In the early 1990s, in order to improve road safety in The Netherlands, the Institute for Road Safety Research (SWOV) developed an evidence-based ‘Sustainable Safety’ concept. Based on this concept, Dutch road safety policy, was seen as successful and as a best practice in Europe. In The Netherlands, the policy context has now changed from a sectoral policy setting towards a fragmented network …
This article discusses ethical challenges posed by market-based government and the degree to which contracting enhances or diminishes government’s ability to ensure that organizations that deliver public services adhere to ethical practices and public values, such as lawfulness, transparency, and accountability. A case study of an organization—Blackwater (now, Xe)—vividly illustrates the consid…
How do public servants compare to the general public in their religious affiliation, beliefs, and behaviors? Using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, we compare public servants in government and outside government to the general public through a series of logistic regression models. Although there is little difference in terms of denominational affiliation, public servants have a stronge…
A language barrier prevents us from understanding how other cultures look at public administration, as “semantic fields” differ between languages. These differences can never be fully grasped, but what we can do is study what happens when a particular concept crosses the border. In this article we select a concept, public–private partnership, that in recent times migrated from one administrativ…
This study analyzes intergenerational justice perceptions among 2,075 undergraduate students in 1996-1998 across eight democracies spanning four welfare regime types. It examined how different regimes structure perceptions of (a) justness in principle of young-to-old public resource transfers and (b) actual contributions to and rewards from society of various age groups. Support in principle of…
This article analyses the Servicios de Administración Tributaria (SAT), which currently operate in nine Peruvian cities, to show that semi-autonomous tax agencies can play a significant role in strengthening the effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy of decentralised tax systems. Its findings indicate that the SAT collect local taxes and non-tax revenues more effectively than conventional tax…
Advocates of local government often argue that when decentralisation is accompanied by adequate mechanisms of accountability, particularly those responsive to local preferences, improved service delivery will result. From the perspective of the health sector, the appropriate degree of decentralisation and the necessary mechanisms of accountability depend upon the achievement of health system go…
The burden of stroke and other non-communicable diseases has risen sharply in developing countries in recent years. This article provides a detailed review of this trend and its underlying causes, and discusses the social and economic effects of stroke and the scope for interventions to reduce incidence and mitigate impacts. It demonstrates that policy-makers have been slow to recognise the gro…
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes, providing eligible households with periodic cash payments, contingent on their children's adherence to school enrolment and attendance requirements, hold considerable promise for reducing levels of child labour across the developing world. This article presents the results of an analysis of a CCT programme in Nicaragua, Red de Protección Social, and c…
It is commonly believed that labour-market returns to education are highest for the primary level of education and lower for subsequent levels. Recent evidence reviewed in this article suggests that the pattern is changing. The causes of such changes, and their implications for both education and labour-market policy, are explored.
The arguments in academia over the effectiveness of foreign aid fall into two broad categories: those grounded in political economy and those focused on donor conduct and aid effectiveness. There have been policy attempts within the donor community to reconcile them, including the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. This article examines the key features of foreign aid to Nigeria betwe…
The purpose of this study is to outline the theme of saving energy resources and its relationship with the preservation of the environment, as well as the importance of green marketing in achieving sustainability. The model of data collection was a survey conducted by self-administered questionnaire. After collection, the data were statistically analysed and interpreted. Most individuals claim …
This paper takes a new look at the importance of context - institutional and political - in effective public engagement processes. It does so through a rare comparative opportunity to examine the effectiveness of processes of public engagement in two UK waste authorities, where the same waste company was involved as both the primary contractor for the delivery of the waste management service (i…
Lagoons are naturally complex ecosystems whose dynamics are strongly influenced by anthropic factors. Therefore, their value depends not only on their characteristics but also on the nature of the interactions, whether positive or negative, between mankind and nature. Starting from a representative set of 31 original studies exclusively devoted to coastal lagoons valuation, we estimate a meta-a…
Urban sustainability literature calls for new governance relations to support green urban agendas. Privileging non-hierarchical relations, this literature fails to address the means by which organisations create these capacities. The author interviewed public, private and community environmental leaders in metropolitan Chicago regarding their disposition toward creating boundary spanning organi…
In the not too distant future several power plants throughout Europe will have to be replaced and the decision has to be made whether to build coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). In a study for the city of Kiel in northern Germany only an 800 MW coal power plant reaches a required minimum for rentability. This study looks at an additional economic and environmental ev…
As important players in the policy process, many studies have investigated the determinants of bureaucratic behavior. One intriguing set of findings suggests that behavior is linked to bureaucrats’ views of themselves as government officials and their views of the people who they serve. Despite the importance of workers’ perceptions, we have little understanding about how bureaucrats develop ps…
In an era of devolution, collaboration between state and local institutions could be an effective tool for state governments to capitalize on local knowledge and respect local autonomy, while maintaining consistent standards and enforcement. However, the benefits to local agencies are less clear. Local agency personnel may have goals that diverge from their state counterparts and significant co…
Public agencies increasingly perform their functions in partnership with other public, nonprofit, and private sector actors, prompting growing research interest in how these collaborations function. As yet, almost no one has thought it worth asking how collaborative partners perceive each other's performance, although these perceptions may themselves constitute important measures of agency effe…