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This paper aims to propose a legal characterisation of the recent proliferation, across the broad range of global environmental good governance initiatives and practices, of a diverse mix of regulatory environmental standards, many of which are informal in origin insofar as they are neither State-driven nor State-centred. It examines the novel conception of legal order posited by Twinning and Walker, to determine whether it encompasses the myriad rules and standards emerging in the field of environmental governance.

Surveying the rapidly developing montage of formal and informal rules and standards associated with global environmental governance, this paper uses the analytical framework provided by scholars of “global administrative law” to reconcile the complementary roles of formal and informal sources of legal rules, and to explain their increasing convergence around a set of good governance principles and standards commonly used in national administrative law systems.

The paper concludes that the emerging regulatory framework for global environmental governance comprises an almost endless variety of forms of novel transnational regulatory activity, many succeeding in having a profound impact on environmental outcomes. Yet all appear to be founded upon and guided by a discrete set of good governance standards and principles of an administrative law character – including transparency, participation, legality, rationality, proportionality, reviewability and accountability – which serve to enhance the credibility and legitimacy of each regulatory mechanism.

It appears that new and informal forms of environmental regulatory activity enjoy a complex symbiotic relationship with formal systems of environmental law. In addition to filling lacunae and addressing deficiencies in such systems, owing, for example, to the transnational character of much of today’s trade, informal regulatory systems are increasingly influencing the evolution of formal legal frameworks and, in so doing, are improving the responsiveness, flexibility and accessibility of this new environmental “legal order”.

At a practical level, viewing the wide range of new forms of environmental regulatory activity through the prism of global administrative law (or global environmental law) brings unity to this diverse field and, in so doing, makes available to all the actors involved in this “community of practice” a wealth of established practice and principle which can help to inform the elaboration and interpretation of rules and standards of environmental governance through a process of cross fertilisation of ideas and approaches.

Recognition of the legal character and significant role of the wide range of novel forms of environmental regulatory activity lends further credibility and legitimacy to such mechanisms, which often comprise the only truly relevant and applicable environmental controls or truly accessible mode of redress and accountability. The challenges of realising sustainability are immense and, as one leading commentator has noted, “all normative means are useful to this end”.

This paper attempts to characterise the legal nature of the range of novel forms of environmental regulation which (can) play such an important role in modifying the behaviour of many of the key environmental actors globally – actors who have largely been unaffected by more formal legal frameworks. For this reason, it seeks to encourage a fundamental shift in the way we think about environmental law and legal authority.

Inter-organizational collaboration is the organizational guarantee and key link to achieve the goals of megaproject management. Project governance has always played an important role in the construction of megaprojects, but the relationship between project governance and organizational collaboration is unclear. The purpose of this study is to explore the role paths of different project governance mechanisms in influencing the collaborative behaviors of stakeholders and collaborative performance and to elucidate the mechanism of project governance on inter-organizational collaboration.

A conceptual framework was developed based on a comprehensive literature review, termed the structural equation model (SEM). The hypotheses of the model were tested based on data obtained from a questionnaire survey of 235 experts with experience in megaprojects within the construction industry in China.

The results show that project governance positively contributes to the collaborative behavior of megaproject stakeholders and the collaborative performance of the project team. Collaborative behavior acts as a partial mediator between project governance and the collaborative performance of the megaproject inter-organization alliance. The complexity of the project modulates the relationship between the governance mechanism of the project and the collaborative behavior of the stakeholders, which affects the collaborative performance of the megaproject inter-organization alliance.

The findings provide theoretical and practical implications for promoting positive collaborative behavior among stakeholders in megaproject selection and improving the collaborative performance of megaproject inter-organization alliances.

The literature on corporate governance has experienced an explosive growth in the past decade and presented some new trends. One purpose of this paper is to make an exploratory survey of this. Since China is a typically emerging and transition economy, another purpose of this paper is to review some domestic studies with an intention to discover the evolution logic of corporate governance practices in China under a complicated and exclusive context, the third purpose is to provide future research directions.

This paper surveys recent literature in the field of corporate governance, intending to find out the development trends and extract the main line of literature on and practices of Chinese corporate governance.

In this paper, we find that recent literature on corporate governance provides some new insights into subtle characteristics of governance, governance effects of relational network, political connections, corporate governance evaluation and financial institutions governance. During the past decade, the literature on Chinese corporate governance has referred to some new areas during the transition process from administrative governance to economic governance. In addition to the above, we attempt to put forward an analytical framework and the proposition that Chinese corporate governance is in the transition process from administrative governance to economic governance.

The authors propose some research topics where future studies on corporate governance may prove valuable, especially putting forward an analytical framework which can be used for discussing and analyzing corporate governance in China.

This paper reviews some new trends of literature on corporate governance and makes a contribution to corporate governance studies by providing fruitful directions, extracting the main line and analytical framework for China's mode during the transition process from administrative governance to economic governance.

This paper makes the first attempt to provide a new analytical framework for research on the evolution of China's corporate governance models. The purpose of this paper is to investigate developmental corporate governance mechanisms in China the over past decades from a synthetic and dynamic analytical viewpoint.

This is a conceptual paper.

The evolution of corporate governance from an administrative to an economic model in China was not a smooth process and was confronted with various unavoidable institutional and ideological obstacles. Consequently, the transition of governance models has demonstrated the following four salient characteristics: gradualism, dualism, systematization and path dependency.

This paper makes the first attempt to provide a new analytical framework for research on the evolution of China's corporate governance models.

New Public Governance is becoming an important framework for managing the public sector in the era of collaborative governance. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which New Public Governance as a framework is limited to the political and administrative context of Romania and to create a connection between good governance and New Public Governance through operationalizing the concepts and clarifying their inter-dependency. New public leadership skills are required from both horizontal and vertical approaches, in order to tackle the country’s wicked problems.

Through the use of qualitative methods, such as document analysis of Cooperation and Verification Mechanism reports of the European Commission on Romania, and expert interviews with a focus on governance aspects, the paper seeks to clarify the challenges that Romania faces in terms of democratization given the current political and administrative context.

Findings in Romania reveal little agreement on progress in government effectiveness, regulatory quality and implementation of the rule of law. However, progress has been noted on voice and accountability and strengthening democracy.

The authors discuss the uncertainty that the concept of good governance has created from an international organizations’ perspective in developing countries, and define the good governance infrastructure as a means of bringing governance closer to the complex and changing context of each country. The paper aims to clarify the connection between good governance and New Public Governance, by assessing contextual factors in developing countries.

The practical implications of the study are related to the possibility of this paper to inform other developing countries on the conditions that are necessary in order to adhere to New Public Governance. The paper has implications in proposing the use of the good governance infrastructure as a helpful concept when considering democratic frameworks for research and practice.

The social implications of this paper are connected to the current political, administrative and social context of the Central and Eastern European region and its component countries. Improving democratic practices, through advancing the importance of good governance indicators in switching to a public governance perspective in public administration, is the main outcome of New Public Governance-style reforms.

The paper’s originality stands in designing the premises for the “good governance infrastructure” as a new concept that aims to bridge the gap between good governance and New Public Governance, and bring more conceptual clarity. Being supported by evidence, through the use of primary data generated by expert interview analysis, the new concept can improve and encourage further research on this topic.

The purpose of this study is to understand venture capital family businesses (VCFBs) governance of portfolio companies through the deal process.

This study applies a theory-developing approach. A model of VCFB governance is developed whose key aspects are illuminated by four examples (cases) of VCFBs.

Recent research suggests that a venture capital firm's corporate deal processes can be divided into the pre-deal, deal and post-deal phases. Based on the age, size and succession dimensions, propositions for how a governance trajectory develops for VCFBs, affecting the deal process of target family firms (TFFs), are presented. These propositions highlight how the family owners' actions and behavior are related to VCFB governance, which in turn, influences the three phases involved in making an investment.

The propositions suggest how personal and administrative VCFBs' governance of the deal process of portfolio companies is significantly affected by centrifugal and centripetal forces that drive the respective types of governance where third-generation family owners appear as changers of governance approach.

This study aims to examine the influence of market logics on tendering capabilities and small and medium enterprise (SME) involvement in public procurement, the influence of SME governance mechanisms on tendering capabilities and SME involvement in public procurement and the influence of tendering capabilities on SME involvement in public procurement.

Data was collected from owners/managers of SMEs registered by the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority. The SPSS software and CB-SEM software were used to obtain results on the influence of market logics on tendering capabilities and SME involvement in public procurement, the influence of SME governance mechanisms on tendering capabilities and SME involvement in public procurement and the influence of tendering capabilities on SME involvement in public procurement.

Findings indicated that SME involvement in public procurement is mainly influenced by their governance mechanisms whilst both market logics and governance mechanisms had a positive influence on tendering capabilities of SME firms. Market logics and tendering capabilities had no effect on SME involvement.

The study mainly focussed on SMEs’ involvement in public procurement. The research has implications for decision makers in government and SME firms concerned with enhancing levels of SME involvement in public procurement activities.

Many governments are now focussing on procurement lot sizing so as to increase SME involvement in public procurement. Despite the use of lot sizing, SME involvement in public procurement is still low in many developing countries and also declining in others. Aspects such as market logics and governance mechanisms that may help understand the variations in involvement have not been given significant attention.

The purpose of this paper is to show that, while in many low income countries inefficient regulatory regimes have been blamed for impeding ICT market development, Tanzania constitutes a remarkable exception. This study aims to identify the organizational and contextual factors that have enabled the Tanzanian Communications Regulatory Agency (TCRA) to implement innovative regulations, including a fully converged licensing framework as the first country on the continent, and how subsequently these regulations have influenced market development.

The analysis is based on case study data gathered through 20 face‐to‐face interviews in 2006 as well as secondary data gathered from government documents, news reports and company web sites.

The research finds that the market developments and regulatory innovations were due in part to Tanzania's Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA)'s high level of autonomy, afforded by independent funding mechanisms and lack of capacity of the Ministry, which pressed the regulator to play a greater role in policy making than is found in other countries. Further, TCRA's significant internal focus on capacity building has also enabled strong regulatory governance.

The results provide further evidence of the role that institutional endowments and regulatory governance play in fostering policy reform.

The research examines regulatory innovations in a region typically associated with regulatory inefficiencies. It identifies institutional factors and subsequently shows how in a very low income country they may be conducive to effective regulatory governance and market development.

This paper aims to increase the current understanding of the connection between operational level information and communication technology (ICT) projects and national level digital transformation by researching how project governance structures and practices are applied in an e-government context.

An elaborative qualitative study through public documentary analysis and empirical multi-case research on Finnish central government is used.

The study constructs a multi-level governance structure with three main functions and applies this in an empirical setting. The results also describe how different governance practices and processes, focusing on project portfolio management, are applied vertically across different organizational levels to connect the ICT projects with the national digitalization strategy.

This study integrates project governance and portfolio management knowledge into public sector digitalization, thus contributing to project management, e-government and ICT research streams by improving the current understanding on the governance of ICT projects as part of a larger-scale digitalization. This study also highlights perceived gaps between current governance practices and provides implications to managers and practitioners working in the field to address these gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the relationship between the corporate governance (CG) environment, governance behavior and governance performance and place it into the research of the evolution and revolution of the Chinese telecommunication industry, a complex economic system.

On the basis of information about the Chinese telecommunication industry from 1949 to 2009 and China Mobile from 1997 to 2007, the authors analyze the Chinese telecommunication industry from two levels, namely industry level and firm level, with the combination of a critical incident method and time series method.

The results demonstrate that the evolution of the Chinese CG environment and governance behavior presents characteristics of punctuated equilibrium; governance behavior lags behind governance environment and it can cause the governance environment to evolve to benefit its development through exerting active effects; governance environment and governance performance strongly relate to and have an effect on each other; and the improvement of governance structure and mechanisms, together with the enhancement of strategic capability, can greatly contribute to the governance performance of firms.

This paper has divided the development of the Chinese telecommunication industry into four stages, revealing the relationship between governance environment, governance behavior and governance performance with a case study of the Chinese telecommunication industry and China Mobile.