Multi-agency working as an approach to tackling complex and inter-related problems has increasingly been advocated in recent years in a variety of policy contexts. The research in this thesis concerns the development and implementation process of one such policy, the Glasgow Women's Health Policy. This Policy was developed by the Glasgow Healthy City Project Women's Health Working Group and is based on a social/holistic model of health. The research analyses, as a case study of multi-agency working, the process through which the Women's Health Policy was implemented, and identifies the enablers and barriers to that process. The research consists of a retrospective analysis of the implementation of the Women's Health Policy within the statutory partner organisation of the Glasgow Healthy City Project. Using a qualitative approach, the research involved three primary methods of data collection: semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis and observation. Fifty-seven interviews were conducted with a range of key informants from the statutory sector organisations, which provided the main source of data. The analysis identifies a range of action associated with the development and implementation of the Women's Health Policy by the Women's Health Working Group and statutory sector organisations. The implementation process of the Women's Health Policy was enabled by: the collaborative development of the Policy; the agency of key individuals with access to power; and the establishment of women's fora within the organisations. Barriers to the process included the marginalisation of both 'women's issues' within gendered organisations, and the social/holistic model of health in relation to the dominant biomedical paradigm prevailing within organisations. In addition a range of other impediments relating to organisational structures and cultures were identified as being common to all policy implementation.

This dissertation comprises a close analysis of decentralization in Bolivia, employing a methodology that marries qualitative and quantitative techniques. It first examines the effects of decentralization on public-sector investment and the provision of public services in Bolivia using a unique database that includes measures of municipalities' social and institutional characteristics and information on its policy-making processes. I find that decentralization changed both the sectoral uses of public resources and their geographic distribution significantly by increasing government sensitivity to local needs in human capital investment and the provision of basic services. I then investigate the determinants of central and local government investment respectively in order to investigate why the shift in regime produced such large changes in investment patterns. I then turn to a much deeper examination of local government via nine case studies, selected to broadly represent Bolivia's national diversity. I begin with an account of the workings of local government in the best and worst of these, analyzing the character and interactions of the major societal actors. I locate fundamental causes of good and bad government in the economic structure of a district as it relates to the political party system, and the cohesiveness and organizational capacity of its civil society. These ideas are used to build a conceptual model of the local government process in which the interactions of political, economic and civic actors reveal information and enforce accountability. I show how imbalances between them can cripple accountability and distort the policy-making process. Lastly, the dissertation tests the model by examining government performance in seven additional municipalities. I show that the framework can explain the emergence of good or bad government institutions, and thus the quality of government a district ultimately receives, through the interactions of key players —notably civic organizations — deep in the local political economy.

The study was carried out against a background of a general perception that participatory budgeting (PB) in developing countries is an annual ritual exercise to comply with pressure from supranational agencies to adopt New Public Management (NPM) reforms, rather than a practical process that involves citizens in formulating and developing local government plans and budgets that incorporate their needs and priorities. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach and a case study design, using Uganda and Wamala District Local Government as country and study sites respectively, to explore how PB is implemented in practice and whether the desired outcomes are achieved. It further explores the underlying factors that restrict or enhance PB in a decentralised LG framework. The study argues that adapting NPM reforms to the local environment, and citizens exercising their rights and responsibilities, are critical to the achievement of desires, goals and outcomes. The findings of the study demonstrate that owing to power relations, inadequate locally raised revenues, citizens’ lack of knowledge, skills and competencies in public sector financial management, and inherent cultural norms and values, PB may not achieve the desired goals and outcomes in developing countries under a decentralized local governance system. The contribution to accounting theory from this study is that institutional pressures (coercive, mimetic and normative) can be mitigated by empowering citizens to exercise their civil, social, political and economic/financial citizenship rights and responsibilities effectively. This could lead to strengthening management accounting systems, and result in policy reforms (that are donor driven) achieving desired outcomes.

Demand for health services is growing, but funding is often failing to keep pace. To ensure that budgets are balanced and that delivered services continue to be high quality, decision makers are having to set priorities, removing funding from some services- this is disinvestment. This thesis details research incorporating a literature review followed by a two stage empirical investigation into the way that disinvestment decisions are made and whether or not the public should be involved. The first stage is a Q-Methodology study, the second is in-depth interviews. The population for the study is NHS health professionals (including managers and clinicians). 55 participants took part in the Q-study, and of these, 20 took part in follow-up interviews. The study highlighted three distinct perspectives, all of which supported public involvement. One was unequivocal in its support, another highlighted some potential disadvantages to involving the public and the third suggested that the public should have the freedom to choose whether they became involved. The follow up interviews re-iterated participants support for involvement but suggested that the public should become involved earlier and to a greater extent in those disinvestment decisions which affected more patients and/or resulted in a tangible loss of services.

This thesis seeks to better understand and evaluate the practice of Islamic finance. In order to do this, the thesis employs a practice-dependent, or constructivist, approach with the aim of identifying the principle or principles that inform, constrain and guide Islamic finance practices. The thesis proceeds by arguing that Islamic finance is a salient site of justice, with a clearly identifiable set of participants and shared set of aims. Having established this, the thesis goes on to demonstrate, through an analysis of the rules and operation of Islamic finance, that a distinct conception of justice can be identified as informing the practice. The central claim of the thesis is that the practice of Islamic finance is guided by a sufficiency-constrained luck egalitarian principle. This principle, it is argued, not only helps us to better understand Islamic finance, but can also help us to evaluate existing Islamic finance practices and, where they are found wanting, offer guidance on how best to reform those practices.

The concept of clinical governance was first introduced to the National Health Service in the White Paper published in 1997 (Department of Health); it has been described as the 'linchpin' of the quality reforms and, as of April 1999, is one of the statutory duties placed on NHS Trust Boards. Clinical governance is defined as: 'A framework through which NHS organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality if their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish.' (Department of Health, 1998; p33). The research project upon which this thesis is based took place over an 18 month period and has followed one NHS Trust as it implemented this new policy. Implementation may be conceptualised as both a change process and an end state; to capture this duality, two broad research questions are posed namely: what constitutes the local clinical governance agenda (content) and how has clinical governance been implemented (process). Given that the main purpose of these research questions is to explore and describe, an overarching qualitative framework has been adopted and, within this, an action research approach utilised

This research investigated the relationship between organizational culture and public sector performance management. The research was based on a study of the promotion of good governance in the Thai public sector through the implementation of the performance agreement (PA) scheme, using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The scheme had faced numerous challenges, perceived to be influenced by organizational culture. It had been assumed that a transformational shift in the organizational culture of the civil service, in the direction of market-based or new public management (NPM) values, was required in order to secure improved performance. The research aimed to explore how organizational culture influences civil service performance and identify other organizational factors that may also influence civil service performance in the provincial administration of Thailand. The research used a mixed methods approach of questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews, based on the Competing Values Framework (CVF). Questionnaire surveys were carried out with 480 civil servants within 16 provinces. Semi-structured interviews – in-depth and focus group – were conducted within four provinces. A distinction was made between the low and high KPI scoring provinces. The findings of the research suggest that there was no dominant type of culture in the low and high KPI scoring provinces. Instead, a strong culture was found to be important in gaining high KPI scores, supported by participative leadership and appropriate management. Leadership style appeared to influence whether the public services performed to a high level, which seemed to be achieved through a balance between task focussed and people focussed. Therefore, a transformational cultural shift may not be required, but instead more effective leadership and management.

This study of the neoliberal experiment in Chile from 1973 to 2015 uses the social harm approach. It offers an alternative evaluation of the benefits and harms of the experiment, the ways in which Chileans understand its consequences and where the legitimacy of the model unravels. The study refines the conceptualisation and measurement of social harm, marrying the notion of harm with the Marxist theory of contradictions. The research design is multimethod, incorporating analysis of 59 semi-structure interviews with secondary quantitative data. The study captures and describes not only a wide array of harms and injuries in the reconfiguration of social dynamics under neoliberalism, but also investigates how these harms have been justified and challenged over time. The study finds that there are areas in which the model has brought benefits to Chileans, but these benefits are flawed. The study critiques the neoliberal conceptualisation of harms as the 'price worth paying' for social prosperity. It concludes that the 'winners' of the model are very few, while those harmed populate the Chilean social structure from top to bottom. This study argues for a normative scenario to move toward a less harmful society.

The basis of this study is to attempt to throw light on some of the problems arising from the public ownership of industrial enterprise through making a comparative examination of the records of public and private ownership in the gas and electricity industries before nationalisation. The plan of the study is to examine first of all the phenomenon of municipal 'trading' enterprise, studying its development, and considering it In relation to other municipal services. Then the genera’ structure of the gas and electricity industries is described. After this the main comparisons are attempted, under the headings of efficiency; financial policy; location policy; and administration. (In studying the difficult problem of the relative levels of efficiency achieved under public and private ownership in these two industries some attention is given to the meaning of the word efficiency itself and to evaluating the significance of the different methods of making efficiency measurements).

Using the BHPS data, we have carried out three empirical studies to investigate household risky asset choice in the UK. In the first study we follow appropriate econometric procedures to identify household specific factors that can be observed to influence a household’s asset choice through parameters of their objective function, such as risk aversion and habit. In the second and third study, we use techniques to explain the specific influence of various factors rather than finding what lies behind the interactions observed. Specifically, the second study is about examining the effect of retirement on household risky asset choice and investigating whether this effect would be different when house ownership is taken into account. In fact, we do find that retirement has a positive effect on risky asset shares for house owners while it has no effect on non-house owners. In the third study, we carry out an empirical study on the impact of taxation on household risky asset choice, and we find in the short run paying income tax has negative impact on individual’s risky asset shares and in the long run paying capital gain tax has positive effect on individual’s risky asset shares. Hence a possible policy implication is to increase the income tax allowance in order to provide incentives for people on low incomes to save, and to save in a balanced portfolio of low and high risk assets.