While some e-government projects fail to deliver the expected benefits due to numerous technical, organizational, institutional, and contextual factors, information technology continues to be utilized by international governments to achieve countless benefits. E-Government Success around the World: Cases, Empirical Studies, and Practical Recommendations presents the latest findings in the area of e-government success. Written for academics and professionals, this book aims to improve the understanding of e-government success factors and cultural contexts in the field of governmental information technologies in various disciplines such as political science, public administration, information and communication sciences, and sociology.

'The Maternal Sepsis Intervention has had a profound impact on maternal mortality and antibiotic use whilst also reducing hospital costs. The Ministry of Health is keen to explore opportunities to extending the lessons learnt and integrate them in national policy-making.' -Dr. Richard Mugahi, Ministry of Health, Uganda. This open access book provides an accessible introduction to the mechanics of international development and global health text for policy-makers and students across a wide range of disciplines. Antimicrobial resistance is a major threat to the well-being of patients and health systems the world over. In fragile health systems so challenged, on a day-today basis, by the overwhelming burden of both infectious and non-communicable disease, it is easy to overlook the impacts of AMR. The Maternal Sepsis Intervention, focusing on a primary cause of maternal death in Uganda, demonstrates the systemic nature of AMR and the gains that can be made through improved Infection Prevention Control and direct engagement of laboratory testing in antibiotic prescribing.

"This publication could not be more timely. Little more than a decade after the global financial crisis of 2008, governments are once again loosening the reins over financial markets. The authors of this volume explain why that is a mistake and could invite yet another major crisis." -Benjamin Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA "Leading political scientists from several generations here offer historical depth, as well as sensible suggestions about what reforms are needed now." -John Kirton, University of Toronto, Canada, and Co-founder of the G7 Research Group "A valuable antidote to complacency for policy-makers, scholars and students." -Timothy J. Sinclair, University of Warwick, UK This book examines the long-term, previously underappreciated breakdowns in financial regulation that fed into the 2008 global financial crash. While most related literature focuses on short-term factors such as the housing bubble, low interest rates, the breakdown of credit rating services and the emergence of new financial instruments, the authors of this volume contend that the larger trends in finance which continue today are most relevant to understanding the crash. Their analysis focuses on regulatory capture, moral hazard and the reflexive challenges of regulatory intervention in order to demonstrate that financial regulation suffers from long-standing, unaddressed and fundamental weaknesses.

This volume continues the tradition now established since 2006, of compiling excellent research into the practice and application of community indicators in a single source volume. It focuses on the theme of the Community Indicators Consortium 2020 Summit, as a significant venue for the advancement of the practice and theory of community indicators work. It covers the conference's theme of "community resilience", which is the capacity of all of a community's elements to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. In keeping with the practical, "best cases" emphasis of this book series, the editors incorporate a case-based approach to chapters discussing how specific indicators, indices or series of indicators can lead to better decisions and outcomes to help communities adapt and transform in the face of challenges, helping them prepare for both the expected and the unexpected to sustain and improve quality of life, including technology and open source approaches to data sharing and data-focussed collaboration; evolving approaches that use shared indicators to improve overall community well-being and quality of life; research related to community indicators and policy, application, research, and/or practice; and techniques and approaches to measure resilience. This volume is of interest to social scientists, management professionals, social workers and policy makers working on various aspects of community indicators of quality of life and well-being. Chapter "The Cost of Sea Level Rise for the Island Community of Vinalhaven, Maine: Spurring action through collaborative data analysis" is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapters.

On 25 September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted Resolution 70/1, "Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development". Also known as 2030 Agenda, the document lays out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the realm of ecology, society and economy. The current book focuses on three of these goals: SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions; SDG 3: Health and Wellbeing; SDG 11: Cities and Sustainable Communities. It is critical that interdisciplinary approaches go one step further and translate more effectively into intersectoral policies. This is particularly vital when it comes to urban planning and health. This book address the key question: In the context of a growing influence of European Union policies at a national level, can SDGs simultaneously contribute to harmonising sectoral policies and promoting intersectoral policies? Claiming a growing convergence between health and spatial planning, the main goal of the book is to formulate an answer to the following question: how can policymakers translate the SDGs effectively into public policies in order to improve cities, health and wellbeing?

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.

E-government faces huge challenges in achieving interoperability and integration, taking into account differences in laws, regulations, services, administrative processes and languages across regions and countries. On the other hand, issues like service, data and process integration have been researched by the Semantic Web community for several years now, and in the last two to three years we have witnessed the first applications of semantic technologies in real, operational e-government systems in both Europe and the US which address exactly these challenges.

With this book, the editors present the latest research results on how to use semantic technologies in order to improve or even revolutionize the use of ICT in public administration systems. The contributions are organized into three parts: architectures and process integration, ontologies and interoperability, and portals and user interactions. They give a broad overview of how semantic technologies have been applied in different e-government projects funded from the European program for ICT Research and Development, and they cover a wide spectrum of semantic technologies such as development of domain and service ontologies, semantic enhancements of business process models, semantic Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) frameworks, and ontology-based knowledge management.

In this volume, researchers of Semantic Web technologies will find a wealth of challenging real-world scenarios to stimulate new fields of research, while developers of e-government systems as well as other stakeholders in public administration will appreciate the detailed presentations and discussions of numerous applications in areas such as e-government portals, personalization of Web-based public services, or integration and orchestration of public administration processes.

This book investigates how actors organize in order to solve a water quality problem. Research on the use of environmental resources has mainly focused on the circumstances needed for users to self-organize or to maintain an already sustainable way of resource use. Few studies have investigated the reasons why actors start to cooperate when they are faced with an environmental problem. Actor networks in three regions of the Rhine catchment area are scrutinized regarding a) actors' cooperation pattern when managing an environmental problem; and b) the factors that trigger actors in a common-pool resource situation to initiate cooperation. Water quality policy is analysed in two European countries - Germany and Luxembourg - and one non-European country - Switzerland -, providing an overview of the distinctive measures applied in these regions aiming to tackle the water quality problem of micro-pollutants in river surface water. Applying the social-ecological system framework (SESF) devised by E. Ostrom and her colleagues and Social Network Analysis (SNA), the current book combines qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the question of why actors cooperate in the management process of an environmental problem like water pollution.

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 discusses transport research and innovation, highlighting prospects for cooperation between different countries. To create a basis for such cooperation, the book first describes the status quo in individual countries, focusing on China, Japan and Korea, and identifies the main technological trends as well as current innovation policies in these countries, discussing their main advantages and the challenges to establishing collaborations between them. The book is a valuable resource for transport researchers, research authorities and transport organizations, not only in the three countries considered, but also in the US and the EU. By providing a revealing snapshot of current transport research and policies, it fosters exchanges and collaborations between nations.

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.

Food insecurity rates that skyrocketed with the Great Recession have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food.

Discover the latest insights in organization theory from a comprehensive and masterful volume Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 6th Edition provides readers with an authoritative reference for scholars, masters, and doctoral students in public management and public affairs programs in the United States and other nations. The 6th Edition of Understanding and Managing Public Organizations presents the latest research and insights from organization and management theory and their application to public organizations and the people in them. The book expands coverage from previous editions about organizational goals, performance and effectiveness, strategy, decision-making, structure and design, organizational change, operating environments, individuals and groups, motivation and work-related attitudes, leadership, teamwork, and more. Authors and professors Hal Rainey, Sergio Fernandez, and Deanna Malatesta provide new and expanded coverage of such topics as The context and distinctive character of public and nonprofit organizations, including expanded coverage of "publicness" and of the legal context including "state action" Performance management, measurement, organizational effectiveness, and managing for high performance Representative bureaucracy, workforce diversity, and performance Communication and information technology Employee engagement and empowerment, intrinsic motivation, self-determination theory, public service motivation, and positive organizational behavior--resilience, self-efficacy, optimism, and hope Recent developments in theory and thought on leadership, including authentic leadership, shared leadership, servant leadership, and integrated leadership Design and process topics including red tape and green tape, administrative burdens, and organizational routines Theoretical perspectives such as behavioral theory of decision making, resource dependence theory, and others, and their implications for public and nonprofit organizations Advances in theory and practice about rapid developments in collaborative governance, organizational networks, partnerships, and contracting Since the book is used in courses for students in numerous public affairs programs, this new edition updates the Instructor's Guide, with new and revised PowerPoint slides, cases, exercises, and discussion and examination questions These materials, with the topics in the chapters, are designed to address the learning outcomes required by NASPAA accreditation requirements Belonging on the shelf of scholars and students in public affairs, as well as anyone interested in public management or organization theory, this new edition of Understanding and Managing Public Organizations provides an advanced and comprehensive enhancement to a widely used and compelling series of previous editions.

This open access book examines the magnitude, causes of, and reactions to white-collar crime, based on the theories and research of those who have uncovered various forms of white-collar crime. It argues that the offenders who are convicted represent only 'the tip of the iceberg' of a much greater problem: because white-collar crime is forced to compete with other kinds of financial crime like social security fraud for police resources and so receives less attention and fewer investigations. Gottschalk and Gunnesdal also offer insights into estimation techniques for the shadow economy, in an attempt to comprehend the size of the problem. Holding broad appeal for academics, practitioners in public administration, and government agencies, this innovative study serves as a timely starting point for examining the lack of investigation, detection, and conviction of powerful white-collar criminals.

Democracy in Europe is about the impact of European integration on national democracies. It argues that the oft-cited democratic deficit is indeed a problem, but not so much at the level of the European Union per se as at the national level. This is because national leaders and publics have
yet to come to terms with the institutional impact of the EU on the traditional workings of their national democracies.
The book begins with a discussion of what the EU is-a new form of 'regional state' in which sovereignty is shared, boundaries are variable, identity composite, and democracy fragmented. It then goes on to examine the effects of this on EU member-states' institutions and ideas about democracy,
finding that institutional 'fit' matters. The 'compound' EU, in which governing activity is highly dispersed among multiple authorities, is more disruptive to 'simple' polities like Britain and France, where governing activity has traditionally been more concentrated in a single authority, than to
similarly 'compound' polities like Germany and Italy.
But the book concludes that the real problem for member-states is not so much that their practices have changed as that national ideas and discourse about democracy have not. The failure has been one of the 'communicative' discourse to the general public-which again has been more pronounced for
simple polities, despite their potentially greater capacity to communicate through a single voice, than for compound polities, where the 'coordinative' discourse among policy actors predominates.

This book examines public administration in South Asia in the context of rapid changes and modernization of administrative traditions, thoughts, and practices. The existing literature has, however, not given adequate attention to these developments, at least in a single volume. The book describes both the shared administrative traditions of Bhutan, Bangladesh, China, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and how far they have adapted their administrative systems to respond to contemporary administrative and governance challenges. The book studies how national civil service reforms have been carried out in each member state of South Asia and how the national civil service acts and different regulations are being implemented, as well as what are the critical factors associated with the implementation of national civil service acts and reform measures in the region.

This book identifies "development-oriented poverty reduction" as a crucial part of what is now often billed as China's unique development path, experience and model. China's success serves as an example for any society aiming to eradicate poverty. However, there is still a tough road ahead as the country enters a new phase of the war on poverty. In addition to a systematic overview of the country's development-oriented poverty reduction experiences over recent decades, the book also offers an outlook for poverty reduction in the coming years, including challenges the country will face as it enters the final stretch in the race to achieve moderate prosperity for all. It also discusses policy options for meeting the government's poverty-reduction targets by 2020 within the precision-targeting strategy framework.

"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.

Performing Governance sets out a new framework to assess the performance of partnerships and examines what these actually deliver. This is applied to three areas of New Labour's welfare policy; child safeguarding, urban regeneration and the modernisation of health and social care. This book contributes to understanding governance under New Labour.

This book analyses the role of evidence in taking wellbeing from an issue that has government attention to one that leads to significant policy change. In doing so, it draws on contributions from political science, policy theory and literature specifically on the evidence and policy relationship. The book has three main aims: to understand the role of evidence in shaping the prospects for wellbeing in public policy; to inform the barriers literature on the use of evidence in policy; and, to inform the multiple streams approach (MSA) to agenda-setting. While the book focuses on developments at UK government level, a number of the findings and arguments presented here have wider significance, both in relation to wellbeing developments elsewhere and to the theoretical literatures on agenda-setting and evidence use. The book draws on insights from interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders that were undertaken as part of the work of the Community Wellbeing Evidence Programme of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing.

This book explores the work of the European Ombudsman and her or his contribution to holding the EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies to account, through examination of complaints on maladministration, own-initiative inquiries and other proactive efforts. It considers the Ombudsman's current institutional and constitutional position and her or his 'method' of dealing with complaints, and unravels the depth of subject matters that fall under the Ombudsman's remit. A separate chapter focuses on transparency and access to documents. The last part of the book critically reflects upon the present mandate and practice of the Ombudsman, and discusses a number of possible proposals for improvement. This work has interdisciplinary appeal and will engage scholars in law, political science and public administration, as well as EU and national policy-makers.

This book provides a theoretical basis for understanding the phenomenon of renegotiations in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). It analyzes the case of transport projects, and provides empirical evidence from a variety of real-world projects. What drives renegotiations? Why are some projects more likely to be renegotiated than others? What are the outcomes? How can we improve the performance of renegotiation processes? These questions form the core of discussion in this book. PPPs are a procurement model for the delivery of infrastructure and public services that have experienced significant growth over the last three decades, particularly in terms of the development of transportation projects. The empirical evidence suggests that most PPP projects are inevitably renegotiated, i.e., the original contract needs to be adapted to new and unforeseen circumstances. The impacts of these changes on the welfare of the respective stakeholders are frequently asymmetric. Most academic research and professional guidelines are focused on PPP contract design and preparation of the procurement process, and very little has been published on the management and, mainly, the process of renegotiating that will - in all likelihood - occur. This book fills this gap in the academic discussion. Several country-based analyses and case studies from Europe and the Americas provide the reader with practical applications of the theory.

This book provides an overview of the science, technology, and innovation (STI) policies in Vietnam in a globalized world. Science, technology and innovation policies play important roles in boosting research and development, promoting entrepreneurship and building national innovation systems, especially in developing countries. The author offers in-depth analyses and insights on the STI system of Vietnam and provides comparisons with the major STI development trends around the world. Each chapter of the book includes intensive studies and analyses of the STI system and policies in Vietnam, providing valuable arguments and essential tools for students, researchers, and policy makers in the field of science and technology management, political science, public policy and business studies. The author then addresses potential challenges and proposes policy recommendations to overcome them to improve the performance of the Vietnam's STI system in the context of globalized economies and international integration of science and technology.

Eskom is a South African company that has developed from a state utility under apartheid into an efficient globally competitive state-owned enterprise. In 2001, Eskom received the Power Company of the Year title at the "Financial Times" Global Energy Awards Ceremony in New York. This book draws on the growing body of knowledge about corporate governance in state-owned enterprises. It locates Eskom's experience in that context and argues that a state-owned enterprise can be run as efficiently as any other. The key to performance excellence lies in good governance and the authors reveal how a public company can implement good governance practices when government is the major shareholder.

This book provides a study of governmental digitalization, an increasingly important area of policymaking within advanced capitalist states. It dives into a case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark, fusing a national policy study with local institutional analysis. Denmark is often framed as an international forerunner in terms of digitalizing its public sector and thus provides a particularly instructive setting for understanding this new political instrument. Advancing a cultural political economic approach, Schou and Hjelholt argue that digitalization is far from a quick technological fix. Instead, this area must be located against wider transformations within the political economy of capitalist states. Doing so, the book excavates the political roots of digitalization and reveals its institutional consequences. It shows how new relations are being formed between the state and its citizens. Digitalization and Public Sector Transformations pushes for a renewed approach to governmental digitalization and will be of interest to scholars working in the intersections of critical political economy, state theory and policy studies.