This book compares local self-government in Europe. It examines local institutional structures, autonomy, and capacities in six selected countries - France, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, and the United Kingdom - each of which represents a typical model of European local government. Within Europe, an overall trend towards more local government capacities and autonomy can be identified, but there are also some counter tendencies to this trend and major differences regarding local politico-administrative settings, functional responsibilities, and resources. The book demonstrates that a certain degree of local financial autonomy and fiscal discretion is necessary for effective service provision. Furthermore, a robust local organization, viable territorial structures, a professional public service, strong local leadership, and well-functioning tools of democratic participation are key aspects for local governments to effectively fulfill their tasks and ensure political accountability. The book will appeal to students and scholars of Public Administration and Public Management, as well as practitioners and policy-makers at different levels of government, in public enterprises, and in NGOs.

This open access book presents a topical, comprehensive and differentiated analysis of Germany's public administration and reforms. It provides an overview on key elements of German public administration at the federal, Lander and local levels of government as well as on current reform activities of the public sector. It examines the key institutional features of German public administration; the changing relationships between public administration, society and the private sector; the administrative reforms at different levels of the federal system and numerous sectors; and new challenges and modernization approaches like digitalization, Open Government and Better Regulation. Each chapter offers a combination of descriptive information and problem-oriented analysis, presenting key topical issues in Germany which are relevant to an international readership.

The Sunday Times Bestseller 'Seasoned Whitehall watchers often remark: "It wouldn't have been like this if Jeremy Heywood were still around." ... How could it be that the effectiveness of the once-revered civil service had become reliant on a single man?' Guardian 'This book should be read in a similar spirit to Mantel's masterpieces - as a portrait of an exceptional man who was always at the centre of events ... Invaluable' Guardian As a young civil servant, Jeremy Heywood's insightful questioning of the status quo pushed him to the centre of political power in this country for more than 25 years. He directly served four Prime Ministers in various roles including as the first and only Permanent Secretary of 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Secretary and the Head of the Home Civil Service. He was at the centre of every crisis from the early 1990s until 2018 and most of the key meetings. Invariably, when faced with a new policy initiative a Prime Minister's first response would be: 'but what does Jeremy think?' Jeremy worked up until his death, retiring just a few days before he died from lung cancer in October 2018. This book began as a joint effort between Jeremy and his wife Suzanne - working together in the last months of his life. Suzanne completed the work after his death. In a time of political uncertainty, this extraordinary book offers an unforgettable and unprecedented insight into political decision-making, crisis management and the extraordinary role of the civil service. It is also a moving celebration of Heywood's life in the beating heart of UK politics, and a man who for so long was the most powerful non-famous name in Britain. (Sunday Times Bestseller, February 2021)

This book aims to gather the insight of leading experts on corruption and anti-corruption studies working at the scientific frontier of this phenomenon using the multidisciplinary tools of data and network science, in order to present current theoretical, empirical, and operational efforts being performed in order to curb this problem. The research results strengthen the importance of evidence-based approaches in the fight against corruption in all its forms, and foster the discussion about the best ways to convert the obtained knowledge into public policy. The contributed chapters provide comprehensive and multidisciplinary approaches to handle the non-trivial structural and dynamical aspects that characterize the modern social, economic, political and technological systems where corruption takes place. This book will serve a broad multi-disciplinary audience from natural to social scientists, applied mathematicians, including law and policymakers.

Is the Prefect an exception, surviving only in France and some countries influenced by Napoleon? No! This book tells the varied stories of the resilience, in most European States and under different names, of the prefectoral institution. It is the first comparative book in English studying these territorial administrators who have a go-between role in centre-periphery relations and a nodal role in territorial governance. Gathering a multidisciplinary team of scholars under the auspices of the European Group for Public Administration, this volume offers a fine-grained analysis of 17 national cases, examines cross-country data, and proposes a theoretical frame made of a Weberian ideal-type with three variants, to better comprehend and explain the permanence and changes of the prefectoral figure.

Water pollution control has been a top environmental policy priority of the world's most developed countries for decades, and the focus of significant regulation and public and private spending. Yet, significant water quality problems remain, and trends for some pollutants are in the wrong direction. This book addresses the economics of water pollution control and water pollution control policy in agriculture, with an aim towards providing students, environmental policy analysts, and other environmental professionals with economic concepts and tools essential to understanding the problem and crafting solutions that can be effective and efficient. The book will also examine existing policies and proposed reforms in the developed world. Although this book addresses and has a general applicability to major water pollutants from agriculture (e.g., pesticides, pharmaceuticals, sediments, nutrients), it will focus on the sediment and nutrient pollution problem. The economic and scientific foundations for pollution management are best developed for these pollutants, and they are currently the top priorities of policy makers. Accordingly, the authors provide both highly salient and informative cases for developing concepts and methods of general applicability, with high profile examples such as the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone in the US; the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe; and Lake Taupo in New Zealand.

This book explores the concept of multi-species relationships and suggests critical systemic pathways to protect shared habitats. This book discusses how the eradication of species as a result of rapid urbanisation places humanity at risk. This book demonstrates how narrow anthropocentrism has focused on the rights of human beings at the expense of other species and the environment. This book explores a priori norms and a posteriori measures and indicators to include and protect multiple species. This book aims to strengthen institutional capacity and powers to address and extend the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda by drawing on local wisdom but also the need to implement laws to prevent ecocide. This book highlights that our fragile interdependence requires a recognition of our hybridity and interconnectedness within the web of life and suggests ways to reframe policy within and beyond the nation state to support living systems of which we are a strand.

Deliberative democracy has become the central reference point for democracy theorists over the last decade or so, influencing normative frameworks and the ways we conceptualize the workings of democratic societies. It has also been linked with a burst of experimentation with new procedures that involve citizens directly in deliberations about public policy. But there is a contradiction at the heart of deliberative democracy: it seems that it cannot deliver legitimate agreements. Deliberative decisions are said to be legitimate when all those subject to them take part in free and equal debate, but in complex societies that can never happen. Few people can deliberate together at any one time, certainly not in any strict sense, so how can the results of a deliberative event be legitimate for non-participants? And why would people with passionately held views sit down and deliberate when there seems little advantage in them doing so? This book explores these problems in theory and practice, searching for a solution that does not merely dismiss a strict understanding of deliberative democratic criteria. It reconsiders the theory of legitimacy and deliberative democracy, but goes further by examining cases of deliberation on health policy in the United Kingdom to see what problems emerge in practice, and how real political actors deal with them. The result is a complete rethink of the institutional limits and possibilities of deliberative democracy, one which abandons the search for perfection in any one institution, and looks instead to the concept of a multifaceted deliberative system.

This edited book unpacks the nature of Central Asian migration to East Asia. This book uses the case of Uzbekistan, the most populous country of Central Asia, and demonstrates the migration channels and adaptation strategies of migrants to the realities of Japan. What are the foreign policy engagements of Japan in Central Asia? How do they relate to the intensifying educational mobility and labour migration from Central Asia (in particular, Uzbekistan) to Japan? By answering these two questions, this book aims to detail the social factors that play important roles in localizing foreign policy engagements and narrating them in terms easily understood by the public.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the Institutional Grammar, an approach for analyzing the design of institutions. To lay the foundation for the application of the Grammar for different application areas, the book first provides a background of the IG, before motivating the introduction of an updated version of the Institutional Grammar, called the Institutional Grammar 2.0 that aims at representing institutions more comprehensively and with greater validity. The book then turns to applications and introduces methodological guidance alongside expositions of emerging analytical applications of the "Grammar" that include presentations of current practice, as well as developing novel analytical opportunities that the analyst can apply or build upon for their application. This book is aimed at students, faculty, and practitioners of diverse disciplinary backgrounds with varying levels of understanding of institutional analysis and experience conducting it.

What is the relationship between the financial system and politics? In a democratic system, what kind of control should elected governments have over the financial markets? What policies should be implemented to regulate them? What is the role played by different elites--financial, technocratic, and political--in the operation and regulation of the financial system? And what role should citizens, investors, and savers play?
These are some of the questions addressed in this challenging analysis of the particular features of the contemporary capitalist economy in Britain, the USA, and Western Europe. The authors argue that the causes of the financial crisis lay in the bricolage and innovation in financial markets, resulting in long chains and circuits of transactions and instruments that enabled bankers to earn fees, but which did not sufficiently take into account system risk, uncertainty, and unintended consequences.
In the wake of the crisis, the authors argue that social scientists, governments, and citizens need to re-engage with the political dimensions of financial markets. This book offers a controversial and accessible exploration of the disorders of our financial capitalism and its justifications. With an innovative emphasis on the economically 'undisclosed' and the political 'mystifying', it combines technical understanding of finance, cultural analysis, and al political account of interests and institutions.

Longer term thinking and new approaches to development and prosperity have never been more urgently required. Since 2020, the precarity of the global economy, links between ecological destruction and public health and disparities in levels of exposure and vulnerability to systemic disruption have all been thrown into stark relief. In this book the authors put forward a series of principles on which economic and development policy for the post-Covid era should be developed. These are outlined as five 'pillars' through which to (re-)build a shared prosperity in the aftermath of the Covid-19 global shock. The five pillars are an ecological prosperity (pillar one), a decarbonized economy (pillar two), a shared (cost) burden (pillar three), a transformative social sustainability (pillar four) and a just resilience (pillar five). The book provides a framework through which policymakers, decision-makers, politicians, community groups and the corporate sphere might begin to consider, map out, and plan for just transitions in their domains.

This book provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the many socio-economic challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic across international boundaries, disrupting the economic system and life styles globally. It starts by setting the historical context of the pandemic and proceeds to describe the impact on the Indian economy, how certain sections of the population have become economically and psychologically vulnerable. International experts from diverse fields-development economics, macroeconomics, corporate finance, history, sociology, psychology, public policy, and urban studies-contribute to this exciting analysis of an Indian and global society at the crossroads. The book examines emerging themes related to global economic revival, intellectual property rights over the vaccine, and rupturing of the global supply chains. It discusses the response of institutions and markets to the global pandemic. It closes with a futuristic look at the new society and global system that may emerge out of the chaos. A valuable resource appealing to a wide readership across the social sciences and the humanities. Readers include undergraduate students, postgraduate students, researchers and academic teachers, and also public policy experts.

Governing the Embedded State integrates governance theory with organization theory and examines how states address social complexity and international embeddedness. Drawing upon extensive empirical research on the Swedish government system, this volume describes a strategy of governance based in a metagovernance model of steering by designing institutional structures. This strategy is supplemented by micro-steering of administrative structures within the path dependencies put in place through metagovernance. Both of these strategies of steering rely on subtle methods of providing political guidance to the public service where norms of loyalty to the government characterize the relationship between politicians and civil servants. By drawing upon this research, the volume will explain how recent developments such as globalization, Europeanization, the expansion of managerial ideas, and the fragmentation of states, have influenced the state's capacity to govern. The result is an account of contemporary governance which shows the societal constraints on government but also the significance of close interaction and cooperation between the political leadership and the senior civil servants in addressing those constraints.

Brazil is a pioneer in the development of participation policies, with the most advanced banking systems in the world and a health system that serves the majority of a population scattered over more than 8.5 million square kilometres. However, Brazil also displays one of the highest rates of social and economic inequality worldwide, unable to fight illiteracy, school dropout, lack of basic sanitation, and unemployment. The Brazilian Way of Doing Public Administration is an accessible collaboration between scholars and practitioners rich with findings applicable worldwide, exploring Brazil's government's functioning at various points in recent history. Comprehensively presenting public management cases and theories in two sections - public management and public policy - the chapters provide scholars and practitioners with unique and previously underexplored insights and experiences. Exploring links between administrative systems and policy performance, The Brazilian Way of Doing Public Administration is a necessary book for practitioners, policymakers and researchers in management, public administration, business, and economics.

What are the key issues facing the makers of European cultural policy in the 2lst century? How is cultural policy at the metropolitan, national and European level addressing recent developments that are complicating the cultural and social realities of contemporary Europe? This book offers an innovative assessment of these questions and aims to provoke debates about the way forward for cultural policy in Europe. Based on extensive theoretical and empirical research by an interdisplinary team of international scholars, this volume critically addresses the way in which cultural policy has evolved until now, and develops new conceptual and theoretical perspectives for re-imagining cultural change and complexity. The book offers an interesting set of studies on transcultural flows between some major European metropoles (such as Berlin, London and Paris), on the rather closed realities of other European capitals (like Rome or Ljubljana) as well as on new cultural trends emerging in cities both at the heart and at the periphery of Europe (Vienna and Belgrade). Each contribution questions the relationship between cultural diversity, cultural policy and immigration. The book thus provides new insights into the limitations of the national framework for cultural policy and into the emerging transnational dynamics in European cities.

This book examines the impact of Australian public opinion towards defence and foreign policy from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. For most of this period, the public showed little interest in defence and security policy and possessed limited knowledge about the strategic options available. The principal post-war exception to this pattern is, of course, the Vietnam War, when political divisions over Australia's support for the U.S.-led action eventually resulted in the withdrawal of troops in 1972. The period since 2001 has seen a fundamental change both in the public's views of defence and foreign affairs, and in how these issues are debated by political elites. This has come about as a result of major changes in the strategic environment such as a heightened public awareness of terrorism, party political divisions over Australia's military commitment to the 2003-11 Iraq War and the increasing overlap of economic and trade considerations with defence and foreign policies, which has increased the public's interest in these issues. Combining the expertise of one of Australia's foremost scholars of public opinion with that of an expert of international relations, particularly as pertains to Australia in Asia, this book will be a critical read for those wishing to understand Australia's alliance with the U.S., interactions with Asia and China, and the distinctive challenges posed to Australia by its geographic position.

This innovative book investigates the concept of collapse in terms of our built environment, exploring the future transition of modern cities towards scenarios very different from the current promises of progress and development. This is not a book about the end of the world and hopeless apocalyptic scenarios. It is about understanding change in how and where we live. Collapse is inevitable, but in the built environment collapse could imply a manageable situation, an opportunity for change or a devastating reality. Collapsing gracefully means that there might be better ways to coexist with collapse if we learn more about it and commit to rebuild our civilisations in ways that avoid its worst effects. This book uses a wide range of practical examples to study critical changes in the built environment, to contextualise and visualise what collapse looks like, to see if it is possible to buffer its effects in places already collapsing and to propose ways to develop greater resilience. The book challenges all agents and institutions in modern cities, their designers and planners as well as their residents and users to think differently about built environment so as to ease our coexistence with collapse and not contribute to its causes. .

This book explores the development of sustainable public procurement (SPP) as a strategic policy instrument to support decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation and enhancing social well-being. Offering an in-depth case study of India's SPP implementation trajectory, it discusses the challenges of integrating sustainability criteria into purchasing decisions, and examines policy choices and best practices to address them. It investigates the legislative, institutional, and governance framework for SPP in India, and identifies priority actions to accelerate wider uptake of SPP policy and practices. Furthermore, the book highlights the evolving role of SPP policies in response to emerging global mega trends, such as international trade, low carbon economy, circular economy, and Industry 4.0. Given its scope, this book appeals to scholars of economics, public administration, and environmental and social sciences, as well as to policymakers, practitioners, and advocates interested in steering transformational changes towards mainstreaming sustainable procurement practices in developing economies at the desired scale. "This book comes at the right time to compensate for the lack of in-depth works on the origins, nature and reality of the implementation of sustainable purchases." - Farid Yaker, Programme Officer, Sustainable Public Procurement, Economy Division, UNEP, Paris, France. "...If you are a procurement or sustainability professional anywhere in the world, please read this book. It will change the way you think and feel about your profession." - Shaun McCarthy OBE, Chair, Supply Chain Sustainability School, London, UK & Director, Action Sustainability, London, UK

Migration across Europe's external and internal borders has introduced unprecedented sociocultural diversity, and with it, new questions about belonging, identity, and the incorporation of others into extant and emergent groups and communities. Bringing together leading cultural anthropologists, Digesting Difference offers a series of ethnographic studies that show incorporation to be a process rooted in the everyday encounters and exchanges between strangers, friends, lovers, neighbors, parents, workers, and others. Rich in ethnographic detail and ambitious in its theorizing, the volume tells the stories of Europe's transformative engagement with sociocultural difference in the wake of migration associated with EU expansion, the Eurozone meltdown, and the 2015-2016 refugee crisis. It promises to be essential reading for scholars and students of cultural anthropology, migration, integration, and European studies.

This edited volume explores recent research and developments in the study of organized crime. It covers six key areas: drug-related issues; human trafficking and prostitution; sports and crime; procurement and corruption; and enforcement and prevention. The contributors provide timely research for understanding various aspects of organized crime, as well as the responses that have been developed worldwide to prevent and contain them. These contributions were presented at seminars of the Centre for Information and Research on Organized Crime (CIROC). It will be of interest to researchers in Criminology and Criminal Justice, particularly with an interest in organized crime and criminal networks, as well as related fields such as Comparative Law, and Political Science. This collection represents the most current thinking on entrenched problems of organized crime....This book is an important contribution in developing new approaches to organized crime and its control. - Jay S. Albanese, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Criminal Justice Programs, Virginia Commonwealth University The book is very well organised and written and deals with a diversity of topics and approaches. - Ernesto U.Savona, Director of Transcrime, Professor of Criminology, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan

This book presents papers from the 10th Applied Research Conference in Africa (ARCA), showcasing the latest research on education and inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable communities. The conference is focused on applied research discussion and its dissemination, developing understanding about the role of research and researchers in the development of the continent. Education is a key driver to transform lives, build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development in Africa. Researchers face large challenges to making a meaningful contribution to the development of Africa. It is a continent where research can at time be not viewed directly related to development. The aim of the Applied Research Conference in Africa is to provide a platform for capacity building and networking among researchers in Africa. The proceedings is focussed on applied research, its discussion and dissemination and will be if interest to researchers, professors, graduate students, policymakers and professionals in industry.

This edited volume brings together debates from the Global South and Global East to explore alternatives to conventional planning in Southern cities. Embracing the evolving post-colonial theory, the volume offers 'fragments' of the urban that provide clues to the larger, often-repeated ontological question that continues to hold: Why and what does theory from the South mean? The chapters derive from and speak to the simultaneously homogenous and heterogeneous South. They focus on presenting the alternative realities of Southern cities as critical analytical lenses that can build up to the theorisation of the Southern urban with a potential to (re)understand the contemporary urban world. The contributions explore locally rooted knowledge systems, premised on social and cultural practices, as possible conduits to evolving planning methods. In doing so, the volume breaks apart the linear modernity that urban theory from the North relies on. Chapters [Chapter-1] and [Chapter-11] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.