How Civil Servants Frame Participation: Balancing Municipal Responsibility With Citizen Initiative in Ede’s Food Policy

Contemporary governance is marked by increased attention for participation of non-governmental actors (NGAs) in traditionally governmental activities, such as policy-making. This trend has been prevalent across food policy processes and reflects a key feature of food democracy. However, the role of governmental actors in facilitating and responding to this participation remains a gap in the literature. In this article, we ask how civil servants frame the participation of NGAs in policy processes. Drawing on ethnographic research, we introduce the case of civil servants working on an urban food policy for the municipality of Ede (the Netherlands). Our analysis uncovers two competing frames: 1) highlighting the responsibility of the municipality to take a leading role in food policy making, and 2) responding reflexively to NGAs. The analysis provides insights into how the framing of participation by civil servants serves to shape the conditions for participation of NGAs. It further sheds light on related practices and uncovers existing tensions and contradictions, with important implications for food democracy. We conclude by showing how, in the short term, a strong leadership role for civil servants, informed by the responsibility frame, may be effective for advancing policy objectives of the municipality. However, the reactive frame illustrates that civil servants worry this approach is not effective for maintaining meaningful participation of NGAs. This remains a key tension of participatory municipal-led urban food policy making, but balancing both municipal responsibility and an open and reactive attitude towards the participation of NGAs is useful for enhancing food democracy.

Download Full-text

Multiplicity of Perspectives on Sustainable Food: Moving Beyond Discursive Path Dependency in Food Policy

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su11102773 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 11 (10) ◽

pp. 2773 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Michiel P.M.M. de Krom ◽

Hanneke Muilwijk

Keyword(s):

Focus Groups ◽

Policy Making ◽

Food System ◽

Food Policy ◽

Civil Servants ◽

Sustainable Food ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Path Dependencies ◽

Problems And Solutions ◽

Integrated Policy

The idea that a sustainable transformation of the food system is urgently needed is gaining ground throughout Europe. Yet, opinions differ substantially on what a sustainable food future exactly entails, and on how this future may be achieved. This article argues that recognising this multiplicity of opinions and perspectives in policy making is productive because it creates attentiveness to innovative ideas and initiatives, and may contribute to a broad social support base for policy choices. However, food policy makers may overlook the diversity in perspectives by unreflexively adopting understandings of problems and solutions that are historically dominant in their organisations. In this article, we reveal the usefulness of triggering reflection on such discursive path dependencies amongst policy makers. We do so by presenting a three-fold case study that we conducted in the Netherlands. First, we analytically distinguish five perspectives on sustainable food that feature prominently in the Dutch public debate. Subsequently, we show that only two out of these five perspectives predominantly informed a Dutch food policy—despite intentions to devise a more integrated policy approach. Finally, we discuss the findings of two focus groups in which we discussed our analyses with Dutch civil servants who have been involved in drafting the Dutch food policy. These focus groups triggered reflection among the civil servants on their own perspectival biases as well as on discursive path dependencies in Dutch food policy making. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the understanding of the discursive politics of sustainable agro-food transformations in Europe.

Download Full-text

Sir Horace Wilson, 1900–1935: the Making of a Mandarin

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x00020926 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 30 (3) ◽

pp. 641-662 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Rodney Lowe ◽

Richard Roberts

Keyword(s):

Compact Group ◽

Policy Making ◽

Civil Service ◽

Political History ◽

Civil Servants ◽

Corporate Influence ◽

Modern Britain

In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries, Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.

Download Full-text

Enforcing China’s Anti-Monopoly law in regulated industries: a study of the airline industry

Journal of Antitrust Enforcement ◽

10.1093/jaenfo/jnaa054 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jingmeng Cai ◽

Jae Woon Lee

Keyword(s):

Airline Industry ◽

Short Term ◽

Competitive Effects ◽

Fair Competition ◽

Policy Objectives ◽

Regulated Industries ◽

The Government ◽

Set Up

Abstract Since China enacted its Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) in 2007, foreign observers and business operators have constantly raised concerns as to whether the AML can inject a modern competition spirit into the world’s largest transitional economy or whether the AML will be overridden by policy objectives. These concerns become more obvious in industries that have been heavily regulated by the government. In this article, we choose the airline industry as a research target to explore possible ways to restrain industrial regulators from unduly interfering in competition and to reinforce the role of the AML. We focus on three kinds of administrative regulations in China’s domestic aviation market: limiting the threshold of market entry, price regulations, and subsidies. Then we analyse the policy objectives these regulations intend to achieve and their anti-competitive effects. Finally, we conclude with two suggestions from long-term and short-term perspectives: first, the newly established Fair Competition Review System (FCRS) should be effectively used to normalize and limit regulators’ policy-making authority. Moreover, the reviewing criteria should be made clearer and more meticulous to offer both FCRS reviewers and anti-monopoly agencies guidelines for assessing the effects of administrative behaviours on competition. Second, in the long term, industrial regulators are encouraged to set up competition-friendly industrial policies, embrace modern competition concepts in their traditional regulatory paradigm, and foster a competitive culture.

Download Full-text

Revisiting the Role of Bureaucrats in Pension Policy-making: The Case of South Korea

Government and Opposition ◽

10.1017/gov.2013.26 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 264-289 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Won Sub Kim ◽

Young Jun Choi

Keyword(s):

South Korea ◽

Policy Making ◽

Civil Servants ◽

Pension Policy ◽

Political Actors ◽

Policy Making Process ◽

Major Reform ◽

Institutional Positioning

This article aims to provide an understanding of the dynamics of pension politics in South Korea with a particular focus on the role of bureaucrats. In order to explain the reforms, this research will closely examine how the expertise and legitimacy of civil servants, together with their institutional positioning, have affected their power and role in the policy-making process. This article will argue that bureaucrats, particularly the welfare bureaucracy, attained their major reform goals by associating and competing with other political actors in two major reforms.

Download Full-text

Political Economy of Fiscal Policy in Pakistan

THE LAHORE JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ◽

10.35536/lje.2003.v8.i1.a1 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 1-23

Author(s):

M. Abdul Mateen Khan

Keyword(s):

Economic Growth ◽

Full Employment ◽

Underdeveloped Country ◽

The State ◽

Price Stability ◽

Short Term ◽

Role Of The State ◽

Policy Objectives ◽

Term Performance

In an underdeveloped country, the state regulates not only the short- term performance of the economy but also its path of development. Such an overwhelming role of the state derives its justification from the very nature of underdevelopment itself. Economics and economists are usually concerned with policy, with a view to determining as to what policies are appropriate in a given economic situation to attain policy objectives such as economic growth, full employment, price stability, redistribution of income and wealth. But adopted policies are often not the policies that economists recommend as the best or even the second best.

Download Full-text

Energy potential festulolium herbage with short-term and long-term use

Multifunctional adaptive fodder production ◽

10.33814/mak-2021-25-73-101-105 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Kira Privalova ◽

Ruslan Karimov

Keyword(s):

Energy Production ◽

High Energy ◽

Metabolic Energy ◽

Short Term ◽

Energy Potential ◽

Leading Role ◽

Natural Factors

The studies for the period 2004–2017, he reveals a high energy potential of pasture herbage technologies, created on the basis of domestic varieties of Festulolium VIK 90 at 6-and 14-year-old terms of use. The ratio of anthropogenic and natural factors in the production of pasture feed is given. At the same time, the leading role of renewable natural factors has been revealed: they account for 66–71% of the structure of metabolic energy production.

Download Full-text