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This chapter identifies the serious issue of the mental health and wellbeing of English paramedics working in the emergency ambulance service. It identifies the case of the extant top-down performance measurement regime and the absence of indicators of wellbeing in ambulance performance reporting. The impact of such measures on frontline staff and the implications for their motivation and commitment are also documented. More decentralised, open and discursive approaches to performance management in the public sector are advocated as key methods for re-imagining ambulance and wider public services in a global context.

Drawing on relevant literature, the chapter provides the context of the English ambulance service and the challenges it faces with reference to the New Public Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG). Key issues concerning performance metrics and staff wellbeing and welfare are then identified and discussed. The notions of communicative rationality, deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism are introduced as a framework for analysing the state of both wellbeing and resilience and the performance regime within the English ambulance service. The chapter relates these themes to the re-imagining of public services internationally, proposing a more participative and discursive approach.

It is desirable for the evaluation of public services to include the wellbeing of the healthcare provider, as well as the public service recipient. Additionally, there is a case for greater participative and dialogic engagement to address the intertwined relationship of ambulance staff wellbeing and the performance management regime of the service. The process should be revised, therefore, to take into account the wellbeing of ambulance staff as an integral and intrinsic part of the delivery of the service, and it is recommended that deliberative methods of participation are deployed in reimagining ambulance services and public services more generally.

The challenges facing ambulance services and, more generally, health services globally continue to proliferate and intensify. They are exacerbated by foreseeable contextual challenges such as the demographic profile of patients and service users and budgetary cuts. Traditional and more recent NPM approaches are proving inadequate for this challenge and appear unsustainable in practice. The lack of acknowledgement of welfare indicators in the performance metrics make them unfit for purpose. Our suggested discursive approach would help to re-imagine the service by improving its sustainability and resilience in parallel with the improved wellbeing and personal resilience of the people who provide the service.

Botswana enjoys the celebratory status of a shining example of a successful democracy in Africa. As such, one expects democracy to underpin policy formulation and the running of the education system. This chapter problematizes the relationship between democracy and education in Botswana. It focuses on the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2010 Examinations. The conduct of the examinations marked a crisis which resulted in a deadlock between the Botswana’s Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD), Botswana Examination’s Council (BEC) on the one hand and teachers’ unions-Botswana Sectors of Educators Trade Union (BOSETU) and Botswana Teacher’s Union (BTU) on the other hand. Teachers’ unions complained about poor conditions of service and remunerations associated with the administration of national examinations. This action triggered a national strike in the public service in general and consequently revealed Botswana Government’s undemocratic response to what was a sensitive issue of national interest. When the examinations results were released, it became evident that students performed horribly BEC was persecuted for the poor performance. This chapter therefore registers that the 2010 Examinations crisis in Botswana is a classic indication that democracy and education are two worlds apart in Botswana’s education system.

This study contributes to the management accounting (MA) literature by exploring the effect of managers’ perception of justice in the budgeting process (as a subsystem of MA) on their satisfaction and motivation to achieve organizational objectives. Drawing on the Habermasian concept of deliberative democracy, which underscores the importance of gaining legitimacy to achieve desirable outcomes, our analysis focuses on seven constructs related to situational and intrinsic participation, procedural and distributive justice, and attitude on two outcome constructs: satisfaction and motivation. We surveyed managers with an accounting background who are directly involved in the budgeting process and analyzed our data using partial least squares-based path analysis–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of this study indicate that both dimensions of justice – distributive and procedural – are positively associated with participation, and in turn, positively impact satisfaction and motivation. Contrary to expectations, managers’ influence on the final budget does not seem to be as important as we expected. Budgeting is an important managerial function that involves setting targets based on an organization’s strategy and allocating resources for its execution. Such a fundamental process requires managers’ participation at various levels to ensure that the process is fair and just. Our study’s findings imply that justice perceptions are an essential fabric of organizational processes that drive human behavior. Specifically, our findings reveal that perception of justice influences participation and satisfaction and motivation.

This is a troubled age for democracy, but the nature of that trouble and why it is a problem for democracy is an open question, not easy to answer. Widespread wishing for responsible leaders who respect democratic norms and pursue policies to benefit people and protect the vulnerable don’t help much. The issue goes well beyond library contexts, but it is important that those in libraries think through our role in democracy as well. Micro-targeting library-centric problems won’t be effective and don’t address the key issue of this volume. The author can only address the future if we recover an understanding of the present by building up an understanding of actually-existing democracy: (1) the scope must be narrowed to accomplish the task; (2) the characteristics of the retreat from democracy should be established; (3) core working assumptions and values – what libraries are about in this context – must be established; (4) actually-existing democracy should then be characterized; (5) the role of libraries in actually-existing democracy is then explored; (6) the source and character of the threat that is driving the retreat from democracy and cutting away at the core of library assumptions and values is analyzed; (7) the chapter concludes by forming a basis of supporting libraries by unpacking their contribution to building and rebuilding democratic culture: libraries are simultaneously less and more important than is understood.

This chapter addresses the relationship between foreign interventions and the democracy of the intervened country. In other words, I discuss how foreign interventions have affected the quality of the democratic institutions of the country that is being intervened. Latin America has been chosen for this endeavour, and more specifically, three countries have been chosen as case studies: Nicaragua, Cuba and Brazil. Furthermore, I analyze two types of foreign interventions: military and economic interventions. Nicaragua, Cuba and Brazil have experienced both types of interventions. In order to do this comparison, I look at the predominant interventionists in Latin America: the United States and China.

Although Danish democracy is not currently facing the same decline in the trust in politicians and government as seen in other countries, it faces some of the same destabilising forces as do other ‘old’ representative democracies. While the various forms of citizen participation introduced in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced politician–citizen tensions, we are currently witnessing a wave of highly innovative, hybrid forms of democracy that both integrate representative and direct forms of democracy and push elected politicians towards an interactive political leadership style. These hybrid forms provide occasion for citizens and politicians to meet and debate pressing political matters. Although we are still in early days and dilemmas remain to be addressed, this development holds considerable potential for democracy in Denmark and elsewhere.