This book is dedicated to a fundamental conflict in modern states: those persons holding public office are no more than ordinary citizens. Therefore, their activities must - as a matter of principle - be subject to full judicial control. But at the same time, democratically legitimated politicians need some discretion in their decision-making. Allegations of politicians committing criminal offences in office quickly attract a great deal of media attention. Even politicians themselves frequently use such allegations to discredit their political opponents. However, to date this topic has not been fully addressed on an academic level. This book is a first step in this direction. The individual contributions cover topics such as: "bad" political decisions that result in a waste of taxpayers' money corruption and conflicts of interest in political decision-making immunities and procedural obstacles to the effective prosecution of politicians abuse of criminal law and criminal proceedings in the political arena criminal liability for decisions taken in situations of state emergency the role of criminal law in public opinion. Leading experts examine these and other issues from a comparative perspective.

Why do policy actors create branded policy ideas like the big society and does launching them on Twitter extend or curtail their life? This book reveals how policy analysis can adapt in an increasingly mediatised world, offering interpretive insights into the life and death of policy ideas in an era of hashtag politics.

A major objective of this volume is to create and share knowledge about the socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions of climate change. The authors analyze the effects of climate change on the social and environmental determinants of the health and well-being of communities (i.e. poverty, clean air, safe drinking water, food supplies) and on extreme events such as floods and hurricanes. The book covers topics such as the social and political dimensions of the ebola response, inequalities in urban migrant communities, as well as water-related health effects of climate change. The contributors recommend political and social-cultural strategies for mitigate, adapt and prevent the impacts of climate change to human and environmental health. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in new methods and tools to reduce risks and to increase health resilience to climate change.

Although most advanced industrialized countries are facing population aging and other social changes, public long-term care programs for the aged are remarkably diverse across them. This book accounts for the variations in elderly care policy by combining statistical analysis with historical case studies of Sweden, Japan and the USA.

This book discusses parliamentary oversight and its role in curbing corruption in developing countries. Over the past decade, a growing body of research at the global and regional levels has demonstrated that parliamentary oversight is an important determinant of corruption and that effective oversight of public expenditure is an essential component of national anti-corruption strategies and programs. However, little research has been undertaken at the country level regarding how parliamentary oversight is undertaken, which oversight mechanisms are effective or on how national parliaments interact with other anti-corruption stakeholders. This book presents the results of a new large-scale, quantitative analysis which identifies the mechanisms through which institutional arrangements impact corruption, specifically through country case studies on the Caribbean region, Ghana, Myanmar, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. Addressing a gap in scholarly knowledge while presenting practical policy advice for parliaments and for anti-corruption assistance agencies, this book will be of use to scholars interested in development, anti-corruption, public finance, as well as members of parliament, anti-corruption practitioners, and organizations working in parliamentary strengthening.

Making illegal residence unattractive is a way for Western governments to limit migration from non-Western countries. Focusing on Dutch neighbourhoods with substantial levels of unauthorised migrants, Illegal Residence and Public Safety in the Netherlands examines how restrictive immigration policy influences immigrant crime and perceived neighborhood security. Salient questions arise. To what extent, and under which conditions, do illegal residence and illegal migration impact public safety? Does having illegal residence status influence how people observe or break the law and other social rules? Do their ties with established groups, such as legal migrants, employers and partners, have any sway? Answers to these issues begin surfacing in this rich combination of quantitative information, comprising police figures and surveys on victimisation, and qualitative sources, including interviews at the Dutch Aliens Custody and urban field research.

The inability of many democratic governments in Africa to govern effectively has been an important factor in the many problems that the continent and its constituent countries have faced over the past decades. The question for scholars has been in learning what has caused the endemic failure of public institutions throughout Africa and understanding how to create good government in the future of the continent. Strongly supported by empirical evidence, this book challenges the existing literature on the subject by breaking with the traditional notion among academics that the key to good government in Africa is through the creation of unique administrative structures, or at the very least developing significantly adapted foreign structures with an emphasis on the specific structure of African societies. Instead the author contrasts this notion with theories from other research fields suggesting that public officials are likely to be interested in following professional norms and that organizations generally strive to imitate each other, regardless of geographical location. This book presents rich original empirical research from the field of state audit in Sub-Saharan Africa where the above different theoretical approaches are empirically explored. The research results contradict many assumptions made in the literature on development and points to the importance of adding other dimensions, such as professional norms, to nuance the discussion of the future of the African continent.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

Many disasters are approached by researchers, managers and policymakers as if they have a clear beginning, middle and end. But often the experience of being in a disaster is not like this. This book offers non-linear, non-prescriptive ways of thinking about disasters and allows the people affected by disaster the chance to speak.

Combining practical experience with academic analysis this book explores the social and organizational dynamics of performance indicators. It moves beyond the technicalities of measurement and indicators and looks at how performance information is changing the public sector.

The public sector is going through a period of fundamental change. Service delivery, policy making and policy processes are being carried out by new actors and organisations with new interests, methods and discourses, related to the emergence of new forms of governance. This timely book from bestselling author Stephen Ball and Carolina Junemann uses network analysis and interviews with key actors to address these changes, with a particular focus on education and the increasingly important role of new philanthropy. Critically engaging with the burgeoning literature on new governance, they present a new method for researching governance - network ethnography- which allows identification of the increasing influence of finance capital and education businesses in policy and public service delivery. In a highly original and very topical analysis of the practical workings of the Third Way and the Big Society, the book will be useful to practicing social and education policy analysts and theorists and ideal supplementary reading for students and researchers of social and education policy.

In this latest volume of the Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management series, Professors John Diamond and Joyce Liddle have gathered leading scholars and new research to help discern some immediate areas of public policy making that have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. With this new profoundly different context, “business as normal” is seen as no longer viable. Reimagining Public Sector Management delves into the crisis and emergency management of the pandemic, exploring the ways in which different agencies responded to the pandemic and the lessons learnt in terms of disaster planning and co-ordination. Chapters analyse the ways in which health services and the associated work linked to vaccine development provided significant lessons for those involved in public policy making and analysis before highlighting the emergence of a new consensus on the role of public agencies and institutions could play in the post pandemic environment as captured in the slogan “Build Back Better”.

This book explores the dimensions and characteristics of social vulnerability in Western Europe. It provides a broad empirical foundation for recent theories on the emergence of new social risks in post-industrial societies, revealing to what extent social risks are compromising the 'normal' functioning of the European population.

The Handbook of West European Pension Politics provides scholars, policy-makers and students with a complete overview of the political and policy issues involved in pension policy, and well as case studies of contemporary pension politics (1980 to present) in 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The book is suitable as a text for courses in comparative politics, European Studies, social policy, comparative public policy and public administration. Each chapter is written by an expert on pension politics and is presented in a standardized format with standardized tables and figures that describe: political institutions; government coalitions, parliamentary and electoral majorities; the party system; the pension system; proposed and enacted pension reforms.

This study unravels the real dynamics at stake within the Lebanese Madame/Sri Lankan housemaid relationship. Unraveled in this book are the real dynamics at stake in the Madame/housemaid relationship. While cases of extreme physical abuse by the Lebanese women who hire housemaids - Madames - are an exception, what has become normalised are more insidious patterns of domination used to control each and every aspect of their employees' lives. For their part, Sri Lankan housemaids are not merely passive victims. Away from direct provocation and first-hand repercussions, they try to deflect what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'symbolic violence'. These attempts at 'everyday forms of resistance', as defined by James Scott, can help loosen their employers' grip. Yet, as this unprecedented study shows, the Madame/housemaid relationship and the rules that govern it remain under the managerial hold of the Madame.

Successful delivery of public policy is increasingly dependent upon the effectiveness of information technology and systems. However, reformers must navigate the complex interactions between IT limitations, policy minefields, and complicated organizational networks which make change difficult. Public Sector Reform Using Information Technologies: Transforming Policy into Practice offers an analytical, interdisciplinary examination of electronic governance implementation from theoretical and practical perspectives. Researchers in fields like computer science, information systems, and sociology, and practitioners in policy formulation, implementation, and IT and systems deployment will find useful insights for improving the effectiveness of government services. Successfully transforming public policy using IT will help minimize the political and financial repercussions of failed implementations, meet the increasing expectations of citizens in modern democracies, and shape the public sector of the future.

A comparative study of how economic and political differences between Antwerp and Barcelona influence the life-course trajectories of Senegalese and Gambian migrants. This book examines two major social changes experienced by European cities in the last two decades: post-industrial economic restructuring and new immigration flows. The link between both has been extensively discussed throughout a variety of theoretical approaches and in numerous descriptive contributions. Adding to those studies, this research focuses on three elements of migratory experience that have been relatively neglected thus far: a dynamic view of changes over time, the influence of national welfare and legislation frameworks, and the importance of support mechanisms outside the labour market. The material underpinning the arguments is the qualitative life-course analysis of 81 in-depth interviews with Senegambian migrants living in Antwerp and Barcelona.

As countries around the world make continuous strides in developing their economies, it has become increasingly important to evaluate the different ways culture impacts the growth of a region. Global Perspectives on Development Administration and Cultural Change investigates the impact of economic growth on different demographics throughout the world. Identifying theoretical concepts and notable topics in the areas of economic development, organizational culture, and cultural shifts, this book is an essential reference source for policymakers, development planners, international institutions, public policy analysts, administrators, researchers, and NGOs.

Economic growth continues to transform the economic and political landscape of Asia. Equally the policies now being adopted to promote private sector participation, re-structure state entities, and reduce the presence of the state in the provision of public goods and services, are tied to fundamental transformations in Asia's state-society relations. The global cast of contributors present a timely analysis of the impact of neo-liberalism on Asia's developmental policies and the organisation of Asian states and markets. Ironically, the "developmental state" that has historically driven Asia's rapid economic transformation is now threatened by an increasingly dominant neoliberal agenda that aims to roll back the state in the name of market fundamentalism.

This book provides rare insights into the nature of contemporary, technologically-facilitated government. Its multidisciplinary approach demonstrates that information technology is more than a tool for politicians and policy-makers. E-government has reconfigured public administration, policy, power and citizenship.

The pursuit for better governance has assumed center stage in developmental discourse as well as reform initiatives of all organizations working for the public welfare, and includes such issues as service delivery and responding to citizens' needs and demands. In the era of globalization, multilevel and new modes of governance are changing the traditional governance models of nation states, accelerated by technological innovation, rising citizen expectation, policy intervention from international and multilateral donor communities, and the hegemony of western ideology imposed on many developing nations. However, a universally accepted and agreed upon definition of 'governance' still remains elusive. There is no consensus or agreement as to what would be the nature and form of governance and public administration. The question that is raised: Is there a universal governance mechanism that fits in all contexts or governance mechanisms should be based on home grown ideas?One can see various programs and policies of reforms and reorganizations in public administration in the developing countries, but these efforts have not been effective to address the challenging issues of economic development, employment generation, poverty reduction, ensuring equality of access to public services, maintaining fairness and equity, security and safety of citizens, social cohesion, democratic institution building, ensuring broader participation in the decision making process, and improving the quality of life. Therefore, there is a widespread concern for better governance or sound governance to bridge the gap between theory and practice, making this book of interest to academics as well as policy-makers in global public administration.