Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

In this paper I build on Krugman's work on the “obsession” with competitiveness, accepting as inescapable fact what Krugman laments: the emergence of the global economy and competitiveness as focal points for policy debate is a political phenomenon understandable in terms of agenda setting and issue framing. I explore trade politics in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s in light of two related propositions. First, globalization's domestic effects and the policy requirements imposed by the world economy are at once real and negotiated in the political process—the global economy is ‘socially constructed’ for domestic political/purposes. Second, the ways that the world economy has been constructed can be well understood by using the issue framing and ‘garbage can’ literatures from policy studies. Understandings of the domestic policy requirements of the world economy are at once manufactured in the political process as interests seek to connect old solutions to promising new problems and shape that process as those understandings come to mark the limits of political economic possibility.

Negotiated agreements are relatively new in the field of energy and environmental policies. In order to support the design of future negotiated agreements it is useful to discuss how environmentally effective negotiated agreements can be designed. Based on rational decisionmaking and economic theory, the OECD has put forward eight recommendations for designing pollution abatement schemes through negotiated agreements that set ambitious targets, ensure target achievement, and reach targets in an efficient way. Based on three cases of negotiated agreements regulating industrial energy consumption in Denmark, the Netherlands, and France, the adequacy of the OECD recommendations will be discussed. It is found that the recommendations should pay more attention to the question of efficiency of agreements and to the difficulties in defining unambiguous targets. Apart from these deficiencies it is concluded that the recommendations cover all phases, are soundly based in theory, and give a meaningful evaluation of negotiated agreements.

The author is concerned with improving the quality of information available to the English Regional Development Agencies in the development and review of their strategies and policies. Proposals are discussed and evaluated concerning the use of microdata and user-defined customised output from the 2001 Census of Population for the United Kingdom. The discussion is set within the framework of the guidelines and advice specified within the Regional Strategies and Supplementary Guidance publications of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Assessment of the potential value of 2001 census microdata and customised output in the policy process is substantiated, as far as possible, with the aid of a case study based on the Samples of Anonymised Records from the 1991 Population Census.

Traditionally, when the public sector wanted more capital assets, it borrowed funds for the purpose. Under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), private consortia borrow funds to build assets and then, in return for a charge, use them to provide services for the public sector. The authors explore the implications for the public finances of using the PFI. A widely held belief, which has been put forward by the Treasury, is that using the PFI allows investment in assets used by the public sector to grow, even within public spending limits, because PFI investments fall outside the ambit of public borrowing. However, the authors show that if a constant amount of spending is transferred every year from traditional finance to PFI finance, then the fall in public borrowing will diminish over time and may eventually wholly disappear. So, even if some PFI finance is used every year, the scope for extra investment will diminish and may eventually disappear. They also show that, if PFI finance is used, then the required tax yield for a given level of investment may be permanently higher or permanently lower. In addition, they show that, even if a switch to PFI did reduce both public borrowing and taxes, then it might not facilitate much extra investment.

The author develops the concepts of ‘governance policy’ and how it relates to existing public policy typologies, especially ‘constituent policy’. Although distributive, regulatory, and redistributive types of policy are well understood, scholars have long struggled with an appropriate definition to complete this four-fold typology. Lowi referred to this fourth type as ‘constituent policy’—conferring broad costs and benefits to society—as opposed to policy that affects narrow (often economic) interests. Lowi's conception of constituent policy assumed a top-down process of policymaking dominated by elected officials and administrative agencies. Governance policy represents an attempt to refine the concept of ‘constituent policy’. Governance policy has a prominent procedural component and can be initiated by a bottom-up process of policymaking, via citizen initiatives or interest groups, as well as by a top-down process through political elites. This author explores the history and social significance of governance policy. Cross-sectional data from the fifty states of the USA are used to statistically model explanations for the adoption of nine governance policies. Empirical analysis suggests that states with frequent usage of ballot initiatives are more likely to adopt governance policy, after controlling for other factors. The author also suggests that a Progressive reform tradition, measured by a moralistic political culture, may provide an important trigger for the initial adoption of state direct democracy mechanisms. This suggests that prior adoption of direct democracy mechanisms may provide a necessary intervening trigger for frequent reliance on governance policy.

In this paper, I employ a ‘bottom-up’ approach to analyze efforts to curb exurban sprawl in cross-national perspective. Based on local housing and environmental data in a total of eleven French, German, and US urban regions, the analysis demonstrates that policies and institutions addressed to urban governance made more of a difference for outcomes than did federalism and other aspects of vertical integration at the heights of national states. This result highlights the importance both of local policy determinations and of the supralocal institutional infrastructures in which they nest.

The Council of Ministers plays a major role in EU governance. However, it has not Received sufficient analytical attention because of the difficulties encountered by researchers in obtaining precise information about its activities. Using the Agriculture Council as our focus, we draw upon detailed interviews conducted with over twenty-five Council officials and representatives from member state Agriculture Ministries over the period 1995–2000. Conceptualising the EU polity in the context of multilevel governance, we apply new institutionalist perspectives from political science to argue that the Agriculture Council's operation is founded upon a search for consensus and concordance. On this basis we scrutinise the Council's decisionmaking structure, the tactical and strategic dimensions of decisionmaking within it, and the attitudinal environment in which this occurs.

New empirical evidence on local sourcing by multinational enterprise plants in two UK regions (Yorkshire and The Humber and Northern Ireland) is presented and compared with evidence from other UK regions. The proportion of material inputs sourced locally is generally quite low in both regions and is broadly in line with that observed elsewhere. The scope for increasing the level of local sourcing through policy intervention is then examined and the suitability of various policy models for the UK regions is considered. A number of obstacles to greater local sourcing are identified including the sourcing strategies employed by multinationals and problems of availability, capacity, and competitiveness in local supply bases. The scope for policy intervention, it is argued, is quite limited but supplier-development policies designed to tackle issues of supplier capacity and competitiveness have greater potential than simple ‘brokering’ services.