Fair trade and European public procurement: legal principles and governance dynamics

Purpose The article examines principles of Fair Trade in public procurement in Europe, focusing on legal dimensions related to the European Public Procurement Directives. Design/methodology/approach The article situates public procurement of Fair Trade products in relation to the rise of non-state regulatory initiatives, highlighting how they have entered into new governance dynamics in the public sector and play a part in changing practices in sustainable procurement. A review of legal position on Fair Trade in procurement law is informed by academic research and campaigning experience from the Fair Trade Advocacy Office. Findings Key findings are that the introduction of Fair Trade products into European public procurement has been marked by legal ambiguity, having developed outside comprehensive policy or legal guidelines. Following a 2012 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, it is suggested that the legal position for Fair Trade in procurement has become clearer, and that forthcoming change to the Public Procurement Directives may facilitate the uptake of fair trade products by public authorities. However potential for future expansion of the public sector ‘market’ for Fair Trade is approached with caution: purchasing Fair Trade products as a marker of sustainability, which started to be embedded within procurement practice in the 2000s, is challenged by current European public austerity measures. Research limitations/implications Suggestions for future research include the need for systematic cross-institutional and multi-country comparison of the legal and governance dimensions of procurement practice with regard to Fair Trade. Practical implications A clarification of current state-of-play with regard to legal aspects of fair trade in public procurement of utility for policy and advocacy discussion. Originality/value The article provides needed elaboration on an under researched topic area of value to academia and policy makers.

The drivers of corporate climate change strategies and public policy: a new resource-based view perspective

Effective public policy to mitigate climate change footprints should build on data-driven analysis of firm-level strategies. This article’s conceptual approach augments the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and identifies investments in four firm-level resource domains (Governance, Information management, Systems, and Technology [GISTe]) to develop capabilities in climate change impact mitigation. The authors denote the resulting framework as the GISTe model, which frames their analysis and public policy recommendations. This research uses the 2008 Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) database, with high-quality information on firm-level climate change strategies for 552 companies from North America and Europe. In contrast to the widely accepted myth that European firms are performing better than North American ones, the authors find a different result. Many firms, whether European or North American, do not just “talk” about climate change impact mitigation, but actually do “walk the talk.” European firms appear to be better than their North American counterparts in “walk I,” denoting attention to governance, information management, and systems. But when it comes down to “walk II,” meaning actual Technology-related investments, North American firms’ performance is equal or superior to that of the European companies. The authors formulate public policy recommendations to accelerate firm-level, sector-level, and cluster-level implementation of climate change strategies.

Removal of directors of public companies takes centre stage in Australia : an exploration of the corporate law and governance issues

Increasing attention is being given to the legal and governance issues relating to the removal of directors in Australian public companies. This has been due mainly to the difficulties experienced by the board of National Australia Bank in attempting to remove one of its fellow directors, and the subsequent development of public companies entering into so-called 'prenuptial agreements' with new directors, requiring that the director 'resign' if the board pass a vote of no-confidence in the director. In this article, the author revisits the area of director removal in Australian public companies for two reasons. The first reason, which covers the majority of the article, is to engage in a detailed analysis of whether the pre-nuptial agreements which some public companies have indicated that they support using to remove directors, are in fact enforceable under Australia's Corporations Act The second reason is to outline a law reform proposal to enable public companies to remove directors without requiring the vote of shareholders at a general meeting. The proposal involves providing Australia' corporate  regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) with the power to grant relief from the statutory removal provisions to public companies, but in a way which balances the competing objectives of commercial efficiency and shareholder participation and, very importantly, encourages good corporate governance practices by companies in relation to the performance assessment  of directors.

It is in the interests of both shareholders and directors to agree on a set of ground rules for the effective supervision of companies that reconciles the rights of the owners to overall control with the much tougher demands on modern directors

Opting out of shareholder governance rights: a new perspective on contractual freedom in Australian corporate law

One of the classic debates in corporate law relates to whether the rules of corporate law are ar should be 'mandatory', in that companies must comply, or 'enabling' - meaning a set of default rules which companies have the choice of adopting or 'opting out' of through alternative contractual arrangements. The so-called 'mandatory/enabling' debate has been especially prominent in the United States fro numerous reasons, yet has also received some attention in Australia. That said, the extent to which companies can 'opt out' of corporate law has rarely been considered as a practical issue in Australia - particularly whether Australian companies can 'opt out' of provisions under the Corporations Act ("the Act"). However, just recently, two high-profile events in Australia have made 'opting out' of corporate law a relevant issue, especially the question of whether companies are free to 'opt out' of provisions of the Corporations Act  which provide express governance rights to shareholders. These events were Boral's constitutional amendment in 2003 to restrict the ability of shreholders to propose amendments to the company's constitution, and the contemplation and introduction of so-called 'pre-nuptial' agreements- designed to by-pass the right of shreholders to vote on removing directors in public companies. In the light of these two recent events, in this article the authors revisit the mandatory/enabling debate. However, rather than going over old ground as to whether a mandatory or enabling approach to corporate regulation is desirable, the authors approach the issue from a fresh perspective: that Australian Securitiesand Investments Commission's ("ASIC") existing relief powers under the Act should be extended to provide a means for companies to opt out of provisions containing shareholder governance rights.

Managing sport in drought-new stakeholders and new governance issues : a case study

Globally, almost every nation is facing some form of water crisis (World Commission on Water 2000). In Australia, the sport and recreation industry is one of the highest consumers of water. Other high water consuming industries (such as agriculture and farming) have been forced to adhere to strict managerial and governance reform due to the water crisis, yet in the sport and recreation industry, such changes are yet to be implemented and fully realised across the sector.

This research examines the impacts of drought and sustainable water management for sport and recreation. Specifically, it provides a case study of sport and recreation provision in a municipality that has already undergone considerable reform due to long-term drought. Sport and recreation use water for purposes such as irrigation of playing fields/pitches, filling swimming pools, stadium amenities and facilities, kitchens, maintenance and cleaning, and clubhouse amenities.

For sports that are heavy users of water for the maintenance of playing fields (such as soccer, Australian Rules football, rugby league, rugby union, grass and clay tennis courts to name a few) the impacts of drought and water restrictions have been severe. Some sports have reported an increase in the risk of injury to participants because of the condition of un-watered playing fields (Sport and Recreation Victoria 2007). Others have been forced to delay or shorten their seasons (Sleeman 2007), or worse still, cancel training and organised competition completely (Connolly and Bell 2007). While the impact of water restrictions has been profound on most sports, there are some sports that are not heavy water users and the impact of drought and water restrictions has been minimal. This problem creates issues and apparent inequities raising the need to further examine water consumption in sport and recreation. The potential outcome that arises is that the future of those sports that cannot conduct their competitions may be disadvantaged, while other sports that do not have such problems may be able to flourish.

Water, and those who control the supply of it, then defines which sports are able to flourish and sustain sport development pathways, compared to those whose survival may be in jeopardy. This research explores the stakeholder management and governance issues that have resulted for sport and recreation in the City of Greater Geelong (CoGG) located in Victoria, Australia--a region in long-term water crisis. The supply of sport and recreation facilities in the CoGG (like most municipalities in Australia) is largely the responsibility of the municipal council. The corporation responsible for the supply of water to the municipality is Barwon Water.

Although other sport and recreation facilities exist in the CoGG, the municipal council of CoGG owns and maintains over 120 sporting ovals (including the stadium used by its professional Australian Football League (AFL) team, the Cats), six swimming pools, and three golf courses. The CoGG host their professional AFL team, a range of local, national and international sport events, and provide a wide range of sport and recreation facilities for the community residents.

Eight interviews were conducted in total. Interviews were conducted with representatives from CoGG municipal council (who are responsible for the delivery of sport and recreation services and facilities in Geelong), and representatives from Barwon Water (who are responsible for the ongoing provision and maintenance of sport and recreation services and facilities) through the provision of water. Results show that the ten highest users of water in the municipality are sport and recreation facilitieswhich between them use almost one-third of the city's total water consumption (City of Greater Geelong 2006).

The municipal council is under considerable pressure to find ways to continue to provide sport and recreation opportunities for community members, as well as professional athletes and teams who use these facilities despite water restrictions. After all, these facilities provide benefit to spectators and participants, as well as businesses that rely on visitors to Geelong for sport and recreation events.

Due to such pressures, from 2007, the CoGG and Barwon Water agreed to provide the sport and recreation sector with water allocations rather than to be denied of all water under the water restriction regimes in place in the municipality. During 2007 summer sport season, this allowed the CoGG to keep 16 of its 120 sporting ovals open for participation through allocating all available water to these fields in order to keep them safe and playable. However, CoGG and Barwon Water were required to devise a rating scale to determine which sports (and sport facilities) were to share the allocated water, and which were not. These decisions also had knock on effects through sports. In order to ensure the safety of the playing surfaces, the CoGG and Barwon Water also restricted use of fields to competition only, therefore sport participants were forced to train on local beaches and other parkland areas-transferring issues of safety and public liability to other locations and facilities in the community. Further, it was reported that scheduling of competition seasons and individual matches; as well as the allocation of "home ground" gate receipts and concessions profits were required to be governed by the CoGG and Barwon Water as the competing sports were unable to agree. Perhaps more importantly, the rating scale developed for water allocation also resulted in some sports being rated as ineligible for water and as a result were unable to stage their entire competitions.

Clearly, the water allocation rating scale, and approach taken in this municipality to the continued delivery of sport and recreation has provided a workable solution. However, this study also signals that new stakeholders have entered the arena for the governance of sport. Governance structures in sport and recreation are being impacted as a result of the water crisis.

Those making decisions about which sport and recreation activities and/or facilities will be assisted with water resources are being made by local councils and water corporations. Sport managers are being required to understand existing areas of knowledge (such as turf management) in different ways, to gain knowledge in new areas (such as sustainable water management), and to lobby new stakeholder groups (such as water corporations) in order to secure their futures. The continued existence of some sports is no longer in the hands of governing bodies, but in the hands of local councils, and water corporations.

Clearly, any of the solutions implemented as discussed above, require multiple stakeholders to interact, and to reach agreement in order to assist in sustainable management of water in sport and recreation. In this sense, the management of water in sport (and all other industries) is more than a rational decision about policy, legislation, restrictions and resource allocations. It is a social and political process requiring scholarly attention for practical solutions.

New governance, green planning and sustainability : Tasmania together and growing Victoria together

Bridgman and Davis(2000:91) have argued that ‘ideally government will have a well developed and widely distributed policy framework, setting out economic, social and environmental objectives’. This article compares and evaluates two such frameworks or plans, Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together, in terms of their potential to promote sustainability. It argues that they are very different exercises in new governance, aimed at reconnecting with community priorities and at redirecting macro-policy setting away from a preoccupation with economic priorities, respectively. Nevertheless, both plans have the capacity to ‘green’ state planning, in Tasmania in terms of more purposeful benchmarks, and in Victoria in terms of enhanced sustainability emphasis in the macro-policy setting. The article encounters tensions in its review of the plans between deliberation and planning, policy empowerment and policy progress, and policy institutionalisation and politicisation as means of achieving policy change. It finds that whilst Tasmania and Victoria are re-engaged states that are reinventing state policy, as yet they are failing to meet the governance challenges of sustainability.

E-governance as digital ecosystem : a new way to think about citizen engagement and the internet?

There has been a long history of attempting to deploy networked information and communications – mostly in the form of the Internet – to support the broad goals of effective, efficient and responsible democratic government. While there has been considerable talk about the way such technologies might promote better governance – through increased citizen participation in debates and discussions about future outcomes – there has been, in contrast, much action that actually uses the Internet for more efficient government, by creating online and networked interfaces by which citizens can transact business with government. There has been only limited success in using the Internet and similar communications channels to allow citizens to participate in their own governance. Undoubtedly, the Internet does facilitate public consultation. For example, the European Commission used an Interactive Policy Making web tool for public consultation on legislation for regulation of chemicals. Over 6,500 contributions were received over a period of 2 months and the consultation process led to the identification of key flaws in proposals, saving billions of Euros (Timmers,2008). However, consultation of this kind tends to be a mechanism for gathering opinion and gaining citizen approval for change that is not different except in transmission form than previous approaches based on meetings and written submissions. While the European Commission example can be seen as successful, Internet-based consultation can too easily become promotional or marketing oriented, as in recent efforts in Australian by the Federal Communications Minister to use a blog to discuss proposed changes to Internet censorship regulations: in this case, discussion and debate from participants appears largely to have been ignored in favour of a pre-existing position. This paper aims to provide a solution to some of these problems by drawing on the idea of how the Internet can host and support a digital eco-system.

Law, governance and risk: deconstructing the public-private divide in climate change adaptation

The article focuses on the public–private divide in law and which organizes principles for and governance. It analyzes the governance model of public–private divide regarding for climate change adaptation in context to a case study of water governance and flood risk. It compares the relationship between state and individual laws which helps in policy setting.

A governance of denial: hate crime in New Zealand and Australia

In Australia and New Zealand, the strategies employed by governments to remedy prejudice, intolerance and hatred occur on a continuum; ranging from global mission statements about multiculturalism/ biculturalism, through to the enactment of civil anti-discrimination and anti-vilification legislation. In some jurisdictions, these civil remedies have been extended to criminal codes and sentencing legislation, and enshrined in human rights charters. In the place of a comprehensive outline of each of the nine jurisdictions, case studies from throughout the region are presented as exemplars of the strategies employed and barriers faced in reducing prejudice-related violence.

The differences between the Australian and New Zealand jurisdictions belies a common theme that frames the delay in developing legislative responses to hate crime and the paucity of cases to reach the point at which they begin to establish an agreed set of norms and values about the abhorrence of prejudice and hatred. At most turns—whether political or public rhetoric, or legislative and policy development - there is a frontier denial, minimisation and negation of prejudice and hatred.

A New Symbiosis: Municipalities, Private Contractors and Non-Governmental Organisations for the Provision of Local Public Services"

This project considered the second stage of transforming local administration and public service management to reflect democratic forms of government. In Hungary in the second half of the 1990s more and more public functions delegated to local governments have been handed over to the private or civil sectors. This has led to a relative decrease of municipal functions but not of local governments' responsibilities, requiring them to change their orientation and approach to their work so as to be effective in their new roles of managing these processes rather than traditional bureaucratic administration. Horvath analysed the Anglo-Saxon, French and German models of self-government, identifying the differing aspects emphasised in increasing the private sector's role in the provision of public services, and the influence that this process has on the system of public administration. He then highlighted linkages between actors and local governments in Hungary, concluding that the next necessary step is to develop institutional mechanisms, financial incentives and managerial practices to utilise the full potential of this process. Equally important is the need for conscious avoidance of restrictive barriers and unintended consequences, and for local governments to confront the social conflicts that have emerged in parallel with privatisation. A further aspect considered was a widening of the role of functional governance at local level in the field of human services. A number of different special purpose bodies have been set up in Hungary, but the results of their work are unclear and Horvath feels that this institutionalisation of symbiosis is not the right path in Hungary today. He believes that the change from local government to local governance will require the formulation of specific public policy, the relevance of which can be proven by processes supported with actions.

Street-level bureaucrats and new modes of governance - How conflicting roles affect the implementation of the Swiss Ordinance on Verterinary Drugs

Lipsky’s seminal concept of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) focuses on their role as public servants. However, in the course of new modes of governance, private actors have gained an additional role as implementation agents. We explore the logic of private SLBs during the implementation of the Swiss Ordinance on Veterinary Medicinal Products (OVMP) where veterinarians are simultaneously implementing agents, policy addressees, and professionals with economic interests. We argue that, because of contradictory reference systems, it is problematic for the output performance if an actor is simultaneously the target group of a policy and its implementing agent.

Regional renaissance? New forms of governance in nonmetropolitan Australia

Since the Second World War, Australian governments have adopted various approaches to governing nonmetropolitan Australia. The authors profile three distinct approaches to governance characterised as (1) state-centred regionalism; (2) new localism; and (3) new forms of multifaceted regionalism. Although recent policy initiatives have been justified by the argument that the region is the most suitable scale for planning and development in nonmetropolitan Australia, in practice the institutional landscape is a hybrid of overlapping local, regional, and national scales of action. The authors compare this new, multifaceted, regionalism with the so-called 'new regionalism currently being promoted in Western Europe and North America. It is argued that new regionalism differs in quite important ways from the regionalism currently being fostered in Australia. In Australia, the centrality of sustainability principles, and the attempt to foster interdependence amongst stakeholders from the state, market, and civil society, have produced a layer of networked governance that is different from that overseas. It is argued that there is a triple bottom-line 'promise' in the Australian approach which differs from the Western Europe/North American model, and which has the potential to deliver enhanced economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

What is the public value of government action? Towards a (new) pragmatic approach to values questions in public endeavours

There has been a resurgence of interest in values in recent public administration research, based on two distinct arguments. For different reasons, neither approach is likely to secure a robust normative basis for public endeavours. These reasons are assessed, using an alternative body of theory rooted in contemporary social theory that we term, 'new pragmatism'. New pragmatic ideas are deployed to critique the divorce of values from facts; the abstraction of values from concrete situations; the anthropocentric foundation to social choice; the poorly developed understanding of the process of governance, with its inherent pluralism; and the seeming reluctance to articulate principles of political discourse. © 2010 The Authors. Public Administration © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.