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Water Management and Modernization of the Water Sector in Syria, Considering the German Experience
(2019)
Water plays an essential role in human life as well as in various sectors of the economy, it is a strategic and crucial factor for achieving social and economic development and supporting ecological systems. However, the world's water resources are exposed to considerable and continuing pressure since the water use rate has increased twice as quickly as the rate of population growth during the 20th century, which led to malfunctions in the balance between renewable and available water resources and the growing demand for water.
Therefore, the issue of water is the main challenge to humans in the 21st century. Particularly affected by water scarcity is the Middle East, where the availability of water is less than 1,700 m3 per capita per year. This dissertation focuses on the Syrian water sector, considering both aspects of administrative modernization and stakeholder approaches for ensuring the creation of an enabling environment capable of improving water management in Syria. The central goal of this research is to introduce a set of institutional, legislative and economic measures that can be used to rationalize and maintain the water resources in Syria to apply Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). Quantitative and qualitative data and methods were scrutinized to provide an overview of the status and problems of the water sector, as well as perspectives for innovative water management and corresponding modernization policies in Syria.
The thesis tackled the research questions defining the main challenges of the Syrian water sector and examining its existing enabling environment as well as its suitability for achieving sustainable water resources management. Furthermore, the study evaluated the existing
governance regime and the institutional framework of the Syrian water sector, checked the availability, and estimated the degree of application of its management instruments. The research also examined the ongoing process of development and financing of waterinfrastructure and finally estimated the overall impact of water resources management in Syria on economic, social, and environmental aspects. Finally, the study provides optimized recommendations and potential solutions for the development of the Syrian water sector according to the IWRM paradigm.
Administrative sanctions can be said to dwell in the periphery of punishment because they do not require setting the wheels of criminal procedure in motion. This allows States to save public resources as well as helps them to escape closer scrutiny at the judicial level. At the same time, the imposition of administrative sanctions usually curtails individual guarantees. Against this background, this article examines where the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) draws the line between measures belonging to the ‘hard core of criminal law’ and the periphery. After a presentation of gradual broadening of the ‘criminal limb’ guarantees of Article 6 European Convention on Human Rights to administrative measure of a punitive nature, it explores where do these guarantees meet their limits by taking the approach adopted in the landmark Jussila judgment as a point of departure. Subsequently, a structured analysis of the selected ECtHR case law in which this approach has been applied or – at least – invoked is provided. The article is finished with a reflection on the current interpretation of the said penumbra of punishment, which, among other things, identifies the possible gaps of individual protection, and the outlook for the future.
The analysis of forms and effects of what is usually conceived of as globalization or internationalization has become a major topic of political speeches and academic research, especially in the social sciences. While the consequences of globalization for Western economies and societies are often at the forefront of debates, their effects on public administrations are focused on relatively sparsely yet.
This entry aims at identifying the different manifestations and effects of internationalization in the context of bureaucracies. The subsequent sections provide an introduction and delineate the main mechanisms of internationalization. The next section identifies the topics discussed in the context of globalization, internationalization and transnationalization, and distils the main characteristics of international public administrations, as well as the effects and ramifications of internationalization on domestic public administration.
The insight that politics and administration should be treated as separated spheres is not new, as already Wilson portrayed administration as the apolitical execution of law. Consequently, even if the spheres are distinct, there is no politics thinkable without administration to execute. However, as argued by Peters (2018: 164), “this presumed separation of administration and politics allows them [bureaucrats] to engage in politics.”
While the consequences and causes of revolutions for political systems and the economy are at the forefront of debates in the respective disciplines, scholars have paid scant attention to the role of bureaucracies in revolutions. Against this background, this entry maps the efforts of public administration theory to come to grips with what is understood as revolution. As public administration is of utmost relevance in the context of revolutions, and the scope of the role of administrations in revolutions can be manifold: they may be the passive recipient of change, may influence developments actively, or be more or less unaffected by a change of the political system.
This entry conceptualizes which potential positions in revolutions can be taken by the public administration and which consequences revolutions have for the bureaucracy from a theoretical viewpoint, and provides humble empirical evidence of administrative behavior in revolutions worldwide.
National innovativeness is one key driver of economic development. The relation of national innovativeness and national culture has been firmly established by research. Cultural factors, however, influence national innovativeness via different mechanisms on the macro-, meso-, and micro-level of a country. In our paper, we build on existing research on the link between cultural dimensions and national innovativeness to develop a new model that classifies different cultural dimensions in groups according to their mechanism: political, social, or individual (PSI-model). Using a newly-established data set composed of world data, we test and find support for this model using a variety of regression models. The PSI-model provides a more structured theoretical background of the impact of different cultural dimensions on national innovativeness, especially with regard to social practices and social values. It can be used to generate policy recommendations on national innovativeness and offers further applications in fields related to the various impacts of national culture.
The regulation of interest mediation in democratic, economic relevant countries has not been systematically analyzed in a big N-study so far (smaller exceptions are (Chari et al., 2010; Holman and Luneburg, 2012)). This is surprising since interest mediation itself, the integration of societal actors into the decision-making processes, has been studied from many different perspectives using varying methodological approaches (Reutter, 2012; Willems and von Winter, 2007; Beyers et al., 2008; Eising et al., 2017).
This paper starts with the assumption that each country has a distinct way of dealing with the interests in its society, ranging from social, environmental, religious to economic ones, just to name a few. Each democratic country has to decide, how and in which ways societal interests are integrated into decision-making and which rules apply for these processes.
Existing research in interest mediation in general has in common that the concept of institutions helps us to map similarities as well as differences in the system of interest mediation. Institutions are understood as man-made, formalized (written) or non-formalized (unwritten) common conceptions or understandings of how power and other resources are distributed and exerted, how competences and responsibilities are defined, shaped and shared, as well as how interdependencies are structured (Morisse-Schilbach, 2012; March and Olsen, 1989; Mayntz and Scharpf, 1995).
The paper offers a conceptual framework to map the existing institutions relevant for regulating interest mediation in OECD countries to help understand the qualitative similarities and differences. To do so, it looks at formalized (written) or non-formalized (unwritten) rules, in terms of laws and by-laws, administrative procedures, and patterns of practices. The aim is to measure a) the openness of the interest mediation system in terms of equal access for all societal interests, and b) the level of formalized and non-formalized regulation to arrive at a typology of either open or closed as well as regulated or unregulated interest mediation systems.
The German Environment Agency has developed a guide in English to provide a concise introduction to the German environmental administration for an international readership. The guide is divided into five sections: After the introduction in Section 1, Section 2 introduces the wide range of subjects related to environmental protection in Germany. This is followed by Section 3, which describes the array of instruments the German environmental administration uses in pursuing its goals. The administrative structure in the Federal Republic of Germany, especially the division of tasks between the federal level, the level of the (Bundes-)Länder (federal states) and the local-level are explained in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 provides examples of important procedures and instruments in administrative environmental protection.
Against a background of extensive literature examining how digital platforms are regulated through ‘soft’ mechanisms, this paper analyses the ‘hard law’ techniques, such as sanctions, which are also very much used on digital platforms to police undesirable behaviours.
It illustrates the use of these sanctions, suggesting that it is possible to find three different categories of sanctions: sanctions that find their source in hard (international and domestic) law, sanctions that find their source in digital platforms’ own normative production, and sanctions used in the course of disputes. Platform operators can have an intense power of norm-setting and sanctions, with a tendency to concentrate power within themselves or with unclear arrangements for dividing it across different entities. This can deeply affect individual freedoms. This paper suggests that the ways in which the power to set, decide and enforce sanctions is exercised in the digital space transform the public–private divide: the allocation of roles between sovereign public bodies and free private actors is reshaped to become ‘hybrid’ when it comes to enforcing rules and monitoring compliance through a wide range of sanctions on digital platforms. This paper frames the legitimacy questions arising from sanctions and suggests that the public–private divide may have to be bridged in order to locate a possible source of legitimacy. A future framework for assessing how platform operators set norms and ensure compliance through sanctions needs to start from individual users to see how best to protect their freedom when checks and balances around platforms’ powers and sanctions are developed. These individual users are the ones who suffer from the economic, social and reputational consequences of sanctions in both the digital world and the physical world.
Short presentation of the corresponding conference paper "A soft shell with a powerful core? Soft Europeanisation and social policy: a new understanding of the Open Method of Coordination and its potential to enhance social welfare in Europe", focussing on the theoretical idea and empirical evidence.
Policymakers and transmission system operators frequently face problems when planning and constructing new high-voltage transmission lines because of opposition among local residents. Protest varies due to attributes of the transmission lines (e.g., length and size), site-specific characteristics, and the extent of consternation among local residents. The most controversially discussed grid expansion project in Germany is the SuedLink, which has been causing severe protest among groups of local residents. One driver of public opposition is the existence of local citizens’ initiatives. These groups play an important role, for example by influencing the public debate, taking legal action, or mobilizing their members and other citizens into protest. In doing so, they can cause delays due to confrontational planning and approval procedures. In order to deal with these risks, decision-makers need to know about the actual effects of citizens’ initiatives on public protest. So far, however, empirical research on these effects has been sparse. This study contributes to filling this gap by considering one specific aspect of the influence of citizens’ initiatives. It isolates the causal effects of citizens’ initiative membership on members’ individual protest behavior in the context of the SuedLink. Controlling for various potential confounders, our results clearly indicate that the probability of performing protest behavior and the intensity of protest are substantially larger for members of citizens’ initiatives than for non-members.
Governments and energy operators are frequently confronted with opposition to the construction of new highvoltage transmission lines. In this context, a recent experiment by Mueller et al. (2017) tested the so-called proximity hypothesis and found that spatial proximity to proposed transmission line corridor route alternatives significantly affected residents' likelihood of having negative risk expectations, showing low levels of support, and engaging in protest against the planned facility. Moreover, their findings suggest that the relationship between spatial proximity and the dependent variables is appropriately modeled by a distance decay function, showing that effects attenuate with increasing distance from the infrastructure site. Unfortunately, because of the fact that the study is the only one that has tested the proximity hypothesis in the context of planning new trans-mission lines so far, the existing evidence cannot be considered as a solid knowledge base. Therefore, to strengthen the reliability of the existing evidence, the natural experiment of Mueller et al. (2017) has to be replicated, which is the purpose of the present study. The findings of the replication clearly support the results provided by Mueller and colleagues and provide further empirical evidence that strengthens the proximity hypothesis in the context of power grid expansion.
Freedom of information (FOI) laws aim to improve the public’s opportunities to access official information from public authorities and hence to increase the level of transparency. Thus, it is important to know whether and to what degree the effects intended by establishing FOI laws are achieved and how their implementation could be improved. In order to answer these questions, FOI laws have to be evaluated. Unfortunately, attempts to evaluate FOI laws are still in their infancy. To promote sound evaluation, this article aims to provide guidance on how comprehensive FOI law evaluations might be designed and conducted.
Lecture at Vilnius University.
§ 1 European Administrative Law and EU Administrative Law: Specialties of EU Administrative Law / EU Administrative Law and ‘Unionalisation’ of National Administrative Law / Functions of Administrative Law / European Administrative Law = EU Administrative Law? / „Speyer Understanding“ of European Administrative Law
§ 2 Administrative Law and the Council of Europe:
Aims, Organs and Instruments of the Council of Europe / European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its Impact of Administrative Law /
Other Conventions in Terms of Art. 15 (1) of the Statute of the Council of Europe / Recommendations of the Committee of Ministers of the CoE Concerning Administrative Law / Concept of Pan-European General Principles of Good Administration
Vorstellung des deutschen Systems der GFA
Working Group 2.1.: "Common European Principles of Administrative Law and Good Administration”
(2019)
Common European Principles of Administrative Law and “Good Administration” / EU Administrative Law and ‘Unionalisation’ of National Administrative Law / Functions of Administrative Law / European Administrative Law = EU Administrative Law? / ReNEUAL Working Group 2.1:
“Common European Principles of Administrative Law and Good Administration” / Specialties of EU Administrative Law
Limited Right to Appeal in German Administrative Court Proceedings - A (fake) Success Story of what?
(2019)
The following topics are being discussed: The German Court System / Reform of the Access to the Higher Courts of Appeal in 1996 / Reasons given for limiting the Access to the Higher Courts of Appeal in 1996 / How to measure Success of limiting the Access to the Higher Courts of Appeal? / Do the Reasons given for limiting the Access to the Higher Courts of Appeal make sense? / Lessons to be learned from the German Example
- The concept of a three-tiered structure of administrative courts has been developed from 1949 onwards in the Western part of Germany
- Extremely difficult economic situation, need to built up nearly every infrastructure, very complex legal situation - Nevertheless clear decision of the drafters of the constitution to create effective judicial protection in administrative matters as a reaction to the horrors of the Nazi regime and the Stalinist developments in the Soviet occupation zone
- What does this mean for reforms of administrative court proceedings today?
The European Commission presented, in its White Paper on the Future of Europe, scenarios on the future of the EU in 2025, which prompt the question as to their meaning for the future of EU administrative law. This article explores the implications of the scenarios for the future of EU executive rulemaking and its constitutional consequences. As some scenarios imply a more powerful political role of the Commission, and almost all expand the scope and usage of executive rulemaking, the executive power gains induce the need for more distinct constitutional guidelines for executive rulemaking and for strengthened parliamentary control, to preserve the institutional power balance between legislative and executive rulemaking. The analysis develops proposals insofar and demands respect for constitutional barriers already enshrined in EU primary law but not sufficiently addressed yet in institutional practice.
This study explores public leaders’ organizational learning orientation in the wake of a crisis. More precisely, we study the association between public leaders’ public service motivation and their learning orientation (instrumental versus political). This research addresses the lack of systematic empirical data on crisis-induced learning and provides a first systematic operationalization of this important concept. We analyze survey data collected from 209 Dutch mayors on their learning priorities in responding to a hypothetical crisis situation in their municipality. The mayors’ response patterns reveal (1) “cognitive”, (2) “behavioral”, (3) “accountability”, and (4) “external communication” dimensions of crisis-induced learning. We find that mayors with a stronger public service motivation put more effort into instrumental learning (dimensions 1 and 2), and surprisingly, also into political learning (dimensions 3 and 4). Mayoral experience in previous crises is positively associated with accountability-related learning after a crisis. However, mayoral tenure is negatively associated with crisis-induced behavioral learning.
Darstellung des deutschen Systems der Gesetzesfolgenabschätzung.
Governments and energy operators are often confronted with local residents’ protest against the construction of new high-voltage overhead transmission lines, negative risk expectations, and a lack of public support. A frequently discussed strategy for dealing with these issues is to build underground cables instead of overhead lines. So far, however, there is not much empirical evidence of whether substituting overhead lines by underground cables actually reduces protest or affects public risk expectations and attitudes. This study contributes to filling this gap by comparing residents’ risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior observed at two grid expansion sites in Germany by means of a quasi-experiment. At the time when the data were collected, both grid expansion projects–an overhead line project in Lower Saxony and an underground cable project in Hesse–were at the same stage of the legally defined planning and approval procedure. After controlling for various potential confounders, we obtained results revealing that there are no differences in the risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior of residents interviewed at the two project sites, or only marginal ones. Hence, our findings do not support the assumption that building underground cables necessarily improves the situation with regard to risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior.