The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The psychology of social norms.

Government-driven urbanisation and its impact on regional economic growth in China

Target Interactions and Target Aspiration Level Adaptation: How Do Government Leaders Tackle the “Environment-Economy” Nexus?

With its recently published 12th Five-Year Plan (FYP, 2011–2015) China's leaders have set ambitious national environmental targets and goals for developing a more sustainable economy and society. Past records, however, show that ambitious goals and regulations too often fail due to shortcomings in local implementation and civil society participation. At the sub-national level, economic, political, and social interests continue to dictate the political agenda and the participation of non-state actors remains limited. This article analyses these implementation and participation gaps and reviews recent innovations and experiments to address these gaps in local environmental politics in China. Although many ongoing experiments and new institutional arrangements can be identified, these projects and initiatives remain limited in scope and geographical spread. Further advances in policy enforcement and in opening up policy design to citizens and other non-state actors at the local level are needed in order to t...

Implementation and Participation in China's Local Environmental Politics: Challenges and Innovations

Management Innovation and Policy Diffusion through Leadership Transfer Networks: An Agent Network Diffusion Model

Administrative fragmentation among government agencies has posed a significant challenge to environmental governance. However, few studies have theoretically examined and empirically measured how local governments in China address this with collaborative approaches. Informed by the ecology of games framework (EGF), this paper examined the status of inter-agency water governance in Dongguan City: the pilot city of aquatic ecologically friendly city of China. The research question we seek to address is: What are the main characteristics of the water governance network in local China? With empirical data collected via survey questionnaires and semi-structured in-depth interviews following the EGF, we find that local agencies have realized the need for cooperation in water resource management. However, they were not substantially familiar with each other in the local policy network, failing to reach their full potential in collaboration. Social network analysis was used to analyze the collaborative network. We found that the network has a weak to moderate density, allowing for collective action problems and leading to insufficient cooperative governance. The network has presented central actors with strong bridging capital to control information and resource flows. We also find strong bonding capital among some policy actors as shown in high reciprocity, clustering coefficient and transitivity. To strengthen the effectiveness of local water governance, efforts should be made to establish a functional department and extend the boundary of collaborative network.

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Collaborative Environmental Governance, Inter-Agency Cooperation and Local Water Sustainability in China

/pdf/the-expectancy-disconfirmation-model-and-citizen-2ffxi7lgx6.pdf

The Expectancy‐Disconfirmation Model and Citizen Satisfaction with Public Services: A Meta‐analysis and an Agenda for Best Practice

Portable Innovation, Policy Wormholes, and Innovation Diffusion

This study aims to answer the following research question: how do collaborative networks affect the performance of individual policy actors embedded in the network? We examine this question with a ...

Wenna Chen

Papers

Management Innovation and Policy Diffusion through Leadership Transfer Networks: An Agent Network Diffusion Model

Collaborative Environmental Governance, Inter-Agency Cooperation and Local Water Sustainability in China

The Expectancy‐Disconfirmation Model and Citizen Satisfaction with Public Services: A Meta‐analysis and an Agenda for Best Practice

Portable Innovation, Policy Wormholes, and Innovation Diffusion

Collaborative networks and environmental governance performance: a social influence model