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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Public administration
This book examines the integration experiences of refugees to Sweden from Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), and more recently from Syria (2014-2018) - two of the largest-scale refugee movements in Europe for the last thirty years. It focuses on refugees' interactions with key institutions of integration including language training, civic orientation, validation of previous educational experience, organizations and multiple labour market initiatives targeting refugees. Drawing on interviews with the refugees themselves, it offers a nuanced analysis of how the institutions of integration operate on a daily basis, and the effects they have on the lives of those who take part in them. The authors' comparative approach highlights the particularities of each refugee movement while also revealing developments and persistent issues within institutions of integration in the intervening years between the Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Syrian conflicts. Its conclusion, which situates the Swedish case within the broader European context, demonstrates the wider significance of this timely study. It will provide a valuable resource for policymakers in addition to students and scholars of migration studies, social policy, and public policy and business administration.
Drawing on research from the administrative sciences and using organizational, institutional and decision-making theories, this volume examines the emerging bureaucratic framework of the EU and highlights that analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the EU's administrative capacities is essential to understand how it shapes European public policy.
This volume chronicles the policy challenges and adaptations faced and made by the South Korean government during the post-industrialization and democratization period. Following the model set by the first volume in the series, which covered the economic and social development during the developmental period from the 1960s to the 1980s, this volume examines how and to what extent the South Korean government has adapted to a variety of political, economic and social transformations since the 1990s. The book is divided in two parts. Part I reviews the changing policy environments and government policy paradigms in the wake of industrialization and democratization, focusing on the reorganization and coordination of government ministries and agencies. Part II explores key public policy areas, such as economics, social welfare, and foreign relations, where the South Korean government has successfully adapted to new policy challenges and environments. Drawing policy implications for the future actions of the South Korean government as well as for those countries wishing to replicate South Korea's success and avoid its errors, this book of interest to both scholars and policy-makers concerned with development in the Asia-Pacific.
Two issues have been central within political philosophy in the last decade or so. The first is the debate over 'the politics of distribution versus the politics of recognition, ' which is usually associated with the work of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser. The second is discussion of the phenomenon known as globalization, focusing on the notions of cosmopolitanism and global justice. This book explores the relationship between these two issues. It considers not only the global dimension of the politics of recognition, but also how recognition theory can provide new insights into our understanding of problems of global justice, especially those of a non-distributive nature. A number of the contributors consider the relevance of Hegel's theory of recognition for our understanding of these issues.
In this new fifth edition, there is a strong focus on the increasing concern over infrastructure resilience from the threat of serious storms, human activity, and population growth. The new edition also looks technologies that urban transportation planners are increasingly focused on, such as vehicle to vehicle communications and driver-less cars, which have the potential to radically improve transportation. This book also investigates the effects of transportation on the health of travelers and the general public, and the ways in which these concerns have become additional factors in the transportation and infrastructure planning and policy process. The development of U.S. urban transportation policy over the past half-century illustrates the changing relationships among federal, state, and local governments. This comprehensive text examines the evolution of urban transportation planning from early developments in highway planning in the 1930s to today's concerns over sustainable development, security, and pollution control. Highlighting major national events, the book examines the influence of legislation, regulations, conferences, federal programs, and advances in planning procedures and technology. The volume provides in-depth coverage of the most significant event in transportation planning, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, which created a federal mandate for a comprehensive urban transportation planning process, carried out cooperatively by states and local governments with federal funding. Claiming that urban transportation planning is more sophisticated, costly, and complex than its highway and transit planning predecessors, the book demonstrates how urban transportation planning evolved in response to changes in such factors as the environment, energy, development patterns, intergovernmental coordination, and federal transit programs. This new edition includes analyses of the growing threats to infrastructure, new projects in infrastructure resilience, the promise of new technologies to improve urban transportation, and the recent shifts in U.S. transportation policy. This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in transportation legislation and policy, eco-justice, and regional and urban planning.
"In this innovative study, Dr Ruel explores why political alternation-a bedrock of democratic functioning-has been largely absent in three under-studied regions in Portugal and Spain. Focusing on Madeira, the Azores and the Canary Islands, this book explains how party competition, intra-party democracy and regional economic performance have contributed to political party stasis since the return of democracy in the mid-1970s." -Paul M. Heywood, Sir Francis Hill Professor of European Politics seconded 0.5 FTE to Global Integrity, Washington DC (2018-21), Faculty of Social Science, University of Nottingham, UK This book is about political alternation. It's about parties and politicians. It's about power and resources employed to secure longevity in power over time at Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands. This book explores the phenomenon of political alternation through an in-depth contextual understanding of the path of regional historical legacies at democratization and decentralization processes started in the 1970s; the institutional architectures and the scope of regional authority endowed in those regions; the specific dynamics of regional politics; and the constellation of political parties and actors and the regional elections results, as well as contextual factors that might explain why some political parties have better performances than other at regional elections. Throughout comparative lessons Ruel seeks to highlight the range of factors that affect regional electoral dynamics and outcomes and to develop a comprehensive understanding of the drivers of long-standing incumbency (Azores and Canary Islands) or the absence of political alternation (Madeira) within regional democracies.
In the past 10 years, the Member States of the European Union (EU) have intensified their exchange of information for the purposes of preventing and combating serious cross-border crime, as manifested in three main aspects. Firstly, there is a need to ensure the practical application of innovative principles (availability, mutual recognition) and concepts (Information Management Strategy, European Information Exchange Model) for tackling criminal organisations and networks that threaten the Internal Security of the EU. Secondly, there has been a gradual consolidation of EU agencies and bodies (Eurojust, Europol) aimed at promoting cooperation and dialogue among law enforcement officials and judicial authorities responsible for preventing and combating drug trafficking, trafficking in human beings, child pornography, and other serious trans-national offences. Thirdly, important EU information systems and databases (Prum, SIS-II, ECRIS) have been created, enabling law enforcement and judicial authorities to gain access to essential information on criminal phenomena and organisations. Pursuing a practice-orientated approach, this work provides comprehensive coverage of all these measures, as well as the applicable rules governing data quality, data protection and data security. It is especially intended for law enforcement and judicial authorities who need to develop the appropriate expertise for the practical application of the above-mentioned principles. It also offers a solid basis of practical training material for police training centres and judicial schools.
This book is the first comprehensive, full-scale treatment of the politics, law, and economics with regard to the policies and policy instruments for budget stabilization at the local level. It examines budget stabilization in the United States from the 1910s to 2010 (from adoption of public budgeting in this country through the Great Recession). In addition, it provides details on the methods and results of empirical tests of the effects of budget stabilization instruments on government operations, key/basic services provision, and some other aspects of social and economic life at the local level, including full-purpose governments (county, metro city, municipality, township, and village) as well as special (single-) purpose governments (like school districts and transportation districts). This book dissects an important and pressing issue in public financial administration, analyzes a lesson that has been in the learning process, especially in the United States, and identifies theoretical threads for scholarly refinement, which will be put into specific contexts of policy design and implementation. This book will be of interest to scholars in political science, economics, public choice and in public administration, where it will also appeal to policy-makers.
This book examines the role of unauthorized water use in the American West (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming) and the coming demand for water accountability. Arguing that status quo responses to unauthorized water use (or water theft) and the protection of water rights are largely inadequate, this title examines the far-ranging impacts of this lackluster response on issues ranging from food production to urban livability, and concludes that there will be intense pressure at both the federal and state level to address these issues. Utilizing qualitative and quantitative models and collaborative management literature to identify ideal approaches, this project ultimately seeks to address this major crisis of states' legitimacy and analyze potential solutions under the ever-expanding threat of climate change.
Seth Masket's The Inevitable Party is a study of anti-party reforms and why they fail. Numerous reform movements over the past century have designated parties as the enemy of democracy, and they have found a willing ally in the American people in their efforts to rein in and occasionally root out parties. Masket investigates several of these anti-party reform efforts - from open primaries to campaign finance restrictions to nonpartisan legislatures - using legislative roll call votes, campaign donations patterns, and extensive interviews with local political elites. These cases each demonstrate parties adapting to, and sometimes thriving amidst, reforms designed to weaken or destroy them. The reason for these reforms' failures, the book argues, is that they proceed from an incorrect conception of just what a party is. Parties are not rigid structures that can be wished or legislated away; they are networks of creative and adaptive policy demanders who use their influence to determine just what sorts of people get nominated for office. Even while these reforms tend to fail, however, they impose considerable costs on society, usually reducing transparency and accountability in politics and government.
This book, through an analysis of 49,355 high value public procurement contracts awarded between 2004 and 2011, provides systematic evidence on favoritism in public procurement in Turkey. Public procurement is one of the main areas where the government and the private sector interact extensively and is thus open to favoritism and corruption. In Turkey, the new Public Procurement Law, which was drafted with the pull of the EU-IMF-WB nexus, has been amended more than 150 times by the AKP government. In addition to examining favoritism, this book also demonstrates how the legal amendments have increased the use of less competitive procurement methods and discretion in awarding contracts. The results reveal that the AKP majority government has used public procurement as an influential tool both to increase its electoral success, build its own elites and finance politics. The use of public procurement for rent creation and distribution is found to be particularly extensive in the construction and the services sector through the TOKI projects and the Municipal procurements.
This book analyzes the common set of obstacles to the development and integration of government Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects and effective e-government initiatives in developing countries. It draws on the expertise and experience of more developed states in the Pacific, notably Australia and New Zealand, both highly rated in global rankings for e-government and active in a variety of e-government development projects across the region. There has been a general failure to identify priorities and align projects with local needs in ICT/e-government projects. Small Island Developing States (or SIDS) present a unique problem in terms of e-government. Not only do they suffer from a common set of barriers to ICT development such as their remoteness, geographical dispersion, moist tropical climates, largely rural populations, and lack of ICT capacity and infrastructure, but are also dependent on external agencies for investment, and must negotiate with powerful donors who have conflicting agendas. E-government is widely regarded as 'transformational', increasing efficiency, productivity, accountability, economic growth, and citizen involvement. But while the governments of SIDS are committed to harnessing ICTs for effective government and economic development, they face major challenges in establishing successful e-government initiatives, due to the problems outlined above, coupled with a lack of HR capacities and appropriate strategies and policies. Drawing on the experience of the states mentioned above, as well as regional quasi-governmental bodies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), aid agencies, and the private sector, the book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, and social media.
The field of enterprise systems integration is constantly evolving, as every new technology that is introduced appears to make all previous ones obsolete. Despite this continuous evolution, there is a set of underlying concepts and technologies that have been gaining an increasing importance in this field. Examples are asynchronous messaging through message queues, data and application adapters based on XML and Web services, the principles associated with the service-oriented architecture (SOA), service composition, orchestrations, and advanced mechanisms such as correlations and long-running transactions. Today, these concepts have reached a significant level of maturity and they represent the foundation over which most integration platforms have been built. This book addresses integration with a view towards supporting business processes. From messaging systems to data and application adapters, and then to services, orchestrations, and choreographies, the focus is placed on the connection between systems and business processes, and particularly on how it is possible to develop an integrated application infrastructure in order to implement the desired business processes. For this purpose, the text follows a layered, bottom-up approach, with application-oriented integration at the lowest level, followed by service-oriented integration and finally completed by process-oriented integration at the topmost level. The presentation of concepts is accompanied by a set of instructive examples using state-of-the-art technologies such as Java Message Service (JMS), Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), Web Services, Microsoft BizTalk Server, and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The book is intended as a textbook for advance undergraduate or beginning graduate students in computer science, especially for those in an information systems curriculum. IT professionals with a background in programming, databases and XML will also benefit from the step-by-step description of the various integration levels and the related implementation examples.
To understand the challenges of political leadership and how top executives succeed in accomplishing an Administration s objectives, business-in-government experts Paul R. Lawrence and Mark A. Abramson present the findings of a four-year study of top political appointees in the Obama Administration. The 42 participants Deputy Secretaries and agency heads provide case studies of how each approaches the management challenges and achieves the mission of their organization. Full of behind-the-scenes insights and practical advice from government political executives on how they face management challenges in real time, What Government Does: How Political Executives Manage offers indispensable insights to current and prospective political appointees and everyone interested in understanding how leaders make government agencies more effective. The new book, a follow-up to their previous book, Paths to Making a Difference: Leading in Government, presents an insightful framework of what government does. Instead of thinking about government by policy area, the authors present an alternative approach in which government executives are categorized by the type of agency they are managing. The book includes chapters on Deputy Secretaries, producers, regulators, infrastructors, scientists, and collaborators."
The explosive growth in data, computational power, and social media creates new opportunities for innovating the processes and solutions of Information and communications technology (ICT) based policy-making and research. To take advantage of these developments in the digital world, new approaches, concepts, instruments and methods are needed to navigate the societal and computational complexity. This requires extensive interdisciplinary knowledge of public administration, policy analyses, information systems, complex systems and computer science. This book provides the foundation for this new interdisciplinary field, in which various traditional disciplines are blending. Both policy makers, executors and those in charge of policy implementations acknowledge that ICT is becoming more important and is changing the policy-making process, resulting in a next generation policy-making based on ICT support. Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 point to the specific applications of social networks, semantically enriched and linked data, whereas policy-making has also to do with the use of the vast amount of data, predictions and forecasts, and improving the outcomes of policy-making, which is confronted with an increasing complexity and uncertainty of the outcomes. The field of policy-making is changing and driven by developments like open data, computational methods for processing data, opining mining, simulation and visualization of rich data sets, all combined with public engagement, social media and participatory tools.
This book addresses the education and training of Members of Parliament (MPs). It examines existing training programs offered in various countries around the world, evaluates their strengths and weaknesses and makes recommendations for a new approach, which aligns the professional development of MPs to 21st century requirements. Contributors address the role of parliamentarians, how to prepare them for their multi-faceted functions, the importance of ethics in any program, the requirement for more sophisticated adult learning approaches, human resource implications and the need to reform existing education and training models. The book will appeal to scholars in the fields of political science, adult education and human resource management, as well as to parliamentarians interested in enhancing their skills so as to perform more efficiently and effectively.
This book considers the use of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the delivery of physical assets, infrastructure and technologies and related clinical services, in the health sector. The PPP model represents the most complex form of contracting transaction yet to have emerged in the health sector, owing to its long-term character, financial complexity, and risk-allocation mechanisms. This book draws on the lessons of policy-makers, managers and private companies to address the specific challenges in the health sector. It is the reference guide to PPPs in health, presenting the theory, evidence and practice, and making them operationally relevant to all PPP stakeholders.
This book offers practical advice on managing enterprise modeling (EM) projects and facilitating participatory EM sessions. Modeling activities often involve groups of people, and models are created in a participatory way. Ensuring that this is done efficiently requires dedicated individuals who know how to organize modeling projects and sessions, how to manage discussions during these sessions, and what aspects influence the success and efficiency of modeling in practice. The book also includes a summary of the theoretical background to EM, although participatory modeling can also be used in conjunction with other methods that are not made for EM, such as those made for goal-oriented requirements engineering and information systems analysis. The first four chapters present an overview of enterprise modeling from various viewpoints (including methods, processes and organizational challenges), providing a background for those that need to refresh their basic knowledge. The next six chapters form the core of the book and detail the roles and competences needed in an EM project, typical stakeholder behaviors and how to handle them, tools and methods for managing participatory modeling and facilitation, and how to train modeling experts for these social aspects of modeling. Lastly, a concluding chapter presents a summary and an outlook on current research in participatory EM. This book is intended for anybody who wants to learn more about how to facilitate participatory modeling in practice and how to set up and carry out EM projects. It does not require any in-depth knowledge about specific EM methods and tools, and can be used by students and lecturers for courses on participatory modeling, and by practitioners wanting to extend their knowledge of social and organizational topics to become an experienced facilitator and EM project manager.
This book explores trust in government from a variety of perspectives in the Asian region. The book is divided into three parts, and there are seven Asian countries that have been covered by ten chapters. The first part contains three chapters which focus on two East Asian governments - Hong Kong and Taiwan. The second part includes case studies from two Southeast Asian countries - Thailand and Philippines. The third part consists of four chapters dealing with two South Asian countries - India and Bangladesh. The last chapter analyzes governance failure (i.e., the absence of trust) as uncertainty from a theoretical perspective.
This book traces the narrative strategies framing austerity policies through an illuminating analysis of policy documents and political discourses, exposing the political consequences for women, racialized minorities and disabled people. While many have critiqued the ways in which austerity has captured the contemporary political narrative, this is the first book to systematically examine how these narratives work to shift the terms within which policy debates about inequality and difference play out. Gedalof's exceptional readings of these texts pay close attention to the formal qualities of these narratives: the chronologies they impose, their articulation of crisis and resolution, the points of view they construct and the affective registers they deploy. In this manner she argues persuasively that the differences of gender, race, ethnicity and disability have been stitched into the fabric of austerity as excesses that must be disavowed, as reproductive burdens that are too great for the austere state to bear. This innovative, intersectional analysis will appeal to students and scholars of social policy, gender studies, politics and public policy.
This book seeks to contribute to prior research facing the discussion about public value creation in Smart Cities and the role of governments. In the early 21st century, the rapid transition to a highly urbanized population has made societies and their governments around the world to be meeting unprecedented challenges regarding key themes such as sustainability, new governance models and the creation of networks. Also, cities today face increasing challenges when it comes to providing advanced (digital) services to their constituency. The use of information and communication technologies (usually ICTs) and data is thought to rationalize and improve government and have the potential to transform governance and organizational issues. These questions link up to the ever-evolving concept of Smart Cities. In fact, the rise of the Smart City and Smart City thinking is a direct response to such challenges, as well as providing a means of integrating fast evolving technology into our living environment. This focus on the public value creation in Smart Cities could be of interest for academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts involved in and responsible for the governance, development and design of Smart Cities |
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