Robust Governance In Turbulent Times

This Element aims to build, promote, and consolidate a new social science research agenda by defining and exploring the concepts of turbulence and robustness, and subsequently demonstrating the need for robust governance in turbulent times. Turbulence refers to the unpredictable dynamics that public governance is currently facing in the wake of the financial crisis, the refugee crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the inflation crisis etc. The heightened societal turbulence calls for robust governance aiming to maintain core functions, goals and values by means of flexibly adapting and proactively innovating the modus operandi of the public sector. This Element identifies a broad repertoire of robustness strategies that public governors may use and combine to respond robustly to turbulence. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

What are the conditions for political development and decay, and the likelihood of sustained political order? What are the limits of established rule as we know it? How much stress can systems tackle before they reach some kind of limit? How do governments tackle enduring ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems and environments? These are some of the big questions of our time. Governance in turbulent times may serve as a stress-test of well-known ways of governing in the 21st century. Governance in Turbulent Times discusses this pertinent challenge and suggests how governments and organizations cope with and live with turbulence. The book explores how organizations and institutions respond to precipitous, conflicting, and novel-in short, turbulent-governance challenges. This book is a comprehensive and ground-breaking endeavor to understand how governance systems respond to turbulent challenges, and how turbulent times provide excellent opportunities to investigate the sustainability of governance systems. The book illustrates how politics, administrative scale and complexity, uncertainty, and time constraints can collide to produce turbulence. Building on prior work in organization theory and political science, we argue that turbulence refers to four properties related to the interaction of demands for action: variability, consistency, expectation, and unpredictability. Turbulence occurs where the interaction of demands is experienced as highly variable, inconsistent, unexpected, and/or unpredictable.

This book develops a timely analysis of the complex trends and transformations emerging in EU competition law in the current turbulent times. Repeated economic crises, the climate emergency, digitalisation, and geopolitical and democratic threats are all having profound societal and economic effects on the EU. In light of its fundamental role in the Treaties, EU competition law has been called upon to play an important role in responding to this state of 'turbulence'. This brings about significant governance and constitutional challenges, firstly by questioning how the governance of EU competition law is being transformed to respond and adapt. Secondly, these crisis-induced transformations probe the logic and constitutional limits of EU competition law within the framework of EU law. This collection brings together EU institutional and competition lawyers to reflect on the governance and constitutional challenges emerging from the post-modernisation evolution of EU competition law against the backdrop of the recent multiple crises in the EU. The essays focus on the substantive and procedural developments across the three main policy areas of EU competition law: antitrust, merger control and State aid. EU constitutional and competition lawyers will be interested in this important new collection.

This book aims to understand how public organizations adapt to and manage situations characterized by fluidity, ambiguity, complexity and unclear technologies, thus exploring public governance in times of turbulence.

Lessons from service and system failures describe how governance and leadership each play a pivotal role in high-quality, safe care. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Thoroughly updated with new and fresh examples, " Beyond policy analysis " examines the shifting environment of public sector governance. The text goes through the stages of policy formulation, design, implementation, and evaluation, but does so by looking at what has changed in the way governments operate today. Unlike other texts, " Beyond policy analysis " focuses on analytic tools and the conceptual side of public policy, blending strong theory with vivid examples and real-world context.

What are the constraints on and opportunities of governance for small States in an interdependent and increasingly turbulent global setting? How do small States deal with radical changes in the international environment? What is the role of political institutions in facilitating and constraining policy responses to a rapidly changing international environment? How can political leadership contribute to stability in times of change? This book answers these questions by taking a comparative perspective on the processes of change and adaptation in the governance of Norway and Slovakia. These two small European States with highly open economies have been exposed to the same set of global turbulences related to post-Cold War changes in the security environment and the global financial crisis. They are also facing internal challenges that spring from rapidly rising expectations, while demographic shifts put pressure on their welfare systems. Their governance structures and processes are info

The diversity of knowledge surrounding behavioural insights (BI) means in the policy sciences, although visible, remains under-theorized with scant comparative and generalizable explorations of the procedural prerequisites for their effective design, both as stand-alone tools and as part of dedicated policy 'toolkits'. While comparative analyses of the content of BI tools has proliferated, the knowledge gap about the procedural needs of BI policy design is growing recognizably, as the range of BI responses grows in practice necessitating specific capabilities, processes and institutional frameworks to be in place for their design. This Element draws on the literature on policy design and innovation adoption to explore the administrative, institutional and capacity endowments of governments for the successful and appropriate integration of BI in existing policy frameworks. Further, we present three illustrative cases with respect to their experience of essential procedural endowments facilitating for the effective integration of BI in policy design.