Linking with the debate around new public management (NPM) and new public governance (NPG), the article studies different conceptual approaches for explaining dynamically changing systems that locally deliver integrated health and social care. To make our case, we analyse three health and social care ecosystems: London in England, Tampere in Finland, and West Lothian in Scotland. We argue (a) that network analysis is suited to NPM striving for efficiency, rather than NPGs seeking service effectiveness and innovation; (b) that classifying service systems as networks or ecosystem has important strategic and management implications; and (c) from examining three self-classified local public service ecosystems, that these distinctions are misunderstood in practice.
The aspired potentials of the Smart City (SC) and its deficits in practice are essential reasons why the subject is assigned to a rapidly growing body of literature. This situation requires a specific review of the literature summarizing the research efforts to date into research branches and topics, unifying essential basic concepts and thus forming a solid basis for futher research. The present study first derives a basic structure of research by an analysis of the available literature reviews. Subsequently, a systematic examination of SC literature by means of an EBSCO data query identifies the current research topics and compiles a comprehensive view of the research topics. The present study is therefore not only of interest for scientific use, but also offers practitioners an overview of the various sub-areas of a SC, as well as of the currently available findings and experiences in relation to the implementation of SC (sub-)projects.
In nearly all of the framework models of collaborative governance (CG), leadership is always shown as having a major and strategic role. However, specific studies that discuss leadership tend to be limited. Most of the studies on CG are more concerned with the implementation of CG as carried out through several examples of cases. This study intends to perform a precise analysis of the leadership typologies exhibited by the regents of Kulon Progo and Banyuwangi in mobilizing CG, as well as to discover similarities in the indicators that they display in serving their leadership role. This research uses the quantitative approach by referring to the theory of leadership and leadership typologies as developed by Ricard et al. (2017). Ricard distinguished between 5 leadership typologies in the public sector, encompassing transactional, interpersonal, transformational, entrepreneurial, and network governance typologies as arranged into 23 indicators. Data was obtained through a survey of 39 respondents who are Heads of Agencies who have intensive interaction with the Head of the Region. The results of this survey show that the leadership of the two Regents have a tendency to display similarities in typologies, dominated by the entrepreneurial, network governance, and transformational typologies. In the case of the two leaders, the transactional and interpersonal typologies have the lowest average value. Meanwhile, the predominant characteristics of the leadership of these two heads of the region include indicators such as taking initiative, being visionaries, showing commitment to colleagues and organizations, and lastly, being problem oriented. The results of this research may serve as a reference for other Heads of the Region in exercising leadership for collaborative governance.
Strategy has become an essential of public management. Research shows that there are many different approaches to this; however, research has not explored the strategic resources that different approaches provide. This paper contributes to this field of research by applying neo-institutional theory and paradox theory to strategy in public management. Institutional logics form socially constructed patterns of cultural and material practices by which managers define interests and asks and provide meaning to their daily activity. Institutional logics thus accommodate strategic behaviour when managers – and other strategic actors – respond to institutional pressures and expectations. We show that Public administration, Professional Leadership, New Public Management and New Public Governance offer different configurations of strategy in the public sector, i.e. different reasons and resources for doing strategy, which provide public management with different strategic foci, goals and practices. To explore strategy in public management, the institutional logics should be analysed together with an emphasis on the dynamic interaction between them in order to understand how the strategic resources of a particular institutional logic are applied and legitimized as responses to the flaws of other institutional logics.
In 2018, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada developed the Living Laboratories Initiative, a network of agroecosystem living labs, to encourage the adoption and scaling up and out of innovation in both technology and practice in climate change adaptation and mitigation in agriculture. This paper explores living labs as a new collaborative innovation approach that can build trust and develop long-term relationships between different actors in the agri-food system. It answers the question: what can collaborative innovation approaches, like agroecosystem living labs, reveal about the needs of actors within the collaborative governance process? Using a combination of semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this study gathered early-stage insights from various agroecosystem living lab partners in two Canadian agroecosystem living lab sites. It argues that starting conditions of partners were particularly influential in developing living labs. To mitigate current and potential obstacles, metagovernance can be a way to maintain commitment from partners.
JGSD is a peer-reviewed journal, which provides a forum for scholarly research and policy-oriented analyses on various dimensions of society, politics, economy, public administration, and security with a focus on South Asia.
National civil protection systems have been developed and implemented each time a crisis unfolds with different degrees of success in responding and solving the crisis. However, crises are increasingly not confined by national borders and challenge the states’ capacities to adequately respond and thus calling for a crisis management governance that goes beyond the nation-state. In this respect, the European Union has developed its civil protection policy and through the Civil Protection Mechanism established forms of cooperation among the participating states of the Mechanism. In this paper, through the lenses of Europeanisation, we aim at uncovering the influences the Mechanism exercises on the Norwegian and Italian civil protection systems and, at the same time, we seek to spot out which kind of influences these states have on the Mechanism’s development. Europeanisation has been widely used as an analytical framework to mainly explain how national contexts are shaped by EU developments, but it is equally important to understand, as well, how national context shape European developments. Our data stem from document analysis and semi-structured interviews with civil protection officers at national and EU levels.
Due to the institutional differentiation of the public sector, which lead to a hardly comprehensible network of organisations from local administration, public economy and the third sector, the critical question of the importance of the integrated steering and coordination (ISC) of public tasks in municipalities arises in local government research and practice. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the aim of this contribution is (1) to examine the idea of the ISC of local public services from the perspective of policy science, New Public Management and public governance and (2) to identify – based on a qualitative empirical study – reasons and restrictions of its implementation. It is discussed why ISC is at the same time a feasible and guiding approach, but in part also a hardly practicable idea. With regard to this crucial controversy, five perspectives for further local public sector reforms are presented. From the perspective of innovative governance, the paper might help us to stimulate critical thinking about alternative approaches to problem solving and decision making in the public sector.
The state built brown coal (lignite) power generation industry in the Latrobe Valley, Australia started in the 1930’s. The State Electricity Commission Victoria (SECV) managed this industry until its disaggregation, corporatisation, and privatisation, into four privately owned power stations over the 1980s and 1990s. Engie (72%) and Mitsui & Co (28%) privately owned the oldest of these plants, the Hazelwood Power Station and Mine (formerly known as GCF Suez S.A.), when on 9 February 2014, a large out-of-control brown coal fire commenced in the ‘open-cut’ mine adjacent to the Hazelwood Power Station. Although fires are typical in coal sites, this fire became a crisis, burning for 45 days and a cause of considerable stress and dislocation to the local population of 70,000. After the crisis, the Victorian State Government conducted a public inquiry into the disaster, instituted a long-term health study of affected residents, and established the office of Commissioner for Mine Rehabilitation. In 2017, the private owners permanently closed the Hazelwood Power Station due to its advanced age (Engie 2016). This was a huge loss of jobs and a loss of 25% of the state’s available power. The subsequent Hazelwood Mine Fire Inquiry (2014) concluded that, “the Hazelwood mine fire was a foreseeable risk that slipped through the cracks between regulatory agencies” (Hazelwood Mine Fire Inquiry, 2014). This paper examines the public management of the mine fire crisis using the model of ‘organisational path dependency’ developed by Sydow, Schreyogg & Koch, (2005, 2009) adapted to this situation of ‘inter-organisational path dependency’. According to Sydow et al. ( 2005 , 2009 ), path dependence is a process often initiated by a single event, which over time establishes a path that is self-reinforcing due to the effects of coordination, complementary, learning, and, adaptive expectation factors. These effects cause the path to become irreversible, ‘locked-in’ to inefficiencies, so that managers believe they lack the power to act outside the path. This eventually leads to the death of the organisation (Sydow, Schreyogg & Koch, 2009). This paper refers to Mine-Fire Inquiry transcripts and other publications in order to examine the utility of path dependency theory in explaining events before and after the mine fire crisis. It identifies a watershed and subsequent self-reinforcing factors that led to mismanagement of the fire. Moreover, this catastrophe became the ‘path breaking event’ that changed public management in this sector and from which new paths may emerge.
Coordination and collaboration is a perennial theme within public administration and management. This paper studies coordination and collaboration in the public sector by examining a specific case and policy field: The Norwegian joint, multi-agency effort to prevent and combat work-related crime. The main research questions are: How has the Norwegian government organized their work against work-related crime over the last decade? What specific coordination instruments have been introduced, and how do practitioners in the field assess these instruments? What characterizes coordination and collaboration, and what facilitates and constrains it? We find that the coordination efforts are seen as largely successful. The development represents a larger societal push towards joint intelligence efforts at the national level for the purpose of more analytical capacity and more effective use of punitive sanctions. At the same time, sector-based priorities, regulations and performance targets clearly constrain coordination and collaboration between the main actors in the field.
The global financial crisis has put public budgets throughout the European Union under severe pressure. Government responses to the financial crisis have mainly focused on cutbacks to balance the budget. In this paper, we focus on a specific case of innovation in financial governance in Italy that aimed to minimize the severe effects of financial constraints on local government, while managing deficit control goals at the central level. The regulatory innovation consisted in a system of agreements between levels of government based on the ability to exchange fiscal deficit permits. While this system keeps the aggregate government-wide deficit unchanged, it allows individual local governments to deviate from their initial fiscal balance targets by obtaining deficit permits from governments that have a surplus. This paper critically analyzes this innovation from three perspectives: the governance model inherent to this mechanism, the new financial management practices emerging at the local level, and the effectiveness of the mechanism with regard to declared goals and objectives. Findings from this study show that a critical element limiting innovation in fiscal governance seems to be connected to the simplistic observation that the overall budgetary position of the country’s government results from the algebraic sum of all individual government bodies’ financial results. At the core of this understanding are collateral effects that occur when local priorities are distorted by the need to achieve detached fiscal targets set in a top-down manner by the central government, as exemplified by the unexpected investment crunch in Italy induced by fiscal targets calculated on a mixed accrual-cash basis. Keywords – innovation, governance, local government, deficit control, austerity, financial management
Climate change poses a series of risks and hazards that fall within the responsibilities of public sector organizations. Climate adaptation and preparedness for climate-related events creates pressures for these organizations to handle complex, fragmented, divergent and uncertain problems that are more locally oriented than what is typically considered as the main wickedness of climate change-related action. In this article, two questions are raised: whether there may be a particular form of small-scale wickedness associated with climate adaptation and preparedness, and what the issues this would raise for governance capacity. By investigating six cases where Norwegian local, regional and national public organizations interact, the article suggests that there is indeed a certain small-scale wickedness in the context of local climate adaptation and preparedness. This wickedness intertwines with organizational factors relating to coordination and interconnectivity across levels and actors. This may contribute to an ‘amplification’ of the wicked characteristics of local climate adaptation and preparedness issues. Although important elements of this wickedness rests with climate change as such, the presence of third order effects are displayed in increasing complexity, fragmentation, uncertainty and divergence. These wicked aspects are arguably barriers to establishing, sustaining and increasing governance capacity.
This paper looks into decision-making processes in the course of a crisis. In particular, it looks into how governments decide and use heuristics during crisis management, in order to transfer policies, as an attempt to reinforce or regain their legitimacy in unsettled times. It aims to understand how two institutional features, one intrinsic–problem uncertainty– and one extrinsic –ambiguity at the international level– affect decision-making. It develops a typology of policy transfer under these two dimensions. It examines the case of disappearances in Mexico, where Congress issued national legislation in a crisis generated after the disappearance of 43 students in 2014. The Law on Disappeared was a result of an explicit attempt to transfer international guidelines. Results show that, as long as the degree of uncertainty surrounding the problem is low, heuristics change according the degree of ambiguity at the international level: when they are clear, tallying occurs, while when they are ambiguous, one-reason heuristics would favor binding instrument. Furthermore, findings also point towards a nuanced understanding on the effect of a high degree of problem uncertainty on policy transfer. The research is relevant for understanding how, in crisis, decisions adapt based on context.
