This book explores, in a series of detailed case studies, how public policy is actually made in Qatar. While Qatar is a Gulf monarchy, its governance is complex. Other analysts have tried to come to grips with this complexity using qualified descriptions of the system such as 'late rentier,' 'pluralized autocracy,' 'tribal democracy,' or 'soft authoritarian.' The authors of the volume use the lens of a transformative state. Qatar is deliberately engaged in a rapid process of radical economic and societal transformation. That process has its contradictions and tensions, particularly with regards to achieving a balance between Islam, social traditions, and modernity. This book explores how it also has a specific policy dynamic of generating ideas and institutions, developing policy and program designs, implementation and coordination.

This book explores the convergence of law and public policy. Drawing on case studies from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, it examines how judicial and political institutions are closely linked to the socio-economic concerns of the citizens. The essays argue for the utilization of both legislative and executive, private and public spheres of society as vehicles for transformative social change and to safeguard against violations of socio-economic rights. The volume will be of great interest to both public and private stakeholders, as well as professionals, including NGOs and think tanks, working in the areas of law, government, and public policy. It will also be immensely useful to academics and researchers of constitutionalism, policymaking and policy integration, social justice and minority rights.

This book studies how smaller Gulf states managed to increase their influence in the Middle East, oftentimes capitalising on their smallness as a foreign policy tool. By establishing a novel theoretical framework (the complex model of size), this study identifies specific ways in which material and perceptual smallness affect power, identity, regime stability, and leverage in international politics. The small states of the Gulf (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) managed to build up considerable influence in regional politics over the last decade, although their size is still considered an essential, irresolvable weakness, which makes them secondary actors to great powers such as Saudi Arabia or Iran. Breaking down explicit and implicit biases towards largeness, the book examines specific case studies related to foreign and security policy behaviour, including the Gulf wars, the Arab Uprisings, the Gulf rift, and the Abraham Accords. Analysing the often-neglected small Gulf states, the volume is an important contribution to international relations theory, making it a key resource for students and academics interested in Small State Studies, Gulf studies, and the political science of the Middle East.

This title was first published in 2002: The resurgence of the democratization movement in Africa in the post-Cold War era is gradually replacing authoritarianism with forms of democratic systems. These changes have put into question the traditional big man image of African states’ foreign policy and foreign policy-making. The first book of its kind to focus on the foreign policy-making process of Southern African countries in the era of globalization, these instructive and rewarding case studies contextualize the increasing involvement of other internal actors in African states foreign policy-making process. Foreign policy actors such as the Presidency, Ministries of Defence, Foreign Affairs, Trade, Finance and the Intelligence Community, among others, are examined in a comparative perspective.

This book uses the transformative innovation policy (TIP) as a lens to show how innovative processes, practices and systems could address critical challenges and facilitate the delivery of sustainable human settlements in South Africa. The TIP approach shows that addressing societal problems is not a function of a technical solution within a government department but one that requires partnership with multiple stakeholders. The book argues that it is essential to understand and embrace innovation policy that is transformative and responds to the social and environmental needs at local, provincial and national levels. It demonstrates that innovation policy should focus on transforming the socio-technical systems that demand embracing notions such as experimental delivery and learning, directionality and inclusivity. Chapters explore the ability of the state to transform its organisational processes and capacity to improve and align its planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation systems to high levels of efficiency and sustainability targets. Bringing together various theoretical and empirical perspectives on innovation in the context of sustainable human settlement, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Housing, Human Settlements, Architecture, Public Policy, Development Studies, Civil Engineering, Political Science and Public Administration.

Despite the growing focus on issues of socio-economic transformation in contemporary transitional justice, the path dependencies imposed by the political economy of war-to-peace transitions and the limitations imposed by weak statehood are seldom considered. This book explores transitional justice’s prospects for seeking economic justice and reform of structures of poverty in the specific context of post-conflict states.

This book looks at the current state of entrepreneurship development in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, consisting of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It is a comprehensive state-of-the-art coverage of entrepreneurship and small business management issues, supported with theoretical discussion and empirical evidence. The book covers current processes in each country, paving the ways for potential investors, researchers, academics and professionals to better understand this region. An outcome of long-lasting endeavour, this book includes contributions from experts across the Gulf region.

Combining the theoretical tools of comparative politics with the substantive concerns of environmental policy, experts explore responses to environmental problems across nations and political systems How do different societies respond politically to environmental problems around the globe? Answering this question requires systematic, cross-national comparisons of political institutions, regulatory styles, and state-society relations. The field of comparative environmental politics approaches this task by bringing the theoretical tools of comparative politics to bear on the substantive concerns of environmental policy. This book outlines a comparative environmental politics framework and applies it to concrete, real-world problems of politics and environmental management. After a comprehensive review of the literature exploring domestic environmental politics around the world, the book provides a sample of major currents within the field, showing how environmental politics intersects with such topics as the greening of the state, the rise of social movements and green parties, European Union expansion, corporate social responsibility, federalism, political instability, management of local commons, and policymaking under democratic and authoritarian regimes. It offers fresh insights into environmental problems ranging from climate change to water scarcity and the disappearance of tropical forests, and it examines actions by state and nonstate actors at levels from the local to the continental. The book will help scholars and policymakers make sense of how environmental issues and politics are connected around the globe, and is ideal for use in upper-level undergraduateand graduate courses.

How can we best analyse contemporary welfare state change? And how can we explain and understand the politics of it? This book contributes to these questions both empirically and theoretically by concentrating on one of the least likely cases for welfare state transformation in Europe. It analyzes in detail how and why institutional change has taken Germany’s welfare state from a conservative towards a new work-first regime. Christof Schiller introduces a novel analytical framework to make sense of the politics of welfare state transformation by providing the missing link: the capacity of the core executive over time. Examining the policy making process in labour market policy in the period between 1980 and 2010, he identifies three different policy making episodes and analyses their interaction with developments and changes in such policy areas as pension policy, family policy, labour law, tax policy and social assistance. The book advances existing efforts aimed at conceptualizing and measuring welfare state change by proposing a clear-cut conceptualization of social policy regime change and introduces a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of the welfare-work nexus between 1980 and 2010 in Germany. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social policy, comparative welfare state reform, welfare politics, government, governance, public policy, German politics, European politics, political economy, sociology and history.

'Non-traditional', border-spanning security problems pervade the global agenda. This is the first book that systematically explains how they are managed.