Public PolicyStudies

Poor returns to cultivation and absence of non-farm opportunities are indicative of the larger socio-economic malaise in rural India. This is accentuated by the multiple risks that the farmer faces – yield, price, input, technology and credit among others. The increasing incidence of farmers’ suicides is symptomatic of a larger crisis, which is much more widespread. Risk mitigation strategies should go beyond credit. Long term strategies requires more stable income from agriculture, and more importantly, from non-farm sources. Private credit and input markets need to be regulated. A challenge for the technological and financial gurus is to provide innovative products that reduce costs while increasing returns. The institutional vacuum of organising farmers needs to be addressed through a federation of self-help groups (SHGs) or alternative structures.

We discuss issues of the application of antitrust law and regulatory rules to network industries. In assessing the application of antitrust in network industries, we analyze a number of relevant features of network industries and the way in which antitrust law and regulatory rules can affect them. These relevant features include (among others) network effects, market structure, market share and profits inequality, choice of technical standards, relationship between the number of active firms and social benefits, existence of market power, leveraging of market power in complementary markets, and innovation races. We find that there are often significant differences on the effects of application of antitrust law in network and non-network industries.

Like all other nations Nigeria aspires to greatness but over five decades after Independence still ranks very low on all parameters of good governance. The objective of the paper is to examine the concepts of leadership, participatory democracy and good governance, evaluate their significance as components of the development process and articulate the implications of their absence from the administration of public institutions. The paper argues that all three elements are missing from the development process in Nigeria. Systems Analysis or systems theory as enunciated by David Easton is adopted as the theoretical framework. Methodologically the study relies mainly on secondary historical sources of data collection. The paper is significant for its identification of the need for these concepts as guiding principles of the development process in Nigeria. The scope of the paper is Nigeria as a whole from Independence in 1960 till date. It draws the conclusion that Nigerians must insist...

There is a long lineage in neighbourhood research that has underpinned sustained academic and policy interest in the UK centred on understanding how spatial ‘clusters’ of neighbourhood-based deprivation might be destabilised. This has seen the privileging of composite indices in the analysis of deprivation which have been criticised for fostering a common perception that deprived neighbourhoods are homogeneous in terms of their compositions and underlying structures. Such indices have also been criticised for being ineffective at capturing temporal change, providing only static snapshots of deprivation at particular points in time. This paper focuses on patterns of deprived neighbourhood change in the Greater Manchester city-region between 2001 and 2007. It develops a typology of neighbourhood change that is triangulated with three complementary typologies capturing the socioeconomic and demographic compositions of deprived neighbourhoods; the functional roles played by deprived neighbourhoods in redistributing population through migration; and the spatial contexts in which deprived neighbourhoods are located. The analysis reveals that an over reliance on static indices to measure deprivation has long-served to conceal complexities in the way that deprived neighbourhoods change, owing to their variable structures and contexts. It illustrates the danger that lies in treating all deprived neighbourhoods in the same way.

From the past few years, multi-stakeholder governance is one of the captivating concepts that mostly discussed in public administration. Multi-stakeholder governance has represented the modes of governing that involves a multiplicity of informal actors and formal institutions. This new mode of interaction has involving a network of government sectors, non-profit organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGO) and other non-state actors in implementing the public policy. There is many type of public policy and solid waste management policy is one of them. In developing countries, the issue of ineffective policy implementation on solid waste management has grabbed attention of many public policy scholars. Poor multi-stakeholder governance in solid waste policy implementation is one of the main causes. In fact, ineffective solid waste management will brought negative impact to human health, environment and the economy development. Hence, the study of multi-stakeholder governance is very crucial to enhance solid waste policy implementation. This concept paper is critically examines multi-stakeholder governance as a theoretical tool which has potential to advance our understanding on the complexity of policy implementation with regard to solid waste management. This could be an insight for developing countries like Malaysia for achieving sustainable solid waste management.

Public Policy, being a quintessential concept when it comes to International Law, is scarcely interpreted or even approached by present courts due to its complex nature. The purpose of this research paper would be to unify the meaning and purpose of this widely interpreted concept by looking into several interpretations courts have given over the course of time.

La presente aportación es una breve revisión del proceso político por el cual ciertos valores, creencias y orientaciones en torno a la crisis del agua se han convertido en visiones competitivas por parte de los actores relevantes en el orden internacional para estructurar una política hídrica a nivel global que busca incidir en el orden local. El centro de atención por un lado es la disputa por los significados en torno a la naturaleza del agua, la cual se debate entre una visión del agua como bien económico y otra que concibe el recurso vital como un derecho humano. Por otro lado, se trata de una revisión del cómo la Gestión Integral de los Recursos Hídricos (GIRH) se posicionó como un paradigma aceptado por la mayoría de los actores internacionales, pero que lejos de ser un mero instrumento técnico para un manejo más eficiente y sustentable del agua a nivel de cuencas, está impregnado por el conjunto de ideas que subyacen en cada una de la visiones que sobre la naturaleza del agua compiten en el subsistema de la política hídrica.

Les instruments gouvernent en structurant sur le long terme des configurations d’action publique regroupant des acteurs soumis à des contraintes contradictoires. D’une part, les instruments sont moins le chaînon manquant entre les intentions et les pratiques que ce qui relie les acteurs entre eux. Cette capacité détermine leur pérennité. D’autre part, ceux que les instruments gouvernent
sont moins les ressortissants lointains de dispositifs de gouvernement que l’ensemble des acteurs inclus dans une configuration d’action publique. L’attention porte alors sur la façon dont les instruments autorisent ou limitent les possibilités de coopération des acteurs.

Problematyka rozwoju lokalnego była wielokrotnie podejmowana w literaturze przedmiotu. Liczne prace poświęcone mu koncentrują się na jego celach, czynnikach, stymulowaniu go i na jego pomiarze. Mimo to, jak dotąd niewiele uwagi poświęcono pojęciu polityki rozwoju lokalnego prowadzonej przez władze lokalne. Kategorii polityk rozwoju lokalnego prowadzonych przez władze ponadlokalne w ogóle nie formułowano i nie omawiano. Polityki takie są jednak prowadzone w Polsce i za granicą, a ich znaczenie rośnie. Istnieje zatem potrzeba ich definiowania i charakteryzowania dla budowy aparatu pojęciowego wykorzystywanego w dyskursie naukowym, w praktyce projektowania i aplikacji tych polityk oraz w dydaktyce.
Artykuł to próba odpowiedzi na to wyzwanie. Otwiera go prezentacja genezy i istoty lokalizmu oraz koncepcji rozwoju lokalnego. Następnie sformułowano pojęcia rozwoju lokalnego postrzeganego z perspektyw lokalnej i ponadlokalnej oraz omówiono paradygmat rozwoju lokalnego, jego znaczenie i pozycje˛ wobec innych paradygmatów rozwoju. Bazując na lokalnej i ponadlokalnej perspektywach rozwoju lokalnego, sformułowano kategorie lokalnej (gminnej) praz ponadlokalnych (regionalnej, państwowej i ponadpaństwowej) polityk rozwoju lokalnego i wskazano podmioty, które je prowadzą. Omówiono także cele i cechy tych polityk, sposoby ich prowadzenia oraz ich pozycje wobec innych polityk funkcjonalnych i horyzontalnych. W dalszej kolejności przedstawiono spójności wertykalną i horyzontalną ponadlokalnych polityk rozwoju lokalnego. W artykule wykorzystano metody badawcze krytycznej analizy literatury przedmiotu, indukcji, dedukcji i analogii.

[The local development issues were repeatedly discussed in the subject literature. Numerous works devoted to it focus on its objectives, factors and its measurement. Despite this, until now, a little attention has been paid to the category of local development policy pursued by local authorities. The categories of local development policies pursued by the supra-local authorities have not been formulated or discussed at all. Nevertheless, such policies are held in Poland and abroad, and their importance is growing. Thus, there is a need for their definement and characterizing for the construction of nomenclature used in academic discourse and in the practice of design and the application of these policies and in didactics as well. The purpose of this article is to answer this challenge. It opens with the presentation of the origin and the nature of localism and the idea of local development. Then the categories of the local development perceived from the local and supra-local perspectives have been formulated, as well as local development paradigm, its meaning and position in relation to other paradigms of development have been described. Based on local and supra-local perspectives of local development, the categories of local (municipal) and supra-local (regional, national and international) policies of local development have been formulated and the entities who pursue them have been pointed. Also the purpose and features of these policies, ways of their pursuing and their positions in relation to other functional and horizontal policies have been described. Next, the vertical and horizontal cohesion of supra-local policies of local development have been presented. The article uses the research methods of critical analysis of the subject literature, induction, deduction and analogy.]

This dissertation is about the exploration of the traits of the Maltese welfare state in comparison to the mainstream welfare regimes. Many studies have taken place to determine the various characteristics of several welfare regimes which capitalist countries comprise in relation to their welfare state. Furthermore, the three main welfare regimes established by these studies are the Conservative, Liberal and Social Democratic; and eventually the Southern European welfare state. This study deduces that Malta has no clear-cut traits that replicate one particular model of welfare. Moreover, Malta has a hybrid system of welfare as a result of certain factors such as Malta’s colonial history, the country’s geographical location, the importance of the Church, EU membership; among others.

The field of public policy involves two fields of study: "producing knowledge for public policy" and "producing knowledge of public policy". This distinction, which leads to defining public policy on the dualities of politics-knowledge, value-decision, participation-interference, goal-means, depends on the separate consideration of the state's regulatory functions and politics/political structure. While giving the causality of the genesis of the field, the approaches based on this distinction have endeavored to find a historical moment that explains their theoretical positions rather than discovering historical and theoretical roots. The denial of this distinction and the reception of public policy as the product of social relations occurred in a particular conjuncture that would have changed the determinations about the causality of the genesis. The field of public policy is an answer to be given to the political and administrative problems of the US during the period of the Second World War. The reflection of this problem oil the government as the strengthening of execution has realized the definition of public policy as political planning.

PIMENTA, M. S. (Org.) ; CANABARRO, D. R. (Org.) . Governança Digital - Coleção CEGOV Capacidade Estatal e Democracia. 1. ed. Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 2014. v. 1. 212p .

Volume integrante da serie CAPACIDADE ESTATAL E DEMOCRACIA do CEGOV/UFRGS.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

In 2008, the Government of Egypt (GoE) announced new targets for Renewable Energies (RE) up to 2020. It was the first time specific targets were set. By 2020, 20 percent of the national energy demand is supposed to be met by renewable forms of energy.
This study aims to identify key challenges that may be encountered for changing the current energy mix.
The first section of the study briefs the reader with a background of the situation in Egypt, the research question, research methodology and the limitations of the study. The second section is dedicated to present theoretical considerations made in this regard, in addition to some practical aspects and lessons learned from countries’ experience with energy transition. Followed by “Egypt’s Country Profile”; presenting the main data required to assess the country’s potentials. The fourth section develops an analysis of both theoretical as well as practical considerations applying to the case of Egypt.
And finally the study will summarize the major findings and remarks in the conclusion part.

Corrupt exchanges are often brokered by a third party, but this phenomenon has not been satisfactorily explored by researchers of corruption. Literature on brokerage in general provides interesting models but they have not previously been applied to corrupt exchanges. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with respondents who participated in actual corrupt transactions, this paper identifies several distinct brokerage types in low-level corruption in contemporary Hungary. The paper also provides explanation of variation in corruption brokerage in terms of actors' group affiliations, forms of the corrupt exchanges, brokerage mechanisms, as well as neutrality, benefit and motivation, risk distribution, and stability of the brokerage structure. Finally, we discuss some policy implications of corruption brokerage.

Malaysia is one of the most successful developing countries in term of economic growth and stable politic conditions. Rapid economic transition and increasing of urban population will reflect the escalation of solid waste generation. In fact, it has become a threatened to human habitat nowadays as well as one of the critical challenges in sustainable development. Municipal solid waste management in Malaysia has experiencing a transition since 1960 until official solid waste management legislation is fully implemented in 2011. This transition shows the Malaysian government is committed to strive towards effective municipal solid waste management. The objective of this concept paper is to give an insight towards sustainable municipal solid waste management in Malaysia through brief discussion of municipal solid waste definition, characteristic, practices and policies.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Complete conference proceedings for the II Brazilian Congress of Leisure Studies that took place September 2016 in the city of Belém, Brazil.
Anais completos do II Congresso Brasileiro de Estudos do Lazer, realizado em setembro de 2016 na cidade de Belém-PA.

Coautores: victoria Alexandra Calderon, Adolfo Eslava Gómez, Jenny Elisa López, Federico Parra, Juan-Antonio Zornoza, Rocío Rubio, Alfredo Rosero, Luisa Fernanda Cano, Jean-francois Jolly, Luz Alejandra Cerón, Mireya Camacho, Miguel Angel Herrera, Deisy Arrubla, Magnolia del Pilar Ballesteros, Alberto Martinez, Luis Hernando Barreto, Ana María Fernández, Jorge Ivan Cuervo

We are a country, full of paradoxes. The forward-looking elite in the country emphasize the need for
re-skilling but conduct this with backward-looking institutions. We want to be a knowledge economy
without reflecting and contemplating on the demands of the knowledge society. As a result, we lack the
institutions to be systematically innovative and our policies seem short run and sometimes erratic. We
are being out-fought and out-thought in the realm of knowledge and policy, while confusing rhetorical
victories for real-time gains. The recent debates around growth, development and the fate of ecology
have also raised issues that public policy must attempt to answer.

We discuss the case of a monopolist of a base good in the presence of a complementary good provided either by it or by another firm. We assess and calibrate the extent of the influence on the profits from the base good that is created by the existence of the complementary good. We establish an equivalence between a model of a base and a complementary good and a reduced-form model of the base good in which network effects are assumed in the consumers’ utility functions as a surrogate for the presence of direct or indirect network effects, such as complementary goods produced by other firms. We also assess and calibrate the influence on profits of the intensity of network effects and qualityimprovements in both goods. We evaluate the incentive that a monopolist of the base good has to improve its quality rather than that of the complementary good under different market structures. Finally, based on our results, we discuss a possible explanation of the fact that Microsoft Office has a significantly higher price than Microsoft Windows although both products have comparable market shares.

El següent article pretén reflexionar sobre un dels
actors que ha denunciat de manera més
contundent i continuada el problema de la manca
d’habitatge i d’espais de sociabilitat no
mercantilitzats. L’okupació d’immobles abandonats
és un fenomen antic, però la seva constitució en
tant que moviment social es remunta a la dècada
dels 70. És durant aquesta dècada quan es
popularitzen les okupacions a països com
Alemanya, Holanda, Itàlia o Gran Bretanya. Al
nostre país, però, no és fins al 1984, quan es
produeixen les primeres okupacions reivindicades
en el barri de Gràcia a Barcelona. De fet, no és fins
al 1996 amb la conjunció de diversos factors
d’oportunitat (criminalització de l’okupació a través
del Codi Penal, okupació i desallotjament violent
del Cinema Princesa, acumulació de forces del
propi moviment) que aquest moviment no dóna el
salt a l’Agenda Pública. A continuació presentarem
breument el context sociopolític on es desenvolupa
el moviment; apuntarem els principals impactes
que ha tingut el moviment en les polítiques
públiques i acabarem amb un reflexió comparada
de cara a abordar la temàtica de l’okupació des de
les institucions.

¿Cómo han evolucionado las principales instituciones políticas del país después de una férrea dictadura de más de30 años? ¿Cuál es el balance institucional a 50 años del ajusticiamiento de Trujillo? Los procesos de configuración del Estado, la sociedad civil, los partidos políticos, el poder judicial, el poder legislativo, los gobiernos locales y las políticas públicas sociales y de propiedad intelectual son descritos y analizados minuciosamente por actores del sistema y académicos.

This dissertation scrutinizes the implications of EU Structural Funds on the Maltese Public Administration from Malta’s accession to the European Union up to the execution of the 2007-2013 Programming Period. This study reviews these implications in the context of two theoretical frameworks namely Public Choice Theory and Managerialism. Information was gathered through semi-structured interviews as well as from quantitative data that was available from official documentation as well as from beneficiaries of Structural Funds. Whilst Malta has a comparatively high rate of absorption capacity of EU Funds when compared to other Member States of the European Union, a number of gaps that can jeopardise this rate were uncovered in this study. These start from working in a system under tight scrutiny of the supranational, namely the European Commission and the European Court of Auditors, both of which have their own set of respective checks and balances. Subsequently, this can bring about a high level of bureaucracy at national level to safeguard these checks and balances which might hinder the scope of managing Structural Funds, namely the optimum absorption and implementation of these funds. In this regard, Malta’s small public administration comprises of stakeholders within the system of Structural Funds that must execute their ‘normal’ public function as well as carry out their functions in relation to Structural Funds. With such little room for the limited administration to manoeuvre, this is leading to a situation where the entire system is not reacting in a timely manner leading to delays in adjusting to the exigencies of the supranational and delays in the implementation and absorption of activities and funds respectively. With the help of continuums and dichotomies of the structures within the public administration, this study analyses the parts of the administration that have been shaped during this complex relationship between Structural Funds and the administration itself. Furthermore, this study proposes recommendations on how systematic improvements can be carried out even within the remit of these funds.

Both experts and the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) have agreed that efficiency, transparency, a diversification of implementers, and an impact-oriented approach is necessary to improve the foreign assistance of the United States Government (USG). This article shows the importance of the correlation of rent-seeking and program impact in terms of democracy and development aid. There are limited publications regarding the Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreement (NICRA) and other operational costs that nonprofit organizations or implementers have been charging to projects funded by US taxpayers. This article also exposes the poorly studied practice of providing a negotiated overhead that is applied to all projects by a given organization without major oversight or transparency. Thanks to the deep knowledge in the field after three decades of implementing USG projects, the author of the article provides recommendations to improve the effectiveness and transparency of international assistance programs, and it opens discussion of an area that may need to be reformed to address such as rent-seeking programs.

We discuss and compare the remedies in the two cases antitrust cases of the European Union (EU) against Microsoft. The first EU case alleged (i) that Microsoft illegally bundled the Windows Media Player (WMP) with Windows; and (ii) that Microsoft did not provide adequate documentation that would allow full interoperability between Windows servers and non-Microsoft servers as well as between Windows clients and non-Microsoft servers. After finding Microsoft liable and imposing a large fine, the EU imposed as remedies the requirements on Microsoft (i) to sell a version of Windows without WMP (Windows-N); and (ii) to publish and license interoperability information. Windows-N was a commercial failure, and there has been only limited cross-platform server entry. In its second investigation of Microsoft, the EU alleged illegal tying of Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows. The EU settled with Microsoft with Microsoft undertaking the obligation to ask (through compulsory Windows updates) consumers whose computers have Internet Explorer pre-installed to choose a browser from a menu of competing browsers. Thus, the EU imposed quite different remedies in the two cases: an unbundling remedy for the WMP but a close to a must-carry requirement for IE. We analyze and compare the different approaches.

Utilizing an array of statistical, oral life history, ethnographic, and other research, this doctoral dissertation is a historical-comparative analysis of the implications of the expansion of mass education and industrialization on the inequalities among the English-speaking, Chinese-speaking, and Malay-speaking in Singapore. This thesis is part of a larger project. A book manuscript will be the final product of these endeavors. Succinctly, this dissertation corroborates that when and how the antecedents of each linguistic group arrived in Singapore determined its market situations and life chances. Not only did they supply the condition regarding its capacity to maximize the makeover of the political economy when the Straits Settlements, of which Singapore was a component, became a Crown Colony, these also in turn situated the equally crucial circumstance about its categorically differentiated ability to exploit educational expansion and industrialization a century later, where schooling was again pivotal.

En lo que va de este siglo, el mundo ha empezado a experimentar cambios drásticos, que marcan y acompañan el nacimiento de un nuevo orden mundial. En este contexto, después de muchos años de alto crecimiento económico y notables avances sociales, los países de renta media se encuentran en una encrucijada: ¿cómo afianzar los logros conseguidos y consolidar la eficacia de sus políticas sociales en medio de una coyuntura macro-económica menos alentadora y un panorama político frágil y fragmentado? Para contestar a esta pregunta, este capítulo estudia el nuevo posicionamiento de los países latinoamericanos de renta media y sus principales desafíos, por un lado, y la filosofía de la cooperación euro-latinoamericana, por el otro, y profundiza el análisis de la experiencia del Programa EUROsociAL, con especial referencia a Colombia. A manera de conclusión, el texto plantea algunas reflexiones sobre cómo apoyar los países mencionados en esta coyuntura en lo referente a las políticas sociales y el buen gobierno, evidenciando la necesidad de un replanteamiento de los paradigmas de la cooperación internacional para el desarrollo y la oportunidad representada por la Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible.