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This study empirically examines the relationship between public service values and city managers’ involvement in policymaking in an effort to uncover which values are more instrumental in encouraging city managers to engage in particular areas of policymaking. The data for this study were collected from a national sample of city managers across the United States in 2011. This study employs factor and regression analyses. The results show that public service values such as knowledge, collaboration, fiscal realism, and stewardship encourage city managers to get involved in a greater number of areas of the policymaking process. The findings are discussed in light of the contemporary public administration literature with implications for public affairs education.

The post-COVID-19 era has witnessed intensive engagements on latest datasets on COVID-19 experiences and the need for robust data systems to understand emerging policy pathways. There have also been extensive deliberations on how public organisations can deliver beyond immediate concerns with economic recovery and improved livelihoods. This paper draws insights from the Afrobarometer round 9 dataset on how different African governments' economies have been recovering from COVID-19 and how this has affected citizens' well-being in Kenya. The results show that despite the good recovery progress, the government has yet to stabilise high food prices, inflation, debts, job creation, etc. While national policy priorities may explain how this situation plays out, these challenges remain complex and linked to external factors that African governments may have little control over.

Governance is hybrid to the extent that it involves diverse organizational forms, jurisdictional domains, and stakeholders across the public and private sectors. This article analyses the governance of household solid waste management in Sweden from a hybridity perspective, with the City of Helsingborg in North-Western Scania in Sweden as an example. The governance arrangements comprise municipal and company-based organizations, conflicting legislation, and long planning and investment horizons. The latter has resulted in significant innovations over the last 20 years, while changes in organizational forms, tasks, networks and jurisdictions have caused tensions in governance processes and relationships.

Based on a developed model, this study deals with an investigation on whether innovative climate is a variable that moderates the relationship among middle managers' technological innovation and organizational factors such as structure, strategic posture, and environment. We used path analysis framework to study this relationship. The respondents (N=158, n=96) were all the managers of large or medium manufacturing companies with headquarters in the province of Tehran in Iran. The study found that innovative climate has an intervening role in the relationship among organizational structure, strategic posture and environment, and middle managers' technological innovation. The results have implications for the executive and human resource management practices.

This study identifies the determinants of appointment of executives in quangos. Using data from 85 quangos in Korea over 15 years between 1993 and 2007, we investigate the degree to which various characteristics of organizational actors affect the choice of executives. Three organizational actors include presidents, sponsoring government departments, and the concerned quangos. Although results vary by executive position, the findings of the empirical analysis with multinomial probit and generalized linear mixed models support the idea that the appointment of quango executives is not the result of presidential choice but that of the interactions among the key organizational actors, with different incentives and resources, on the appointment. Compared to former bureaucrats, presidential allies are more likely to be appointed when presidents have more political support from the National Assembly and it is easier for insiders to be promoted as executives from larger and older quangos with clear legal origins.

The demand for regional autonomy, which crystallised in the 1990s during municipal decentralisation, has profoundly marked Bolivia’s political history. This article examines the reorientation of the autonomic model since the 2009 Constitution. This “recentralisation” is explained by: (a) the political hegemony achieved by the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and its consequences for local politics; (b) regulatory centralism, especially in the Ley Marco de Autonomías y Descentralización (Autonomy and Decentralisation Law); (c) fiscal inequality in the financing of the different Autonomous Territorial Entities; and (d) the malfunctioning of the model of intergovernmental relations.

This paper maps institutional trust in Bangladesh and analyzes to what extent citizens perceive public institutions to be trustworthy. According to a number of expert evaluations, public and political institutions in Bangladesh do not stand out as very trustworthy. Yet, despite such expert evaluations, recent survey data indicate that popular trust is quite high in certain major institutions such as the parliament and the central government. Since it is misplaced, the high level of popular institutional trust presents a paradox. It implies some kind of blind or naive trust, which may be dysfunctional for the emergence of a democratic governance system.