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Berufswelt
(2022)
Einleitung
(2022)
Young citizens
(2022)
A growing number of expert organizations aim to provide knowledge for global environmental policy-making. Recently, there have also been explicit calls for stakeholder engagement at the global level to make scientific knowledge relevant and usable on the ground. The newly established Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is one of the first international expert organizations to have systematically developed a strategy for stakeholder engagement in its own right. In this article, we analyze the emergence of this strategy. Employing the concept politics of legitimation, we examine how and for what reasons stakeholder engagement was introduced, justified, and finally endorsed, as well as its effects. The article explores the process of institutionalizing stakeholder engagement, as well as reconstructing the contestation of the operative norms (membership, tasks, and accountability) regulating the rules for this engagement. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of the findings for IPBES, as well as for international expert organizations in general.
This paper is concerned with the normative underpinnings of popular sustainability indicators and country rankings. Attempts to quantify national sustainability in the form of composite indicators and rankings have increased rapidly over past decades. However, questions regarding validity and interpretability remain. This article combines theoretical and statistical tools to explore how input variables in five popular sustainability indicators can be related to different theoretical paradigms: weak and strong sustainability. It is shown that differences in theoretical interpretations affect input variable selection, which in turn affects indicator output. This points towards the risk of indicators becoming a sort of ‘circular argumentation construct’. The article argues that sustainability indicators and country rankings must be treated as theoretical just as much as statistical instruments. It is proposed that making underlying normative assumptions explicit, and making input variable selection more clear in a theoretical sense, can enhance indicator validity and usability for policy makers and researchers alike.
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.
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)
In recent decades, a wave of administrative reforms has changed local governance in many European countries. However, our knowledge about differences as well as similarities between the countries, driving forces, impacts, perceptions, and evaluation of these reforms is still limited. In the chapter, the authors give an overview about mayors’ perceptions and evaluations of two major reform trajectories: (a) re-organisation of local service delivery and (b) internal administrative/managerial reforms. Furthermore, differences between (groups of) countries as well as similarities among them are shown in these two fields of administrative reform. Finally, the authors tried to identify explanatory factors for specific perceptions of administrative reforms at the local level.
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.
South Africa’s energy sector finds itself in a gridlock situation. The sector is controlled by the state-owned utility Eskom holding the monopoly on the generation and transmission of electricity, which is almost exclusively produced from domestically extracted coal. At the same time, the constitutional mandate enables municipalities to distribute and sell electricity generated by Eskom to local consumers, which constitutes a large part of the cities’ municipal income. This is a strong disincentive for city governments to promote reductions in energy consumption and substantially limits the scope for urban action on energy efficiency and renewable energies. In the present case study, we portray the current development in South Africa’s energy policy and trace how deadlocked legal, financial, and institutional barriers block the transition from a coal-based energy system toward a greener and more sustainable energy economy. We furthermore point to the efforts of major South African cities to introduce low-carbon strategies in their jurisdictions and highlight key challenges for the future development of the country’s energy sector. By engaging with this case study, readers will become familiar with a prime example of the wider phenomenon of national political–economic obstacles to the progress in sustainable urban development.
Germany has a long tradition of federalism extending far back in history (Ziblatt 2004; Broschek 2011). This tradition has always been characterized by a discrepancy between the attitudes of the public to its federalism and the reform ideas of the (political) elites. While the public has a strong desire for an equality of living conditions, solidarity, social cohesion, and cooperation between the orders of government, academic discourse is shaped by calls for wide-ranging federalism reforms, which are oriented toward the American model of "dual federalism." Against this background, this chapter contrasts public attitudes on key aspects of the federal system with long-lasting academic recommendations for reform. Light will be shed on the general perception of the federal system as a whole, the division of powers, and in particular the issue of joint decision-making (Politikverflechtung) between the orders of government-all issues that have been repeatedly interrogated in various surveys. A further aspect of these polls is the question of the extent to which solidarity or competition shall be realized between the federal and Land governments-a question that is highly controversial in politics and academia (especially in the fiscal equalization debate), though public perceptions are quite different.
In a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not. The book defends this thesis and explores ‘semi-parliamentary government’ as an alternative to presidential government. Semi-parliamentarism avoids power concentration in one person by shifting the separation of powers into the democratic assembly. The executive becomes fused with only one part of the assembly, even though the other part has at least equal democratic legitimacy and robust veto power on ordinary legislation. The book identifies the Australian Commonwealth and Japan, as well as the Australian states of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia, as semi-parliamentary systems. Using data from 23 countries and 6 Australian states, it maps how parliamentary and semi-parliamentary systems balance competing visions of democracy; it analyzes patterns of electoral and party systems, cabinet formation, legislative coalition-building, and constitutional reforms; it systematically compares the semi-parliamentary and presidential separation of powers; and it develops new and innovative semi-parliamentary designs, some of which do not require two separate chambers.
The past two decades have witnessed widespread scholarly interest in the role of cities in climate policy-making. This research has considerably improved our understanding of the local level in the global response to climate change. The present article synthesizes the literature on local climate policies with respect to the 1.5 degrees C target. While most studies have focused on pioneering cities and networks, we contend that the broader impacts of local climate actions and their relationship to regional, national, and international policy frameworks have not been studied in enough detail. Against this backdrop, we introduce the concept of upscaling and contend that local climate initiatives must go hand in hand with higher-level policies and be better integrated into the multi-level governance system.
In recent time, phytoliths (silicon deposition between plant cells) have been recognized as an important nutrient source for crops. The work presented here aims at highlighting the potential of phytolith-occluded K pool in ferns. Dicranopteris linearis (D.linearis) is a common fern in the humid subtropical and tropical regions. Burning of the fern D.linearis is, in slash-and-burn regions, a common practice to prepare the soil before planting. We characterised the phytolith-rich ash derived from the fern D.linearis and phytolith-associated potassium (K) (phytK), using X-ray tomographic microscopy in combination with kinetic batch experiments. D.linearis contains up to 3.9g K/kgd.wt, including K subcompartmented in phytoliths. X-ray tomographic microscopy visualized an interembedding structure between organic matter and silica, particularly in leaves. Corelease of K and Si observed in the batch experiments confirmed that the dissolution of ash phytoliths is one of major factors controlling K release. Under heat treatment, a part of the K is made available, while the remainder entrapped into phytoliths (ca. 2.0-3.3%) is unavailable until the phytoliths are dissolved. By enhanced removal of organic phases, or forming more stable silica phases, heat treatment changes dissolution properties of the phytoliths, affecting K release for crops and soils. The maximum releases of soluble K and Si were observed for the phytoliths treated at 500-800 degrees C. For quantitative approaches for the K provision of plants from the soil phytK pool in soils, factors regulating phytolith dissolution rate have to be considered.
This article examines the reorganization of formal coordination structures in the Directorate-General for Fisheries and Maritime Affairs of the European Commission. While rational approaches in organization theory emphasize functional efficiency as an explanation for organizational design and coordination structures, the findings of this study indicate that the reorganization was not driven primarily for reasons of efficiency and to increase the coordination capacity of the organization. The study demonstrates that, even in a highly technical policy area such as fisheries management in the European Union, the (re-)design of formal organizational structures does not follow primarily a technical-instrumental rationale. Instead, the formal coordination structures have also been adapted to live up to changing expectations in the institutional environment, to modern management concepts in marine governance, and to ensure the legitimacy of the organization. However, although the empirical findings of this study substantiate the theoretical assumptions of an institutional perspective, institutional explanations alone are insufficient to comprehensively understand why organizational structures are reorganized and changed.
Comparatice methods B
(2020)
Moving mountains?
(2022)
Introduction
(2021)
Introduction
(2022)
Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West – with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission ‘to subdue the world’ – has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today’s politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.
Contesting citizenship
(2022)
Democracy and citizenship are conceptually and empirically contested. Against the backdrop of recent and current profound transformations in and of democratic societies, this volume presents and discusses acute contestations, within and beyond national borders and boundaries. Democracy’s crucial relationships, between state and citizenry as well as amongst citizens, are rearranged and re-ordered in various spheres and arenas, impacting on core democratic principles such as accountability, legitimacy, participation and trust. This volume addresses these refigurations by bringing together empirical analyses and conceptual considerations regarding the access to and exclusion from citizenship rights in the face of migration regulation and institutional transformation, and the role of violence in maintaining or undermining social order. With its critical reflection on the consequences and repercussions of such processes for citizens’ everyday lives and for the meaning of citizenship altogether, this book transgresses disciplinary boundaries and puts into dialogue the perspectives of political theory and sociology.
Democracy and citizenship are conceptually and empirically contested. Against the backdrop of recent and current profound transformations in and of democratic societies, this volume presents and discusses acute contestations, within and beyond national borders and boundaries. Democracy's crucial relationships, between state and citizenry as well as amongst citizens, are rearranged and re-ordered in various spheres and arenas, impacting on core democratic principles such as accountability, legitimacy, participation and trust. This volume addresses these refigurations by bringing together empirical analyses and conceptual considerations regarding the access to and exclusion from citizenship rights in the face of migration regulation and institutional transformation, and the role of violence in maintaining or undermining social order. With its critical reflection on the consequences and repercussions of such processes for citizens' everyday lives and for the meaning of citizenship altogether, this book transgresses disciplinary boundaries and puts into dialogue the perspectives of political theory and sociology
Angesichts neuer globaler Herausforderungen gehört eine starke kommunale Ebene zu den Grundvoraussetzungen gesellschaftlicher Problemlösungsfähigkeit. Die Stärkung kommunaler Selbstverwaltung ist daher ein wichtiges institutionen- und verwaltungspolitisches Zukunftsthema, zu welchem die vorliegende Studie einen Beitrag leisten möchte.
The Gezi uprising can be considered a crucial turning in Turkish politics. As a response to countrywide democratic protests, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government revived the security state, escalated authoritarian tendencies, and started to organize a nationalist, Islamist, and conservative backlash. This essay argues that the Gezi Park protests revealed both the fragility of the AKP's hegemony and the limits of the dominant political group habitus, which were promoted by the party to consolidate political polarization in favor of the party's hegemony. Moreover, it is argued that the Gezi uprising transformed the culture of political protests in the country and paved the way for the emergence of affirmative resistance, radical imagination, and a new politics of desire and dignity against authoritarian and neoliberal policies.
Signals for 2 degrees C
(2019)
The targets of the Paris Agreement make it necessary to redirect finance flows towards sustainable, low-carbon infrastructures and technologies. Currently, the potential of institutional investors to help finance this transition is widely discussed. Thus, this paper takes a closer look at influence factors for green investment decisions of large European insurance companies. With a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, the importance of policy, market and civil society signals is evaluated. In summary, respondents favor measures that promote green investment, such as feed-in tariffs or adjustments of capital charges for green assets, over ones that make carbon-intensive investments less attractive, such as the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies or a carbon price. While investors currently see a low impact of the carbon price, they rank a substantial reform as an important signal for the future. Respondents also emphasize that policy signals have to be coherent and credible to coordinate expectations.
Arend Lijphart uses an average of five standardized variables – the executive-parties dimension (EPD) – to describe patterns of democracy and explain differences in democracies’ performance. The article suggests ways to improve the descriptive part of the project. It argues that the EPD maps different approaches to achieving accountability and representation, rather than differences in consensus. This re-conceptualization leads to a more coherent and valid measurement. It is also argued that more systematic adjustments are needed for differences in constitutional structures (presidentialism and bicameralism). The article presents data on a revised EPD and its components for 36 democracies in the period from 1981 to 2010. As to the explanatory part of the project, we contend that the EPD often hinders adequate causal analysis rather than facilitating it. We show this by re-analysing democracies’ performance with respect to turnout and capital punishment.
Die Erzählungen der Energiewende: Erzählungen beherrschen die Interpretation des politischen Geschehens mehr als formal und methodisch strenge Argumentationsketten. Dies gilt insbesondere für Demokratien. In Demokratien gilt es zu überzeugen und auch zu überreden, um Macht zu erhalten, Macht zu sichern oder Akzeptanz für bestimmte politische Vorhaben zu generieren. Diese simple Feststellung lässt zwei Schlüsse für eine transformativ ausgerichtete Politikwissenschaft zu. Erstens können transformative Narrative produziert werden, die das Auftreten von ökologisch, sozial, ökonomisch und kulturell nachhaltigem wahrscheinlicher machen, Zweitens können die Narrative von nachhaltiger wie nicht-nachhaltiger Transformation analysiert werden. Beiden Aufgaben widmet sich die Dissertationsschrift. Dabei werden für den transformativen Teil ethnografisch erhobene Daten zu fünf transformativen Narrativen verdichtet, die Vorwärts- und Vorbildcharakter haben. In den fünf Aufsätzen wurde auf Diversität zwischen den beschriebenen Protagonisten geachtet, sodass eine breite Leser*innenschaft angesprochen wird. Im analytischen Part wird in einem Aufsatz über diese Vorgehen reflektiert und die Form beschrieben durch die transformative Narrative Wirksamkeit entfalten. Dabei gilt immer, dass die Wissenschaft keine Narrative selbst setzt, sondern mittels nachvollziehbarer Methoden Daten zum Sprechen bringt. Dies ist unter review-Bedingungen gelungen. Neben eines Einsatz von Narrativen in Fragen der Gestaltung der neu entstandenen und weiter entstehenden Energielandschaften behandelt diese Dissertationsschrift a, diskursstrangorientierte als auch institutionsorientierte Erzählungen über die Energiewende. Dabei wurden diskursstrangorientiert die unterschiedlichen Erzählungen der und über energieintensive Unternehmen bezüglich der EEG-Umlage untersucht und kategorisiert und die Metaphern der Energiewende im Magazin DER SPIEGEL erhoben und analysiert. Institutionsorientiert wurde die Energiewendeerzählung der Partei `Alternative für Deutschland´, die Bildsprache des Wirtschaftsministeriums an Hand eines Beispiels sowie die Nachhaltigkeitserzählungen der Zukunftsinstitut GmbH. Schließlich wird nach messbaren Folgen des Nachhaltigkeitsnarrativs in drei Regionen des Rhein-Maas-Gebiets gefragt, was die Arbeit abrunden soll.
In this introductory chapter, the editors describe the main theoretical basis of analysis of this book and the methodological approach. The core of this book consists of 14 country-specific chapters, which allow a European comparison and show the increasing variance in migration policy approaches within and between European countries. The degree of local autonomy, the level of centralisation and the traditional forms of migration policy are factors that especially influence the possibilities for local authorities to formulate their own integration policies.
This chapter focuses on the relationship between public opinion on migration and its media coverage. Different explanatory models, including individual characteristics, cultural factors and the impact of media and politics, have been proposed to explain public attitudes towards migrants. Understanding the local context is important, as the shares of migrants living in each region and city vary considerably. Providing correct statistical information, stressing the diversity of current migration patterns in Europe and taking part in media and public discussions are ways in which to impact public attitudes at the local level.
The chapter begins with a brief historical overview of Germany’s transition in the twentieth and twenty-first century from a transit and emigration country to one of immigration. The next part of this chapter looks at the challenges and problems facing German immigration policy within a multi-level federal system. Finally, the chapter gives an analysis of some of the trends in German migration policy since the refugee crisis in 2015, such as changes in the party system and in the concepts underlying migration policies to better manage, control and limit immigration to Germany.
As expected, the traditions of national-state migration policies continue to play a very important role, path-dependence in this policy field remains high. The distribution of competences in migration policy and the integration of migrants in the nation states continues to be very different. When implementing integration strategies at grassroots level, the respective policies should be tailored to the profile of both the local migrant community and the native population. Besides better migration management in local administration and the interaction of top-down and bottom-up efforts to integrate migrants is of importance.
This book presents an overview of European migration policy and the various institutional arrangements within and between various actors, such as local councils, local media, local economies, and local civil society initiatives. Both the role of local authorities in this policy field and their cooperation with civil society initiatives or networks are under-explored topics for research. In response, this book provides a range of detailed case studies focusing on the six main groups of national and administrative traditions in Europe: Germanic, Scandinavian, Napoleonic, Southeastern European, Central-Eastern European and Anglo-Saxon.
In this volume, Egeberg and Trondal put forward an ‘organizational approach to public governance’ (p. 1) that, in their view, complements existing explanations for organizational change and behaviour in governance processes (‘Understanding’) and produces relevant advice for practitioners, specifically anyone involved in reorganizing public administration (‘Design’). Following the authors’ introduction of the theoretical reasoning behind their approach (chapter 1), they present supporting findings that are based on new material (chapters 2 and 9), but mainly draw on six previously published research articles (chapters 3–8). Egeberg and Trondal conclude with possible ‘design implications’ of said findings (chapter 9). Their ‘organizational approach’ focuses on the impact of selected organizational characteristics on decision‐making in and on behalf of government organizations in policy‐making generally (‘public governance’) and administrative politics more specifically (‘meta‐governance’). The authors concentrate on three sets of ‘classical’ organizational characteristics: structure (mainly vertical and horizontal specialization), demography (personnel composition), and locus (geographical location). The conceptual part of the volume convincingly summarizes ‘formal organization matters’—arguments from the literature for each of the individual organizational factors. Their main, already well‐established argument is that the way an organization is formally set up makes some (reform) decisions more likely than others—a line of reasoning that the authors present as neglected in governance literature.
In the following five empirical chapters, the authors show that aspects of horizontal and vertical specialization—mainly operationalized by Gulicks’ principles of horizontal specialization and the idea of primary versus secondary affiliation of staff—affect organizational behaviour. Readers learn that whether government levels are organized according to a territorial or non‐territorial principle impacts the power relationship between levels: non‐territorial organization at the supranational level tends to empower the centre against lower levels of government. There are two chapters on the decision‐making behaviour of commissioners and officials in the European Commission, both showing that organizational affiliation trumps demographic background factors such as nationality, even with temporary staff.
Chapter 5 addresses coordination dynamics in the European multi‐level system and finds that coordination at the territorially organized national level thwarts non‐territorially organized coordination at the supranational level, resulting in the phenomenon of ‘direct’ national administration bypassing their national executives. Further, the authors show that vertical specialization—while controlling for other factors such as issue salience—has an effect on officials’ behaviour at the national level: agency officials in Norway report significantly less sensitivity towards political signals from the political executive than their colleagues in ministries. Chapter 7 discusses the relevance of geographical location for the relationship between subordinated organizations and their political executive. The authors find that the site of Norwegian agencies does not significantly affect their autonomy, influence, or inter‐institutional coordination with the superior ministry.
The last empirical chapter focuses on the effect of formal organization on meta‐governance, that is, administrative politics. Based on a qualitative case study of a reorganization process in Norway in 2003 involving the synchronized relocation of several agencies after many failed attempts, the authors conclude that administrative reforms can be politically steered and controlled through the organization of the reform process. They argue that amongst other factors the strategic exclusion of opposing actors from the reform process as well as the deliberate increase in situations demanding quick decisions (‘action rationality’, p. 119) by political leaders helps explain the reform's unexpected success. The last chapter is dedicated to the synthesis of the results and to design implications. Supported by new data from a 2016 survey among Norwegian public officials, the authors conclude that organizational position is the most important influencer of decision‐making behaviour, with educational background and previous job experience also playing a large role (p. 135). Consequently, their suggestions for practitioners involved in meta‐governance processes concentrate on aspects of the deliberate crafting of organizational specialization to shape organizational positions, and spend less time discussing location and employee demographics. The authors illustrate and contextualize their recommendations with the help of three empirical examples: organizing good governance by balancing political control and independence in the case of agencification, organizing for coping with boundary‐spanning challenges such as climate change through inter‐organizational structural arrangements, and designing permanent organizational structures for innovative reforms in the public sector (pp. 137 ff.).
This volume is an excellent compilation of theoretically informed applications of the all too often undefined ‘organization matters’ argument. It juxtaposes—particularly in the theory chapter and in the last chapter on design implications—organizational arguments against other explanations of organizational change like historical institutionalism or the garbage can model of decision‐making. However, two major aspects of the book's approach are less convincing. First, supplementary explanations such as the garbage can model that are discussed in the reflections on meta‐governance are neither argumentatively nor empirically applied to public governance; why should, for example, the ‘solutions in search of a problem’ idea only be applicable to decisions on reform policy, but not to decisions in all other policy areas? Similarly, it would have been nice to read more on the authors’ idea on the interaction between organizational factors and between them and other explanations in the empirical cases on public governance—this would have allowed the reader to get a better idea about how much formal organization matters. The view on bureaucrats’ demographic background is slightly confusing: it is presented as a competing approach (p. 7), but also as one of the main organizational factors (p. 12).
Second, as the authors themselves state, the concept of governance is about ‘steering through collective action’ (p. 3) and focuses on interactive processes, and explicitly includes non‐governmental actors in the policy‐making equation. Against this background it seems unfortunate that most of the work presented in the book takes an exclusively governmental perspective and the justification for it remains rather superficial. It would be preferable and even necessary to see the organizational arguments—at least theoretically or through discussing appropriate literature—applied to interactive governance processes involving other actors and/or to non‐bureaucratic organizations.
Regarding its methodology, the specifics of the proposed approach deserve to be addressed more systematically and critically in the book. Except for chapters 2, 3 and 5 (literature‐based studies) as well as chapter 8 (single case study), the empirical studies follow a quantitative logic and are informed by data on self‐reported behaviour through large‐N panel surveys with public officials. In terms of analysis, descriptive statistics or basic inferential statistics (linear regression) are employed. Certainly, the authors are aware of the limitations of their data sources, such as the results being possibly affected by social desirability, and they discuss and justify them in the chapters individually (e.g., on pp. 47, 89). Still, their approach could be strengthened with a more cautious account on the extent to which their choice of data and methods is able to uncover the ‘causal impact of organizational factors in public governance processes’ (p. 131, emphasis added) and with some suggestions for widening their methodological toolbox in the future. On this note, the survey method presented as new on p. 135 is not a particularly convincing choice. The authors do not lay out a research agenda; a surprising omission. This is, however, somewhat made up for by the concluding chapter's stimulating discussion of the possible real‐world implications of their findings and perspective, skilfully using organization theory as a ‘craft’ (p. 29).