Look what the cat dragged in : national responses to the EU packaging and packaging waste directive

In 1994, the European Union approved the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (Directive 94/62/EC) having as a primary goal to mandate the adoption of national legislation targeted at the increase of recovery and recycling goals by member States. In spite of the flexibility allowed by the EU in choosing the path towards goal attainment, a significant number of countries adopted voluntary agreements generally known as Green-Dot consortia. The main research question reflects this concern over the dominant governance structure adopted, the Green Dot agreements: Did voluntary agreements improve the performance of national recycling systems or did they favour collusion practices that dominate the industry, impose barriers to entry by new firms, and generate social welfare losses? The paper discusses the alternative governance structures to manage packaging waste (command-and-control regulation, market-based instruments, and voluntary agreements) and focuses on the economic transaction costs entailed by each of these alternative solutions. It is stressed that proper institutional design is crucial in order to minimize these transaction costs and improve the degree of efficiency of these governance structures

Can the market be used to preserve land? the case for transfer of development rights

This paper discusses the use of a market-driven technique – transfer of development rights (TDR) – to preserve land from development while guaranteeing the rights of property owners. While the technique is often used in the United States, Europe has a lot more urgency in land preservation but it is still lagging in the use of market based instruments such as the transfer of development rights. This paper explores the economic arguments favoring the use of TDR programs, discusses the difficulties in implementing these programs in Europe, where command-and-control regulation has been preferred in land preservation to market-based solutions, and presents tentative hypotheses to explain the adoption of TDR programs in local communities. Preliminary data collected for TDR programs in Florida supports some of the arguments presented and encourages researchers to extend this empirical analysis to European countries

Evaluation of policy alternatives to reduce alcohol-related traffic fatalities

This paper reviews the alternative policies to reduce traffic fatalities due to drunk-driving presented in the literature and elaborates on their contradictions to develop a larger, more encompassing program of research to evaluate the effective results of these alternatives when implemented across states and over time. The goals of this research are both societal and scientific. Five major types of policies are generally presented to accomplish the reduction of alcohol-related fatalities: deterrence policies, alcohol policies, transportation policies, education and rehabilitation policies, and civil liability policies. The literature review on alcohol-related traffic fatalities reveals a large number of studies developed in this area, not always with consensual results. One important idea to retain is that the units of analysis, methods, and data are extremely diverse, which makes any attempt to provide a comprehensive set of policies to solve the problem an extremely complex task.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT

Institutions, incentives, and the politics of growth management

Paper prepared for the Florida Political Science Association meeting March 23-24, 2001 Jacksonville, FLLand use management is relevant to the discussion of environmental policy because regulation of land use and growth has been used as an instrument of environmentally concerned actors. More generally, growth management policy is best characterized as regulatory, because state and local governments use public policy to direct private behavior (Feiock, 1994). It is appropriate to note however that, the consequences of growth management are inherently distributive. Molotch (1976) depicted a city as an aggregate of competing land-based interests. Decisions regarding growth, at the local or any other level, are then decisions of who gets what, where, and how (Lasswell, 1936). These interests refer not only to competition for economic development but also for quality of life under the heading of growth management. In this discussion of land use management policy, I proceed in the following manner. First, I begin by describing the history and evolution of American land use planning activities and policies throughout the XX century. Next, I succinctly describe the land use policy tools employed over the years and the context in which they have been used. In the core of the paper, I apply a transaction cost theory to explain the relationship between states and localities in terms of economic and political transaction costs. I conclude with some suggestions regarding hypothesis and future theory testing

Land use management: local institutions and the power to shape?

This chapter discusses the influence of local institutions in the design, implementation and outcomes of land use policies. It begins with a synthesis of three generations of land use policy tools. Next, the chapter describes the political market framework as an explanation for the adoption of land use policies. The framework accounts for land use choices as the result of supply decisions made by local authorities as policy makers, demand pressures by competing pro-development and pro-conservation interest groups, and the mediating effects of local institutions. Illustrating the usefulness of the framework, the chapter reviews the empirical literature on the role played by executive, legislative, and participatory democracy institutions in shaping land use decisions and extracts lessons to better understand this role

Mini-symposium: institutional collective action in comparative perspective

[Excerpt] First developed by Richard Feiock and his team at the Local Governance Research Lab (https://localgov.fsu.edu) at Florida State University, the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework aims to understand and explain local and regional dilemmas of fragmented authority that characterize a federalist system. Since its initial installment in the mid 2000s, the ICA framework has gained significant traction in the United States

Municipal amalgamations and their effects: a literature review

Municipal amalgamation reforms have been advocated as ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance capacity in local government service provision. Research on the consequences of amalgamations has reached maturity in terms of theories, research designs and methods, justifying a systematic survey of results. This article provides a synthesis of the empirical literature published over the last 20 years, organizing the effects of amalgamations into three categories: economic efficiency and cost savings, managerial implications, and democratic outcomes. Despite the significant variation across countries and reforms, some regularities emerge: cost savings being primarily limited to general administration expenditures (wages, office supplies, and so on), few changes in the quality of local services, and the diminished quality of local democracy. Several studies point to amalgamation reforms experiencing a trade-off between efficiency and democracy

Ten years after: revisiting the determinants of the adoption of municipal corporations for local service delivery

Research on the use of municipal corporations to deliver local and regional public services has evolved significantly in the past decade. Most of this work addresses the performance of this service-delivery mode in relation to local bureaucracies. However, much less is known about the drivers for the adoption of municipal corporations in the first place. This article reviews the main determinants of adoption – service characteristics, institutional and regulatory settings, political constraints and financial conditions – and highlights the need for comparative research across countries.This work was supported by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia [UID/CPO/00758/2013]; Programa Operacional da Regiao Norte, NORTE2020 [NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037 (SmartEGOV)]

The implementation of social policy through the nonprofit sector: a political market framework

The uneven geographic distribution of nonprofit organizations has been an issue of debate in the implementation of social policy since the 1980s. This paper proposes a political market framework to test an integrated explanation for the geographic distribution of nonprofits. Government failure theory attributes this variation to the distribution of social problems, so that nonprofit organizations are more prevalent in jurisdictions displaying larger and more diverse service needs that governments are not prepared or willing to tackle. In contrast, entrepreneurship theory argues that nonprofit organizations are created in jurisdictions with higher levels of prosperity and resources and a stronger tradition of generosity. This second explanation suggests that nonprofit organizations are established by entrepreneurs seeking to maximize non-monetary returns. Our framework argues that both demand-side and supply-side market forces help to explain the variation in the geographical distribution of nonprofit organizations. The hypotheses are tested using data assembled from nonprofit organizations established at the local level in continental Portugal. The variation in nonprofit sector activities is measured by the number of users and by the number of nonprofit organizations operating by block groups responsible for the implementation of social policy in each local jurisdiction. These groups constitute our dependent variables and include nursing homes, day care centers, home care organizations, leisure centers, and homeless care organizations. The paper employs a series of economic, social and demographic features of the local jurisdictions as explanatory factors to test the propositions derived from the political market framework for the formation and size of nonprofit organizations. Our findings indicate that citizen donations, demand heterogeneity, income, and population size are relevant predictors of the dimension of the local nonprofit sector

Size, density and small scale elections: a multi-level analysis of voter turnout in sub-municipal governments

What are the consequences of fragmenting political and administrative authority within municipalities? Portugal provides an excellent setting to study the effects of sub-city institutional fragmentation because each of its 308 municipal governments is divided into sub-municipal governments (SMUs). The 4259 SMUs deliver services to the residents and its executive leader serves on the city council. In this paper we investigate the determinants of voter turnout in these SMUs. We argue that the size and density of SMUs affects electoral participation, but this effect is mediated by the municipal context. High levels of population concentration and low levels of territorial fragmentation at the municipal level are expected to improve voter mobilization efforts and mitigate the negative effect of size and density on voter turnout. Hierarchical linear analysis of municipal and SMU data finds strong support for size and density effects and moderate support for multilevel relationships.This research is partially supported by the “Programa Operacional da Região Norte”, NORTE2020, in the context of project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037 (SmartEGOV) and by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) [Grant n. º PEst-OE/CJP/UI0758/2014], and the Estonian Research Council Grant PUT-1142. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation