Advancing our understanding of the EU sports policy: the socio-cultural model of sports regulation and players’ agents

This paper explains the development of the socio-cultural dimension of the European Union (EU) sports policy over the course of the decade from 2005 to 2015. By adopting the theoretical lenses of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), the paper firstly offers a novel perspective on the belief systems of the members of the socio-cultural advocacy coalition that operates within the EU sports policy subsystem. A set of empirical policy core beliefs of the coalition actors reflecting their concerns regarding to sport’s integrity and economic welfare that affect its healthy development is presented and explained as the basic causes of the policy problem, i.e., threats that undermine sport’s specific characteristics. In this light, the paper then illustrates that the coalition members have perceived the issue of players’ agents, in particular problems in the activities of agents in European football, to be detrimental to the integrity of sport. As a result, the issue has been the subject of a considerable policy activity by the coalition actors with a view to establishing an alternative regulatory framework to effectively govern players’ agents. Consequently, the paper elucidates the evolving nature of the socio-cultural model of sports regulation that not only promotes the social role of sport in Europe but now also addresses the problems that affect its well-being and clear image. The paper’s principal method of investigation is based on the content analysis of official policy documents and statements of the coalition actors

What’s the problem? Multilevel governance and problem-solving

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.The study of multilevel governance (MLG) is fundamentally concerned with the capacity of multilevel governance to effectively deal with policy problems. However, the notion of problem-solving itself remains vague. Moreover, MLG research prioritizes questions of structure and agency, while neglecting the role and nature of policy problems themselves. This symposium defines problem-solving in both procedural and operational terms. The introduction reviews relevant attributes of policy problems and existing assumptions about their influence on problem-solving. By adding uncertainty, tractability, and three political attributes (power, conflict, salience), we propose an extended list of attributes of policy problems that matter for problem-solving, and link them to different notions of procedural and operational problemsolving in MLG. The contributions address the challenges facing problem-solving in the European Union, adopting a particular focus on the characteristics of policy problems. Empirical cases include the European Semester, Brexit, the governance of the swine flu pandemic, and climate change

Is American Public Administration Detached From Historical Context?: On the Nature of Time and the Need to Understand It in Government and Its Study

The study of public administration pays little attention to history. Most publications are focused on current problems (the present) and desired solutions (the future) and are concerned mainly with organizational structure (a substantive issue) and output targets (an aggregative issue that involves measures of both individual performance and organizational productivity/services). There is much less consideration of how public administration (i.e., organization, policy, the study, etc.) unfolds over time. History, and so administrative history, is regarded as a “past” that can be recorded for its own sake but has little relevance to contemporary challenges. This view of history is the product of a diminished and anemic sense of time, resulting from organizing the past as a series of events that inexorably lead up to the present in a linear fashion. To improve the understanding of government’s role and position in society, public administration scholarship needs to reacquaint itself with the nature of time.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Sport policy convergence: a framework for analysis

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in European Sport Management Quarterly on 30th April 2012, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/16184742.2012.669390The growth in the comparative analysis of sport management processes and policy has led to an increased interest in the concept of convergence. However, the concept is too often treated as unproblematic in definition, measurement and operationalisation. It is argued in this paper that a more effective framework for examining claims of convergence is one that analyses the concept in terms of seven dimensions which can be explored through a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. It is also argued that a deeper understanding of the process of convergence can be gained by operationalising the concept in the context of a selected range of meso-level theories of the policy process or of specific aspects of the process. The proposed analytic framework provides not only a definition of convergence but also the basis for a more nuanced investigation of hypotheses of convergence

Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities

Trees structure the Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem, tropical forests. The vast number of tree species presents a formidable challenge to understanding these forests, including their response to environmental change, as very little is known about most tropical tree species. A focus on the common species may circumvent this challenge. Here we investigate abundance patterns of common tree species using inventory data on 1,003,805 trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm across 1,568 locations1,2,3,4,5,6 in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. We estimate that 2.2%, 2.2% and 2.3% of species comprise 50% of the tropical trees in these regions, respectively. Extrapolating across all closed-canopy tropical forests, we estimate that just 1,053 species comprise half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm. Despite differing biogeographic, climatic and anthropogenic histories7, we find notably consistent patterns of common species and species abundance distributions across the continents. This suggests that fundamental mechanisms of tree community assembly may apply to all tropical forests. Resampling analyses show that the most common species are likely to belong to a manageable list of known species, enabling targeted efforts to understand their ecology. Although they do not detract from the importance of rare species, our results open new opportunities to understand the world’s most diverse forests, including modelling their response to environmental change, by focusing on the common species that constitute the majority of their trees