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Sanktionen sind ein wichtiges Instrument des UN-Sicherheitsrats zur Erhaltung des Weltfriedens. Viele zentrale Entscheidungen, wie etwa die Listung und Entlistung terrorverdächtiger Personen, werden fernab der Öffentlichkeit in Sanktionsausschüssen getroffen. Die Einsetzung dieser Ausschüsse hat die Entscheidungsdynamiken im Rat erheblich verändert.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss different approaches of performance measurement and benchmarking as reflexive institutions for local governments in England, Germany and Sweden from a comparative perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
These three countries have been selected because they represent typical (most different) cases of European local government systems and reforms. The existing theories on institutional reflexivity point to the potential contribution of benchmarking to public sector innovation and organizational learning. Based on survey findings, in-depth case studies, interviews and document analyses in these three countries, the paper addresses the major research question as to what extent and why benchmarking regimes vary across countries. It derives hypotheses about the impacts of benchmarking on institutional learning and innovation.
Findings
The outcomes suggest that the combination of three key features of benchmarking, namely - obligation, sanctions and benchmarking authority - in conjunction with country-specific administrative context conditions and local actor constellations - influences the impact of benchmarking as a reflexive institution.
Originality/value
It is shown in the paper that compulsory benchmarking on its own does not lead to reflexivity and learning, but that there is a need for autonomy and leeway for local actors to cope with benchmarking results. These findings are relevant because policy makers must decide upon the specific governance mix of benchmarking exercises taking their national and local contexts into account if they want them to promote institutional learning and innovation.
The article responds to four commentaries on the concept of semi-parliamentary government and its application to Australian bicameralism. It highlights four main points: (1) Our preferred typology is not more ‘normative’ than existing approaches, but applies the criterion of ‘direct election’ equally to executive and legislature; (2) While the evolution of semi-parliamentary government had contingent elements, it plausibly also reflects the ‘equilibrium’ nature of certain institutional configurations; (3) The idea that a pure parliamentary system with pure proportional representation has absolute normative priority over ‘instrumentalist’ concerns about cabinet stability, identifiability and responsibility is questionable; and (4) The reforms we discuss may be unlikely to occur in Australia, but deserve consideration by scholars and institutional reformers in other democratic systems.
The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system – a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government – which we call ‘semi-parliamentary government’. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a two-dimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from 1995 to 2015.
Sub-municipal units (SMUs) in Germany differ in German Länder. In Berlin, Hamburg and München Metropole Districts fulfill a number of quasi-municipal self-government rights and functions. They have their own budget and strong councils, as well as mayors. In all other Länder, most sub-municipal councils were subordinated under the municipal council and directly elected mayor heading the administration. SMUs were introduced as a kind of compensation with different territorial reforms in the 1970s. Although directly elected, sub-municipal councilors are weak, and their advisory role competes with other newly established advisory boards. Here the focus remains on traffic and town planning. Some sub-municipal councils fulfill smaller administrative functions and become more relevant and important in recent decentralization strategies of neighborhood development.
Foreword
(2018)
Conservation nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) are often involved in the design and implementation of global forest management initiatives such as the REDD+, which currently is being rolled out by the UNFCCC, the UN-REDD Programme and the World Bank as part of efforts to mitigate climate change. Nigeria joined the UN-REDD in 2010 and submitted its REDD+ readiness proposal in 2011. The proposal has a national component and subnational forestry activities in the Cross River State (CRS) as the pilot site. This chapter examines the involvement of local NGOs in the CRS consultative participatory meetings to validate the Nigeria-REDD proposal. It shows that political representation of local communities in the validation exercise was through customary authorities and NGOs who claim to speak for and are recognised as advocates for the communities. Local government authorities, the substantive political representatives of local communities were left out of the process. The chapter also shows how the CRS Forestry Commission, which organised the validation exercise, used NGOs as pawns to legitimise it, and how these NGOs were powerless to challenge the Forestry Commission. In contrast, local governments, the third tier of government and political authority routinely disrespected by state-level administrators, regularly challenge such higher level government actors in the courts and the national legislature. Thus, local NGOs may speak and work for local social development but compared to the substantive political representatives at the local level (e.g., local government authorities), local NGOs have limited resources to challenge the political shenanigans of the state.
The collaboration during the modeling process is uncomfortable and characterized by various limitations. Faced with the successful transfer of first process modeling languages to the augmented world, non-transparent processes can be visualized in a more comprehensive way. With the aim to rise comfortability, speed, accuracy and manifoldness of real world process augmentations, a framework for the bidirectional interplay of the common process modeling world and the augmented world has been designed as morphologic box. Its demonstration proves the working of drawn AR integrations. Identified dimensions were derived from (1) a designed knowledge construction axiom, (2) a designed meta-model, (3) designed use cases and (4) designed directional interplay modes. Through a workshop-based survey, the so far best AR modeling configuration is identified, which can serve for benchmarks and implementations.