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The introduction to this chapter discusses the question of why nations respond so differently to a set of social risks that are similar over various countries, and analyses three typical homines: Homo liberalisimus, Homo familias, and Homo socialdemocraticus. When the instincts of these ideal typical homines are combined, moral conflicts result, although a sufficient mass manages to profile itself in collective expression and sways society towards its preferred welfare regime. Old risks may fade and new ones emerge, but the response of a welfare regime will be, more likely than not, normatively path dependent. It is argued that since core institutional traits appear to be so unyielding to change, it is unlikely that the contemporary welfare state crisis will produce revolutionary change: there may be a blueprint for an ideal post‐industrial regime, but unless it is compatible with existing welfare regime practice, it may not be practicable. The author argues that, nonetheless, optimizing welfare in a post‐industrial setting will require radical departures, and these are discussed under the following headings: What is to be Optimized; Rival Reform Strategies; The Market Strategy; A Third Way?; and Equality with Inequality?

Although British policy makers accepted managerialist ideas more enthusiastically than the policy makers in Canada and in France, this does not explain how Britain has one of the most mature and well-developed management consulting industries and professions. In order to analyse the impact of managerialism on public administration, this chapter investigates the following policies of bureaucratic reform to verify whether these have affected the predisposition of policy actors towards reform strategies and the access of consultants to decision-making centres: the 1968 Fulton Committee Report on the Civil Service; the 1970 White Paper on the Reorganization of Central Government; the 1979 Rayner efficiency scrutinies; and the 1982 Financial Management Initiative.

The policy priorities of the government went through a gradual shift. Initially, the government left out ownership restructuring from the SOE reform strategies. In the mid-1990s, however, the government attempted to experiment with new strategies through full or partial privatization. Several issues were to the forefront during the period in which China was undergoing the transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. This chapter attempts to look at how pacing and sequencing have significantly affected the selection and adjustment in the country's reform strategies through analyzing the historical background, designs, objectives, and the actual effects of alternative reform efforts throughout China's economic development. This chapter looks into the alternative strategies adopted in three stages of SOE reform while examining important debates regarding the reform's direction and methods.

For large countries, an agenda of economic integration, deregulation and natural resource management reform typically cannot be effectively pursued without the active participation of subnational governments. While most of the literature about federalism and reform is about the reform of federalism, this volume is about reform through federalism. It explores federal reform strategies, that is, ways in which central governments can motivate, incentivise, influence and ensure coordination of subnational policies. It covers such mechanisms as the imposition of conditions on specific-purpose grants to subnational governments, the provision of grants if certain reforms are undertaken, the development of cross-government agreements, and the centralization of power from subnational to the central government. By exploring a range of case-studies, drawn mainly from India and Australia but also covering Indonesia and China, it fills the existing gap in the literature relating to federal reform strategies. This overview provides a conceptual framework, including a typology of strategies, summarizes the case-studies, and draws out some lessons learnt.

Media reform is a great and formidable challenge. Across international contexts, reformers are inspired by what the late C. Edwin Baker referred to as the democratic distribution principle for communicative power: “a claim that democracy implies as wide as practical a dispersal of power within public discourse” (Baker, 2007, p. 7). The challenge is made manifest in battles over the future of investigative journalism, media ownership, spectrum management, speech rights, broadband access, network neutrality, the surveillance apparatus, digital literacy and many others waged in pursuit of the normative ideals at the heart of Baker’s vision. At the same time, those committed to media reform confront formidable challenges: entrenched commercial interests and media conglomerates; sometimes powerful, sometimes disorganized and sometimes neoliberal governments; a general public often disenfranchised, digitally illiterate and not focused on issues of media reform; and always, the uphill battle of organization, mobilization and influence that is the work of any activist. In light of these significant challenges, the central question addressed by this volume is: What strategies might be utilized to overcome these obstacles in the pursuit of media reform?

This chapter identifies the deficiencies in legal governance and accountability accompanying the New Public Contracting. It considers various proposals for legal reform in administrative law, private law, and constitutional law. It also argues that a hybrid reform strategy, rather than one that attempts just to extend or develop private or public law in any particular direction, is most likely to be successful in addressing these governance deficiencies, and in protecting both the individual interests of parties with stakes in public contracting processes and the public interest more generally.

This paper seeks to identify patterns of inter-state and centre-state interactions that condition the processes and outcomes of governance reform in Indian federal polity. Centralizing federalism offers examples of failures as well as successes. Intergovernmental competition can activate reforms as seen in Bihar and Gujarat, and that may also motivate reforms in other states. The central government should actively support competitive federalism through parallel reform processes, incorporate successful state initiatives into national programs, foster incentives for states to persist with reform through financial support packages, and encourage states to learn from one another. The paper argues that India needs to move towards a cooperative federalism that allows for genuine reform to occur, as in the case of the Right to Information Act, but which avoids the dilution that a consensus-based solution can entail. In this model, the central government would nudge states in the right direction using the wide array of instruments and create cooperative processes to formulate reforms.

This chapter gives an account of deserved punishment today, and in so doing, to suggest some limitations to what desert might become. Desert is not an antidote to public sensibilities, but a vehicle for their expression. Of course, public sensibilities vary by place as well as time, and so desert has a geography as well as a (developing) history. Much of the discussion focuses on the United States, but there is evidence that the analysis describes at least some other developed western democracies. It examines desert's promise to discipline today's passions and suggests that we should not be surprised that this promise has remained unfulfilled. This, then, leads to a final normative question—the question of whether policy makers or legal decision makers should defer to populist attitudes concerning deserved punishment. The chapter concludes with some reflections on reform strategies that seek neither to bury nor to praise desert, but to scrutinize the underlying components of desert judgments.

This chapter focuses on the ambivalence of colonial discourse, specifically the issue of mimicry, which, it explains, is the sign of a double articulation, a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline. It suggests that the effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing, for in normalizing the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms.

This chapter lays out the options adopted by proponents of change and tradition. The groups include neoconservative Catholics aligned with the periodical First Things, advocates such as Survivors Networks of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), moderate progressives joined with Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), business leaders and philanthropists associated with the National Leadership Roundtable for Church Management, and FutureChurch, a group that promotes women's ordination to the priesthood. Lay interests have usually followed one of two strategies since John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian, succeeded in expanding tolerance for religious freedom and political pluralism at Vatican II. One path is doctrinally confrontational, pitting traditionalists against reformers favoring women's rights. Another is legalistic-combative or administrative-collaborative. SNAP focuses on curbing the church's “immunity” from civil and criminal prosecution in cases of sexual abuse. The Roundtable counts on administrative reform from within to upgrade the ministries of the church.

After the enterprise reforms did not achieve positive results, China embarked on an incremental reform strategy that placed priority on the reform and gradual expansion of the nonstate sector. An amendment to the Constitution in 1988 defined the private sector as a supplement to the socialist public economy, thereby recognizing the legality of the private sector in China’s ownership structure. The unexpected rise of township and village enterprises, the relaxation of the restrictions on individual businesses, permission to hire workers to allow for the growth of private enterprises, and the opening to foreign investment all led to gradual increases in new nonstate elements in the national economy. These incremental economic changes are the main reasons for China’s sustained high growth rates in the 1980s.