How and to what effect do firms coordinate their actions in order to deal with the negative external effects of productive activity? Under which conditions do firm associations engage in environmental self-regulation and what kind of governance devices do they develop in order to tackle the...

In the transition towards a decarbonized energy system, we need city authorities to lead by example as public actors, to govern the actions of the private urban actors as local policy makers, and to conceive and manage the implementation of an integrated approach as coordinators, which we...

A crisis of governability has engulfed the world's industrialized democracies. It is not coincidental that the United States, Europe, and Japan are simultaneously experiencing political breakdown. Rather, globalization is a common culprit. Across the West's open societies, globalization is...

The challenge of institution building in African countries remains a major threat to the establishment of peace and justice, and the entrenchment of sustainable social and economic development. This may be attributed largely to the dynamic and complex social landscape of most African countries....

How can development policy support weak, dysfunctional or fragile states? What constitutes state fragility and what are the appropriate instruments for state-building? After reviewing two recent quantitative indexes (The Index of State Weakness in the Developing World and The Ibrahim Index of...

State weakness has come to be recognized as a key problem for the transformations in a number of Eastern European countries, particularly those East and South of enlargement. This paper addresses the issue firstly by asking how state capacity can be assessed and observed empirically, and...

Normative discourses on the European institutional set-up have paid attention to both vertical and horizontal decentralism. Decentralism refers to the respect of the autonomy of lower or smaller decision-making levels, the procedures privileging these decision-making levels (subsidiarity), and...