Drawing on transaction cost economics and externalities theory, we argue that private-public partnerships will be necessary when economic opportunity realization (1) calls for industry-specific competencies but entails significant positive externalities (i.e., implies specialized private actions with significant public benefits), (2) is shrouded by high uncertainty for the private actors, and (3) necessitates for private actors high governance costs for contracting, coordinating, and enforcing. Thus, specialized resources, positive externalities, uncertainty, and governance costs are all jointly implicated in our theory.

Constructive Partnerships: When Alliances between Private Firms and Public Actors can Enable Creative Strategies

Most literature about global health governance assumes that surveillance is the most important public health function during pandemics and other transnational outbreaks. This paper challenges that assumption and argues public health actions like medical treatment and infection control are far more important. However, global governance focuses on surveillance and reporting by the World Health Organization, and since most literature sees intrinsic value in global governance, it overemphasizes the significance of surveillance as a global public good. In contrast, this paper suggests that surveillance is a luxury good; demonstrates that global governance through surveillance had little effect during SARS, H5N1, or H1N1; and recommends refocusing the analysis of outbreak response on action rather than information.

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Look But Don't Touch: Overemphasis on Surveillance in Analysis of Outbreak Response

Corporate parenting strategies refer to the management's ability to sustain the competitiveness of multidivisional firms. During the last decade, infusing elements of market governance and control, thus fostering internal entrepreneurship, became the most popular corporate parenting strategy. We argue that this corporate parenting initiative leads to market failures within multidivisional firms. Internal market failures hinder the creation and transfer of resources with firm-specific public good character. We label those resources corporate commons. The aim of our paper is, firstly to identify the spectrum of such firm-specific public goods according to their degree of non-excludability and of non-rivalry. Secondly, we uncover the role of corporate commons in the competitiveness of multidivisional firms. Using a case example from the telecommunication industry, we argue that successful corporate parenting strategies are those that encourage the provision of corporate commons across business units to sustain a firm's competitiveness.

Corporate commons: sustaining competitiveness through public goods in multidivisional firms

The monograph is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to BI Norwegian School of Management in 2004. Originally published by VDM Verlag in 2009. http://www.vdm-publishing.com/

Co-market Orientation in Networks: Evidence from the Tourism Industry

The aim of this article is to analyse the functions of the new local government to give response to social demands, promote development and regulate public services. From a defi nition of the concepts of sovereignty and autonomy of the new local government, it reconfi gures a new governance structure of local governments that implies more citizen participation in the decision-making processes and the formulation of public policies, by facilitating processes of decentralisation of functions, and mechanisms for coordinating public services. Finally, the article analyses the implications on the governance of the social engineering of the new local government.

Gobierno local: autonomia y gobernabilidad local government: autonomy and gobernance

The theory of public goods is largely irrelevant to their management and governance. It is highly normative but is unused in the policy area. It remains centred on highly idealized and dichotomized characteristics (non-rivalrousness and non-excludability) of public goods despite important theoretical progress in the last twenty years. It is suggested that public goods are as much social as technological constructions, but there is no explanation of how such goods come into existence. It is argued that they are often subject to evolution that changes the balance of their characteristics between being public or private goods. Present theory bears little relationship to the governmental budgetary processes assumed necessary to finance such goods, yet all management and maintenance costs, often high enough to deter such funding, are ignored. While there is recognition that the intensive use of a public good often imposes costs directly upon users, there is no corresponding recognition either that inappropriat...

John Forster

Papers

The Creation, Maintenance and Governance of Public Goods and Free Goods