Bridging and Bonding Capital in Two‐Mode Collaboration Networks

Public management and policy scholars have empirically demonstrated that in complex policy arenas, governments depend on the collaboration of policy actors outside their direct control to produce needed goods and services. Government‐sponsored shared‐cost programs are one of the premier mechanisms to foster such cooperation, yet little is known about the inner patterns of participation in such programs and whether they are conditional on specific resource needs that partners may have. In this article, I study the participation of organizations in projects seeking funds from the Cooperative Funding Initiative, a program sponsored by the Southwest Florida Water Management District that finances projects dealing with the management of water resources. Through the estimation of a series of Exponential Random Graph Models in the networks that form when organizations participate in projects (two‐mode networks), I show that centralization around popular organizations results in greater bridging network capital, which facilitates the flow of nonoverlapping information from project to project. I analyze the implications of these findings and discuss how the formation of these bridging structures may enhance the capacity of the program to find innovative solutions to the problems the projects are designed to deal with.     

Index to Volume L—2009

A U. S.-based geographer investigates how decentralization, a central component of China's fiscal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, has altered the foundation of underlying economic inequalities among its regions. More specifically, the paper examines the evolution of China's fiscal system during the reform era and corresponding changes in the character of central-local fiscal relations. It focuses on analyzing how patterns in regional fiscal disparities at multiple geographic levels have changed over time, laying the groundwork for further research on China's uneven regional development.     

Topping Off and Bottoming Out: Setting Budget Priorities Through Executive Power

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade-offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to “top off” categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda-setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process.     

Accommodation and the politics of fiscal equalization in multinational states: The case of Canada

The politics of accommodation in multinational states sometimes features an important, yet often overlooked, fiscal dimension. In fact, the scholarly literature on the accommodation of nationalist movements emphasizes territorial autonomy, access to power and representation within central institutions, and the promotion of the state national identity, but it is virtually silent on how patterns of territorial fiscal redistribution, and more specifically programs of horizontal fiscal equalization, may contribute to accommodating sub‐state nationalism. This article looks at the Canadian case and analyses the multidimensional relationship between equalization policy and Québécois nationalism. It explains how a key motivation behind the creation of Canada's fiscal equalization program in 1957 was to “end” the institutional and political isolation of Québec and how equalization may have, thereafter, contributed to making Québec's secession less appealing to a good number of Quebeckers than it would have been in the absence of this program. Simultaneously, the article discusses how equalization may have contributed to a certain political backlash against Québec in the other provinces, thus providing mixed evidence in the assessment of the accommodation potential of equalization policy.     

Policy coordination and selective corruption control in China

In autocracies facing widespread corruption, the allocation of the scant attention available for fighting corruption strongly affects corruption control. Although research has found that authoritarian regimes tend to fight corruption selectively, it is unknown whether and how autocracies allocate attention across different policy areas to combat corruption. We propose that single-party authoritarian regimes can steer anticorruption attention to the policy domains prioritized by the central authority through the mechanism of cross-organizational policy coordination. Using original datasets compiled from Chinese governmental and procuratorial policy papers from 1998 to 2016, we demonstrate that Chinese prosecutors direct anticorruption attention to the policy domains accentuated in the central government's major reforms. Our field interviews support this finding and reveal possible disruption of anticorruption efforts in policy domains falling off the central government's top list. Thus, we extend the research on political influence over anticorruption agencies and show that single-party regimes can instrumentalize anticorruption to serve the government's policy agenda, driving the allocation of limited anticorruption attention across policy areas.     

Biros,Books and Big‐men: Literacy and the Transformation of Leadership in Simbu,Papua New Guinea

This article examines local strategies used to build leadership roles and enlist public support in a newly literate Papua New Guinean highlands rural community. The ethnographic evidence presented shows how the relationship between literacy and local ideas about modernisation and development has facilitated a shift in patterns of local political structures. When literacy is viewed as an unequally distributed and novel resource with inherently modernist connotations it becomes evident why male villagers in a contemporary highlands village endeavour to acquire and exploit it in rivalry with others. And while individual villagers market their reading and writing proficiency as a means to bolster their reputations within the existing socio‐political system, this has significance for traditional leadership and authority patterns, given that village leaders have traditionally been unschooled and therefore do not possess these highly regarded skills. To illustrate these processes I examine the political careers of two prominent villagers with particular attention to their respective claims to head two competing village‐based development projects. An analysis of the agendas they use to legitimate their authority roles in these projects makes clear how the quest to be seen to be literate has become a constitutive component of a prospective leader's repertoire of skills.     

More than just experts for hire: A conceptualization of the roles of consultants in public policy formulation

Consultants are increasingly a part of public policy formulation, and their policy involvement draws extensive interest in research and public debate. However, there is a gap in how we think about their formulation role: they are often conceptualized as a type of expert, while their actual interaction with and contribution to policy formulation is much more varied. This paper develops a conceptualization of consultants' formulation roles. It demonstrates that rather than just informing policy formulation, consultants take multiple roles and interact with policymaking and makers in multiple ways. Using a policy network/subsystem distinction and a substance/process distinction as the main axes for analysis, the paper develops four role categories: (1) experts and knowledge brokers, in which consultants provide policy advice and analysis; (2) seeing for the government, in which they construct a picture of the policy field; (3) legitimizers and validators, in which they provide symbolic capital to policy; and (4) channels for stakeholders' policy preferences, in which they manage deliberation and synthesize actors' policy preferences. The paper provides much-needed clarity on how consultants engage with policy formulation and policymakers and forwards our understanding of how consultants exert their policy influence.     

SCHOOL DISTRICT BUDGETARY ELECTIONS: A COST REDISTRIBUTE PROCEDURE?

This article examines, theoretically and empirically, school district budgetary election voting behavior. In the study it is argued that the change from fiscally independent to state-funds dependent school district operations may have altered the traditional cost/quantity-based school budgetary voting behavior. With the assumption of state aid schemes to school districts, the school district budgetary election processes may have become political procedures by which the cost of school district operations has been distributed to broader tax bases.     

The Making of a Regulatory Crisis: Restructuring New York City's Water Supply

Much practically orientated environmental research is marked by a polarity between functionalist abstraction and ahistorical normative discourse. This paper seeks to bridge the divide between theoretical and empirical research through a case study of New York City's water supply. Current processes of socio-economic restructuring are leading to negative environmental consequences obscured by a failure to extend analysis beyond limited temporal, spatial or sectoral scales. Insights from regulationist theory show that a combination of fiscal, political and other developments are bringing about a wide-ranging reformulation of existing patterns of environmental regulation and service provision in the city. The power of the state is being radically diminished in relation to the power of capital and a plethora of different interest groups. A relatively simple centralized model of environmental regulation is being transformed into a complex decentralized pattern involving the emergence of new approaches to urban governance. Further research is needed on the contradictions between capitalist accumulation and environmental regulation at different spatial scales in order to link New York's changing role within the global economy to the declining political legitimacy and fiscal capability of the state to play an extensive role in environmental management.     

The Political Economy of Housing Investment in the Short-Term Rental Market: Insights from Urban Portugal

Short-term rentals (STRs) emerged as holiday accommodations, disrupting the hospitality industry in the decade before COVID-19. Mainstream explanations for their growth revolved around digital tourism platforms like Airbnb as market disruptors and the sharing economy rationale. At the same time, critical scholars explored the capitalisation of greater rent gaps in urban central locations. However, these explanations are insufficient to explain the growth of STRs. We supplement them by building bridges between the urban political economy and the geographies of financialisation through the cases of Lisbon and Porto before the pandemic. The paper focuses on tourism-induced housing investment, taking a closer look at the profile of investors in association with STR property managers in the context of the late-entrepreneurial urban regime. We conclude that tourism development has allowed opportunities for housing financialisation through STR professionalisation, enhancing the allocation of interest-bearing capital in tourism-oriented real estate.     

LOCAL CHALLENGES TO GLOBAL AGENDAS: CONSERVATION,ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION AND THE PASTORALISTS' RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN TANZANIA

Since the mid-1980s, “democratization” and structural adjustment, have been transforming domestic political economies throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, these processes could significantly alter the terrain in the conflict between local land rights and state wildlife conservation. The situation has become increasingly complex as the parties involved - land-holders, state and international conservation agencies - are joined by land rights political organizations, domestic conservation groups and foreign capital. The paper focuses on struggles over land and resource rights, specifically on new forms of grassroots political action which has emerged on the question of wildlife conservation in national parks. At the same time, tourism is expanding with an influx of foreign capital. The paper explores the implications of the interactions between these forces.     

The social production of ‘attractive authenticity’ at the World Heritage Site of Røros,Norway

This paper examines how authenticity and its use as a way of conceptualising the past participates in processes of heritage production, which are here defined as both the social construction of heritage sites and the uses of heritage sites as resources to achieve social goals. We argue that the social production of place and the social values generated by place are linked by a common approach based on the use of ‘place attraction’ as a unifying social concept. The World Heritage Site of Røros has as an attractive place become a resource for the production of cultural capital among various stakeholders, taking the form of a large body of ‘heritage knowledges’. However, a symbolic capital production of ‘attractive authenticity’ has today generated an idealised past and a purified iconic image of Røros as World Heritage. The discourse of ‘attractive authenticity’ reveals a conflict of interests where symbolic capital unfolds and makes power relations evident. This exposes a discussion about cultural heritage management practices at World Heritage Sites.     

‘Defying’ democratization and environmental protection in Kenya: The case of Karura Forest reserve in Nairobi

It had been assumed that the rise of multipartyism in sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1980s and 1990s would necessarily lead to better environmental management. Limited studies, mostly based on experiences in southern Africa, suggest that the relationship between the environment and democratization in sub-Saharan Africa still remains an open question. Furthermore, democratization in sub-Saharan Africa has coincided with the implementation of neoliberal-inspired economic adjustment programs. So far, most discussions of the environmental effects of democratization in the region reflect studies of democratization and neoliberalization which tend to treat the two processes separately, failing to recognize their complex interconnections, both in their material and discursive dimensions. This paper is, therefore, an effort to broaden the discussion of the interactions between democratization and the environment in sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly, the paper investigates the change in the protection of Karura Forest, a key public forest reserve in Nairobi, Kenya, during a period of multi-party politics and election and neoliberal economic reforms in the country in the early 1990s. The paper uses the urban political ecology perspective to help tease out the interactions between democratization and the environment, and highlights how neoliberalism may complicate those interactions. Ultimately, this paper supports cautionary observations about the environmental effects of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa.     

THE LONG-RUN ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF FEDERAL,STATE, AND LOCAL FISCAL POLICIES IN METROPOLITAN AREAS*

ABSTRACT. This paper uses new estimates of metropolitan factor demand and output supply functions to study how federal, state, and local fiscal policies affect metropolitan economies. We illustrate our work with findings for ten metropolitan areas in five states for changes in state corporate income taxes, local property taxes, the federal corporate income tax, an investment tax credit, interest rates, public capital stocks, output prices, and tax and regulatory policies affecting gross wages. It is clear from these simulations that a policy that is nominally the same everywhere will have repercussions that vary widely across regions and cities.     

Network Dynamics in Natural Resource Governance: A Case Study of Swiss Landscape Management

Structural characteristics of social networks have been recognized as important factors of effective natural resource governance. However, network analyses of natural resource governance most often remain static, even though governance is an inherently dynamic process. In this article, we investigate the evolution of a social network of organizational actors involved in the governance of natural resources in a regional nature park project in Switzerland. We ask how the maturation of a governance network affects bonding social capital and centralization in the network. Applying separable temporal exponential random graph modeling (STERGM), we test two hypotheses based on the risk hypothesis by Berardo and Scholz (2010) in a longitudinal setting. Results show that network dynamics clearly follow the expected trend toward generating bonding social capital but do not imply a shift toward less hierarchical and more decentralized structures over time. We investigate how these structural processes may contribute to network effectiveness over time.     

From Democratization to Securitization: Post‐Arab Spring Political Order in the Middle East

This article examines the question: why and how the wave of democratization in the Middle East has receded, giving way to the prioritization of security in the post‐Arab Spring by conducting analyses at three levels: societal, state, and international. By applying the main concepts and theories found in the literature on democratization and securitization and by analyzing the Bertelsmann Stiftung's Democracy Status Index, the Arab Barometers Survey, and the Arab Opinion Survey, the article concludes that: at the societal level, the tragic unfolding of events after the Arab Spring prohibits the public from pushing a reform agenda; at the state level, the post‐Arab political environment raises doubts among the ruling elite about how far political reforms should be extended; and at the international level, with the rise of new security threats, international pressure on Middle East countries to democratize has been restrained, giving way to security cooperation as the top priority.     

The Investment Contract as a mechanism of urban development in the Russian Federation

This article considers the Investment Contract, which has been introduced in several cities of the Russian Federation as the mechanism to link private capital with municipal resources in urban development projects. The device is intended to stimulate development by diminishing economic risks and providing investors with more secure legal status during the processes of project design, construction and land parcel formation and allocation. Looking at the Investment Contract as both an economic and legal device, this article considers whether it is likely to fulfil its intended purposes.     

Tensions between municipal reform and outdated fiscal levers in rural British Columbia

Debates about the future of small municipalities in Canada are set against a backdrop of economic, political, and social restructuring processes that have displaced former state investment policies in favour of neoliberal public policy approaches. Small municipalities struggle with outdated financial and governance structures and a provincial public policy agenda that asks them to become more creative, innovative, and “entrepreneurial” in their approach and responsibilities. Drawing upon key informant interviews with eight case studies in British Columbia, Canada, this research examines the tensions between municipal reforms mandated by the provincial government over the past 30 years and commensurate fiscal levers and capacities in place to address these broadening responsibilities for small municipalities in volatile staples-dependent regions. Our findings demonstrate how successive provincial governments have mobilized New Public Management objectives through a host of legislative and regulatory changes that have increased the responsibilities and requirements on local governments without commensurate fiscal or jurisdictional capacity.     

Local Fiscal Strategy to Retain Heterogeneous Firms

This paper is about the strategy of retaining unobservably heterogeneous firms attracted by unobservably valued outside alternatives. We prove that differentiating taxation and public good fiscal packages within one's own locale dominates offering the same packages to all firms. We rationalize the full range of observed practice by considering more than one type of firm, more than one type of fiscal instrument, and all kinds of utility in alternative locations, under asymmetric information. Mobile agents can earn rents under some conditions, and immobile agents earn rents under others. Ways to minimize budgetary exposure in tax wars and effects on the composition of local economies are discussed.