Alastair Stark

Citizen participation, community resilience and crisis-management policy

This article presents two arguments. The first relates to the relevance of citizen participation vis-à-vis the design and implementation of public policy. More specifically, the article empirically demonstrates how a model of community decentralisation can have a number of practical benefits for crisis-management policy. The second argument relates to a question that has come to characterise studies of citizen participation in public policy. Why is it that there is so much rhetoric in support of participation but so little action in terms of the day-to-day realities of policy implementation? We place this question in a crisis-management context so that we might ask: why is it that crisis-management systems built around the principles of community resilience continue to fail on these very grounds? We find our answer to this question in state-centric governance settings which devolve authority, but do not relinquish it. 本文提出两个观点。第一个观点涉及公民参与对于公共政策设计和实施的意义。具体地说，本文用实证的方法说明社区分权模式如何对危机管理政策产生一系列实际效益。第二个观点涉及公民参与公共政策的问题：为什么对公民参与口头上不吝支持，而日常政策的实施上却不见动静？这个问题可以放在危机管理的语境中重新提问：为什么围绕着社区弹性原则的危机管理体系仍以这样的理由失效？我们的答案是：以政府为中心的治理环境虽然转移但并未放弃权威。

Legislatures, legitimacy and crises: The relationship between representation and crisis management

This article presents a theoretical argument that the study of representation can yield important insights for crisis analysts. The argument is presented through a claim that the representative systems, legislatures and individuals of a state – defined here broadly as ‘representative institutions’– should be factored into political analyses of crisis management, as they provide a lens for novel explorations of crisis issues. In particular, the use of parliamentary perspectives, and the examination of specific legislature functions during crises, can lead to valuable insights into the legitimacy dynamics that characterize political crisis episodes.

More micro than meta? Competing concepts of metagovernance in the European Union

Interactive and state-centric relational governance scholars disagree about the concept of metagovernance. Contestation relates to who can metagovern, the processes that can steer policy networks and the extent of autonomy held by non-state actors. This article uses data generated from interviews with policy officials and document analysis to examine the validity of these competing claims in relation to a European crisis management network. The findings validate both conceptualisations in terms of the minutia of network governance but they also question their value as a proxy for understanding how the European Union has affected the policymaking authority of the nation-state.

Bureaucratic Failure and the UK's Lack of Preparedness for Foot and Mouth Disease

This article explores the UKs lack of preparedness for Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and the consequences for the 2001 outbreak. First, it utilises literature on crisis management and policy failure in order explore the problems caused by, and explanations for, lack of crisis preparedness. Second, it examines in detail a series of overlapping bureaucratic failures, particularly on the part of the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), which not only reduced the UKs capacity to cope with the epidemic, but also exacerbated it. These failures included cultural complacency, resource weaknesses, lack of contingency planning, delays in implementing EU legislation, confused priorities and a failure to learn from the previous major outbreak in 1967-68. Finally, it suggests that explanations for the UKs inadequate preparedness for FMD can be found at the individual, organisational and societal levels.

Community resilience and crisis management: policy lessons from the ground

Community resilience is a central concept within crisis management policymaking, but it has escaped critical analysis. This article responds to this problem by examining a community-led response to a large natural disaster (the Queensland floods of 2010–11). The findings emerge from the application of a novel ethnographic method, uniquely informed by an insider’s view of the disaster, which generated narratives from ‘the ground’. These narratives highlight a darker side to community resilience, which is largely unacknowledged, but needs to be understood so that we can critically appraise the concept more effectively in the future.

A New Perspective on Constituency Representation: British Parliamentarians and the ‘Management’ of Crises

This article examines the constituency roles performed by members of the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly during four crises. While the constituency work of British parliamentarians has already attracted the attention of scholars, this article emerges from a belief that new findings about legislatures can be generated by examining familiar representative functions during the abnormal context of a crisis. In order to investigate this argument, the article sets out a series of theoretical proposals about the relevancy of constituency roles to state-led forms of ‘crisis management’. These proposals are then applied to four crisis case studies and tested via interviews with parliamentarians and civil servants. Findings emerge which show that constituency roles can improve the implementation of crisis management decisions and generate support for political actors and systems during a crisis episode.

Institutional amnesia and public policy

ABSTRACT Institutional amnesia continues to be ignored by policy scholars despite the fact that it can undermine the effectiveness of public policy in various ways. In calling on policy scholars to start taking amnesia seriously as a research concern, this article provides data and analytical tools to help develop that agenda. The data are drawn from an international comparison of policy learning and amnesia in four Westminster systems (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK), which highlights how public-sector leaders widely regard amnesia as a serious matter of concern. Analytical tools are presented in the form of a working definition of amnesia that can operationalize research; a series of hypotheses about how amnesia can act as an independent variable in relation to other policy concerns; and a variety of research-based pathways through which policy practitioners might seek to address the risk of memory-loss.

Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to ‘co-benefits’ suggests that the facilitation of social-welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social-welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low-to-middle-income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to ‘co-benefits’ as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social-welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.

New institutionalism, critical junctures and post-crisis policy reform

ABSTRACT Two accounts of change dominate with new institutional literature. The first emphasises ‘punctuated equilibria’ in which change is shock-driven, sudden and radical enough to loosen path dependencies. The second emphasises a more gradual-incrementalism and a view of change that is more or less constant. This article argues that neither account is suitable for the policy scholar interested in understanding the complexity of a post-crisis reform period and that a synthesis between these two views would better serve those interested in the nuance of post-crisis change. The article provides this synthesis in the form of a reconceptualization of the critical juncture. This reconceptualization merges the punctuated equilibrium and the gradual-incremental views and, in doing so, presents a much more realistic institutional account of the fine print of policy change post-crisis. The reconceptualization is subsequently justified empirically through the analysis of a specific post-crisis reform period (the Queensland floods of 2010–11).

Legislatures: Help or hindrance in achieving successful crisis management?

Abstract Legislatures have the potential to influence the politics and policies of crisis management. As such, they deserve analytical treatment from those interested in the effectiveness of state-led efforts to resolve crises. However, determining and evaluating the extent of a legislatures involvement in a crisis management process is a complicated research endeavour. The purpose of this article is to reduce this complexity by presenting a research framework that can be used for the analytical and evaluative exploration of legislatures in relation to crisis management. As the framework unfolds, insights are generated about how the interaction between politics and policy affects crisis management performance, and the ways in which interpretations of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are constructed subjectively by crisis actors. Emerging from the framework is an argument that assessments of institutional performance must be cognizant of the ‘normative pluralism’ that characterises contemporary crises.