This is the first book to articulate resilience-based public policy for a constantly changing, complex, and uncertain risk society. Its primary focus is on operationalizing resilience, i.e., on incorporating elements of resilience in public policy in the context of our modern risk society.While there is a wealth of literature on resilience and disaster risk management, there are few publications that focus on the nexus of resilience and public policy, resulting in gaps between various fields and public policy for resilient societies and disaster risk management. In response, this book integrates the latest theoretical insights on public policy and resilience and the latest practical analyses of case studies such as the Tohoku Disaster (Great East Japan Earthquake) in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy on the North American East Coast in 2012 to provide policy tools for future resilient societies and disaster risk management. The recent disaster cases illustrate that our changing, complex and uncertain risk environment requires far more resilience-based public policy through co-production of knowledge than is normally required for conventional disasters. By linking various fields and public policy, the book articulates a resilience-based public policy, i.e., the incorporation of resilience into various entities by designing and implementing "linkages." These include national-to-local linkages, linkages between different entities such as scientific communities and decision makers, and linkages between financial, human, and information resources. Thus, the nexus of resilience and public policy presented in this book aims at better public policy to face a changing and complex risk society, together with fundamental uncertainties at regional, national, and local levels around the world.

This book discusses blockchain technology and its potential applications in digital government and the public sector. With its robust infrastructure and append-only record system, blockchain technology is being increasingly employed in the public sector, specifically where trustworthiness and security are of importance. Written by leading scholars and practitioners, this edited volume presents challenges, benefits, regulations, frameworks, taxonomies, and applications of blockchain technology in the public domain. Specifically, the book analyzes the implementation of blockchain technologies in the public sector and the potential reforms it would bring. It discusses emerging technologies and their role in the implementation of blockchain technologies in the public sector. The book details the role of blockchain in the creation of public value in the delivery of public sector services. The book analyzes effects, impacts, and outcomes from the implementation of blockchain technologies in the public sector in select case studies. Providing up-to-date information on important developments regarding blockchain in government around the world, this volume will appeal to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations, and technical experts looking to understand how blockchain can enhance public service delivery.

Do philosophers have a responsibility to their society that is distinct from their responsibility to it as citizens? This edited volume explores both what type of contribution philosophy can make and what type of reasoning is appropriate when addressing public matters now. These questions are posed by leading international scholars working in the fields of moral and political philosophy. Each contribution also investigates the central issue of how to combine critical, rational analysis with a commitment to politically relevant public engagement. The contributions to this volume analyse issues raised in practical ethics, including abortion, embryology, and assisted suicide. They consider the role of ethical commitment in the philosophical analysis of contemporary political issues, and engage with matters of public policy such as poverty, the arts, meaningful work, as well as the evidence base for policy. They also examine the normative legitimacy of power, including the use of violence.

There is a widely acknowledged evaluation gap in the field of e-participation practice and research, a lack of systematic evaluation with regard to process organization, outcome and impacts. This book addresses the state of the art of e-participation research and the existing evaluation gap by reviewing various evaluation approaches and providing a multidisciplinary concept for evaluating the output, outcome and impact of citizen participation via the Internet as well as via traditional media. It offers new knowledge based on empirical results of its application (tailored to different forms and levels of e-participation) in an international comparative perspective. The book will advance the academic study and practical application of e-participation through fresh insights, largely drawing on theoretical arguments and empirical research results gained in the European collaborative project "e2democracy". It applies the same research instruments to a set of similar citizen participation processes in seven local communities in three countries (Austria, Germany and Spain). The generic evaluation framework has been tailored to a tested toolset, and the presentation and discussion of related evaluation results aims at clarifying to what extent these tools can be applied to other consultation and collaboration processes, making the book of interest to policymakers and scholars alike.

Food Stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has endured and expanded in recent years. The program has been preserved and in some cases enhanced as a result of its inclusion in the Farm Bill, being characterized as a safety net of last resort and as a program for the deserving poor.

This book examines the use of game elements to encourage citizens to participate in political decision-making and the planning of large-scale public sector projects. It argues that success is based on a personal concern with the project and a belief in the influence on political decision making, but also on fun. Without fun, only a very small group of the 'usual suspects' will participate, especially in classic policymaking approaches like citizens' panels which require time and physical attendance. The book also examines the relationship between representative democracy and citizen participation from the perspective of direct democratic instruments in Germany. Readers from different countries with different political systems can decide for themselves, if and how the results from Germany are transferable to their respective conditions. Grounded in theoretical literature and statistical data, the book also makes use of narratives, applying a 'storytelling' approach to the case studies.

This book identifies key factors necessary for a well-functioning information infrastructure and explores how information culture impacts the management of public information, stressing the need for a proactive and holistic information management approach amidst e-Government development. In an effort to deal with an organization's scattered information resources, Enterprise Content Management, Records Management and Information Culture Amidst E-Government Development investigates the key differences between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Records Management (RM), the impact of e-Government development on information management and the role of information in enhancing accountability and transparency of government institutions. The book hence identifies factors that contribute to a well-functioning information infrastructure and further explores how information culture impacts the management of public information. It highlights the Records Continuum Model (RCM) thinking as a more progressive way of managing digital information in an era of pluralization of government information. It also emphasizes the need for information/records management skills amidst e-Government development. Ideas about records, information, and content management have fundamentally changed and developed because of increasing digitalization. Though not fully harmonized, these new ideas commonly stress and underpin the need for a proactive and holistic information management approach. The proactive approach entails planning for the management of the entire information continuum before the information is created. For private enterprises and government institutions endeavoring to meet new information demands from customers, citizens and the society at large, such an approach is a prerequisite for accomplishing their missions. It could be argued that information is and has always been essential to all human activities and we are witnessing a transformation of the information landscape.

This book examines failure in the urbanisation of Northwest China as a result of government industrial policies that have impacted on the economic development of the region. By looking at the under-researched provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Inner Mongolia, which make up a quarter of China's territory, Zheng and Deng challenge the common story of China's miracle growth and reveal the dark side of the country's pursuit of modernity. Severe weather conditions, chronic drought, permanent lack of oxygen and unforgiving terrain in the Northwest make farming, manufacture and services difficult simply because people tend not to stay. Yet, China's current political system forces growth to take place even though basic conditions and prerequisites for market-based growth are missing. This volume analyses 'ghost cities' and social tension in the process of 'forced urbanisation' in which huge amount of resources are wasted, the local environment is systematically damaged and ordinary people's basic rights are brutally violated in the name of higher GDP and greater government glory.

This edited volume examines policies aimed at increasing the representation of women in governing institutions in six South Asian countries. Divided into three parts, it addresses the implications of uniformity and diversity for the substantive representation of women in parliament, civil service and local government. The contributing authors explore the scope and limits of 'positive discriminatory policies' within distinct country contexts, and the implications of the lack of such policies in other countries. Their findings shed new light on the extent to which the higher presence of women in different governing institutions matters, particularly in respect of promoting women's issues; and also on the way men and women in different governing institutions look upon each other's roles and adopt strategies for mutual adjustment. This innovative collection will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, public policy and administration, international relations, law and political science.

This open access book investigates the complexity and the modalities of securitization of migration and border control at the EU level. It discusses and compares how different EU institutions and agencies have been deploying different logics of security, e.g. humanitarianism or management of risk, while framing increased migratory flows and so called migration crisis as a security problem. The book argues that the (re)development of EU migration and border control policies in response to increased migratory flows of 2015 have revealed an increasingly tangled nature of securitization of migration in the EU. This is reflected in the intertwining of security logics where migrants and human mobility tend to be securitized through different, sometimes multiple, interpretative lenses at different stages of policy framing. From a theoretical point of view, the book develops a fresh analytical perspective that further contributes to burgeoning discussion on securitization theory. By bridging the literature on policy framing and securitization it makes a significant contribution to the debates on both securitization and migration. As such this book is of great interest to students, academics, policy makers and all those working in the fields of EU politics, migration, security, and international relations.

This book analyses why the Ukrainian state established asylum laws and policies in the thirty years since 1991, even though the number of asylum seekers was very low. International and non-governmental organisations transferred international asylum norms to Ukraine. Various state and non-state actors participated in this process, translating, spreading, and resisting those norms. In many cases, legislative adoption was driven by domestic politicians' pursuit of recognition by international organisations, such as the European Union and the Council of Europe, and by their desire to meet conditionality requirements. NGOs sought to influence administrative practices, alternating between confrontational and conciliatory, formal and informal approaches, and often relying on personal contacts. Actors used and shifted between scales in order to transfer norms or resist transfer. In the process, they produced, renegotiated, and confirmed those scales. For instance, NGOs resorting to the European Court of Human Rights to prevent refoulement placed the European scale above the national scale. This book offers a new multi-actor and multi-scalar analysis of policy transfer.

This book analyzes climate policy integration processes by investigating cause-effect relations in cases of integrating climate policy in energy and land-use sectors of Indonesia and Mexico, taking a novel comparative case study approach. The book identifies root causes for integration outside of the public administration, discussing decisive factors in the political economy of the energy and land-use sectors. Showing how policy windows may open for the successful integration of climate policies nevertheless, the book addresses the need to identify and properly use these windows to establish the administrative and institutional arrangements for effective climate policy implementation. This book offers two-fold insights for overcoming the challenges posed by climate policy integration: Firstly, it contributes to theory-building by amending theories of the policy process and by taking a wider perspective on the role of integration in the context of transformational change processes in emerging economies. Secondly, it sets forth a set of research-based practical policy recommendations on how to foster climate policy integration in the political decision-making processes as well as the public administration structures. Therefore, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers of public policy, public administration, political science, and environmental sciences, as well as policy-makers and practitioners interested in a better understanding of climate policy integration in energy and land-use sectors.

This book examines the socio-political conflicts which have arisen since Hong Kong's return to China and confronts the fundamental problems in the design of the One Country, Two Systems (OCTS) Model. It considers not only the issue of democratization, but also the institutional fractures in the executive-dominant political system and the disconnection between the executive and the legislature. It describes the drastic changes which have affected social mobilization and political activism in Hong Kong, as well as the pattern of interaction between the government and civil society. This edited volume brings together a team of cutting-edge researchers to examine the operation of the One Country, Two Systems (OCTS) Model in Hong Kong over the past 20 years. The discussion and analysis offered by the contributors will cast light on social and political tensions and conflicts that will continue to unfold in the coming years. This timely account, published on the 20th anniversary of the handover, will be a valuable read for students and scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies.

In recent years, crowdfunding has become important and it has been enthusiastically used not only by commercial organizations but also by the public sector. This alternative source of financing in times of constrained government budgets enables citizens to vote with their dollars online to bring ideas into reality. This book sheds light on the developing concept of crowdfunding in the public sector, with an overview of current academic discussions and best practices on crowdfunding in the public sector. The volume approaches crowdfunding in the public sector from an integrated perspective, addressing the dearth of publications on the subject. The book gathers a wealth of theoretical information, ideas, best practices and lessons learned in the context of executing concrete crowdfunding projects, and assess methodological approaches to integrating the topic of crowdfunding in public organizations curricula. The book provides definitions, insights and examples of this managerial perspective resulting in a theoretical framework of crowdfunding in the public sector. The contributors also explore different crowdfunding applications in public sectors such as local government, higher education, schools, arts & culture organizations, healthcare, energy sector, and police services, which are presented in several case studies. This is a unique book in the field that points the way forward both for policymakers and for the research community in terms of thinking about crowdfunding in the public sector and the complex issues surrounding its development.

This book provides unique insights into the role of policy capacity in policymaking and policy change, as it is being uncovered at the research frontier in contemporary policy studies. The book is structured into a series of sections on policy capacity in theory and practice, each focusing on a specific aspect of policy capacity and its influence on policy formulation, decision-making, implementation and evaluation. In addition to making a significant contribution to the body of literature on the theoretical approaches to researching the role of capacity in policymaking, it also provides practical examples of the application of these approaches through a variety of national and sectoral case studies. Including contributions from authors working in a wide variety of disciplines, the book demonstrates, across the various topics investigated, many commonalities and consistencies in relation to the study of policy capacity and policy-making. This work has interdisciplinary appeal and will engage scholars in fields ranging from geography to communications, health, social work and political science, amongst others with an interest in public policy.

This book presents a study of the relationship between Cabinet-level Ministers and top civil servants in Ireland. The nature of this relationship can potentially have far-reaching effects on people's lives as it can influence the type of public policy agreed at top levels of government. A total of sixteen interviews were carried out for the research, eight with retired Cabinet-level Ministers and eight with retired Secretaries General of Irish government departments. Anonymity, not just for the participants but also for the government departments in which they had served, was vital to the success of the research. Also vital was the fact that only retirees were interviewed as this removed the fear for participants that their careers might suffer if they spoke too frankly. The result is a collection of interviews containing frank and open views on the relationship between Ministers and their officials and on how this relationship influences public policy development.

Governing New Democracies is a fully comparative study of decision-making processes in the cabinets of ten post-communist countries of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe. It is based on interviews collected from over 300 ministers to such questions as how far do cabinet members participate in cabinet meetings, how do they assess their prime ministers, how do they relate to their departments and to the civil servants under them. Thus, this book provides the first comprehensive panorama of life in cabinet governments from those who are the main actors in these institutions.

This book explores regulatory conundrums around adolescent sexual health, abortion and assisted reproductive technologies in the UK. In doing so, it seeks to examine the various stages at which women's reproductive health comes into contact with government action and assesses how these legal and policy fields are shaped through the conceptual lens of policy networks. Transformed expectations of women's roles, along with developed biological capabilities and understandings of gender and sexuality have driven an increasingly complex politics of sex and reproduction. The book argues that assumed medial control over these issues is overshadowed by government calculations of cost-effectiveness. Moreover, decisions on the design of programmes and levels of access continually reflect traditional family formation. The outcome is unsurprisingly the marginalisation of women in publicly funded healthcare, but with a clear further impact on gender and sex minorities. COVID-19 has disrupted these dynamics further, altering the manner in which previously inhibited patients engage with the NHS. As the pandemic recedes it has become more timely than ever to consider the future of gendered healthcare in the UK, and to question the likelihood of long term change in the ability of patients to inform health policy decisions. The book will appeal to scholars and students of gender and health policy, law and politics, as well as healthcare practitioners.

This book investigates why the rate of female labor force participation in the Middle East and North Africa is the lowest in the world. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the book explains that the primary reason for the low rate of female labor force participation is the strong institutions of patriarchy in the region. Using multiple proxies for patriarchy, this book quantifies the multi-dimensional concept of patriarchy in order to measure it across sixty developing countries over thirty years. The findings show that Middle Eastern and North African countries have higher levels of patriarchy with regards to women's participation in public spheres compared with the rest of the world. Although the rate of formal female labor force participation is low, women across the region contribute greatly to the financial wellbeing of their families and communities. By defining a woman's place as in the home, patriarchy has made women's economic activities invisible to official labor statistics since it has caused many women to work in the informal sector of the economy or work as unpaid workers, thus creating an illusion that women in the region are not economically active. While religion has often legitimized patriarchy, oil income has made it affordable for many countries in the region.

What is the secret of effective government in today's complex and turbulent world? In this collection of essays written for Singapore's leading news organisations, public policy practitioner turned academic Terence Ho trains his focus on the issues of the day: education, demographics, economic growth, inflation, taxes and social support, among others.In unpacking these issues and what they mean for Singapore, Terence distils policy principles relevant to societies across the world as they grapple with the challenges of rising inequality, political polarisation, technological disruption, climate change and more.The essays in this collection draw insights from the author's nearly two decades of experience in Singapore's Public Service, recognised as one of the world's most innovative. They open a window into the future of governance in Singapore and beyond.

This edited collection goes beyond the limited definition of borders as simply dividing lines across states, to uncover another, yet related, type of division: one that separates policies and institutions from public debate and contestation. Bringing together expertise from established and emerging academics, it examines the fluid and varied borderscape across policy and the public domains. The chapters encompass a wide range of analyses that covers local, national and transnational frameworks, policies and private actors. In doing so, Migration, Borders and Citizenship reveals the tensions between border control and state economic interests; legal frameworks designed to contain criminality and solidarity movements; international conventions, national constitutions and local migration governance; and democratic and exclusive constructions of citizenship. This novel approach to the politics of borders will appeal to sociologists, political scientists and geographers working in the fields of migration, citizenship, urban geography and human rights; in addition to students and scholars of security studies and international relations.

This book analyzes the political and economic conditions that precipitated the nuclear power and ratepayer protest and examines citizen opposition to the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) nuclear venture between 1976 and 1981. .

This book describes the administrative system of Bhutan. Divided into two main parts, the first part of the book describes the Bhutanese public administration by examining the various paradigms and ideal types of public administration. Chapters examine the paradigms and ideal types in the field of public administration, and the paradigm concept helps in explaining the dynamics and the interaction of the application of public sector reforms within the context of the ideal types. Based on the historical and recent reforms, the Bhutanese administrative system has been mapped onto the ideal type typology to show hybridity with a mix and layering of characteristics of paradigms. The second part of the book examines the dynamics of implementing and evaluating the Position Classification System (PCS). This part includes chapters which evaluate the PCS and discusses the dynamics of the reform. It synthesizes the findings of the implementation of the PCS and connects it to the broader discussions on public sector reforms. It discusses the trajectory of public sector reform and the points of convergences and divergences within this trajectory.

This book explores the role of scientific evidence within United Nations (UN) deliberation by examining the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), endorsed by Member States in 2015. Using the SDGs as a case study, this book addresses a key gap in our understanding of the role of evidence in contemporary international policy-making. It is structured around three overarching questions: (1) how does scientific evidence influence multilateral policy development within the UN General Assembly? (2) how did evidence shape the goals and targets that constitute the SDGs?; and (3) how did institutional arrangements and non-state actor engagements mediate the evidence-to-policy process in the development of the SDGs? The ultimate intention is to tease out lessons on global policy-making and to understand the influence of different evidence inputs and institutional factors in shaping outcomes. To understand the value afforded to scientific evidence within multilateral deliberation, a conceptual framework is provided drawing upon literature from policy studies and political science, including recent theories of evidence-informed policy-making and new institutionalism. It posits that the success or failure of evidence informing global political processes rests upon the representation and access of scientific stakeholders, levels of community organisation, the framing and presentation of evidence, and time, including the duration over which evidence and key conceptual ideas are presented. Cutting across the discussion is the fundamental question of whose evidence counts and how expertise is defined? The framework is tested with specific reference to three themes that were prominent during the SDG negotiation process; public health (articulated in SDG 3), urban sustainability (articulated in SDG 11), and data and information systems (which were a cross-cutting theme of the dialogue). Within each, scientific communities had specific demands and through an exploration of key literature, including evidence inputs and UN documentation, as well as through key informant interviews, the translation of these scientific ideas into policy priorities is uncovered. The intended audiences of this book include academic practitioners studying evidence to policy processes, multilateral negotiation and/or UN policy planning. The book also intends to provide useful insights for policy makers, including UN diplomats, officials and staff working to improve the quality of evidence communication and uptake within multilateral institutions. Finally, it aims to support the whole global academic and scientific community, including students of public policy and political science, by providing insights on how to input into, influence, and even shape international evidence-informed policy-making.