Online information technologies are becoming essential tools for urban planning as they support information sharing and participatory decision making in the planning process. Therefore this paper underlines the importance of online planning and e-participation, examines household use of information technology, and discusses the digital divide problem. This paper also explores Australian local g...

The coalition literature recognizes context (geography, demographics and history) as a variable of interest, yet few coalition evaluation studies have focused on it. This study explores the association between geographic context and structures (e.g. member type) with functional characteristics (e.g. decision making or levels of conflict) in a statewide system of community health councils (coali...

Why do the poor make shortsighted choices in decisions that involve delayed payoffs? Foregoing immediate rewards for larger, later rewards requires that decision makers (i) believe future payoffs will occur and (ii) are not forced to take the immediate reward out of financial need. Low-income individuals may be both less likely to believe future payoffs will occur and less able to forego immedi...

In long-term care facilities, the participation of older people relates to individual care provision (individual level) and to policy decisions that affect all residents in a care organization (collective level). In the Netherlands, resident councils are set up in order to improve resident participation on a collective level. However, our research shows that managers and resident councils are f...

Coordinating councils are frequently formed to promote a coordinated response to complex social issues (e.g., community health, violence prevention). Little is known, to date, however, about council effectiveness. Prior research on council effectiveness and the correlates of effectiveness have typically relied on case studies. While case studies provide rich descriptive information about the fu...

BACKGROUND In late 2007, some Swedish County Councils started 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) implementation for children, and PCV7 was included in the national immunization program in 2009. By 2010, both PCV10 and PCV13 were licensed, and the selection of vaccine was subject to County Councils tenders. This study investigated the impact of the order of PCV introduction into vacc...

National governments in almost all developing countries have begun to decentralize policies and decision making related to development, public services, and the environment. Existing research on the subject has enhanced our understanding of the effects of decentralization and thereby has been an effective instrument in the advocacy of decentralization. But most analyses, especially where enviro...

1. This paper draws on research we have carried out for the UK Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Evaluation of New Council Constitutions and the New Ethical Framework. The arguments, inferences and conclusions in this paper are the authors' own and do not in any way reflect those of the Office. Abstract This article examines one of the most significant reforms of English local government, wh...

BACKGROUND The Swedish government has increasingly begun to rely on so called informative governance when regulating healthcare. The question this article sets out to answer is: considered to be "the backbone" of the Swedish state's strategy for informative governance in healthcare, what kind of regulatory arrangement is the evidence-based National Guidelines? Together with national medical reg...

This paper analyses and discusses how to what extent social learning (SL), as a means address complex adaptive problems in water governance, can be enabled local regional multi-stakeholder collaborations. Using multi-method, qualitative, collaborative, self-reflective case study design, the conditions, challenges, enablers for SL were studied, comparing three complementary cases of voluntary mu...