As the economic reform deepened, private sector became the major force in the industrial expansion and collective sector diminished dramatically. Previous researches on the role of local government have been challenged. Instead of "local government as industrial firms" put forward by Andrew Walder, this dissertation proposes a new explanation "local government as agents". Local government has withdrawn from the direct intervention in firms' internal management. It turns to offer public services, as well as help firms to achieve institutional innovation and obtain scarce institutional resources. The firms will pay back to the local government in the forms of tax and other non-financial income. There are mutual selections between "agents" and "star" firms. Horizontal competitions between different governments always exist, and the "star" firms make use of these competitions to bargain with government to obtain more favorable policies. / Based on a case study of a privately-owned automobile enterprise (Geely Holding Group) in China, this study aims at exploring the interactions between institutional environment, local government and individual enterprises, as well as answering these two questions: Under an ambiguous institutional environment, (1) how can the private automobile enterprise deal with various institutional barriers and be able to survive and develop? (2) what role does local government play in this process? Informed by the work of Victor Nee, here in this thesis I put forward an integrated theoretical framework of institutions, local government, enterprises and social network in order to analyze the issues raised above. Qualitative research methods, such as participant observation, in-depth interview and archival research, were employed to collect data in the field. / Institutional ambiguity increases the cost of implementing rules and regulations on the local level, which makes local government more powerful in explaining and executing policies. Thus, local government has many chances to "filter" or "purify" institutional factors which are inconsistent with local interests, and share the profit with enterprises in its jurisdiction by helping them break through the institutional barriers. Based on the interaction between institution, local government and enterprises, cooperative alliance between enterprises and local government has been established, while the relationship between the central and local governments is covered non-cooperative. / It is found that institutional ambiguity is not only an obstacle but also an opportunity for organizational growth. Institutional ambiguity may create grey zones in the economic fields, where enterprises have chances to break through the administrative barriers with the help of local government. Economic and technical barriers can be partially lowered by administrative barriers. On the other hand, institutional ambiguity does increase the indeterminacy of economic actions; so the enterprises incline to rely on social network and establish legitimacy to reduce the risk. / 蔣怡. / Adviser: Tai-lok Lui. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 71-01, Section: A, page: 0351. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 204-210). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Jiang Yi.

This study uses grounded theory method to explore how effective China's social policy in promoting social integration through an investigation of the social consequences of youth unemployment in Shanghai. Research questions include: What is the impact of unemployment on the social integration of young people in Shanghai? What are the roles of state welfare institution and family system in the influencing process? The results show that the unemployed young persons in Shanghai face the risks of social exclusion in their lives, such as, access to state welfare, economic condition, consumption, leisure activities, time structure, social relations, and life transition. The reason for the emergence of these risks is that the state gives the highest priority to system integration and shifts its unemployment protection obligation to the family without well-developed family-supportive polices to assure and promote the realization of the protecting function of family. Thus, under the current framework of social policy, family becomes the primary social institution to promote social integration among the unemployed youth. However, the realization of family protecting function is not automatic inevitable, but a negotiated consequence of the harmonic interaction among family economic resource, family structure, family obligation and family relationship. The failure of family support would make the young unemployed socially excluded. This study suggests that China's social policy should emphasize both system integration as well as social integration: establishing the social right value based upon fair reciprocity of rights and responsibilities, formulating family-supportive polices, and applying the perspective of "new social policy" to broaden the scope of social policy interventions. / 曾群. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2005. / 參考文獻(p. 251-267). / Adviser: Ngan-pun Ngai. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2756. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in English. / School code: 1307. / Lun wen (Zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2005. / Can kao wen xian (p. 251-267). / Zeng Qun.

Researchers have documented that supporting student needs, particularly their social-emotional learning, is critical to their success in the classroom. However, little research has been done to explore how district and school leaders make decisions about allocating resources (funding, personnel, curricula, and infrastructure) to student support services, especially during times of fiscal constraint. This study explores the ways that some of the largest high-needs districts in the United States decide to provide the needed resources to maintain social-emotional learning and other student supports in schools as well as the effects of these policy decisions on resources and schools. It examines district leaders’ rationale and the bounds that shaped these decisions using bounded rationality theory. It focuses on a seven-year period from the 2006–07 school year to the 2013–14 school year, the time period before, during, and after the 2008 Recession. This study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. Through a series of fixed-effects analyses, the study explores funding trends and the impact of student support services (SSS) funding on student support service staff as well as academic and non-academic outcomes. These analyses were conducted in two phases. First, the study explores the impact of SSS funding on the outcomes across the seven-year study period for the 120 largest districts in the United States as a reference and, then, conducts the same analyses exploring the impact within 48 large, high-needs, districts. Following these analyses, the researcher conducted a series of interviews with district leaders in 5 high-needs districts to learn how they were supporting the needs of their students and what considerations shaped the decisions to allocate resources to these support areas. Like the fixed-effects analyses, the interviews focus on the seven-year study period, though context beyond these years is included. The findings indicate that changes in student support services funding are related to changes in student support services staff and high school completion outcomes. The experiences of high-needs district leaders provide additional insight into the decision-making process around student support services funding and the observed variation. District leaders expressed various levels of challenges stemming from changes in federal, state, and local budget reductions as well as challenges in specific years like those that followed the 2008 Recession. These reductions coupled with other limitations and considerations led to different decisions across and within these districts. The constructs of bounded rationality aided in better understanding these limitations, district decisions, and the consequences for students and schools.

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Thesis (M.M. (Public and Development Management))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Wits School of Governance, 2017 / This thesis was greatly motivated by the desire to understand and explain the foreign policy decision making process of the South African government on climate change. The study deploys Allison and Zelikow’s triple model from their famous analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis as lenses in unmasking the complexities associated with processes of foreign policy decision making, on climate decisions in South Africa. In spite of the multi-sectoral interventions of government, business, NGO’s, civil society and academics in mitigating the impact of climate change, the decision making process excluded participation of other stakeholders at the political level. This was evident in 2009 at Copenhagen when the president announced that South Africa had committed itself to reduce carbon emissions by 34% in 2020 and 42% in 2025. A possible explanation why the multi-stakeholders participation was excluded in setting these numerical targets in the climate change decision making process, lies with the failure of the incumbent government to uphold the democratic principles of inclusive participation. Drawing from the work of Allison and Zelikow (1999), that state that it is not adequate to explain government’s events on decision making through the Rational Actor Model only, it is more useful to also consider the organisational processes and government politics from which the decision emerged. In this regard, interviews and documentary analysis were deployed within a qualitative case study design to gain an indepth understanding of South African foreign policy decision making processes on climate change targets. Overwhelmingly, the study established that there was a gross exclusion of multi-stakeholders participation in foreign policy decision making on setting the climate targets, ignoring the effects of the outcome of those decisions on socio-economic issues. This study therefore concluded that, although efforts are being put into place to ensure maximum participation by both government and other actors, there is still a need for South African government to allow participation of external actors. Premised in the forgoing conclusion, it is recommended that South African government foreign policy decisions on climate change can work better if entrenched on other multi-stakeholders’ decisions and following inclusive participation at the political level. / GR2018

In the 1990s, Brazil and Mexico were pioneers in the implementation of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), which since have benefitted an estimated one billion poor families around the world. However, the initial evaluation strategies pursued by each state were different: Mexican officials partnered with US economists to implement an RCT evaluation, while Brazilians used a combination of statistical simulations and qualitative studies and aimed to secure the generation of policy knowledge to domestic experts. Based on eighteen months of participant observation in Mexico City and Brasília, 100 interviews with political and academic elites, content analysis of 400 policy documents, and historical-process tracing methods, this dissertation explains why these two similar countries, implementing the same policy, took different routes to assess the merits of CCTs, and what unintended consequences followed from these choices. I demonstrate that a key factor to achieve the legitimacy and political viability of CCTs is the knowledge regimes that states create to implement and evaluate these programs. The dissertation shows that while knowledge regimes tend to be understood as technical or apolitical machineries, they are inherently shaped by the politics of legitimation of CCTs and they produce unanticipated consequences for the ways that states combat poverty in the long-run. Only by taking into consideration the role that knowledge production plays in securing the political viability of CCTs, I argue, we can assess the politics and consequences of these programs, and how they relate to poor families on the ground.

Thesis (M.Dev.) -- University of Limpopo, 2013 / The purpose of this study was to evaluate post-settlement support given to beneficiaries of land restitution on selected farms in Mpumalanga Province. The study used qualitative and quantitative research methods. Data collection was done using focus group discussions and semi-structured questionnaires. Three groups of respondents participated in the study: the beneficiaries (n=193), government officials (n=13) and private sector [NGOs] (n=5). The study highlighted the inadequacy of support provided to beneficiaries. Support was inadequate in terms of infrastructure, provision of training services and improving access to markets. The findings revealed that there is poor participation by the youth and educated people in the projects. The study also found that strategic partners did not significantly contribute towards viability of projects, primarily, because of conflicting interests between the two. The study recommends that the government, with the private sector, should make enough resources available and attract the youth and educated people to participate in the projects.

Exposure to air pollution is a leading cause of premature death worldwide. An increasing part of air pollution results from industrial activity and the production of energy. When unregulated, emissions of air pollutants constitute a market failure as polluters do not bear the costs imposed on society at large. My dissertation develops empirical methods to test the effectiveness and distributional effects of environmental policies designed to address this externality. To do so, I apply econometrics and data science techniques on large datasets from cutting-edge research in environmental science and engineering that I match with microeconomic data. The dissertation makes use of new datasets on air pollution derived from satellite imagery, as well as micro-level data on power plant operations and housing transactions across the United States. Chapter 1 assembles unit-level data to disentangle the factors that led US power plants to achieve the unprecedented reductions in emissions of the past fifteen years. I calculate the costs incurred by the electricity generation sector and compare these costs to the correspond- ing health benefits. In hedonic regressions, I use these shocks to emissions to estimate the demand for clean air with micro-level data on housing transactions. Chapter 2 studies the causal impacts and evaluates the distributional effects of stringent emissions markets that were put in place to target power plants emissions of air pollutants in the Eastern US. Chapter 3 uses new satellite imagery to document the inequalities in the exposure to air pollution in American cities and their recent evolutions.

In the last decade, the Commonwealth Government has relied increasingly on policy-induced consortia to implement its education policy initiatives. The study focused on education policy pertaining to citizenship education, and specifically on the recommendations of the Civics Expert Group's 1994 report Whereas the people...Civics and Citizenship Education. The then Commonwealth Government called for policy-induced consortia to submit applications as a means to implement the report's recommendations. As a result, the Western Australian Consortium for Citizenship Education was formed. The Consortiums submission for a grant to assist teachers to prepare curriculum materials for citizenship education was successful. The study examined the decisions made by the Consortium members in relation to the curriculum materials project.The study was informed by an examination of literature pertaining to citizenship and citizenship education, the implementation of public policy, and group and curriculum decision-making. The review of the literature concerning the constructs of 'citizen' highlighted the contested nature of citizenship. In turn, this is reflected in the debates about the nature of citizenship education. As well, the literature review revealed many models of policy implementation and group curriculum decision-making do not adequately reflect the complexities and realities of group decision-making processes. The models often ignore the socio-political dynamics of the group, particularly in a policy-induced consortium, which exists for a specific and limited purpose, where members owe allegiance to their institutions rather than the consortium and where the consortium is accountable to a government department for the management of the project.A case study approach using qualitative methods was used. These methods and approaches are most likely to capture and interpret ++ / the humanness of group decision-making. Moreover, they take into account the importance of the values each member of the Consortium brought to the group and recognise that each member constructed his/her meaning as a result of social interaction with other Consortium members.The case study focused on a detailed examination of the work of the Western Australian Consortium for Citizenship Education and especially on the sub-group of the Project Management Committee over eighteen months. The notion of 'critical decisions' was used to analyse the Consortium's decision-making. Each critical decision had significant consequences for the ongoing work of the Consortium. The nature of the Consortium's decision-making highlighted the overwhelming importance of social dynamics over curriculum decision-making.The intentions of the study were to build towards a more complete understanding of the socio-political nature of group curriculum decision-making; to contribute to theorising about the humanness of group curriculum decision-making; and to provide an informed perspective about the significance of the Commonwealth Government's intervention in education through the mechanism of policy-induced consortia.The thesis makes a contribution to the socio-political dimension of group curriculum decision-making in federations. It illustrates that curriculum policy delivery is a socio-political process focussing on interpersonal relationships rather than a rational or deliberative process based on educational outcomes.