Global Public Policy and Governance
1. Crossing the boundaries: reimagining innovation and diffusion
Jing He, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA
Frances Berry,Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA
Boundaries represent separation and the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The diffusion of innovations represents a transmission of information, personal relationships, creativity and similarities across boundaries. While policy and management innovation and diffusion studies began as an American state policy field, over the last 20 years the studies have expanded to include new frameworks for Chinese, Korean and other countries’ innovation and diffusion studies. Using an expanded range of institutional structures, leadership, and factors that impact innovation and diffusion, these studies embrace more comparative studies of policy diffusion across countries. In this paper, we lay out key topics in organizational and policy innovation studies, and independent variables found to lead to innovation and diffusion. In addition, we argue we should expand the types of variables included in multivariate models to empirically test questions related to which innovations diffuse rapidly or incompletely, why governments adopt innovations, and what barriers and resources are present across types of innovations. We introduce three types of boundaries—space boundaries, time and path dependency boundaries, and actors boundaries that we believe should be more regularly and broadly included in innovation and diffusion studies, and we conclude by defining how these boundaries can be operationalized.
2. Impacts of green public procurement on eco-innovation: evidence from EU countries
Chunling Yu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China
Toru Morotomi, Kyoto University, Kyoto , Japan
Enhancing eco-innovation is essential to simultaneously achieving goals of environmental protection and economic development. Besides technological push and market demands, the drivers and determinants of eco-innovation could also be institutional and regulatory factors. While scholars have been examining the effects of environmental regulations on eco-innovation, there is still a lack of research on the effects of economic incentives created by environmental policies. In response, this article investigates the impacts of green public procurement (GPP) on eco-innovation by examining contract award notices from 28 European countries during 2010–2018. The article extracts green contract ratio and applies static and dynamic panel data analyses to estimate its effects on eco-innovation index. The results show that use of green award criteria in public procurement can improve eco-innovation performance, albeit with a decreasing margin. This study concludes that appropriately designed GPP, by providing incentives of compliance, can effectively drive environmental innovations.
3. The mayor or the people? Indigenous identity and differences in managerial practices
Ricardo A. Bello-Gomez,Texas Tech University, Lubbock, USA
Claudia N. Avellaneda,Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
This study explores managerial preferences’ variation among mayors due to Indigenous identity. Specifically, we propose Indigenous identity is associated with more outward and collaborative managerial strategies, as well as more within-group collaboration. We test these hypotheses in a 2017 survey data of 43 Indigenous and 34 non-Indigenous sitting mayors, covering 77 Guatemalan municipalities. Findings are mixed. While different preferences in managerial styles exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous mayors, they mismatch our expectations. However, results suggest that the share of Indigenous population is associated with a stronger mayoral outward management orientation and a higher likelihood to collaborate with an Indigenous partner organization.
Martin de Jong,Rotterdam School of Management and Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China
Haiyan Lu,School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China
City branding as produced by local governments has been widely recognized as a modern version of government communication. Local governments convey attractive features of their identity to current and potential stakeholders in their cities. In this contribution, we examine how municipal governments have used urban design as a form of city branding reflecting the identity of the historical (sub)region in which they are located. We do this in a French border region where features of medieval, Burgundian and Spanish Netherlandish traditions can still clearly be distinguished in public buildings: Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and more specifically its five subregions Maritime Flanders, Roman Flanders, Hainaut, Artesia and Cambrai. We systematically map historical and cultural symbols found on leading public urban architecture and indicate to which era of origin and identity feature they refer. We do this for a selection of 17 municipalities of over 20,000 inhabitants. We find that symbols to pre-French traditions are still very conspicuous (Flemish architecture, typical beer bars, selective use of ancient Dutch language), but also that as new political powers establish themselves in a region these symbols are redefined such that such regional identities are in line with new ‘national requirements’ and become ‘innocuous’. Classicist building styles, French military works and war memorials and modernist architecture embed and blend with these ancient traditions and make regional identities multi-layered. Either way, ‘thin’ instrumental and identities pushed by governments grow ‘thick’ and deeply felt over the centuries.
5. Subnational territorial reforms and state capacity: evidence from the developing world
Jianzi He,Institute for Global Public Policy, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Governments often change their internal territorial divisions to pursue either political or governance goals. Over the recent decades, territorial reforms of splitting local government units, known as government fragmentation, have gained popularity in the developing world, and further stimulate the ongoing discussion about jurisdiction size and the quality of government. Building on this stream of literature, this paper seeks to empirically examine how the design of the primary administrative division affects the overall capacity of the state to implement its policies. Drawing on a country-year panel of 132 developing countries in the 1960–2012 period, the paper documents an inverse U-shaped relationship between the degree of government fragmentation and state capacity measured by different indicators, which suggests a tradeoff in designing administrative divisions. Furthermore, the curvilinear relationship is found more pronounced in countries under a unitary government system or with a high level of ethnic fractionalization.
6. Ideas and making of the East Asia pre-modern Minben meritocratic state
Zhengxu Wang,Department of Political Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Until recently, pre-modern East Asia’s presence as a social science subject has been quite minimum. International relations scholars are prone to limiting their inquiry to the working of the so-called “tributary system”, and are often quick to dismiss “Tianxia” as a viable idea for the making of a global community. Studying the design and working of the ancient East Asian state is generally confined in the historical branch of sinology. Confucianism and other schools of philosophy are generally treated as theories of social ethics, and are rarely believed to be able to inform our thinking of contemporary government. Things have taken a turn of late. With a growing body of works, produced by political philosophers, sociologists, international relations and political science scholars, some may come to realize that we have quite a bit to learn about the pre-modern East Asian society and state. In fact, the trouble may be that we do not know how much we don’t know about it. While in the past pre-modern East Asia, whose model can be referred to with the Mencian idea of Minben (民本), attracted only limited scholarly attention, it may now promise a highly profitable field.
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