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If intergovernmental relations are necessary in normal times, it should be even more required to face complex intergovernmental problem (CIP) as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, collaboration between governments depends on institutional rules as well as on political will. To discuss this issue, the analytical model is based on two dimensions: institutional design and political agency. As for the first dimension, since COVID-19 pandemic is considered as a CIP, three aspects are relevant when discussing how federations can organize the coordination between different levels of government: autonomy of subnational governments, mechanisms of coordination, and policy portfolio. As for political agency, the performance of political leadership (national presidents and governors) will be analyzed. The possibility of sharing collective goals across the federation is also a consequence of the political agency that takes place within the institutional systems of each federation. In short, it seeks to analyze the relationship between institutional design and political agency to deal with this CIP in five American federations.

The growing prison population and challenges related to recruiting and retaining suitable correctional officers (COs) in Canada provided the impetus for the current study. Recruitment efforts in provinces and territories often rely on a variety of diverse testing, ranging from physical fitness to in-person interviews. However, despite such efforts, turn-over rates remain high and insight into what motivates people to seek a career in correctional work continues to require elucidation. By investigating the career development of COs, the purpose of this paper is to understand why certain men seek employment in this field.

Data are derived from in-depth semi-structured interviews with male officers (n=41) who have employment experience in provincial correctional facilities.

Respondents discussed their initial motivations for entering the field and their career ambitions. Some entered corrections because they lacked alternative options for employment, others as a stepping stone for a different justice-oriented occupation such as policing or parole. Many were motivated by the income and benefits or had a specific vocational self-identity toward correctional work. However, nearly all respondents indicated that, over time, they no longer felt their rate of pay justly reflected the demands of the occupation, thus factors motivating field entry fail to materialize in ways that sustain long-term employee retention.

CO recruitment should target individuals with interest in the field of justice more broadly. Occupational demands of the CO occupation need to be addressed to reduce turnover. Recruitment should focus not only on new graduates but also be directed toward more mature individuals. The impact of resource intensive interview processes for candidates on turnover rates needs to be evaluated.

The authors’ focus on COs with employment experience in provincial and territorial correctional facilities, rather than federal, is justified by the lack of research on and the high rate of CO turnover in such facilities. After exploring the qualitative responses of officers, clear themes emerged that align well with natural socio-ecological systems: the self, family and community, and wider society.

Regional disparities in social risk levels threaten social cohesion in Spain, which cannot be justified by the territorial differences in social spending per capita. These divergences may encourage and spread nationalist positions and populist discourses. The objective of this paper is to examine the efficiency of social policies (health, education and social protection) aimed at reducing the risk of exclusion across Spanish autonomous communities.

The authors use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compare each autonomous community. The analysis will determine whether the autonomies' resources (inputs or social spending in this case) are appropriately translated into goods and/or services (outputs or social cohesion), and which regions are more efficient in doing so.

This work contributes to sustaining DEA analysis in the study of social policy efficiency, as it reveals the regions that have better adjustments between social investment and social results from a global perspective, as well as from the different intervention areas. The authors also provide a ranking of regions based on their relative efficiency, estimating a possible margin of improvement in the results.

It is unusual to include the disaggregated analysis of social spending in efficiency studies using DEA at regional level. Therefore, this is an innovative analysis compared to most extended models that are mainly concerned with health or education expenditure, which are also considered in this study.

This paper aims to show that the Spanish central administration, as a representative of the Napoleonic tradition, has undergone considerable managerial changes in non‐autonomous and semi‐autonomous agencies characterised by their direct involvement in service delivery in spite of the failure of macro‐changes and radical reforms of public administration.

This paper provides case studies of “paths” of changes in three organisations.

Through “layering” and “diffusion” of institutions as social mechanisms included in the historical new institutionalism account for innovation, specific organisations like the tax agency, social security and property registry have become more managerial in a state dominated by public law.

More in‐depth case studies would make possible generalisation of how small changes can produce similar impacts or results than reform efforts at the macro‐level.

The use of historical neo‐institutionalism and the exam of mechanisms as “layering” and “diffusion” for explaining change is presented.

Purpose – This chapter aims to analyze the pandemic situation in a legal and political point of view, to find what measures have been adopted by States to face the spread of the contagion, and whether those measures have been determinant in the redefinition of democracy. Emergency dispositions were enacted when an “emergency state” was declared, containing a series of dangerous elements for the correct application of the rule of law.

Methodology/Approach – The approach considers a “pluralistic methodology” that refers to a comparative law study, but also uses the approach of political science, history of institutions, and sociology. From this point of view, this chapter regards similarities and differences, between two or more legal systems, as coincidences or dissonances, comparing cases in a diachronic and synchronic way at the same time to evidence what is the democratic erosion.

Findings – This chapter doesn’t want to provide a mere chronicle of what happened during the COVID-19 situation, but it finds that in some peculiar cases emergency affected a degeneration of democratic institutions, and an acceptance of a new model of state, with hypertrophic executives, weak legislative bodies, not equilibrated balance of fundamental rights, and a rise of technocracy.

Originality/Value – Based on other studies focused on state-by-state oversights during the pandemic, our theory intends to enlighten the COVID-19 as a “black swan” in the international political and legal scenario, or a sort of turning point in an inevitable and unstoppable transformation of the state model that appears to aspire to a return of some autocratic attitudes.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

This paper is positioned at the intersection of the spatial and the practice turn in management research. The purpose of this paper is to address the phenomenon of transgressive small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) formations and the limitations of SME globalisation research in capturing the connectivity of businesses in disjointed locations, and propose a qualitative case-study design to overcome these limitations.

The paper critiques existing approaches to SME globalisation, which are informed by an interpretative community that conceives of territorial geography as the nodal point of SMEs and does not distinguish between internationalisation and globalisation. The paper thus addresses related methodological challenges. Based on a synthesis across disciplines and theoretical perspectives, the paper offers a reflexive method for case-study research, in the hope that such a method may increase the productiveness of analytical exploration of the multidimensional quality of SME organising and managing at the focal point of current transformations.

The paper makes the case for SME globalisation research to move beyond societist and individualist ontologies to embrace social-constructionist thinking, to make practice the unit of case-studies, and to appreciate process geographies of managing and organising.

The paper contributes to business research on SMEs at the nexus of globalising flows. The theoretical, conceptual, and methodological implications are discussed and are substantiated by details and illustrative selected examples from an ongoing study.

The study of social SME landscapes, including from the perspective of the reflexive case-study method, is open to multilingual and international research collaboration.

The paper contributes a multidisciplinary research design that extends SME studies so as to embrace contemporary transformations, by offering a reflexive case-study method for the improvement of research practice. In the field of SMEs, the paper contributes a new concept social “SME landscapes” that could enrich and improve the understanding of contemporary business. In the fields of SME and entrepreneurship studies, the paper implements expressed demands for social constructionist, multidisciplinary approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the issues related to the deployment of renewable electricity technologies (RETs) in remote indigenous communities by examining the views of key informants in a remote northern Ontario community through the lens of a wicked problem approach, with the goal to identify policy direction and strategies for the further development of renewable electricity projects.

The paper uses semi-structured interviews with community key informants, informed discussions with community members and energy conference participants and literature reviews of academic, policy and utility documents as complementary data sources for triangulation of results.

According to informants, the complexity surrounding the deployment of RETs in remote Canadian indigenous communities is the result of different stakeholder perspectives on the issues that RETs are expected to address. Furthermore, institutional complexity of the electricity generation system and uncertainty over both the choice of off-grid renewable technology and the future of electricity generation systems structure and governance add to this complexity.

Given the governments’ legal obligation to consult with indigenous people for projects within their territories, community perspectives provide insights for policy design to support both the deployment of RETs and address indigenous communities sustainability goals.

This paper offers views and opinions of community members from an off-grid Canadian indigenous community. Community members describe how they envision their electricity systems and the desired contribution of community owned renewable electricity generation to increase local control and economic development.

The comparative study between urban regions gathered by the 2010 National Project of Relevant Interest financed by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR – PRIN 2010) re-opened, in Italy, the debate on regional comparison of data, especially the ones of land use monitoring, which are difficult to collect, and to compare. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate some results of comparative studies based on regional and national data sets of land use indicators. Further considerations of land use change (LUC) assessment and its effect on environmental policies extended to the whole metropolitan area of Milan are outlined.

The adopted methodology collects different types of information from the existent databases on land uses/land covers (national/regional) and presents an assessment between the selected case of studies (urban regions), leading a shift from a quantitative evaluation to a qualitative one. A comparative study was conducted applying a geographical and statistical difference of land uses among different time thresholds. Subsequently, a cross-tabulation analysis allows an in-depth LUC analysis for the Milan urban region.

The results of the study display an autonomous pattern for the Milan urban region, which is the most densely populated area in Italy and seems to be the only comparable to other international cases of studies due to its extension and characteristics. Nevertheless, it is not the urban region that is affected by the highest rate of land take, which takes place in the Italian context where densities of settlements are lower and sprawled. According to Soja’s (2011) interpretation, the post-metropolitan condition of Milan seems to be proved.

The study was aimed at creating the first online National Atlas which has been used to overcome traditional problems of homogenization of LUC data in Italy. The quantification and qualification of LUC patterns allow us to understand if, and where, post-metropolis condition occurs. This research gives a clear indication of the kind of ongoing phenomena for policy orientation to planners and administrators, especially the one of the green infrastructure approach at the city-region level to solving the emerging environmental challenges.