The recent global financial and economic crisis has had surprising effects on several economies worldwide. This global event has promoted the discussion on how ethical, transparent, and rigorous the accountability of public sector institutions is. However, public manager accountability is translated into a vision that goes beyond its sphere of activity, demanding information on how public resources have been managed based on the maximization of social welfare and sustainable development. Tools, Strategies, and Practices for Modern and Accountable Public Sector Management is an essential reference source that discusses the process behind how public resources are managed as well as how they are coordinated to achieve collective success. Featuring research on topics such as corporate responsibility, fiscal accountability, and public administration, this book is ideally designed for researchers, managers, financial authorities, auditors, public managers, public administrators, regulatory authorities, accountants, professionals, and students involved with the accountability and reform of public management in local governments.

This collection examines the leadership training of public administration in 19 countries and provides information on where, what, and how the training occurs as well as the up-to-date cultural, political, economic background for each. Factors affecting perceived importance, quality and robustness of top civil servant training are examined.

Even today, many people think of social problems as involving poor and powerless individuals in society. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy seeks to improve the balance by adding a focus on important and powerful institutions. Such organizations often play key roles in managing, and mismanaging, the ways in which some of today's most important social problems are handled by the public policy system. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy is now available online at ScienceDirect - full-text online of volumes 8 onwards. Elsevier book series on ScienceDirect gives multiple users throughout an institution simultaneous online access to an important compliment to primary research. Digital delivery ensures users reliable, 24-hour access to the latest peer-reviewed content.

The UN has suffered from its earliest days as a result of persistent financial problems, which left it on the edge of apparent bankruptcy. This book looks at the history of the regular and peace-keeping budgets. It focuses on the role of the United States, simultaneously the UN's biggest contributor of funds and its largest debtor. It examines possible solutions against the background today of the UN attempting to reform itself to meet the challenges posed by globalization and an increasing number of civil wars.

Collaboration is a ubiquitous yet contested feature of contemporary public policy. This book offers a new account of collaboration's appeal to human actors drawing on empirical examples across time and space. It provides a novel and comprehensive framework for analysing collaboration, that will be of use to those interested in understanding what happens when human actors collaborate for public purpose.

This book provides a broad, interdisciplinary analysis of events impacting on North Macedonia since its independence, particularly during the last decade. In the past thirty years, the country has gone through a series of tremendous changes, including a name change from 'Macedonia' to the 'Republic of North Macedonia' following the Prespa Agreement, which ended a long-lasting name dispute. The contributors consider Macedonia's challenges, its multi-ethnic/multi-cultural background and its ambition to enter the European mainstream through the auspices of the European Union and NATO, amidst a raft of other issues. The volume includes chapters on international politics and North Macedonia's place in the region's security architecture.

This book rethinks the public - along with public communication and public action - in a globalizing and mediated world. Web-based interactions, community empowerment initiatives, participation experiments, transnational struggles, and new ways of understanding and occupying public space offer a range of promising speculations about the renewal of publics and 'publicness.' The book offers a rich set of methodological resources on which researchers can draw, demonstrating the need to interrogate the boundaries between theory, research, and politics. It develops novel theoretical perspectives for investigating the formation of publics, using four themes as key processes to rethinking how publics are brought into being and how to develop research agendas into their formation.

The Hawks of Peace. Notes of the Russian Ambassador is a unique analytical edition where Russian Deputy Premier Dmitry Rogozin shares his notes on personalities and events that shaped the history of post-Communist Russia, believing that without those it would be impossible to understand the past and envisage the future of his country. Permanent Representative of Russia to NATO until recently, in his political diary Dmitry Rogozin contemplates on the complex relationship between Russia and the West. In his behind-the-scenes account, Rogozin opens up about certain mysteries of political stand-offs, military conflicts of the last two decades, terrorist acts and hostage situations. The book contains unique documents directly related to Chechen Wars, inside information from Brussels on the events in Georgia and other records that have been hidden from the public eye. The Western reader now has a rare opportunity to look at Russian current affairs through the eyes of a Russian.

This book challenges the role of scientists in policy making and the idea of deliberative democracy. The author argues that awareness must increase among both politicians and the citizens who elect them. We must revitalise the decision-making processes in representative democracy. The book proposes new institutional structures.

Building public sector image and trust in Africa requires judicious use of appropriate marketing communications tools and platforms. Contributing authors to this second volume of a two-volume work offer insights into how the selection and strategic utilisation of marketing tools will facilitate interactions between the government and the citizens, improve inter-governmental and inter-agency collaboration, and boost a citizen-oriented public sector. Traditional marketing communications tools continue to play a key role in citizen and public sector relationships; however, given mega-trends of demographic change, urbanisation, and digitalisation in Africa, it is important to consider how public institutions, including government agencies, local government, universities, and football associations, respond and adapt to these changes. The digital revolution presents an opportunity for public sector institutions to align their communication plans with new technologies, particularly leveraging social media platforms. Together with the first volume, which focuses on public relations and brand communication perspectives, this collection fills an existing information gap evident in Africa’s public sector literature. The text serves as a decision making, teaching, and learning guide for practitioners, faculty, and students interested in applying marketing principles and practices to the public sector.  

From the 'Third Way' reforms of the 1990s to today's prospect of a post-bureaucracy era, the management of the UK's public services has been radically overhauled in recent decades. This important new text provides a complete introduction to the key themes and developments in public management and the changing relationship between governments, public service providers and the public. June Burnham and Sylvia Horton examine the key components of public management in the UK, including strategic management and the introduction of new performance management techniques as well as financial and human resources management. The book assesses how wider forces such as Europeanization, globalization and the global economic crisis have affected both the structure and role of the state and the way public services are managed. It also looks back to examine the transition from public administration to public management and considers how different ideologies have influenced and driven reform. Distinctively, the authors provide a full assessment of how devolution has affected public services across all parts of the UK. Providing an insightful and accessibly written introduction, this book will be ideal reading for all students of public management.

This is the first technical book that considers tests as public tools and examines how to engineer and process test data, extract the structure within the data to be visualized, and thereby make test results useful for students, teachers, and the society. The author does not differentiate test data analysis from data engineering and information visualization. This monograph introduces the following methods of engineering or processing test data, including the latest machine learning techniques: classical test theory (CTT), item response theory (IRT), latent class analysis (LCA), latent rank analysis (LRA), biclustering (co-clustering), and Bayesian network model (BNM). CTT and IRT are methods for analyzing test data and evaluating students' abilities on a continuous scale. LCA and LRA assess examinees by classifying them into nominal and ordinal clusters, respectively, where the adequate number of clusters is estimated from the data. Biclustering classifies examinees into groups (latent clusters) while classifying items into fields (factors). Particularly, the infinite relational model discussed in this book is a biclustering method feasible under the condition that neither the number of groups nor the number of fields is known beforehand. Additionally, the local dependence LRA, local dependence biclustering, and bicluster network model are methods that search and visualize inter-item (or inter-field) network structure using the mechanism of BNM. As this book offers a new perspective on test data analysis methods, it is certain to widen readers' perspective on test data analysis.

A comprehensive guide to future-proofing public sector communication and increasing citizen satisfaction How to communicate with the citizens of the future? Why does public sector communication often fail? Public Sector Communication combines practical examples from around the world with the latest theoretical insights to show how communication can help bridge gaps that exist between public sector organizations and the individual citizens they serve. The authors--two experts in the field with experience from the public sector--explain how public entities, be they cities, governments, foundations, agencies, authorities, municipalities, regulators, military, or government monopolies and state owned businesses can build their intangible assets to future-proof themselves in a volatile environment. The book examines how the recent digitalization has increased citizen expectations and why one-way communication leaves public sector organizations fragile. To explain how to make public sector communication antifragile, the authors map contributions from a wide variety of fields combined with illustrative examples from around the world. The authors propose a research-based framework of different intangible assets that can directly improve communication in the public sector. This important resource: Helps explain the sector-specific conditions and why communication is often challenging in the public sector Summarizes all relevant literature on the topic across disciplines and includes the most popular management ideals of the recent decades Explores how public sector organizations can increase citizen satisfaction with effective communication Presents new approaches to both the study and practice of communication in the public sector Provides international examples of successful public sector communication Offers realistic guides to building intangible assets in practice Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as public managers and leaders, Public Sector Communication offers an illustrative, research-based guide to improving communication and engaging citizens of today and the future.

This book explains Europol's online sharing platforms efforts in three major cybercrime areas: ransomware, money laundering with cryptocurrencies, and online child sexual exploitation that Europol has already pushed private and public actors to cooperate. Since the global financial crisis, online sharing economy platforms have made a significant impact on use of under-utilized resources. People who have a car (Uber) or a spare room (Airbnb) began to share their under-used assets with others for extra income. The success achieved by these online platforms that enable efficient use of limited resources raised a new discussion on whether a similar governance model can be implemented by public administrations where public resources are insufficient. Cybercrime is one of these fields where most law enforcement agencies have not got enough resources to tackle these crimes. They need the human and technical resources of the private sector for a safer society. This book, for the first time, seeks the answers to this question. It examines the feasibility of online sharing economy platforms to enhance public-private partnerships to tackle cybercrime. The European Union Policing Agency, Europol, is the first police organization to adopt a similar model to interact with policing agencies and private industry. Drawing on extensive research, the book offers crucial insights for policymakers, researchers, and the public interested in new trends in sharing economy, innovative governance models, public-private partnerships, and cybercrime investigations.

This two-volume book offers a broad range of discussions on the immense challenge of climate change, one confronting every country on the planet and forcing them to find a path towards a sustainable future that will not have disastrous consequences in relation to our chances of survival. It also presents a snapshot of the status quo, which reflects all the decisions and measures taken to date. Analyzing the consequences of the steps that will shape our future, the two volumes also reflect on important decisions at a global level that have already been taken. This second volume on risks assessment and the political and social dimension of the green energy transition is structured into 14 chapters. International renowned scholars discuss the inherent risks that arise in consequence of the transition to the intensive use of low carbon energy sources and global warming, risks related to food and water security, as well as risks of social and political conflicts. They further examine the dependence on individual countries' industrial structures and on their socio-economic development level as challenges to climate change solutions and to the global energy policy agenda. This book is a must-read for scholars, researchers and students, as well as policymakers interested in a better understanding of climate change, present scenarios, and alternative solutions and measures.

This monograph evaluates public policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic through a public choice lens. The book compares two prominent, albeit mutually exclusive, theories in social sciences-public interest theory and public choice theory-and explores how their predictions perform within the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic. The chapters present different pandemic policies alongside empirical data in order to draw conclusions about their efficacy, and, in turn, draw conclusions about the veracity of each theory. By the end of the volume, the reader will be able to draw their own conclusions about whether the pandemic policy responses served the public interest, as public interest theory suggests, or the personal interests of the politicians who implemented them, as public choice theory holds.

This book examines why many ambitious public management policies do not materialize. Comprehensive reforms do not generate relevant and lasting changes. Yet some evolutions may occur that actually improve the efficiency level inside public administrations. The book identifies how and why such processes may occur. It explores an innovative approach to the way reform policies inside the public sector are assessed. The opening chapters examine the contributions of different disciplines to the study of change in the public sector, before proposing a framework to better understand management developments. The book then reviews eight crosscutting central government programmes successively launched since the late 1960s, examines how these programmes were designed and constructed, and analyses the ways in which three toolkits are appropriated: dashboards and indicators, cost-benefit analysis, and ex post evaluation. The final chapters examine the links between the development of agencification and the way in which central government proceeds to implement it, and demonstrate why and how the structure of human resources is crucial for initiating change processes. Together, the book proposes lessons for public practitioners as well as for academic purposes.

This book explores how taxation is related to the role of the state and its relationship with its constituents, the concept of private property rights, the concepts of societal fairness and justice, and the battle between the individual and the collective. This book appeals to students and scholars who want to know how philosophers in the past and present think about taxation, and how their thinking has developed through cross-influencing. There exists no comprehensive study providing such an overview. This book is a foundational study on the philosophical justification of taxation (qualitative aspect) and the normative qualifications required of tax law to constitute tax that is just and fair (distributive or quantitative aspect). The latter includes evaluation of what type of tax is morally correct or acceptable to realize distributive justice. This book covers periods from the Enlightenment era until the present. The philosophers are grouped together in schools of thought and each chapter except for chapter 1 and chapter 13, are is dedicated to a specific philosophical school. Moreover, this book aims to provide an overview of each school of thinking and the individual philosophers, including placing them in the context of their times. The book has particular importance as the study of taxation is an underdeveloped area of political and legal philosophy.

This volume aims to shed light on how public service value is identified, managed, measured and reported. The concept of public value has been increasingly associated with the process of modernisation and in recent years the debate has shifted away from 'what' to 'how' public value is conceptualised and practiced. How the public sector can meet the communities' expectations is particularly relevant in light of the Global Financial Crisis. At present, many governments are involved in reform aimed at improving the effectiveness, efficiency and economy of operations, and improving the quality of public services. Examining the effectiveness of these reforms and understanding the gap between the expectations of society and the resources available for public services is an important but under-explored topic. The chapters are the result of a series of conferences and workshops on public value held in 2012 and 2013. There are 20 papers, covering a range of topics, including theoretical reflections, practical case studies and empirical observations aimed at understanding the concept of public value.

This volume explores the unanticipated consequences of emulating, importing, or imposing new institutional models without commensurate attention to the particular constellations of interests, identities, norms, and social relations embedded in local communities. Each chapter is organized around a common problematic that has received only limited attention in the literature on institutional change: the dilemmas of deploying the rules, practices, and design of institutions that have been imported or imposed from external environments in regions where actors are more familiar with and find more legitimate locally embedded norms, practices, social relations, and knowledge structures. The volume strives to illustrate the analytic power of the concept of 'syncretism, ' a concept that can be fruitfully deployed to analyze common aspects of institutional change not easily captured in existing frameworks.

This open access book presents an actor-centered study on Europeanization, based on the assumption that EU-driven reforms are highly dependent on the behavior and interests of the key domestic actors. Whether or not a state pursues a European and democratic agenda depends on domestic lawmakers. Further, political elites are pre-eminent in deciding on the nature, form and content of any law, and on the extent to which the rule of law is actually enforced. Elites can overcome structural or institutional barriers that stand in the way of achieving their goals. The empirical study on Romania presented here lends this observation a more profound meaning: it shows how, in contexts where high level corruption is the norm rather than the exception, self-serving political elites cannot be expected to genuinely commit to adopting sound anti-corruption reform. The book is an inquiry into the motivations that drive legislators to make particular decisions, but also into the structural characteristics and dynamics of the elite that invite a selfish rather than responsible and responsive behaviour.This publication was supported by funds from the Publication Fund for Open Access Monographs of the Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany.

In 2012, over four billion people tuned in to watch the London Summer Olympics. As the single largest mega-event in the world, the Olympics has the power to captivate the global imagination. Long before athletes vie for a gold medal, however, competition between cities eager to host the Games kicks off with a rigorous bid process. The lengthy and expensive endeavor to host the Olympics is as high-stakes as any sporting event. Rather than encouraging cities to refrain from bidding, Bidding for Development takes a policy approach that challenges stakeholders to bid responsibly and strategically in pursuit of concrete outcomes. Every bid city has the potential to accelerate long-term transportation development through a strategic and robust planning process. This book concentrates on the phenomenon of repeat Olympic bids and the opportunities that may come from bidding, particularly for those cities that never win the Games. In this context, Bidding for Development explores the intersection between transportation infrastructure development, the Olympic bid process, and the resulting legacies experienced by bid losers. The findings address the central question: how can participating in the Olympic bid process accelerate transportation development regardless of the bid result? In response, this book presents a Bid Framework outlining how and when cities may use the bid to unite resources, align transportation priorities, and empower leaders to achieve urban development objectives in preparation for the Olympic bid. The Bid Framework is then applied to two case studies, Manchester and Istanbul, to examine each bid loser's effectiveness in using the bid process to catalyze transportation development. Concurrently, the book takes into consideration how the International Olympic Committee's evolving bid regulations and requirements relate to urban development and positive social legacy. Bidding for Development delivers actionable recommendations for all Olympic stakeholders to improve the value of the bid process and transportation benefits beyond the Games.

Over the past two decades public accountability has become not only an icon in political, managerial, and administrative discourse but also the object of much scholarly analysis across a broad range of social and administrative sciences. This handbook provides a state of the art overview of recent scholarship on public accountability. It collects, consolidates, and integrates an upsurge of inquiry currently scattered across many disciplines and subdisciplines. It provides a one-stop-shop on the subject, not only for academics who study accountability, but also for practitioners who are designing, adjusting, or struggling with mechanisms for accountable governance. Drawing on the best scholars in the field from around the world, The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability showcases conceptual and normative as well as the empirical approaches in public accountability studies. In addition to giving an overview of scholarly research in a variety of disciplines, it takes stock of a wide range of accountability mechanisms and practices across the public, private and non-profit sectors, making this volume a must-have for both practitioners and scholars, both established and new to the field.

This book analyses the diffusion and implementation of Aid Effectiveness Principles in Kenya's agricultural sector. Although Aid Effectiveness Principles represent a significant step in aid and development discourse, studies on its implementation remain inadequate, especially in the African context. This book combines the perspectives of the Kenyan government, donor representatives and small-scale farmers. The discussion on Kenya brings in comparative perspectives and, therefore, would have broader relevance to the African region, in general. It highlights a disconnect between the government and farmers concerning the ownership concept, where farmers lack a voice in important policy matters. The book shows that donors have exploited the weaknesses in government responses to interpret The Principles in ways that suit their strategic interests. Consequently, the book argues that the diffusion of Aid Effectiveness Principles has taken the form of symbolic imitation - a form of policy diffusion where the policymakers choose policies for their symbolic value rather than their effectiveness.