Thesis (M.P.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Also available in print.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1982. / Also available in print.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1984. / Also available in print.

Thesis (MCS)--AUT University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print ( leaves : ill. ; 30 cm.) in the Archive at the City Campus (T 302.230993 WAL)

Collaboration has been a central feature of Welsh Government policy in respect of delivering effective public services for over a decade yet continues to be difficult to achieve in a meaningful way across sectors, organisations and boundaries. The report of the Commission on Public Service Governance and Delivery in Wales (2014) reinforced the importance of pursuing collaborative initiatives and offered proposals for approaching collaboration more consistently and effectively. This thesis adds new knowledge to understanding the complexities of collaboration through a critical overview of three research outputs relating to collaboration in social services in Welsh local authorities. By reviewing the literature on collaborative theory and practice and applying it to the research outputs which constitute the portfolio, a conclusion is reached that collaboration will remain an elusive objective unless action is taken to improve its chances of successful implementation. A new strategy is proposed for obtaining the necessary increase in the scale and pace of collaboration to justify its position as a continuing part of Welsh Government policy.

American Cancer Society(ACS) of Greater Boston in partnership with CVS Pharmaceuticals, Mobile Diagnostics and WHDH-TV developed Project:AWARE which offered breast cancer information and free mammograms for over two years in the Greater Boston area. This program was designed to reach low income and/or minority women. In this study the intended audience for Project:AWARE was studied in order to determine if the messages reached them. Forty Hispanic, forty Black and forty Caucasian women thirty-five years of age or older who live in Boston Housing Authority developments were interviewed. An interviewer, using a questionnaire, requested information about the participants' knowledge of breast cancer, knowledge of Project:Aware, and television viewing habits in order to determine if they had seen any part of this extensive television campaign and if it convinced them to get a mammogram. After two documentaries, over 1500 airings of Public Service Announcements(PSA's), ten locally produced programs and numerous ten-second calendar spots, ten-percent of the sample remembered seeing a Project:AWARE message on television while a similar number remembered seeing a poster about Project:AWARE. Only one women reported that seeing information about Project:AWARE convinced her to get a mammogram. Further testing will have to be done by health care professionals in order to insure that health information campaigns are reaching all segments of society. Large audiences for television programs are no indication that everyone in a community is receiving the message. Additional funds will have to be found in order to insure that messages are placed when and where they will be seen by low income and/or minority women of all ethnic backgrounds in order to insure that they have the same opportunities for good health care as other segments of society.

No / Globally supermarkets have been seen as a remedy to the problems of poor diets in deprived neighbourhoods where access to healthy foodstuffs has been limited. This study seeks to quantify the consequences of one such United Kingdom intervention, in Seacroft, Leeds. Where previous work often focused on fruit and vegetables, this paper presents evidence on all food and drink consumed before, and after, the new opening. It is shown that utilising large format retailers can also bring significant negative consequences for already unhealthy diets, exactly the opposite of what policy makers set out to achieve. Suggestion is therefore made that policymakers consider using price, or education, interventions rather than promoting large shops, which, while stocking cheap healthy food also offer shoppers the unhealthy produce they like at low prices.

Scotland has the highest rates of child obesity in Europe with more than 1 in every 4 children aged between 2 and 15 being overweight or obese in 2008. The need to curb the nation’s unhealthy eating habits through Scottish public health policy has been acknowledged, although there remains a shortage of policy addressing the eating habits of infants and young children as they develop in the context of family life. This is matched by a shortage of empirical research which uses nationally representative longitudinal data on Scottish children, to look at how diets of children under five develop within the home. This doctoral research seeks to explain how children’s nutritional trajectories develop from birth through infancy and into early childhood in contemporary Scotland within the context of maternal resources, maternal use of nutrition advice, and family meal habits. Theoretical concepts pertaining to social constructionism and the symbolic meaning of meal rituals, as well as theories of risk and responsibilisation, human capital and health behaviours, and discussions about agency and structure, frame the research questions and the interpretation of results. The research draws on the first three annual sweeps of the Growing Up in Scotland nationally representative, longitudinal survey of families and young children. The analysis is based on multivariate proportional hazards regression and logistic regression models. The empirical analysis shows that maternal education is a consistently superior predictor of children’s nutritional outcomes, when compared to maternal occupational classification and household income, and that children of more educated mothers have healthier diets throughout infancy and childhood. This points to the utility of human capital theories which stress the importance of education, rather than income, and also reflects on the need for policy to recognise the structural nature of nutritional inequalities. More educated mothers are also more likely to be proactive in using healthy eating advice, resonating with theories of risk awareness and medicalised childhoods. Surprisingly, mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to use advice from health professionals, possibly as a result of health professionals actively targeting their support to more ‘at risk’ families. Yet these mothers are also more apprehensive about the interference of health professionals in aspects of childrearing. Relevant policy reflections pointed to the need to identify how support for mothers from more disadvantaged backgrounds can be provided in formats which help to overcome the culture of mistrust towards health professionals prevalent among disadvantaged parents. Nevertheless, positive associations between infant diet and maternal use of breastfeeding advice from health professionals are found, in line with theories of power-knowledge, lending support to information-based policy initiatives as a tool for improving infant nutrition. The analysis also indicates that children who are breastfed, and children who are weaned later have healthier diets in their toddler years, which contributes to the proposal of a theoretical typology explaining how young children’s nutritional trajectories evolve from the pre-partum period through infancy and childhood. Finally, the analysis suggests that communal patterns of eating play an important role in children’s dietary quality, attesting to the importance of the meal ritual as a vehicle for socialising children into developing particular tastes for food. Thus, there seems to be room for policy initiatives which address not only what children eat, but how young children and families eat in the context of everyday family life.

Why is there significant variation in rent extraction amongst high-income democracies? A large number of political economy investigations into this research question have found that a long period of democratic rule and high per capita income are associated with less rent extraction amongst public policy-makers. However, attempts to explain the residual, yet significant, variation in rent extraction amongst countries that possess both these characteristics have been significantly more circumspect and disputed. The thesis explores how the distribution of policy-making responsibilities between electorally accountable decision-makers (EDD) and their electorally unaccountable (NEDD) public policy-making counterparts, determines the optimal level of rents extracted in any given high-income democracy context. Specifically, the thesis formally models how: (1) variation in the EDD/NEDD ratio, by altering (2) voters’ evaluation of incumbent competency, changes (3) the incentives that policy-makers, wishing to remain in office, have to minimize their short term level of rent extraction in order to signal their competency and hopefully retain office. Given these ‘career concerns’ the theoretical model predicts that an increase or decrease in the EDD/NEDD ratio will be associated with more or less rent extraction. This hypothesis is then tested empirically, primarily using an augmented version of Persson and Tabellini’s (2003) dataset. Specifically, the thesis tests whether (1) the EDD/NEDD ratio can predict variation in rent extraction only amongst high-income democracies; (2) whether voters, and not just elites, use the EDD/NEDD ratio to update their beliefs regarding the determinants of rent extraction; and (3) whether the EDD/NEDD ratio affects the level of rent extraction, once controlling for other institutional variables (Efficacy of Elections) also associated with variation in voter evaluation of incumbents’ competency. Establishing that the EDD/NEDD ratio does robustly predict variation in rent extraction is a significant finding, as it can enable analysts to predict how changes in policy-making contexts may affect the incentive for good governance in this sub-set of countries. However, the results are (1) exploratory in nature, and also (2) contingent on other factors (regime type and institutional variation), meaning that while significant, they cannot be generalized to non-democratic contexts.

Esta dissertação busca contribuir para a reflexão a cerca da produção habitacional autogestionária voltada para a população de baixa renda. Para desenvolver essa discussão, primeiro construímos uma abordagem histórica da trajetória do movimento de moradia em torno da apropriação do princípio da autogestão, a partir da política habitacional do Regime Militar ao Governo Lula. Partimos do pressuposto de que o desenho das políticas públicas, particularmente a habitacional, é resultado da disputa de interesses e da interação entre Estado, mercado e sociedade civil. E que a partir dessa interação o movimento popular se formou, amadureceu e passou a interferir na formulação das políticas habitacionais. Assim, o processo de criação do Programa Crédito Solidário, parte integrante da atual Política Nacional de Habitação, não é uma simples reivindicação pontual, mas um passo na trajetória decorrente dessa interação. Ao analisarmos os processos de pleito, elaboração, operacionalização e implementação do Programa Crédito Solidário, definido como o instrumento de análise para compreender qual a importância da autogestão na política habitacional do Governo Lula, foi possível verificar os limites e potencialidades para a efetivação do princípio da autogestão na atual ação pública habitacional. / The present dissertation is a reflection about the selfmanagement housing production directed towards the low income population in Brazil. To achieve our objective, we first devoted our research to a historical reconstruction of the popular housing movement trajectory and its relation to the selfmanagement principle, inside the national housing policies, from the Military Regime until the President Lulas Government. In this context, we assume that the construction of any public policy, and especially the housing one, is a result of the natural dispute of interests between the Government, the market, and the civil society. Furthermore, we believe that the popular housing movement is a result of this interaction, where it grew, matured, and started to interfere in the housing policies formulation. Therefore, the creation of the Program of Support Credit, as part of the National Housing Policy, is not a simple punctual claim, but another step in the trajectory resulted from this interaction. In the process of analysis of the of election, elaboration, operation, and implementation of the Program of Support Credit defined as our instrument of analysis to understand the importance of selfmanagement in the Housing Policy of Lulas Government we verified the limits and potentialities for an effective use of the selfmanagement principle in the current public housing action.