Everywhere we turn in Canadian local politics - from policing to transit, education to public health, planning to utilities - we encounter a peculiar institutional animal: the special purpose body. These "ABCs" of local government - library boards, school boards, transit authorities, and many others - provide vital public services, spend large sums of public money, and raise important questions about local democratic accountability. In Fields of Authority, Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Drawing on extensive research in local and provincial archives, Lucas uses a "policy fields" approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present. A lively and accessible study, Fields of Authority will appeal to readers interested in Canadian political history, urban politics, and urban public policy.

Digital innovations are often non-linear, non-incremental, and perhaps at times, disruptive processes that have transformed private as well as public service delivery. The rise of digitization has not only overhauled the governance system and enabled greater government-citizen engagement but has also revolutionized public administration. For public organizations to thrive, it is imperative to understand the challenges and applications that digitization can create for the development, deployment, and management of public service processes. Leveraging Digital Innovation for Governance, Public Administration, and Citizen Services: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a comprehensive research book that combines theory and practice, reflecting on public administrative governance and citizen engagement implications of digital innovations and strategies, and how and when they can make a difference in the area of digital application in public administration. Highlighting topics such as e-government, electronic payments, and text mining, this publication is ideal for public administrators, policymakers, government officials, executives, administrators, researchers, academicians, and practitioners in the fields of computer science, information technology, citizen engagement, public management, and governance.

Contracting has become one of the tools that governments use to make their services more efficient and effective. This work studies the positives and negatives involved with the multiple elements of contracting. Contract culture is broken down into its many parts: rules and regulations, norms and values, local governments and the private sector. This allows the authors to examine the topic through a unique cross-cultural lens and provide a fresh take on this expanding topic. Sources such as survey data, in-depth case studies, and analysis of advocacy coalitions are used to shed new light on contract governance. Topics include: *Contracting on the Public Agenda. *Limits of the "New Contractualism." *The "hard" and "soft" elements of contracts. *Local Governments. *Contracting as part of the New Public Management.

Open government initiatives have become a defining goal for public administrators around the world. However, progress is still necessary outside of the executive and legislative sectors. Achieving Open Justice through Citizen Participation and Transparency is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of open government within the judiciary field, emphasizing the effectiveness and accountability achieved through these actions. Highlighting the application of open government concepts in a global context, this book is ideally designed for public officials, researchers, professionals, and practitioners interested in the improvement of governance and democracy.

The twin objectives of this book are to identity the determinants and to explore the implications of Third World military expenditure. Beginning with a descriptive profile of Third World military expenditure, the study uses cross-national and longitudinal data to explore the determinants and implications across a range of issues areas. On the basis of this analysis, the book concludes with an empirical theory of military expenditure and a critical appraisal of the general implications.

The contributors discuss the links between ethnicity, inequality and governance. Their findings suggest that it is not the existence of diversity" per se," but "types of diversity" that explain potentials for conflict or cohesion in multiethnic societies. Relative equality has been achieved in the public sectors of countries that are highly fragmented or those with ethnicity-sensitive policies, but not in those with ethnicity-blind policies. The book is critical of approaches to conflict management that underplay background conditions in shaping choices.

During the past decade, globalization and democratization have been the major forces that helped transform the structures, functions, and processes of Asian public sectors. Nevertheless, these transformation efforts of Asian countries vary considerably depending on local context, and have met with different degrees of success. Some countries experienced smooth transformations. For others, the reform process has been more volatile. These issues were explored at a conference July 7-9, 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand, hosted by the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, and co-sponsored by the International Public Management Network, the Asia-Pacific Governance Institute, and Thailand Democracy Watch. This book presents some of the works contributed by participating scholars and practitioners at the conference. The contents fall into three categories: corruption and anti-corruption initiatives, public financial management reforms, and public management reforms with emphasis on performance and results.

This book describes and compares how semi-autonomous agencies are created and governed by 30 governments. It leads practitioners and researchers through the crowded world of agencies, describing their tasks, autonomy, control and history. Evidence-based lessons and recommendations are formulated to improve agencification policies in post-NPM times.

The progression of information and communication technology (ICT) eGovernment systems has substantial implications for the future of government as we know it. eGov presents major challenges and advantages for policy makers as fundamentally different nations are adopting ICT in public administration reforms in order to capitalize on the benefits of transformational government or electronic government technology. This book investigates the modern political, technological, economic, social, and cultural issues of transformational government. It discusses in detail how interaction through advancing technology such as e-participation, mobile government, social media, web 2.0, and cloud computing has been successfully incorporated into eGov practice. International in scope this book gives practical examples and case studies of eGov implementation in countries across the globe and is the essential reference text for this important topic.

In our reforming public institutions it sometimes feels as though the very ground of social and political contracts is shifting. The economic revolution embraced by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives is paralleled by a governance revolution in those same institutions which were designed to protect us from historical swings and ideological roundabouts. Our public institutions - for the most part the public sector and its professional groups - in the eyes of some provided stability, while for others they were a brake on change. Now, however, they have become conduits for political change and reform. We live in an institutional world now dubbed the New Public Management (NPM). In this new landscape evaluators might have to think afresh about how to position ourselves in relation to institutional ethics and the pursuit of social justice. In this volume contributors give us a start in thinking through such a repositioning, some within the values framework of NPM, others as external observers.

This volume investigates the interdisciplinary and cross-cutting challenges in the risk analysis of natural hazards. It brings together leading minds in engineering, science, philosophy, law, and the social sciences. Parts I and II of this volume explore risk assessment, first by providing an overview of the interdisciplinary interactions involved in the assessment of natural hazards, and then by exploring the particular impacts of climate change on natural hazard assessment. Part III discusses the theoretical frameworks for the evaluation of natural hazards. Finally, Parts IV and V address the risk management of natural hazards, providing first an overview of the interdisciplinary interactions underlying natural hazard management, and then exploring decision frameworks that can help decision makers integrate and respond to the complex relationships among natural events, the built environment, and human behavior.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th IFIP TC 9 International Conference on Human Choice and Computers, HCC10 2012, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in September 2012. The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers are organized in topical sections on national and international policies, sustainable and responsible innovation, ICT for peace and war, and citizens' involvement, citizens' rights and ICT.

Hong Kong is at the heart of modern China's position as a regional - and potential world - superpower. In this important and original history of the region, Steve Tsang argues that its current prosperity is a direct by-product of the British administrators who ran the place as a colony before the handover in 1997.The British administration of Hong Kong uniquely derived its practices from the best traditions of Imperial Chinese government and its philosophical, Confucian basis. It stressed efficiency, honesty, fairness, benevolent paternalism and individual freedom. The result was a hugely successful colony, especially in industry and finance, and it remains so today with its new status of Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China.Under British imperial administration, Hong Kong grew from a collection of fishing villages to an international entrepot, an industrial power and an international financial centre. British and Chinese interests dovetailed and the Chinese population was satisfied by the welfare reform and economic advancement perpetuated by Britain's administrative officers. Demand for constitutional reform and a sense of Hong Kong Chinese identity grew only as the handover to China approached.This definitive history of the colourful individuals who administered the colony on behalf of the British government sheds light on two empires inextricably linked in nature and on the philosophy of government.

This primer succinctly summarises key theoretical concepts in fiscal choice for both practitioners and scholars. The author contends that fiscal choice is ultimately a choice of both politics and economics. The book first introduces budget institutions and processes at various levels of government, which restrict budget decision makers' discretion. It also explains budget decision makers' efforts to make rational resource allocations. It then shows how and why such efforts are stymied by the decision makers' capacity and institutional settings. The book's unique benefit is its emphasis on all the essential topics, with short, module-type chapters which can be read in any order.

Between 1789 and 1848, clerks modified their occupational practices, responding to political scrutiny and state-administration reforms. Ralph Kingston examines the lives and influence of bureaucrats inside and outside the office as they helped define nineteenth-century bourgeois social capital, ideals of emulation, honour, and masculinity.

The behaviour of politicians and public servants often strikes outside observers as erratic, inconsistent and sometimes foolish. One way of understanding their behaviour is political anthropology. This book focuses on the everyday life of ministers and senior public servants in different countries, describing their world through their eyes. It analyses how such practices are embedded in political and administrative traditions. It explores how their beliefs, practices and traditions create meaning in politics and public policy making. It provides unique data on the everyday life government elites and practical advice on how to conduct such fieldwork.

This book is concerned with a large question in one small, but highly problematic case: how can a prime minister establish control and coordination across his or her government? The Greek system of government sustains a 'paradox of power' at its very core. The Constitution provides the prime minister with extensive and often unchecked powers. Yet, the operational structures, processes and resources around the prime minister undermine their power to manage the government. Through a study of all main premierships between 1974 and 2009, Prime Ministers in Greece argues that the Greek prime minister has been 'an emperor without clothes'. The costs of this paradox included the inability to achieve key policy objectives under successive governments and a fragmented system of governance that provided the backdrop to Greece's economic meltdown in 2010. Building on an unprecedented range of interviews and archival material, Featherstone and Papadimitriou set out to explore how this paradox has been sustained. They conclude with the Greek system meeting its 'nemesis': the arrival of the close supervision of its government by the 'Troika' - the representatives of Greece's creditors. The debt crisis challenged taboos and forced a self-reflection. It remains unclear, however, whether either the external strategy or the domestic response is likely to be sufficient to make the Greek system of governance 'fit for purpose'.

To be successful in the 21st century, governments must make use of digital and communication technologies in order to coordinate resources and collaborate with their citizens. IT in the Public Sphere: Applications in Administration, Government, Politics, and Planning evaluates current research and best practices in the adoption of e-government technologies in developed and developing countries, enabling governments to keep in constant communication with citizens, constituents, corporations, and other stakeholders in modern societies. Within these chapters, scholars, administrators, managers, and leaders will find the latest information on utilizing digital technologies in their e-governance projects.

The first detailed analysis of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) influence on global public sector reform. Based on extensive interviews and internal documents, this book explores the evolution of the OECD's approach to governance issues over the last 50 years and what its future agenda should be.

This book examines the role governments play in managing policy challenges such as religion, romance, gender relations, same-sex marriages and privacy protection in response to social changes in marriage. Elizabeth van Acker asks whether governments can or should intervene in this personal sphere.

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of "institutional rationality" of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data.

This text introduces students to the interrelationship of politics and economics in American public policymaking: how economic concerns have been legislated into law since Franklin Roosevelt's time and how politics (e.g., Washington gridlock) affects the economy and the making of public policy. Students learn how to measure various indicators of economic performance, how the U.S. economy works (domestically and with international linkages), and how and why policymakers act to stabilise an economy in an economic downturn. Additionally, many social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) are explained and the current fiscal issues concerning current/future costs are treated in some detail. The book concludes with a full chapter case study on the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession and its dealings with Congress; the implementation of the Affordable Care Act is also discussed.

Religious symbols are loaded with meaning, not only for those who display them. They have generated controversy in many circles, be they religious or secular, public or private, and within or outside academia. Debate has taken place throughout Europe and beyond, at times leading to limitations or bans of religious symbols. While this debate might seem whimsical in occasional flare-ups, it merits closer scrutiny, precisely because it is part of a long-running debate, it crosses boundaries and because it touches upon larger underlying questions. This book singles out a particularly contentious issue: religious symbols in public functions and it focuses on the judiciary, the police and public education. It is often argued that public officials in these functions should be 'neutral' which consequently implies that they cannot display religious symbols. This book aims to unravel this line of thought to the core. It disentangles the debate as it has been conducted in the Netherlands and studies the concept of state neutrality in depth. Furthermore, it appraises the arguments put forward against the background of three contexts: the European Convention on Human Rights, France and England. It critically questions whether state neutrality can necessitate and/or even justify limitations on the freedom of public officials to display religious symbols. Although this book is the result of an academic legal study, it can be read by students, academics, professionals, or anyone interested in the issue of religious symbols in public functions.