Moving Beyond the Administrative: Supervisors' Perspectives on Clinical Supervision in Child Welfare

This study contributes to the emerging knowledge base of child welfare supervision. An exploratory study examined the beliefs, practices, and experiences of 51 child welfare supervisors in Ontario, Canada. Eight focus groups were held with supervisors from a range of settings cross the province. The study identified a number of interwoven factors at the organizational, supervisory, and practice level that affect the nature of supervision offered. Implications are drawn for child welfare practice, models of supervision which integrate administrative, clinical and educational features, organizational culture, and training new supervisors.

Contemporary environmental issues of landfill leachate: assessment & remedies

Landfills are the primary option for waste disposal all over the world. Most of the landfill sites across the world are old and are not engineered to prevent contamination of the underlying soil and groundwater by the toxic leachate. The pollutants from landfill leachate have accumulative and detrimental effect on the ecology and food chains leading to carcinogenic effects, acute toxicity and genotoxicity among human beings. Management of this highly toxic leachate presents a challenging problem to the regulatory authorities who have set specific regulations regarding maximum limits of contaminants in treated leachate prior to disposal into the environment to ensure minimal environmental impact. There are different stages of leachate management such as monitoring of its formation and flow into the environment, identification of hazards associated with it and its treatment prior to disposal into the environment. This review focuses on: (i) leachate composition, (ii) Plume migration, (iii) Contaminant fate, (iv) Leachate plume monitoring techniques, (v) Risk assessment techniques, Hazard rating methods, mathematical modeling, and (vi) Recent innovations in leachate treatment technologies. However, due to seasonal fluctuations in leachate composition, flow rate and leachate volume, the management approaches cannot be stereotyped. Every scenario is unique and the strategy will vary accordingly. This paper lays out the choices for making an educated guess leading to the best management option.

State retrenchment and administrative reform in Ireland: Probing comparative policy paradigms

Policy choices in response to crisis may carry consequences both for distributive outcomes and for the future policy capacity of the state itself. In this paper, we use conceptual heuristics to interpret policy practice. We examine the underlying policy paradigms shaping Irish government decisions in the aftermath of the European financial and economic crisis. We distinguish between two such paradigms- market-conforming and social equity - and apply them to three reform themes: reconfiguration of public budgets, the public service pay bargain, and the organizational profile of state competences. Our findings entail lessons for understanding the malleability of policy choice, and how state policy choices in response to crisis are framed and implemented.

Administrative Justice in the United Kingdom

The article examines the concept of administrative justice and shows how this term does not lend itself to a singular definition, but it is generally associated with a more holistic approach to citizen redress against government in which judicial review is only one mechanism among many others. After identifying some of the primary mechanisms within the system of administrative justice (Consultation, Ombudsman, Tribunals) and showing how they interact with one another, the article outlines the main challenges that this system faces in an era of austerity. Indeed, the reduction of government spending on the mechanisms which facilitate administrative justice has the potential to hollow out the values that infuse administrative justice as a whole.

Studying administrative reforms through textual analysis: the case of Italian central government accounting

This paper contributes to the literature on public-sector reforms by proposing textual analysis as a useful research strategy to explore how reform archetypes and related ideas are deployed in the parliamentary debate and regulations advancing reforms. Public Administration (PA) (Wilson 1887; Weber 1922), New Public Management (NPM) (Hood 1991, 1995; Dunleavy and Hood 1994; Ferlie et al. 1996) and Public Governance (GOV) (Osborne 2010; Rhodes 1997) can be depicted as three different archetypes providing characteristic administrative ideas and concepts (i.e. interpretive schemes) and related tools and practices (i.e. structures and systems) which lead reforms. We use textual analysis to look into more than twenty years of Italian central government accounting reforms and investigate how the three administrative archetypes have evolved, intertwined and replaced each other. Textual analysis proves a useful tool to investigate reform processes and allows highlighting that in neo-Weberian countries, such as Italy, NPM and GOV, far from being revolutionary paradigms, may represent fashionable trends that did not leave significant traces in the practice and rhetoric of reforms. These results also suggest interesting implications for practitioners and policy makers.

Sharing services, saving money? Five risks to cost saving when organizations share administrative services

Shared services are a popular reform for governments under financial pressure. The hope is to reduce overheads and increase efficiency by providing support services like HR, finance and procurement once to multiple agencies. Drawing on insights from organization theory and political science, we identify five risks that shared services won’t live up to current expectations. We illustrate each with empirical evidence from the UK, Ireland and further afield, and conclude with suggestions on how to manage these risks.