Late twentieth century congressional leaders as shapers of and hostages to political context: Gingrich, Hastert, and Lott

Most contemporary explanations of congressional leadership postulate a version of contextual theory that typically places greatest emphasis on the strength of party and downplays the personal skills of individual leaders. By analyzing the leadership of just three recent individuals—Gingrich, Hastert, and Lott—this essay demonstrates the extent to which these leaders' different styles, skills, and characteristics interacted with changing political contexts and strategic environments to impact political and policy outcomes. Context matters, but so does leadership skill. Most graphically, Gingrich—a rare transforming leader in Burns' typology—demonstrates the importance of the right person and the right conditions being in place at the same time and the ability of an individual imaginative leader to intervene exogenously to have a significant effect on policy outcomes. Yet the essay also demonstrates that even where leaders adopt more conventional transactional styles, as Hastert and Lott did, the skill and success with which they juggle political pressures emanating from different, often conflicting, contexts—skills in context—also matters.

The capacities of institutions for the integration of ecosystem services in coastal strategic planning: The case of Jiaozhou Bay

This paper explains how the practice of integrating ecosystem-service thinking (i.e., ecological benefits for human beings) and institutions (i.e., organisations, policy rules) is essential for coastal spatial planning. Adopting an integrated perspective on ecosystem services (ESs) both helps understand a wide range of possible services and, at the same time, attune institution to local resource patterns. The objective of this paper is to identify the extent to which ESs are integrated in a specific coastal strategic planning case. A subsequent objective is to understand whether institutions are capable of managing ESs in terms of uncovering institutional strengths and weaknesses that may exist in taking ESs into account in existing institutional practices. These two questions are addressed through the application of a content analysis method and a multi-level analysis framework on formal institutions. Jiaozhou Bay in China is used as an illustrative case. The results show that some ESs have been implicitly acknowledged, but by no means the whole range. This partial ES implementation could result from any of four institutional weaknesses in the strategic plans of Jiaozhou Bay, namely a dominant market oriented interest, fragmented institutional structures for managing ESs, limited ES assessment, and a lack of integrated reflection of the social value of ESs in decision-making. Finally, generalizations of multi-level institutional settings on ES integration, such as an inter-organisational fragmentation and a limited use of ES assessment in operation, are made together with other international case studies. Meanwhile, the comparison highlights the influences of extensive market-oriented incentives and governments' exclusive responsibilities on ES governance in the Chinese context.