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Insufficient achievement of performance management in the federal government is widely acknowledged, despite the absence of an accepted way for determining when and how progress has been made. The process of maturation is traced through a model based on Stinchcombe’s innovation framework, enabling progress toward utilization of performance management to be gauged. The premise of this model is that change has to permeate the organization, reaching the level of routines, to be implemented operationally. Assessment of performance management maturity employs a match between the obstacles expected in the distinct stages of adoption and implementation and the hindrances federal agencies have encountered. Quantitative analysis of data provided by pooled Government Accountability Office surveys of federal managers points to activity at the adoption stage, but not at the implementation stage, calling into question the maturity of the performance initiative.

Globally, over 95% of fire related deaths and injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries. Within informal settlements, the risk of fire resulting in injury or death is particularly high. This paper examines fire risks in informal settlements in New Delhi and Cape Town, and tented informal settlements in Lebanon.

Our analysis draws on primary sources, secondary literature, statistical data and qualitative interviews.

The distribution of fire risk across urban societies is a fundamentally political issue. Residential fire risk can be tackled by accessible, affordable, safety-compliant housing. That said, important interim measures can be taken to mitigate fire risk. Some of the risks requiring attention are similar across our case studies, driven by high population densities; flammable housing materials; unreliable or inaccessible access to safe power sources; and – in the case of Cape Town and New Delhi particularly – the inability of fire services to reach sites of fire. However, these common risks are embedded in distinct social, economic and political contexts that must be placed at the center of any intervention. Interventions must also be aware that the risk of fire is not spread evenly within informal settlements, intersecting as it does with factors like gender, age, health and disability.

Informal settlement fires have been under-studied to date. The studies that do exist tend to operate within disciplinary silos. This paper represents an important interdisciplinary approach to fire within informal settlements, which grounds technical data, modeling and experiments in political, social and economic realities.

Research on performance management, as it applies to public sector organizations, has been addressed most often from a static perspective. A process-oriented view on performance is undertaken through use of perceived obstacles, garnered through two large surveys of U.S. government managers, to infer the adaptive paths federal agencies have followed. By applying a learning-based model founded on March’s framework of exploration and exploitation, the ideal-typical ways that public organizations adapt to a performance initiative can be distinguished, opening a window into the processes such learning entails. Structural equation modeling provides the statistical capacity to interpret exploration and exploitation as cohesive paths. Exploratory adaptation appears to have been largely counterproductive, as the obstacles associated with this dynamic indicated a roadblock rather than a path forward. But exploitation had the opposite effect, as its associated obstacles corresponded with greater use of performance measures for management activities and enhanced results orientation.

The Great Recession has strained governments at all levels and presented cities, especially formerly industrial cities, with nearlyunprecedented budgetary challenges. This paper examines the long-termimplications for infrastructure maintenance and service provision ofunfavorable economic and demographic trends in Philadelphia andBaltimore. The concept of the public equity holder, which borrows a term forpublic finance from corporate finance, introduces a category of potentialcontributors to the capital deficit undermining urban sustainability. Theconcept is illustrated by a case study of the two cities to explore howcandidate public equity holders, including taxpayers, nonprofits, and publicemployees, may contribute. Resulting from this research are identifiablefactors, particularly patience and risk tolerance, which have led to orimpeded partnerships promoting urban sustainability and will provide thefoundation for broader future study

Examining the work of Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, this article argues that their biographic practices and experiences as colonial subjects allowed them to break with imperial representations and to provide new, anticolonial imaginaries. It demonstrates how the experience of the racialized and diasporic subject, respectively, creates a kind of subjectivity that makes visible the work of colonial cultural narratives on the formation of the self. The article first traces Fanon’s and Hall’s transboundary encounters with metropolitan Europe and then shows how these biographic experiences translate into their theories of practice and history. Living through distinct historical moments and colonial ideologies, Fanon and Hall produced theories of historical change, which rest on epistemic ruptures and conjunctural changes in meaning formations. Drawing on their biographic subjectivities, both intellectuals theorize cultural and colonial forms of oppression and seek to produce new knowledge that is based on practice and experience.

Administrative reforms in Argentina have followed an irregular trajectory as a result of the penetration of patronage in the state apparatus. Extensive politicization has impeded the development of a univocal and stable civil service at the national level.

In this context, the goal of this chapter is to analyze the characteristics of the federal civil service in its interaction with actors and institutions of the political system during the 2004–2014 period. The study reveals two main findings: (1) a diversity of bureaucratic formats coexist in the country, both formally and informally; and (2) the relationships between the administration and the political system vary according to the predominant bureaucratic format.

In this chapter, we unpack what we experienced during the process of facilitating a group of early career researchers, and how we feel an approach to ‘humanising academia’ may have helped at least us to envision higher education not in terms of the struggle it is often depicted as but as a community and a safe space. Setting out with a conscious naivety, either ignoring (Taina) or ignorant of (Andrew) the ways things ‘should be done’ in academia, allowed us to start a critically supportive community of researchers. This chapter explores how this approach allowed us to engage with different modes of being together and to reconsider existing forms of togetherness. This ‘being together’ was related not only to academic hierarchies and positions but also to thinking, feeling and experiencing. Using lenses from affect theory and queer studies, we discuss how, without quite meaning to, we developed an ‘affective community’ of those interested in discovering alternative ways to approach the international dimension of higher education. This shows how enacting ideals of community can bring us to build a community beyond hierarchies and competition.

This introductory chapter synthesises an extensive and hot debate revolving around the role of precautionary doctrine in tourism fields. Although the industry faces serious risks and dangers, terrorism – just after 9/11 – situates as the most dangerous hazard and as a challenge for policymakers and practitioners. We have reviewed the pros and cons of the most important academic schools that focused on tourism security and risk perception theory. The urgency is given in creating a bridge between theory and practice in order to articulate the policies to the nature of each risk. Today risk perception theory lacks a robust methodological background that invariably led to a gridlock. Whether the demographic school advances in the multivariable correlation between class, ideology, income or education with risk perception, the sociological school lays the foundations towards a much deeper understanding of the impacts of risks in society. Rather, the radical turn – coming from a Marxist tradition – focuses on the limitations of risk perception theory. Finally, authors who form the psychological tradition, as stated in this chapter, highlight on the complexity of emotions and the inner world. All chapters in this book aim to provide fresh practical cases that reflect the socio-cultural background of the four continents.