Measuring governance has become an increasingly important feature of modern societies, with organisations and institutions expected to prove their worth by quantifying their activities and results. This unique Handbook maps historical developments, theoretical conceptions and key approaches, and summarises what is known about measuring governance from a variety of fields of practice. Peter Triantafillou and Jenny M. Lewis bring together an array of leading international academics to examine how governance is measured across different policy sectors and levels of government. Chapters explore the sociological theory of measurement, the quality of collaborative governance processes, governance in public health care, and global development cooperation. The editors and contributors have combined theoretical thinking with empirical findings to support this comprehensive overview of measuring governance, providing a significant contribution to the ongoing discourse in this field. This thought-provoking Handbook will appeal to public administration and public policy professionals, as well as business and government practitioners at a national and international level. It will also prove highly beneficial to students, academics and researchers in governance, social policy, business and management and political science.

Societies all over the world are facing a host of daunting problems, including poverty, persistent unemployment, income inequality, unequal distribution of political power and participation, ageing populations, uncontrolled migration, and climate change. Public Governance in Denmark: Meeting the Global Mega-Challenges of the 21st Century? provides a nuanced account of how Denmark handles these urgent societal problems. Offering up-to-date academic analysis of Danish public governance, this edited volume encourages an informed and balanced debate about formulating and adopting political reform with reference to 'the Danish model'. The authors explore how recent public governance changes have turned the Danish welfare state into a mix of a neo-Weberian state and an enabling state, deploying its considerable resources to create economic growth for the benefit of most Danes, satisfying the needs of citizens and businesses, and developing collaborative solutions to complex problems. Still, not all Danish policy changes have been successful and evolving problems require further reforms in the years to come. Public Governance in Denmark will be of great interest to students and scholars within the fields of public administration, governance, policy and politics as well as policy professionals engaged in analyzing, designing, and evaluating public policies and governance strategies.

Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new roles and public sector reforms, and analyzes how the gradual transition towards New Public Governance can stimulate the exploration and exploitation of new and bold ideas in the public sector. It argues that the key to public innovation lies in combining and balancing elements from Classic Public Administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance, and theorizes how it can be enhanced by multi-actor collaboration for the benefit of public officials, private stakeholders, citizens, and society at large.

Liberal democracies are experiencing a major transformation of public governance by which self-regulation, co-operation and negotiation between public and private actors and across different political-administrative levels play an increasingly important role for policy-making and implementation. Using the term 'governance imagery', or what a given society envisions to be the proper way of governing public affairs, this volume examines the emergence, causes and consequences of the politics of self-governance both within relevant social science theorizing and in the everyday production of public governance in various policy areas. It questions how self-governance materialized in various areas of public governance in different liberal democracies, and the driving forces and political effects of attempts to enhance the role of self-governance. Challenging the theory and practice of public administration, The Politics of Self-Governance is an indispensable read for all those interested in new forms of public governance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 13th International Middleware Conference, held in Montreal, Canada, in December 2012. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mobile middleware; tracing and diagnosis; architecture and performance; publish/subscribe middleware; and big-data and cloud computing; availability, security and privacy.

This book examines the quest to promote the health and vigour of individuals and populations of liberal democracies. It provides a detailed account of the emergence and working of Danish and English health promotion policies and programs in the areas of obesity control and mental recovery. The book shows that these interventions are supported by a form of optimistic vitalism, according to which we should all work indefinitely to improve our health and vigour. In the areas of both obesity control and mental recovery, equally particular individuals, and the social environment in which they live, are the target of political interventions. The book is above all relevant for social and political science researchers and graduate students as well as for policymakers and practitioners in the field of public health. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, Good health and well-being. -- .

Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new roles and public sector reforms, and analyzes how the gradual transition towards New Public Governance can stimulate the exploration and exploitation of new and bold ideas in the public sector. It argues that the key to public innovation lies in combining and balancing elements from Classic Public Administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance, and theorizes how it can be enhanced by multi-actor collaboration for the benefit of public officials, private stakeholders, citizens, and society at large.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Workshop on Algorithmic Aspects of Cloud Computing, ALGOCLOUD 2015, held in Patras, Greece, in September 2015 in conjunction with ALGO 2015. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 2 tutorial papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 initial submissions. They cover a wide range of topics in two main tracks: algorithmic aspects of large-scale data stores, and software tools and distributed architectures for cloud-based data management.

This book examines the links between major contemporary public sector reforms and neoliberal thinking. The key contribution of the book is to enhance our understanding of contemporary neoliberalism as it plays out in the public administration and to provide a critical analysis of generally overlooked aspects of administrative power. The book examines the quest for accountability, credibility and evidence in the public sector. It asks whether this quest may be understood in terms of neoliberal thinking and, if so, how? The book makes the argument that while current administrative reforms are informed by several distinct political rationalities, they evolve above all around a particular form of neoliberalism: constructivist neoliberalism. The book analyses the dangers of the kinds of administrative power seeking to invoke the self-steering capacities of society and administration itself. -- .

Traditional forms of top-down government are being challenged by the growing complexity and fragmentation of social and political life and the need to mobilise and activate the knowledge, ideas, and resources of private stakeholders. In response to this important challenge, there has been a persistent proliferation of interactive forms of public governance that bring together a plethora of public and private actors in collaborative policy arenas. This book explores how these new forms of interactive governance are working in practice and analyses their role and impact on public policy making in different policy areas and in different countries. The need for facilitating, managing and giving direction to interactive policy arenas is also addressed through empirical analyses of different forms of metagovernance, that aim to govern interactive forms of governance without reverting to traditional forms of hierarchical command and control. Finally, the normative implications of interactive policy making are assessed through studies of the democratic problems and merits associated with interactive policy making.JACOB TORFING is Director of the Center for Democratic Network Governance and Vice-Director in the large-scale research project on Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector. He has been a member of the Danish Social Science Research Council. PETER TRIANTAFILLOU is a member of the Center for Democratic Network Governance and has served as the Dean of Study at the Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University.

Traditional forms of top-down government are being challenged by the growing complexity and fragmentation of social and political life and the need to mobilize and activate the knowledge, ideas, and resources of private stakeholders. In response to this important challenge there has been a persistent proliferation of interactive forms of public governance that bring together a plethora of public and private actors in collaborative policy arenas. This book explores how these new forms of interactive governance are working in practice and analyses their role and impact on public policy making in different policy areas and in different countries. The need for facilitating, managing and giving direction to interactive policy arenas is also addressed through empirical analyses of different forms of metagovernance that aim to govern interactive forms of governance without reverting to traditional forms of hierarchical command and control. Finally, the normative implications of interactive policy making are assessed through studies of the democratic problems and merits associated with interactive policy making.