Research on blame avoidance of public employees primarily focuses on its reactive nature, referring to justifying failures after they happen, while its anticipatory side has received less attention. Using data from 781 Chinese public employees, this study examines how four accountability features, namely, the number of forums, the type of authority, the initiation source, and the evaluative focus, shape their perceptions of anticipatory blame avoidance. Results indicate that political authority and outcome-focused accountability reduce the perceived likelihood of blame avoidance of public employees, whereas the number of forums and the initiation source have little effect. These findings contribute to the governance and policy literature by demonstrating how accountability features shape public employees' anticipation of blame avoidance before misconduct.
Policy reinvention has received substantial scholarly attention. However, little is known about how reinvention at different government levels influences policy implementation outcomes. This study examines the dynamics of multilevel policy reinvention within vertical authority structures. The findings demonstrate that while municipal policy reinvention positively contributes to policy outcomes, excessive policy reinvention at the provincial level can impede municipal policy performance. Contrary to our expectation, faster provincial adoption weakens the positive relationship between municipal reinvention and policy performance. An exploratory typological analysis further shows that conservative reinvention is associated with significantly better outcomes than prudent reinvention. Robustness analyses confirm the stability of these theoretical claims. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of intergovernmental policy processes and offer practical insights into achieving better alignment between policy reinvention efforts across government tiers and policy implementation performance.
Debates over the effectiveness of policy implementation networks and the role of network management have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades. Research has focused on the tasks network managers perform, proposing that network management improves network performance. This study takes a step back by investigating why some network managers intervene in their networks more intensively than others, addressing an important research gap. Using data from 13 Swiss smoking prevention networks, this article bridges the research on policy implementation and public management by analyzing how organizational features and implementation context-related factors jointly influence managerial action within collaborative policy delivery networks. Rather than assuming that managerial activity is driven by single factors, this paper employs Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) alongside in-depth case study evidence to identify combinations of factors that shape the level of managerial activity. The study suggests that high-intensity network management in mandated networks is shaped by the interplay of network managers’ organizational affiliation (public vs. non-state), the presence or absence of goal conflicts, the level of resources available for network management, and the existence of ties within the network. It finds that NGO-affiliated network managers are more likely to apply high-intensity network management – either proactively under favorable conditions or reactively when facing challenges – while public managers typically engage less due to structural constraints or managerial preferences. By conceptualizing network management as a phenomenon situated at the intersection of organizational structure and implementation context, this study offers a more integrated understanding of how public service delivery is coordinated in complex governance settings.
Decarbonising local public services is essential for implementing climate plans. Actors involved, such as utility companies and municipal departments, must balance financial, social and climate goals, often compromising the effectiveness of the ecological transition. While existing literature classifies service delivery arrangements, it offers limited insight into how these arrangements affect climate policy implementation and integration. This paper examines the hypothesis that greater involvement of market-oriented private providers leads to less consistent service delivery with climate mitigation programmes due to increased information asymmetry and coordination costs. It analyses four cities with differing arrangements: Zurich and Lausanne (Switzerland), where public actors are more involved, and Bologna and Padua (Italy), where municipalities rely on private or hybrid providers. Findings draw on 28 semi-structured interviews and relevant policy documents. The analysis suggests that stronger municipal control over service planning and oversight supports more effective climate policy implementation. This contributes to the literature on policy implementation and public management by identifying the institutional contexts that enable collaboration for resolving horizontal collective action dilemmas.
This paper addresses a gap between public management (PM) and policy implementation (PI) in explaining how power operates across policy design and implementation. While PM often begins from questions of institutional design and the management of public authority, PI emphasizes how policies are contested and adapted in practice. Rather than treating these perspectives as irreconcilable, this study develops a processual framework of institutionalized and negotiated power. Institutionalized power refers to power embedded in legal mandates, administrative roles, resources, and recognized participation channels held by both formal authorities and policy recipients, albeit in different forms. Negotiated power emerges when these institutionalized powers interact and contest during implementation. Empirically, this paper traces the post-Morakot housing reconstruction of Siaolin village in Taiwan by showing how an initial government-NGO permanent housing plan produced acceptance among some households but resistance among others. It shows that policy outcomes are neither simply delivered through formal authority nor spontaneously produced through local contestation, instead they emerge through recursive interaction between institutionalized arrangements and negotiated practice. The paper contributes to PM and PI scholarship by offering an integrated account of how formal design, implementation contestation, policy adaptation, and institutional learning are connected in disaster recovery governance.
