Global Financial Crisis and International Institutions: Challenges, Opportunities and Change

The global financial crisis is not just another economic downturn. It signals the need for fundamental changes in the management of the global market economy. Certainly, time has come to reshuffle voting rights in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, recognizing shifts in global economic power. Also, the question remains of whether effective collective international action can be taken on climate change and global ecology. The crisis has offered the opportunity for reflection on the basic rules, leading hopefully to institutional evolution and not merely a huge anti-cyclical spending frenzy with a rejuvenated Keynes.     

Business in Metropolis: Local Governance of for-Profit Organisations in Finland

European local governments face strong pressures to privatisation and market-based reforms in the near future to combat economic austerity and demands for efficiency. This article shows how Finnish metropolitan city has been able to organise its for-profit activities in the new competitive landscape which requires balancing between political demands, legal restrictions and economic efficiency. The governance of for-profit activities in metropolitan city shows that there is both demand and room for administrative innovation to accommodate past administrative idiosyncrasies to market environment. In conclusion, local governments need to pay attention to their own role in shaping local competitive landscape.     

Critical aspects of cultural diversity in music education: examining the established practices and cultural forms in minority language schools in Finland

This article addresses the role of general music education within the framework of cultural diversity. The empirical part of the article focuses on teachers in Swedish-speaking minority schools in Finland and their perceptions of the relationship between music and multicultural perspectives. The results showed that in some instances it took some time for teachers to discuss, define and grasp the concepts of multiculturalism and cultural diversity in relation to their teaching activities. While much was discussed on a theoretical and/or political level, it was not necessarily something that they would connect to their own practice.     

Trends in Development Aid,Negotiation Processes and NGO Policy Change

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) and government donor agencies (GDA) are often caught in a dilemma; an NGO between responsiveness to its target group(s), expectations of individual donors and demands of its GDA; GDA between its policy to respect NGO’s integrity, its wish to keep NGOs accountable for received fund and its operation within the bounds of its general policies. This dilemma is mirrored in the NGO–GDA negotiation for funds. Based on negotiation theory and using three explanatory approaches, 18 years of negotiations between an NGO, Vi Skogen (ViS) and its GDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), are analyzed in order to demonstrate how organizational structures, power relations and the context influence the outcome of the negotiations. All three approaches help to explain how ViS managed, mainly in the interest of its individual donors, to resist changes demanded by Sida and also to explain how the agendas of ViS and Sida finally converged.     

Choice and constraint in budget-making

A theory of the budgetary process within public resource allocation has to recognize that decision rules may vary over time and program. Our findings based on a new econometric approach indicate that various different decision mechanisms operate in different categories of public resource allocation. Variation over time is particularly difficult to accommodate within the incrementalist approach as incremental decision rules imply structural stability over time. We find the opposite to be true of the programs analysed.A model of the public expenditure process has to take choice into account to a larger extent. The attempt to make budget-making a function of constraints violates the occurrence of shiftpoints that is typical of the data. The existence of a base and the resort to mechanical rules for the derivation of the yearly increments implies a deterministic interpretation of budgetary behavior. Budgets are made in choice processes where the principal actors employ various decision rules meaning that budget-making is more voluntaristic than deterministic. The choice rules employed for the derivation of requests and appropriations are not mechanistic decision rules.