What contribution can International Relations make to the evolving global health agenda?

This article presents two approaches that have dominated International Relations in their approach to the international politics of health. The statist approach, which is primarily security-focused, seeks to link health initiatives to a foreign or defence policy remit. The globalist approach, in contrast, seeks to advance health not because of its intrinsic security value but because it advances the well-being and rights of individuals. This article charts the evolution of these approaches and demonstrates why both have the potential to shape our understanding of the evolving global health agenda. It examines how the statist and globalist perspectives have helped shape contemporary initiatives in global health governance and suggests that there is evidence of an emerging convergence between the two perspectives. This convergence is particularly clear in the articulation of a number of UN initiatives in this area - especially the One World, One Health Strategic Framework and the Oslo Ministerial Declaration (2007) which inspired the first UN General Assembly resolution on global health and foreign policy in 2009 and the UN Secretary-General's note "Global health and foreign policy: strategic opportunities and challenges". What remains to be seen is whether this convergence will deliver on securing states' interest long enough to promote the interests of the individuals who require global efforts to deliver local health improvements.     

Traceable Tasks and Complex Policies: When Politics Matter for Policy Implementation

Implementation represents a key venue for the expression of political conflict. The challenge of illusory implementation, implementing the law's letter but not its spirit, has long vexed scholars and architects of public policy. We develop a political model of policy implementation to predict the kinds of politics—electoral, group, administrative—that different parts of complicated laws activate during implementation. Using original state‐level data on landmark education policy, we assess whether and how these politics render illusory implementation more or less likely for specific policy tasks embedded in complex laws. Consistent with our model, we find electoral politics render illusory implementation less likely for a narrow set of tasks. Group‐based politics and administrative politics bear on illusory implementation for a broader set of tasks in diverse ways. Overall, how policy activates politics during implementation depends on the features of the policy lever, where it is put into practice, and how traceable it is to the bureaucrats who do the implementing. Further, the results underscore how nuanced insights about implementation emerge when one considers individual components of complex laws, rather than treating the laws themselves whole cloth.     

Situated Payments for Ecosystem Services: Local Agencies in the Implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in Southwest China

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an innovative initiative to use market instruments for conservation that has spread across the world since the late 1990s. In assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of PES initiatives, global scholarship has focused on an outcome-oriented approach. This has led to debate on PES programmes’ contributions to, and the trade-offs between, conservation and development. Taking the Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP) in China as an example, this article uses a process-oriented analytical approach to provide novel understandings of PES as a specific type of development practice. The article shows how notions of equity and justice, local knowledge and local institutions have played a role in shaping the processes and outcomes of the SLCP. The actions of local stakeholders in an interplay with the state created a space for negotiating, adapting and adjusting PES implementation, which eventually contributed to a local development pathway for meeting both national conservation interests and local economic development needs. This indicates that attention to situated agency can help illuminate how PES can be smoothly implemented and effectively negotiated in developing countries.     

Local Strategies within a European Policy Framework

This article discusses the Lisbon Agenda from the perspective of entrepreneurship policy. After a brief overview of the events leading up to the development of the Lisbon Agenda, the authors describe the goals and content of this policy framework as well as of the structural funds. Using examples of initiatives towards implementation at the local level, the authors illustrate the necessity to promote entrepreneurship in order to foster economic growth in communities and regions. We assess how the new European growth policy became translated into an action plan realized through structural funds and community initiatives and demonstrate that a greater focus on entrepreneurship policy could strengthen the Lisbon Strategy and aid in the achievement of its goals.     

New State Spaces,Agency and Scale: Devolution and the Regionalisation of Transport Governance in Scotland

Abstract: New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre‐existing institutional arrangements ( Peck 1998 , Space and Polity 2:5–31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub‐national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's “new state spaces” (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path‐dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of “regional armatures” and “the politics of scale” to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that “form” and “mould” particular spaces.     

The Politics of Connectivity: The Role of Big Business in UK Education Technology Policy

Since 1997, the United Kingdom (UK) government has embarked upon a series of education policy initiatives based around the increased role of private interests in both policy formulation and implementation. This article takes a detailed look at private sector involvement in education policymaking and implementation using the current "National Grid for Learning" (NGfL) technology policy drive as a contemporary form. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with key public and private actors in the NGfL the article covers the role of business in the origins, policy formation, and eventual implementation of the initiative. It concludes by discussing the function big business can be said to be playing in UK education policy and the bearing this may have on the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of such policies.     

The political impact of the European Capital of Culture: ‘Maribor 2012 gave us the power to change the regime’

The European Capital of Culture (ECoC) is a cultural political initiative of the European Union and is perceived as one of the most prestigious events in the community. Existing studies have neglected the political effects of hosting ECoC in terms of engendering regime change in host cities. The present study therefore tries to fill this gap and demonstrates how the cultural policy of Maribor 2012, including its implementation, impacted on local citizens’ communication and political activities and contributed to regime change in the city at the end of the cultural year. The paper employed document analysis, participant observation of all the main processes of ECoC Maribor 2012 and in-depth interviews with management, programme organisers, cultural operators and participants. It shows that through the empowerment of local citizens by means of bottom-up initiatives in the effective planning and implementation of ECoC, they challenged the regime and neoliberal system of Maribor.     

Women of Steel: Constructing and Contesting New Gendered Geographies of Work in the Australian Steel Industry

The article argues that although structuralist-inspired approaches to steel restructuring have provided significant insights and recognised the role of "labour" in sectoral change, such studies have predominantly equated labour politics with unionism, downplaying the impact of other forms of workers' politics. This has created a problematic disjunction between "real world" events and academic research, with ensuing issues for policy development and delivery. In response to this difficulty, the paper builds on Herod's concept of a labour geography to develop multiple labour geographies of power, an approach that describes different forms of workers' politics. To illustrate this approach, the paper presents female steelworkers' politics of restructuring. It details the Jobs for Women Campaign in Wollongong, Australia, a 1980s place-based initiative that sought to gain blue-collar employment for women in the local steelworks. The study demonstrates how female steelworkers developed restructuring politics addressing gender and employment discrimination, issues not normally associated with labour politics. The paper concludes that such workers' struggles need to be analysed as they affect restructuring impacts and processes.     

The art of nationalism: Artists' perspectives on the Latvian Centenary film programme

In the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe, the social fabric of post-socialist societies is frayed. In this context, nationalist cultural policies and everyday displays of national belonging have emerged as key instruments of social solidarity. There has recently been a drive of state initiatives in Latvia in the field of cultural policy aimed at strengthening national identity. In this paper, we focus our attention on one particular cultural policy initiative, Latvian Films for Latvian Centenary. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 16 film directors who participated in the Centenary film programme, the paper explores how artists and cultural operators involved in this programme are mobilised as national(ist) subjects and how they see their work within such a framework. We argue that nationalist cultural policy can be successfully implemented because the artists, themselves formed as responsible political and moral subjects in the tradition of Latvian cultural nationalism, share a regard for culture and the arts as a resource for sustaining the political statehood and the national community. However, the artists also recognise the limitations of their work as a source of social cohesion and solidarity in a society that is ethnically divided.     

Policy entrepreneurship in Australia: a conceptual review and application

This article adapts the theoretical construct of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ in political science to an analysis of one important initiative in policy‐making in Australia between 1992 and 1994, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy (NALSAS). Originally an initiative of the Queensland Government, NALSAS sought to advance the teaching of Asian languages and studies of Asia in Australian schools. The then Director General of the Queensland Office of the Cabinet, Mr Kevin Rudd, was its key protagonist. The article identifies and analyses Rudd's adroit policy entrepreneurship that was needed to overcome significant resistance and deliver the subsequent policy outcomes. It does this by carrying out a two‐level analysis that considers individual and contextual factors and concludes that, even though Rudd displayed many of the individual characteristics of a policy entrepreneur, his actions were heavily mediated by contextual factors. The article also demonstrates how a concept developed elsewhere, in this case North America, can be applied in other contexts, and calls for more scholarship on policy entrepreneurship in contemporary Australia.     

The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal

This paper considers how discretion, understood as both a capacity to make decisions and a form of influence that is often hidden, operates within the accommodation and support of asylum seekers. Combining critical discussions of discretion with accounts of a ‘local turn’ in migration policy, I argue that discretion plays a key role in shaping how policy is implemented and offers insight into the changing governance of asylum at national and local levels. Drawing on empirical material examining the development of the UK's asylum dispersal system, the paper extends accounts of discretion beyond ‘street-level’ to argue for a focus on how discretion reflects different claims to institutional authority. Addressing four accounts of discretion in dispersal, I argue that tracing discretion can offer insights into how ‘implementation gaps’ in asylum policy are negotiated and how tensions between national and local governments are contained. Tracing discretion in this way may advance critical interrogations of power relations in welfare bureaucracies and develop understandings of institutional agency and influence within liberal democracies.     

Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

Political contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.     

Not My Taxes! Explaining Tax Resistance and its Implications for Australia's Welfare State

In discussing Australia's need to increase taxes to pay for future social security, Michael Keating worries that voters see taxes as a ‘burden’ and that ‘the link between taxation and citizenship has been broken’. This paper deals with the problem of tax resistance (preferring lower taxes even when tax cuts risk public services) for Australia's welfare state. First, I describe how two Australian fiscal institutions—a residual welfare system and visible income taxes—promote tax resistance among voters. Second, I draw on these insights to develop several explanations for tax resistance: voter self-interest, voter hostility to minorities, voter disengagement (low trust and lack of interest in politics), and individualistic attitudes. The main conclusion is that tax resistance in Australia is institutionalised, making it easier to mobilise interests around low taxes, and harder to advocate for alternatives. Results of multivariate analysis using AES 2004 data indicate that an ‘anti-tax coalition’ can build on three diverse publics; one of higher and middle-income earners attuned to self-interest, another hostile to welfare beneficiaries, and another ‘tuned out’ of politics and willing to support any call for tax cuts. Inevitably, the debate about the welfare state is shadowed by a debate about voter willingness to pay taxes that finance it.     

Policy Characteristics,Patterns of Politics,and the Minimum Wage: Toward a Typology of Redistributive Policies

The central hypothesis of all policy typologies is that distinctively different patterns of politics can be identified for different types of public policy issues. Lowi identified three different policy types, which he termed distributive, regulative, and redistributive, each of which triggers a distinctively different pattern of political behavior. Unfortunately, Lowi's categories were inductively derived and ambiguously defined, leading to disagreements over how to categorize particular policies. Hayes built on Lowi's seminal effort, deriving Lowi's three policy categories from two underlying dimensions and identifying additional categories Lowi's original formulation had missed. Using the minimum wage issue as an example, this article will identify a critical deficiency in both these typologies. While Hayes' typology defines the boundaries between policy categories more precisely than Lowi's, neither typology is equipped to deal with variations in political patterns occurring within a particular cell. As this article will show, the minimum wage issue, although consistently redistributive in Hayes' terms, has manifested three very different patterns of politics at different points in time. Accordingly, a typology of redistributive policies will be advanced to account for these variations in the redistributive politics of the minimum wage.     

Combined Innovation Policy: Linking Scientific and Practical Knowledge in Innovation Systems

New research indicates that firms combining the science-based STI (Science, Technology, Innovation) and the experience-based DUI (Doing, Using, Interacting) modes of innovation are more efficient when it comes to improving innovation capacity and competitiveness. With regard to innovation policy, the STI mode calls for a supply-driven policy, typically aimed to commercialize research results. The DUI mode suggests a demand-driven policy approach, such as supporting the development of new products or services to specific markets. This article analyses how the two types of innovation policies and the two innovation modes can be combined in regional innovation systems (RISs). The analysis builds on studies of the food industry and related knowledge organizations in two counties, Rogaland County (Norway) and Skåne County (Sweden), and two policy initiatives (NCE Culinology and Skåne Food Innovation Network) aimed at strengthening the innovative capability of the RISs. The analysis indicates that policies aimed to link science- and user-driven innovation activity should focus on building absorptive capacity of DUI firms (e.g. through increased scientific competence) and implementation capacity of STI firms (e.g. through increased market and process competence).     

Situating Political Agronomy: The Knowledge Politics of Hybrid Rice in India and Uganda

The emergence of ‘political agronomy’ — a research agenda that interrogates the knowledge politics through which agronomic debates are constructed, shaped and contested — has added a new and important tool for the analysis of agricultural research and policy making in development contexts. This article seeks to advance the scope of political agronomy by providing an enhanced framework to link the analysis of agronomic knowledge production to the study of new agricultural technologies in practice. Using case studies of hybrid rice promotion in southern India and western Uganda, the article illustrates the power relations and unanticipated outcomes that accompanied the translation of agronomic research into agrarian settings characterized by pronounced social polarization and marked environmental transformations. These case studies affirm how the starkly uneven outcomes of technological change refract back into the politics of agronomic research and extension as both researchers and policy makers react to the unintended impacts of previous interventions when designing future agendas.     

Electoral salience and the costs of voting at national, sub-national and supra-national elections in the UK: a case study of Brent, UK

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election – parliamentary, European and local elections – over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap – the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travelling to a polling station to vote in person are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of multi-level models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, marginality as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout, and other spatial and contextual variables, which are stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the siting of polling stations.     

Making Territory and Negotiating Citizenship in a Climate Mitigation Initiative in Indonesia

For almost two decades, the concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has been widely adopted in Indonesia, in policy initiatives ranging from pilot projects to more established PES schemes and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programmes. Drawing on a case study of a REDD+ initiative in Aceh, Indonesia, this article analyses how the initiative became an avenue to renegotiate political authority, territory and citizenship. Analysis of relevant documents, combined with focus group discussions and interviews at local and national levels, reveals the complex processes by which the authority to govern forest is claimed and legitimized through the revision of provincial land-use plans, and shows how citizenship is rearticulated through participatory mapping processes. The article demonstrates that the initiative has been negotiated and reshaped to conform to local aspirations for greater control over forests and to achieve broader development goals. The discourses of green economy and REDD+ have provided the Aceh government and communities with a new ‘surface of engagement’ to express Acehnese struggles over territory and citizenship by aligning with global climate change issues.