Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

I examine the purchaser – provider split in the contexts of two local government areas (Hobart and Sorell) in Tasmania, Australia. I assess whether that split has delivered on the promised effects. I also examine the influence that context has on response outcomes to the purchaser – provider arrangement. Specifically, I pay attention to the impact of purchaser – provider reform on service spending, aggregate municipal spending, and total employment. The evidence shows that the use of the purchaser – provider split is viable only for large programme expenditures. The purchaser – provider split is not related to total municipal spending even though it may be negatively related to the programmes that are subject to it. Savings from purchaser – provider reform result in increased spending and therefore employment elsewhere in the local authority. Greater efficiency gains in some jurisdictions are attributable more to particular local favourable contextual conditions than to the purchaser – provider split per se.

The area-based property tax has been gaining influence in developing and transitional countries around the world. While an area-based property tax is advocated for its simplicity and transparency, it is often criticized as being unfair because assessed values upon which property tax liabilities are based are not related to market values. We present a case study in Lithuania that explores the uniformity of assessments, and thus the implications for fairness of the distribution of property tax liabilities across properties, for an area-based tax as opposed to an ad valorem property tax. The findings suggest that, in Lithuania, assessments are more uniform, and the distribution of property tax liabilities across properties are more fair, for detached housing under the area-based assessment than under the market-based assessment; alternatively, uniformity and fairness of the distribution of tax liabilities for flats are better under market-based than area-based assessment.

From a discursive-institutionalist perspective I seek to establish the influence exerted over environmental agenda setting and policy change by ideas and discourse, through an examination of recent developments in the UK's flagship biofuels policy, the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO). Discursive institutionalism's central contention is that the intricate interactions between ideas and institutions should be at the centre of studies of the policy-making process. By elucidating the mutually reinforcing character of cognitive processes (including ‘framing’ and ‘boundary work’) and institutional factors (such as ‘standard operating procedures’ and path dependency), I show how, despite a raft of countervailing evidence, significant changes in both the form and objectives of the RTFO were precluded. Longer-term research is required to establish the precise precipitating circumstances enabling such stability to result from these feedbacks, however, as it is—theoretically at least—equally likely that far shorter periods of dramatic policy change, or ‘paradigm shifts’, will emerge.

Some 40% of the world's urban poor—living predominantly in informal settlements—lack access to legal electricity. Urban upgradation programmes, if they exist, prioritize water supply over electrification since water is nonsubstitutable and more essential for sustaining human life. Illegal electricity—albeit unreliable, expensive and dangerous—is also already widely available in informal settlements. I share the experiences of the Self-Employed Women's Association and Saath—two nongovermental organizations (NGOs) based in India—of participating in a multiple-stakeholder propoor electrification programme. By 2008 close to 100 000 homes had been electrified in the city of Ahmedabad and the programme is currently being replicated in smaller cities in Gujarat and in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. I use academic literature on urban infrastructure provision and politics, project reports and evaluations, pricing surveys, and interviews with electricity utility and NGO staff to analyze the programme for its impacts upon access, tariffs, consumption patterns, quality of service, and security of land tenure. The findings indicate that NGOs can be very effective as intermediaries between utilities, municipalities, and urban poor communities. However, scaling up such programmes will require strong state involvement in developing a policy framework to facilitate NGO participation in the design and implementation of propoor electrification activities, and in the energy reform process in general.

In this paper I focus on the emergence of discrete food policy approaches throughout the UK over the last decade. I review key developments and argue that greater awareness of, and engagement with, policy making is crucial to understandings of contemporary food debates and adds to understandings of the changing alternative and mainstream food systems. The development of food policies by the UK government and the administrations of Wales and Scotland are explored through convention theory. The analysis suggests that the creation and existence of a food policy, expressing what is effectively a common good, are of more strategic value than the actual policy content. The challenge to existing food ‘policy competency’ (the power to legislate) can be identified as a strategic disruption to existing food governance practices. This is particularly the case when the multiple roles adopted by policy makers are considered in relation to the justification and evaluation of policy approaches.

We address the changing relationship of the state vis-à-vis regional partnerships on issues of state policy performance, partnership legitimacy, and the role and position of the state. Theoretical expectations regarding these issues differ greatly according to whether a state-centric or a society-centric perspective is adopted. A general case study of Dutch area-based rural policy (1988–2008) reveals that changes predominantly lean towards the state-centric perspective. These changes include an increased usage of regional partnerships as state instruments, an improved democratic anchorage of regional partnerships, and a continuation of the state's privileged position. An embedded case study shows that individual partnerships can continue to develop in other directions and can institutionalise into largely self-organising partnerships. We conclude by showing that regional partnerships can serve as state instruments, provided that a certain degree of self-organisation is possible. Overregulation of regional partnerships could eventually undermine their overall performance.

Despite the diffusion of cluster policies across time and space, the universal applicability of the underlying concept or its otherwise necessary adaptation to national, regional, and local peculiarities are rarely questioned. Drawing on the varieties of capitalism approach, we adopt an institutional perspective to compare the cluster policies of North Carolina and Bavaria, situated in their countries' multilevel governance frameworks in which the state level interacts with federal and local policies. Contrasting North Carolina and Bavaria, we link the differences in the design and implementation of cluster policies to characteristics of the national institutional environment, as well as to regional specifics and path dependencies. Our findings highlight the importance of institutional contexts that needs to be considered when adapting cluster policies to specific circumstances.

The capacity-building benefits for urban governance of unsuccessfully bidding for large events are often asserted, but much more rarely demonstrated. With the cost of bidding for an Olympics now running at US $25 million, we seek to address this gulf by asking whether the trend for ‘festivalisation’ amongst urban managers is rationally underpinned. Drawing on Lyon's bid for the 1968 Summer Games, we look at the role played—materially, politically, and symbolically—by the Olympics bidding process, and its influence on Lyon's later trajectory. The Lyon bid put forward proposals for its position within a pan-European urban hierarchy which have become influential in European spatial planning. Yet, this situation is not a consequence solely of the Olympics bid, but also of a critical urban governance moment in which the bid played a complicated role. By reflecting on the dimensions of influence within which the bidding process became involved we seek to provide a greater depth to the way that international festivals are regarded in contemporary conceptualistions of metropolitan development and governance.

International environmental and social concerns about tropical shrimp production have led to the emergence of private transnational governance and regulation. Using cases from Ca Mau we investigate how the shift to private transnational regulatory networks has changed the role of the government from a regulator to a facilitator of global private governance interests and arrangements. The rise of these various schemes has also been part of a shift from quantitative to qualitative policy goals within the Vietnamese aquaculture sector. In turn, this has led to new internal relationships, most notably the repositioning of private interests and community-based management within the Vietnamese state framework. We conclude that the ongoing transformation of the government's role in environmental shrimp governance requires mechanisms that foster improved participation and compliance between the state and private actors. To achieve this efforts are needed to better include local government at both communal and village levels and to use existing global market incentives more strategically.

Interest in environmental policy integration (EPI) has recently been strong, both in the literature and in practice. We explore Dutch initiatives to integrate noise management into spatial planning policy in light of the body of literature on EPI. The main approaches of EPI are translated into a conceptual framework consisting of organizational, procedural, and contextual factors. The objective of this literature review is to relate paradigm shifts and policy innovations regarding noise management and spatial planning to empirical windows of opportunity for and barriers to implementation of EPI. It shows how instruments allowing a flexible approach and deviation from standards at the local level fit in with the discourse on decentralized and area-oriented policy. The analysis suggests that procedural and decision-making rules and organizational arrangements can bridge implementation gaps in local-level planning practice. However, EPI in the Netherlands has not solved the noise problem, and the number of affected inhabitants is increasing. We conclude the paper by examining the conceptual and normative issues affecting the integration and prioritization of noise management policy.