the US and the UK governments' management of Y2K and considers the extent to which such management can be understood as responses to market pressures, public opinion and organized interests. It concludes by providing valuable lessons to those concerned about managing risk and critical infrastructure today.

Neopatrimonial analysts attribute the failure of development policies in Nigeria to entirely internal problems emanating from the personalization of state resources by rulers for their own benefits and as forms of patronage for securing the loyalty of clients. Based on elaborate theoretical and empirical analysis of development policies in Nigeria with special focus on development planning, this book argues that the neopatrimonial analysis is one-sided and does not adequately capture the fundamental factors responsible for the development malaise in the country. Understanding Nigeria's development problems entails looking beyond neopatrimonialism. The adverse effects of diffusionism that underlined development policies, and the associated external factors that fostered neocolonial dependence and peripheralization of Nigeria's economy are crucial for understanding and coming to terms with the development problem. This book makes a strong case for endogenous formulation of development policies and for the reformulation of the Nigerian state in order to make it more developmental.

"Gender, Equality and Difference During and After State Socialism" examines gender as a socially and culturally constructed phenomenon which is influential in and influenced by state-led policies and structures, as well as social practices and relations and which shapes the experiences and lives of women and men. The volume explores the pivotal nature of the demise of the communist regimes, in relation both to experiences of gender and to their study in former state socialist societies. Each chapter is based on new and original research by the authors.

This is the only book that provides a comparative analysis of local government reforms in six developed Anglo-American countries: Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada. The authors provide important insights on the factors that have driven local government reforms and the effects of those reforms. The emphasis on these English-speaking common law democracies facilitates an analysis of the essential features of local government reform programs and the common factors driving them. The book is unique in that it provides a systematic comparative analysis of municipal reform by using an analytical framework that focuses on structural, functional, financial, jurisdictional and organizational/managerial reform in each of the six countries. It can be used as a valuable reading in advanced level undergraduate and graduate courses in local government and public administration politics, as well as in local government administration and policy making. Academics and students of local government and policy makers will be pleased with this thorough treatment of the subject.

Education reformers and policymakers argue that improved students' learning requires stronger academic standards, stiffer state tests, and accountability for students' scores. Yet these efforts seem not to be succeeding in many states. The authors of this important book argue that effective state reform depends on conditions which most reforms ignore: coherence in practice as well as policy and opportunities for professional learning. The book draws on a decade's detailed study of California's ambitious and controversial program to improve mathematics teaching and learning. Researchers David Cohen and Heather Hill report that state policy influenced teaching and learning when there was consistency among the tests and other policy instruments; when there was consistency among the curricula and other instruments of classroom practice; and when teachers had substantial opportunities to learn the practices proposed by the policy. These conditions were met for a minority of elementary school teachers in California. When the conditions were met for teachers, students had higher scores on state math tests. The book also shows that, for most teachers, the reform ended with consistency in state policy. They did not have access to consistent instruments of classroom practice, nor did they have opportunities to learn the new practices which state policymakers proposed. In these cases, neither teachers nor their students benefited from the state reform. This book offers insights into the ways policy and practice can be linked in successful educational reform and shows why such linkage has been difficult to achieve. It offers useful advice for practitioners and policymakers seeking to improve education, and to analysts seeking to understand it.

Using the cases of Northern Cyprus and Transdniestria, the author examines state-building as practiced by informal states. Exploring symbolic and economic dimensions of state-building projects and using insights from political sociology, she investigates how they function under circumstances of non-recognition.

This study applies policy network theory to major technological, economic, environmental and social trends to generate propositions about the future of public policy. Among the findings are that we should expect more business-friendly policies, more intrusive law enforcement, more women-friendly policies, and stronger climate policies.

Manohar Pawar discusses the relevance and importance of social policy for water issues. By analysing several interrelated perspectives on water, he suggests core values as bases for formulating and implementing social policies so as to provide universal free access to safe drinking water for all, particularly for the most poor and disadvantaged.

In times of dramatic social, economic and political change, governments around the world are questioning their roles and responsibilities in the public sector. The trend is away from a traditional public-sector market model, but there does not yet exist a universally accepted alternative. The essays offer a comparative analysis of public administration in several OECD countries, including the UK, US, Australia, and Scandinavia, and explores possible future directions.

The impact of political lobbyists remains highly controversial. No-one has explored when they matter. This book tells readers when lobbyists count and analyzes the relationship between lobbying, policy outcomes and the impact of external factors to reveal the professional lobbyist's limited effect on policy. On most policy issues lobbyists simply do not matter. But, on rare occasions lobbyists can make a difference and this book explains when they matter and why.

This study presents, for the first time, a synoptic picture of the future directions in which public policy in EU countries is likely to move based on using contemporary theories of policy-making to deduce the implications for public policy of major long-term technological, economic, environmental and social trends. The resulting 12 policy implications can be loosely summarized as more assertive security policies, more business-friendly economic policies, more liberal social policies and increased public spending.

This volume explores the domestic and transnational considerations associated with Indonesia's ascent, referring to its rise in terms of hard and soft power and its likely trajectory in the future. The range of contributors analyse economic resources, religious harmony, security, regional relations, leadership and foreign policy.

When the global financial crisis spread to Europe and its weak periphery through the banking sector, few contemplated that the real causes of the crisis did not reside only in the faulty architectures of globalisation and European integration but also in a pronounced power-shift to the 'global East'. The authors connect the 'local' with the 'global', and the 'local' with the 'European'. In this context, Fouskas and Dimoulas scrutinize the financial, geopolitical and historical underpinnings of the current Greek debt crisis that threatens not just the cohesion of the European Union, but the entire security architecture of the Euro-Atlantic world. By identifying the 'debt problem' as being one of the 'birthmarks' of Greece passed by the country's one hegemonic master onto another, they challenge the current half-truths about the contemporary debt crisis in Greece and the Euro-zone.

As 300 million Americans squeeze into our country, and as single-person households outnumber parents with children, it's time to rethink our land use laws that favor the single-family house. This provocative book visits sites of recent controversies--from an immigration dispute in a Virginia suburb, to eminent domain in New York City, to illegal apartments in the backyards of California. Boudreaux explores how we could scrap the old housing bias in favor of affluent homeowners, and in its place harness the free market to provide for a greater variety of residences--apartments, townhouses, and mobile homes - for the twenty-first century.

A critical yet constructive description of the rich analytical techniques and substantive applications that typify how statistical thinking has been applied at the RAND Corporation over the past two decades. Case studies of public policy problems are useful for teaching because they are familiar: almost everyone knows something abut health insurance, global warming, and capital punishment, to name but a few of the applications covered in this casebook. Each case study has a common format that describes the policy questions, the statistical questions, and the successful and the unsuccessful analytic strategies. Readers should be familiar with basic statistical concepts including sampling and regression. While designed for statistics courses in areas ranging from economics to health policy to the law at both the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, empirical researchers and policy-makers will also find this casebook informative.

The contributors assess to what extent regional organizations in Europe and Latin America provide a space for the regulation and provision of social policies in the area of social protection, higher education and health. They analyse the impact of regional organizations on social citizenship following political struggle and contestation.

A political economy analysis of the history of food security in the Arab world, including the role played by the global food price crisis in the Arab Spring and the Arab response aiming at greater food sovereignty via domestic food production and land acquisition overseas - the so-called land grab.

Africa is changing and it is easy to overlook how decentralization, democratization, and new forms of illiberalism have transformed federalism, political parties, and local politics. Chapters on Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa help fill an important gap in comparative institutional research about state and local politics in Africa.

Divisions in the EU are considered, as well as the conflicts that have arisen from enlargement and foreign policy concerns. Leading specialists on European politics and society reflect on the nature of consensus and competition between elites, and whether the EU may be able to provide a sense of common identity and purpose for its citizens.

This book considers the extent to which, and in what circumstances, political parties affect public policy. It explores the regional level in Germany; using case studies in the areas of education, childcare and family, and labour market policy. In particular, the author explores whether party politicians make a difference to policies.

In the post-Bretton Woods era, the advent of ever-expanding capital markets beyond national borders led to a series of financial reforms in many industrial economies. In comparing reform cases across different time periods in the United States, Japan, and Germany, Sara Konoe stresses the role of dynamic interactions between institutions and political contexts in determining reform paths. In non-crisis periods, regulatory fragmentation is utilized by financial sectors to pursue their demands for liberalization, though those in self-regulating or monopolized markets resist the agenda of liberalization. A time of crisis empowers reformers to restructure the financial regulatory structure and markets and enables the tightening of regulation. By drawing out key implications for global politics, Konoe sheds light on what types of reform dynamics come into play in the formation of global financial governance while considering the impact of regional-level institutionalization in the EU and EMU.