Governments in the advanced industrial countries increasingly rely on supply-side reforms to intervene in the economy. This article examines one such reform, that of vocational education and training in France, whose successful implementation required that private actors cooperate not with the state, but with each other. As demonstrated through an empirical analysis of two employment zones, theories of institutional design that underscore the necessity of sanctioning cannot explain the successful emergence of cooperation, because new sanctioning regimes lack credibility under the uncertain conditions of economic reform. The primary obstacle to successful implementation of these reforms is uncertainty about the consequences of reciprocal cooperation, and the article highlights the mutual roles of states and employers' associations in overcoming this uncertainty. Active collaboration between policymakers and employers' associations, which have uniquely good access to private information about firms, is necessary to enable state policies to target those firms which are the most likely potential cooperators.

The evolution of public policies in the United States has been characterized as a process involving long periods of stability followed by abrupt episodes of substantial change. In this project, we identify strands in the literature and synthesize policy theories into a policy regime model useful in explaining both stability and change. This model focuses on power arrangements, policy paradigms and organization - factors that operate to maintain long periods of stability. We demonstrate how stressors - catastrophic events, economic crises, demographic changes, shifts in modes of production, and others - impact policy regimes and create pressures for change. We argue that the process of policy regime change - the abrupt episodes of substantial change - occurs with changes in the policy paradigm, alterations in patterns of power and shifts in organizational arrangements. The old policy regime disintegrates and the new one emerges with a new policy paradigm, new patterns of power and new organizational arrangements that operate to maintain long periods of stability.

A considerable and growing body of crisis management literature seeks to help business managers address disasters. Notwithstanding, the business literature on crisis management fails fully to understand the policy and political aspects of business disasters, and concentrates on prescriptive, managerial issues that show disregard and sometimes disdain for plural democracy. We illustrate our argument with a review of the existing crisis management literature, and three case studies: the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Jack in the Box E. Coli outbreak, and the crash of ValuJet flight 592. We find that the primary gap in the crisis management literature is its failure to understand the motivations of countervailing interest groups and the facts that mobilize them to take action. We argue that the lessons derived from these cases are equally applicable to North American, European and Asian business crises.

Past studies of the dynamics of U.S.-Canada environmental policy and policy-making have found little evidence of ‘weak’ convergence in this sector; that is, of Canadian policy moving towards the U.S. model of adversarial legalism, an implementation style based upon procedural policy instruments such as action-forcing statutes, citizen suits, and judicial activism. However, recent efforts at de-regulation and the reformation of government in the U.S., and moves towards multi-stakeholder policy-making in Canada, have altered the standard against which trends towards Canadian^ American convergence must be assessed. These reforms have moved the U.S. environmental regulatory system closer to that existing in Canada, in which regulations and other elements of the environmental regime are developed through negotiation rather than litigation. Since Canadian environmental implementation has also been altered over the same period, however, it is argued that a form of ‘strong’ convergence is emerging, in which both countries are moving not towards each other but towards a third, common, style, that associated with the development of self-regulation and voluntary initiatives under the influence of New Public Management ideas and principles.