Institutional Design and Central—Local Strategies: Introducing the New Block Grants System in Norway

1989 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
N Aarsaether
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Financing System ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
National Welfare ◽  
Central Level

When special grants are replaced by block grants in a central–local financing system, central government steering of the communalized welfare sectors can no longer be based on economic incentives. In this paper the potential for central government control over welfare policies under block-grants conditions is discussed, with particular reference to the change in the Norwegian transfers system. It is argued that, given high ambitions for the welfare state at the central level, a central government may find legislation to be an insufficient means of control, and it may be more likely to search for new types of economic incentives to make the communes perform according to the priorities of the national welfare state. In doing so, however, the central government must find methods of legitimizing a partial return to old practices that do not contradict the principle of block grants.

scholarly journals Sustainable Financing for New Vaccines in Indonesia: Challenges and Strategies

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 9265
Author(s):  
Fonette Fonjungo ◽  
Debabrata Banerjee ◽  
Rizky Abdulah ◽  
Ajeng Diantini ◽  
Arif S. W. Kusuma ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Evaluation Studies ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Initial Step ◽  
Financing System ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Effective Interventions ◽  
General Revenue ◽  
Sustainable Financing ◽  
New Vaccines

Immunization is one of the most cost-effective interventions in global health and has a crucial role in achieving 14 of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The issue of sustainable financing for new vaccines is particularly pertinent as Indonesia transitions away from extensive Gavi support towards a self-financing immunization system. As the current immunization system transitions, practical solutions must be found and applied to provide more flexibility in the budget for financing immunizations without sacrificing the current healthcare system’s needs. Despite the fact that economic evaluation studies are essential as an initial step to ensure financial readiness, the lack of reliable data is the first barrier to Indonesia’s journey toward a self-financing immunization system. To overcome this problem, standardization of data collection strategies and methodologies are required. In particular, Indonesia may have to explore other options to increase revenue for its immunization system, such as through general revenue from the central government, a sector-wide approach to financing, and a national trust fund. To deal with the tight immunization budget and its consequences, Indonesia also has to restructure its immunization system, which can be implemented through province block grants, insurance mandate and subsidy. Taking the potential of a COVID-19 vaccine into account, the Indonesian government should consider a number of costs and issues beyond the development and procurement of vaccines. The costs of delivering vaccines to the remote parts of Indonesia, implementing the necessary infrastructure, and modifying vaccine delivery are also important in this time of transition. These constraints must be addressed in the new self-financing system and other public health efforts must be increased to decrease the burden of infectious disease as Indonesia develops a stronger immunization system.

The cost of becoming a neo-liberal welfare state: A cautionary case of Lithuania

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 728-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalija Atas
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Current State ◽  
National Welfare ◽  
Welfare State Development ◽  
The Cost

This article reveals the extent to which western-driven neo-liberal policies have influenced and shaped the current state of the national welfare policies, and consequent socio-economic conditions, in Lithuania. It looks at different stages of welfare state development following the independence of Lithuania before providing an overview of the current national institutional settings and policies. First, it discusses policy reforms that occurred during the transformation from planned to market economy. This part deliberates ideological changes characteristic to that period along with socio-economic impacts of the transformation. Then, it evaluates the more recent welfare state developments that began after Lithuania’s accession to the European Union (EU). The article concludes with an assessment of the key features of contemporary welfare policies and their wider socio-economic outcomes.

scholarly journals China's War on Air Pollution: Can Existing Governance Structures Support New Ambitions?

2017 ◽  
Vol 231 ◽  
pp. 662-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Wong ◽  
Valerie J. Karplus
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Environmental Policies ◽  
Economic Incentives ◽  
Current Approach ◽  
Local Policy ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Cost Information ◽  
Education Campaigns

AbstractUnprecedented and highly visible degraded air quality in China's urban centres has prompted a step change in central government control efforts in recent years. This “War on Air Pollution” has included a mixture of administrative controls, regulatory clampdowns, economic incentives and public education campaigns. A critical constraint on how policies are designed and implemented is the central government's capacity to access accurate cost information, and monitor, evaluate and enforce the policies at subordinate levels of government. We examine in detail the directives and arrangements that underpin China's “War on Air Pollution” at the provincial level, taking Hebei province as a case study. Located upwind of Beijing, Hebei's heavy industries have been a particular focus of the environmental policies. The current approach, which requires highly specific and costly local actions, yet allocates funds centrally, suffers from misaligned incentives and does not address longstanding weaknesses in local policy monitoring, evaluation and enforcement.

Ausnahmesegment

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (191) ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Schönig
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Development Models ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Institutional Organization ◽  
National Welfare ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Welfare State

Going along with the end of the “golden age” of the welfare state, the fordist paradigm of social housing has been considerably transformed. From the 1980s onwards, a new paradigm of social housing has been shaped in Germany in terms of provision, institutional organization and design. This transformation can be interpreted as a result of the interplay between the transformation of national welfare state and housing policies, the implementation of entrepreneurial urban policies and a shift in architectural and urban development models. Using an integrated approach to understand form and function of social housing, the paper characterizes the new paradigm established and nevertheless interprets it within the continuity of the specific German welfare resp. housing regime, the “German social housing market economy”.

Policy Refiners and Street-Level Lesson Learners

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alastair Stark
Keyword(s):  
Policy Evaluation ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Street Level Bureaucrats ◽  
Central Level ◽  
Government Level ◽  
Inquiry Lesson

This chapter explores agents who are influential in terms of inquiry lesson-learning but have not been examined before in inquiry literature. The key argument is that two types of agent—policy refiners and street-level bureaucrats—are important when it comes to the effectiveness of post-crisis lesson-learning. As they travel down from the central government level, street-level actors champion, reinterpret, and reject inquiry lessons, often because those lessons do not consider local capacities. Policy refiners, however, operate at the central level in the form of taskforces, implementation reviews, and policy evaluation processes. These refiners examine potentially problematic inquiry lessons in greater detail in order to determine whether and how they should be implemented. In doing so, these ‘mini-inquiries’ can reformulate or even abandon inquiry recommendations.

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Ryan LaRochelle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Block Grant ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Block Grants ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

scholarly journals Understanding Social Insurance: Risk and Value Pluralism in the Early British Welfare State

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292199467
Author(s):  
Rachel Z. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Perceptions Of Risk ◽  
Mathematical Probability ◽  
Policy Tool ◽  
Theoretical Support ◽  
Modern Welfare State ◽  
Normative Reconstruction

This article seeks to make two contributions to the understanding of social insurance, a central policy tool of the modern welfare state. Focusing on Britain, it locates an important strand of theoretical support for early social insurance programs in antecedent developments in mathematical probability and statistics. While by no means the only source of support for social insurance, it argues that these philosophical developments were among the preconditions for the emergence of welfare policies. In addition, understanding the influence of these developments on British public discourse and policy sheds light on the normative principles that have undergirded the welfare state since its inception. Specifically, it suggests that the best model, or normative reconstruction, of social insurance in this context is a value-pluralist one, which pursues efficiency and equality or solidarity, grounded in group-based perceptions of risk.

scholarly journals “We have never been public:” Continuity and change in the policy production of “the public” in education in England

2021 ◽  
pp. 147490412199047
Author(s):  
Matthew Clarke ◽  
Martin Mills
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
Central Government ◽  
First Century ◽  
Government Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The People ◽  
Future Potential ◽  
Education And Society

Recent educational reforms in England have sought to reshape public education by extending central government control of curriculum and assessment, while replacing local government control of schools with a quasi-private system of academies and multi academy trusts. In this paper, we resist reading this as the latest iteration of the debate between “traditional” and “progressive” education. Instead, we note how, despite the mobilisation of the rhetoric of the public and public education, schooling in England has never been public in any deeply meaningful sense. We develop a genealogical reading of public education in England, in which ideas of British universalism – “the public” – and inequality and exclusion in education and society have not been opposed but have gone hand-in-hand. This raises the question whether it is possible to envisage and enact another form of collective – one that is based on action rather than fantasy and that is co-authored by, comprising, and exists for, the people. The final part of this paper seeks to grapple with this challenge, in the context of past, present and future potential developments in education, and to consider possibilities for the imaginary reconstitution of public education in England in the twenty-first century.

Early European Influences on Tswana Law

1987 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 151-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Schapera
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
Western Law ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Impact

In the closing paragraph of his inaugural lecture Law and Language, Professor Allott referred to what he termed “a daunting obstacle” to the intensive study of African legal systems.That obstacle is the rapid disappearance, before our very eyes, of the traditional systems that we have proposed to study. A generation ago there would not have been that difficulty; but today the traditional tribunals have vanished in many African countries where their place has been taken by statutory local courts. Even where the traditional courts appear to have survived, at least in name, they are usually affected by the impact of western law and institutions and of central government control.Those words were written in 1965. How true and necessary they were is shown by the fact that more than fifty years previously—even more than “a generation ago”—the impact of “western” influences upon the Tswana peoples of the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now the Republic of Botswana) had already led to many changes in the indigenous legal system, although, at that time, the “traditional courts” still survived virtually intact and not merely “in name”.The nature and extent of those changes can be readily ascertained by the fortunate chance that, there are still available the records of approximately 470 cases tried, over a period of six and a half years, in the highest traditional court of the Ngwaketse, a major Tswana chiefdom.

Privatizing Welfare Services

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Jordahl ◽  
Mårten Blix
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Elderly Care ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Welfare Services ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Upper Secondary Education ◽  
Service Production ◽  
The Government

The Swedish welfare state is known for providing extensive services to its citizens. Much less well known is that a fair amount of the services are delivered by private for-profit firms. The first steps of privatization were taken in the mid-1980s for childcare services at the municipal level, and the government often found itself scrambling to introduce regulation afterwards. Other sectors were subsequently privatized, most notably through an extensive voucher scheme to provide choice in compulsory and upper-secondary education. A key question throughout this process has been how to maintain the Swedish egalitarian ethos while undergoing extensive privatization. How has the country managed to reap the benefits from market forces without endangering equitable outcomes? The Swedish system is no middle road between socialism and capitalism. Instead, it is more akin to a large-scale laboratory for institutional design with lessons that should be of broad relevance to other countries aiming to get high-quality welfare services while containing costs. Focusing on what others can learn from Sweden, the book makes accessible original research on schools, health care, and elderly care. The privatization of service production has occurred despite major political controversy between two competing visions for the welfare state. Successful experiments have spread organically to neighbouring municipalities. What was done well in this process and what were the mistakes? The book addresses the fundamental economic challenges, the trends of the future, and the implications for institutional design

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