The Struggle to Reform Regulatory Procedures, 1978–1998

This article examines the attempts between 1978 and 1998 to enact general regulatory procedural reform legislation. Two decades of off-again, off-again legislative efforts have yielded only fragments of reform. A major explanation for this, despite the official popularity of reform, seems to be the inability of putative reformers-traditionalists, populists, and restrictivists-to agree among themselves on the direction and content of general reform legislation. This experience raises a number of important theoretical issues for students of regulation, including the ethicalness of using procedural restraints deliberately to disrupt or impede the regulatory process and the impact of procedural controls on regulatory policy.     

Dilemmas of Counter‐Mapping Community Resources in Tanzania

Recent work has celebrated the political potential of ‘counter‐mapping’, that is, mapping against dominant power structures, to further seemingly progressive goals. This article briefly reviews the counter‐mapping literature, and compares four counter‐mapping projects from Maasai areas in Tanzania to explore some potential pitfalls in such efforts. The cases, which involve community‐based initiatives led by a church‐based NGO, ecotourism companies, the Tanzanian National Parks Authority, and grassroots pastoralist rights advocacy groups, illustrate the broad range of activities grouped under the heading of counter‐mapping. They also present a series of political dilemmas that are typical of many counter‐mapping efforts: conflicts inherent in conservation efforts involving territorialization, privatization, integration and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of ‘community‐level’ political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of ‘external’ actors such as conservation and development donors, the state and private business interests.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

Interest Groups and (Re-)establishing Stability in Policy Making: The Case of the NSW Farmers' Association and the Native Vegetation Conservation Act

This article examines the response of the New South Wales Farmers' Association (NSWFA) to the Native Vegetation Conservation Act in NSW. Given the State government's decision initially to impose, without prior consultation with the Association, a regulation limiting farmers' activities on private land, the Association's response occurred in the context of efforts by policy makers to reconstitute a pattern of stable policy making. The case is particularly interesting because the efforts at re-establishing stability included a mix of a peak interest-group forum and regional policy-making committees. The difficulty that the Association had in influencing the emerging native-vegetation-management policy agenda reflects its inability to secure member compliance, which was necessary to enable it to operate effectively in these new arenas. The article offers a range of explanations to explain the absence of member compliance and explores the broader implications for interest-group analysis.     

Now that's Controversial! Tracing the Influence of Policy Discourses on History Education Reform in the Balkans

In this article, I bring an ethnographic lens to untangling the influence of policy discourses on civil society-initiated projects of history education reform in the Balkans. Drawing on data from a multi-sited project conducted amongst historians, teachers, and NGO personnel, I ask: what are the dominant discourses that impact civil society-initiated efforts to promote history education reform, and how are these discourses made authoritative? How does policy act to organize the work of this cluster of actors, and what kinds of responses does it provoke? While educational policy discourses and their impacts are varied, I argue that such discourses can be profitably viewed as technologies of governance deployed in the service of post-national citizenship formation. In analysing behaviours of “complaisance”, how “competencies” emerge as a slippery signifier whose expansive meaning was exploited to multiple ends, and how the demands of post-national citizenship can, and sometimes do, detract from the goal of addressing controversial history, I map the field of possibilities in which my interlocutors found themselves, and highlight how they navigated their positions as mediators of particular, shifting, social worlds.     

Culturally sustainable development: theoretical concept or practical policy instrument?

Abstract

This paper outlines the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, and considers the evolution of efforts to integrate culture into sustainable development policy and practice over recent years. The specific concept of culturally sustainable development (CSD), first promulgated more than 20 years ago, is re-assessed in the light of contemporary circumstances as a theoretically plausible proposition and as a basis for application to cultural policy formation. The paper proposes a set of principles by which consistency of a cultural policy or cultural development strategy with CSD can be judged. The application of each of the principles is discussed, drawing illustrations from particular policy areas in both developed and developing countries. The paper argues that CSD is a concept that has both theoretical substance and potential for practical policy application.     

Hungry for Justice: Social Mobilization on the Right to Food in India

This article explores the potential and limits of contemporary economic rights‐based social activism by analysing an ongoing ‘Right to Food Campaign’ in India. While social movement theory often positions radical and reform strategies as alternatives, the RTF campaign has adopted a hybrid strategy: it has made a radical legal demand that the right to food be recognized as intrinsic to the right to life, while seeking implementation of this right through reform of existing government feeding programmes. The campaign's dual strategy reflects two distinct logics of human rights: a logic of non‐derogable rights that are immediately actionable (such as the right to life) and a logic of progressive implementation of rights that can only be realized fully over time (such as economic rights). This article draws on original data to demonstrate that the campaign's radical legal demands framed around the non‐derogable right to life have come closer to fulfilment than its reformist demands around progressive implementation. The RTF campaign's relative success in galvanizing legal action on hunger is tempered by ongoing challenges in sustaining grassroots‐level mobilization and influencing public policy implementation.     

Peaceful development: China's policy of reassurance

The rise of China has aroused much concern and anxiety around the world. This has complicated China's foreign policy objective of securing a peaceful international environment for domestic reforms and development. Accordingly, reassuring the world of the benign nature of China's rise has become a central feature of China's foreign policy. This paper describes and analyses China's efforts in this regard. First, it outlines the central features of such efforts which constitute a policy of reassurance. Then it explores the major factors shaping the policy. Finally it tries to assess the result of the policy and speculate about its future development. It is hoped that this will help gain a better understanding of China's foreign policy.     

Malthus,gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare reform

This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial rhetorical architecture for welfare reform debates in the USA during the 1990s. Populationism, which Joni Seager defines as ‘the dogma and the rhetoric of population alarmism and population control,’ subtly legitimized efforts to control and marginalize poor women's bodies in the context of welfare reform. The populationism underlying welfare reform hinges on a deep fear of engulfing social chaos if ‘we’ do not check the fertility of poor women, and particularly women of color. This article historically situates contemporary welfare politics by tracing in some detail how Malthus' original writings on population were constitutively linked to debates about ‘poor relief’ in early nineteenth century England. Exploring the gendered linkages between Malthus and social welfare policy in the 1800s allows us to understand how Malthus continues to haunt discourses about social welfare in the 1990s and beyond, with direct consequences for poor women and particularly poor women of color.     

Metropolitan reform in Allegheny County: the local failure of National Urban Reform Advocacy, 1920-1929

During the 1920-1929 period, the Civic Club of Allegheny County supported political consolidation of the county's municipalities and townships. Civic Club leaders sought boundary reform to tackle perceived social problems and political inefficiencies in the Pittsburgh region. This policy was aligned with a national network of Progressive urban reformers, some of whom guided the Civic Club's plans. These reform efforts culminated in the 1929 Metropolitan Charter, which was rejected by Allegheny County voters. Traditional explanations of this failed vote emphasize the high threshold for success of the charter. However, such accounts ignore the apparent disjunction between the national perception of regional problems and the local reception of recommended solutions. Reform advocates were unable to adapt national Progressive theories to the local context of Allegheny County. This article first describes the national network of Progressive Era research that prescribed metropolitan solutions for urban problems in cities such as Pittsburgh. The article then examines attempts by the Civic Club of Allegheny County to introduce these theories to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The failure of the 1929 Metropolitan Charter is reevaluated, and the implications of these events for current proponents of metropolitanism and political reform are discussed.     

Regional Innovation Policies in the Czech Republic and the Case of Prague: An Emerging Role of a Regional Level?

The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the development of Czech innovation policy which started to get its shape in the first years of the 21st century. The article traces its origins to a number of interlinked factors—the introduction of European regional policy in the Czech Republic, the increased inflow of foreign direct investment into R&D-intensive sectors and also the devolution of power to Czech regions that were established in 2001 and gave a new, regional dimension to research and innovation policy. It pays particular attention to the process through which the regionally-based innovation policy advocated by the European Union (EU) has been translated and adapted in the context of a new EU member state. As an illustration of the efforts at the regional level to make a better use of the potential of R&D and innovation in the regional development, a case study of a regional innovation strategy of the City of Prague is analysed. The City of Prague was selected for a critical analysis of an innovation system and innovation policy due to the fact that it is a region with significant but until now not fully exploited innovation potential and, in addition, its first innovation strategy has been recently adopted. The innovation strategy is closely scrutinized and the process of its elaboration is critically examined within the European and especially national context. The authors demonstrate that there is a lot of conceptual ambiguity and confusion associated with the process of transferring the experiences of Western European regions to the Czech Republic. The authors believe that at least some of their observations and analysis of weaknesses of the process through which the regional innovation strategy (RIS) has been carried out will have relevance for other Czech regions and even for other regions in the new EU member states.     

日本政府推进信息化发展的政策措施

日本政府为改变信息化相对落后的状态，在新世纪初制定《IT基本战略》，决定实施IT立国战略，2005年把日本建设成为世界上最先进的IT国家。为此，日本政府以制定《IT基本法》、实施IT立国战略为中心，通过e-Japan战略、IT新改革战略、IT新改革战略政策纲要和e-Japan重点计划等，积极采取了推进信息化发展的战略和政策措施。在此基础上，日本政府又提出《u-Japan构想》，争取在2010年建设无所不在的网络社会，以消除数字鸿沟，使地方也能够充分利用IT基础设施，有信息均等和机会均等的公平上网环境，以建设充满活力的地方，实现城市和地方的协调发展。     

Science as culture and leisure: cultural policy,industry and scientific culture in the Canadian context

Government ministries of industry have long been promoters, co‐producers and even sometimes producers of cultural policy – from local and regional development strategies to initiatives that fund cultural organizations to support emerging fields such as the technological arts. This article explores the relationship between cultural policy‐making, science museums and industry ministries in Canada. More specifically, this article investigates the emergence and institutionalization of scientific culture policy as a result of advocacy by science centres in the 1980s. Beyond the delineation of scientific culture as a field and of the contribution of industry ministries to cultural policy, this article highlights the entrepreneurial strategies of cultural organizations and their impact on policy and facilities, thus suggesting that cultural organizations are not just passive instruments of social regulation and reform.     

Re-regulating the Gambling Industry: Regulatory Reform in Victoria and New South Wales, 1999–2006

Historically, in Australia, gambling policy and regulation have been the sole responsibility of Australian State and Territory governments. However, in 1998–99 the Commonwealth commissioned an unprecedented national inquiry into gambling that was highly critical of existing gambling policies and regulatory regimes. The Productivity Commission proposed a ‘blueprint’ for an effective, independent gambling regulatory system. Seven years on, this article revisits Australian gambling regulation to present a contextualised account of regulatory reform in Victoria and New South Wales (NSW). It finds that that they have taken a markedly different approach to structural reform. Neither State has adopted the Productivity Commission's ‘ideal’ regulatory model. Reforms have been shaped by local circumstances and government priorities, rather than the regulatory principles and functions outlined by the Productivity Commission.     

基于量图分析法的中国贫困省区划分研究

科学划分贫困区有助于强化政府反贫困战略实施的针对性、实效性,有助于贫困人口尽快脱贫。本文在综述国内外贫困区划分方法的基础上,运用量图分析法,从动态的角度、省级行政区的层次,划分了中国的贫困省区,并根据贫困省区的经济社会发展特点和变化,分析了导致其贫困的原因,提出了中国贫困省区脱贫致富的措施。分析表明,中国经济社会发展呈现东中西梯级分布的空间特征,贫困省区集中在西部地区;贫困省区的贫困不但表现为收入低、生活条件差,而且还表现为市场化发育程度低、财政基础薄弱、受教育程度低;中国内部区域差距有进一步扩大趋势。     

Narratives and expert information in agenda-setting: Experimental evidence on state legislator engagement with artificial intelligence policy

Are narratives as influential in gaining the attention of policymakers as expert information, including for complex, technical policy domains such as artificial intelligence (AI) policy? This pre-registered study uses a field experiment to evaluate legislator responsiveness to policy entrepreneur outreach. In partnership with a leading AI think tank, we send more than 7300 U.S. state legislative offices emails about AI policy containing an influence strategy (providing a narrative, expert information, or the organization's background), along with a prominent issue frame about AI (emphasizing technological competition or ethical implications). To assess engagement, we measure link clicks to further resources and webinar registration and attendance. Although AI policy is a highly technical domain, we find that narratives are just as effective as expert information in engaging legislators. Compared to control, expert information and narratives led to 28 and 34 percent increases in policymaker engagement, respectively. Furthermore, higher legislature professionalism and lower state-level prior AI experience are associated with greater engagement with both narratives and expert information. Finally, we find that policymakers are equally engaged by an ethical framing of AI policy as they are with an economic one. The findings advance efforts to bridge scholarship on policy narratives, policy entrepreneurship, and agenda-setting.     

Negotiating the regulation of the structural funds: Italian actors in EU regional policy‐making

The role of Italy in the reform process of the regulations concerning EU regional policy has traditionally been weak. Since 1998, however, Italian actors in Brussels started to play an increasingly more central role. Looking at the 1998 Regulation, we analyse the internal and external factors that explain this improved performance and conclude that this change might lead to an even more active and creative role being adopted by Italian institutional actors in the current negotiations which will lead to the reform of the regulation of the Structural Funds for 2007–13.     

'New Programming' and the Influence of Transnational Discourses in the Reform of Regional Policy in Italy

Recent developments in regional policy in Italy may be interpreted as outcomes of a mutual fertilization between two distinct policy discourses, concerning the reframing of regional programming in the framework of a reform of the State, and the promotion of local initiatives in a perspective of endogenous development. This paper presents a critical itinerary of the mutual evolution of these lines of discourse during the 1990s. Their provisional merging in the framework of the strategy of 'new programming' adopted in connection with the reform of the Structural Funds and with the new community support framework (CSF) for the period 2000-2006 is interpreted in light of the 'Europeanization' of Italian public policy and of the influence of its progressive embedding into transnational policy discourses.     

Police unions and use-of-force reforms in American cities

Following the murder of George Floyd, there was widespread debate about the policies that govern the use of force by police, but municipal leaders suggested that police unions kept many of the proposed changes from being adopted. Although there is anecdotal and scholarly evidence that unions frequently oppose policing reform, the limited literature in this area actually offers somewhat mixed conclusions about the relationship between union strength and the success of previous reform efforts. In this study, we draw on Halpin's theory of interest groups as politically adaptive organizations to develop expectations about the behavior of police unions in police governance subsystems. We hypothesize that union attempts to influence policy will correlate positively with reform adoption when the political environment is conducive to victory on that front or makes the cost of opposition too high and negatively when the opposite conditions hold. Analyses of the impact of union campaign contributions on the adoption of use-of-force policies in the 100 largest U.S. cities demonstrate that the nature and direction of union influence are moderated by the political climate of the jurisdiction in which they operate.     

Confronting Conservation at Mount Elgon,Uganda

National parks remain at the centre of conservation efforts in Africa, although the long established strategy of conservation through law enforcement is now supplemented by participatory strategies such as community conservation. These new strategies have not changed the preservationist thrust of conservation policy and action. The relationships between parks and people are best understood as struggles in which ‘park neighbours’ use covert and overt ‘weapons of the weak’ to challenge the hegemony of conservation. This study of a national park in Uganda describes and analyses these forms of resistance.