The study is aimed at identifying the factors which support a successful development of national strategies, programmes, packages of measures etc. with the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (SFOPH) and will provide findings and guidelines for the future planning of programme development processes. The research is based mainly on detailed case studies of selected programme development processes in the SFOPH. The case studies consist of a detailed reconstruction of the programme formulation processes with special emphases on the actors involved in the processes and other factors influencing the success of the programme formulation. In addition to a traditional comparative case study design, the research will rely on the Actor Process Event Scheme approach (APES; see pwi-apes.uzh.ch) which allows not only for a graphical analysis of the processes but as well for a comparative social network analysis.
The Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) is in charge of the environmental education on the federal level. The unit for Environmental Education (EE) encourages the implementation of environmental education since 12 years. The activities in environmental education of the FOEN are mostly based on partnerships with the following four institutions: the Foundation for Environmental Education (SUB/FEE), the Education Centre of WWF, Partner for Environmental Training and Sustainability (sanu) and Silviva, an organisation for environmental education and forest. Furthermore the FOEN collaborates with the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET) and the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education. The evaluation of these activities intends to analyse the effects of the FOEN regarding the implementation of the environmental education in the educational system in Switzerland. It should give a basis for future activities of the FOEN in environmental education. The leading questions are 1) Did the division EE of the FOEN achieve their goals from 1993-2005? 2) How are the effects of the EE on a political level regarding the educational system in Switzerland and on a textual level in schools and education centres? 3) What can be improved regarding synergies with other domains like health and global learning in the framework of education for sustainable development? 4) What are the consequences of an abandonment of the EE in the FOEN? 5) What role plays the International Day of Forest? 6) What is the ideal institutional setting of the EE unit within the FOEN? The study follows a multi-methods approach with inter alia documentary analysis, surveys and expert interviews.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is in a very challenging situation. The territorial organisation with the two entities, the Federation and the Republica Srbska, is far from contributing to overcoming ideological and political barriers within the country. The professional and political exchange with the surrounding countries of former Yugoslavia is (to a great extent artificially) kept low-profile. The relation to the EU is as yet mainly marked by the 'foreign governance' of the country, and not by spatial, social and economic coherence. Within the SCOPES 2000-2003 programme, aspects, shortcomings and opportunities of inter-regional co-operation within Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also with the surrounding countries, were tested and evaluated against the background of two specific issues of regional planning and development: the main transport corridors linking to the EU, and the question of city networks and territorial units (project nr. 7BIHP65680). One of the most important conclusions was that that it might not be possible to find an optimal regional structure solving all kinds of tasks and ambitions. Instead, an efficient system and basis for inter-regional co-operation could actually be the primary task, allowing for flexibly generating adequate forms of co-operation for different issues. Bearing this in mind, the project has culminated in a final conference bringing together professionals from all space-relevant fields of work (sociology, planning, economy, ecology, political sciences, law etc.) as well as political representatives, from all countries of former Yugoslavia. The current SCOPES 2005-2008 project is being built upon this strong basis. On the one hand, the impulse induced by the final conference will be picked up and 'institutionalized', establishing a platform of professional and political exchange in the region on the basis of strategic and regional planning tasks. This will challenge and help to overcome the ideologies still strongly determining opportunities in the region. On the other hand, specific issues regarding the territorial organization of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be further developed. In this respect, the aim of the project is to establish principles and criteria for the territorial organization and inter-regional cooperation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. An appropriate territorial organization and inter-regional cooperation would accelerate democratic processes, improve the efficiency of civil services, and prepare grounds for a thorough exercise of civil rights. At the same time, it would speed up the linking of regions and cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina with those in Europe, which means speeding up the entire development of the country. All of this in a time when European cities and regions – more than ever – are at the heart of the dynamics of the continent.
Many scholars have asserted that the legitimacy of democratic political systems depends more and more on the performance of public policies. Output of the political system is replacing input as the central criterion for legitimate public action. For a political system to achieve output legitimacy, it must incorporate information about the public’s perception of its performance into its policy-making processes. The question of how to measure public policy performance, the processes through which the media system selects and communicates news about public performance, and the utilization of information on public perceptions of performance in public decision-making have each received wide attention in the literature, some of which addresses the Swiss case. However, no research to date has attempted to show how these issues relate to each other. We propose to investigate these questions in a common framework, which will allow us to address how the interdependencies between the processes of creation, diffusion, and utilization of information affect public performance. Connecting these processes is a necessary step towards answering the question of whether information on performance can generate political legitimacy. To investigate these questions, four policy fields are selected, within each of which three to four case studies are conducted. Each of these embedded case studies deals with one policy-making process. The main questions are: 1) how is information about the performance of the public sector created? 2) How do the media (and other communication channels) select and frame information about public performance for diffusion to citizens and decision-makers? And 3) how does the public sector use this information about perceptions of its performance? This integrative approach will provide insight into the processes of creation, diffusion and utilization of information about public performance. In so doing, the project will contribute to the ongoing debate on whether democratic legitimacy can be secured by political system output and thereby covers a crucial topic for the future of democracy in the 21st century.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, capacity of area-wide governance in urban regions is seen to rely increasingly on issue-oriented networks that associate public authorities from various levels of government, and often also business actors and other non-governmental agencies. The purpose of this project is to assess this trend towards ‘new regionalism’, through an analysis of the ways in which the conditions, the structures and the democratic anchorage of area-wide governance have changed in seven Swiss metropolitan areas during the 20th century. The research is guided by three basic questions: How have socio-political cleavages changed in the metropolitan areas under scrutiny? How has governance of these areas changed? How have patterns of decision making regarding metropolitan policies changed? The project combines quantitative and qualitative methods. On the one hand, longitudinal quantitative demographic, socio-economic and electoral data at the communal level will be collected and analysed for each metropolitan area. On the other hand, comparative case studies will be conducted on the change of urban public transport policies in these areas.
Die dezentrale Besiedlung der Schweiz ist unter Druck geraten. Zwar wurde seit den 1970er Jahren eine ganze Palette regionalpolitischer Instrumente entwickelt, mit denen das Überleben peripherer Regionen gesichert werden soll. Mit diesen Instrumenten wurden Berg- und sonstige wirtschaftliche Problemregionen während langer Zeit zweckmässig gefördert. In den letzten Jahren hat jedoch aufgrund geänderter nationaler und internationaler Rahmenbedingungen der Druck auf diese Regionen deutlich zugenommen. Viele periphere Regionen sehen sich aufgrund dieser Entwicklung mit Abwanderung – vor allem junger Menschen – und Bevölkerungsrückgang konfrontiert. Daran wird auch die gegenwärtig zur Debatte stehende Reform der Schweizer Regionalpolitik nichts grundlegendes ändern. Auch wenn dadurch die Zukunft gewisser Regionen insgesamt gesichert werden kann, ist nicht ausgeschlossen, dass innerhalb derselben weiterhin Abwanderungs- und Schrumpfungsprozesse stattfinden. Vor diesem Hintergrund besteht das Ziel dieses Teilprojekts darin, die relevanten politischen Prozesse zu erfassen, welche im Zusammenhang stehen mit der Entwicklung peripherer Regionen (d.h. im Wesentlichen: Wachstum oder Schrumpfung).
Background: HIV/Aids policies in Western Europe entered the phase of normalisation since the mid nineteen-nineties. The overall objective of this research project is to describe and to explain the development of HIV/Aids prevention policies in Western Europe in the current phase of normalisation, as well as to assess the capacity of national HIV/Aids prevention networks to meet current and future challenges in limiting the spread of HIV. Aims: During the first phase of funding, research activities were focused on the Swiss case (analysis of recent developments in HIV prevention policy at the Federal level as well as in seven cantons). The second phase of funding will be used to discuss the Swiss results in the light of developments in other European countries. Methods: The second phase of funding will entail comparative qualitative case studies in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and compare them to the Swiss case. The international case studies will work out developments of the various national HIV/Aids policies, since the mid-1990s, at the level of (1) policy ideas, (2) actors’ interests and motivations, and (3) institutional structures and procedures. More particularly we will focus on four domains of the national HIV/Aids policies: (a) large scale information campaigning, (b) targeted prevention for female sex workers, (c) targeted prevention for migrants, and (d) clinical treatment for persons living with HIV.
Wie kaum ein anderer Politikbereich verdankt die HIV/Aids-Prävention in Westeuropa ihren Erfolg der systematischen Verwendung von sozialwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen. Auch in der Schweiz wurde seit dem Auftauchen des HIV Mitte der 1980er Jahre im Bereich der HIV/Aids-Prävention sozialwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse gefördert, vermittelt und verwendet. Im Zuge der sogenannten Normalisierung wurde in der Schweiz die Förderung der HIV/Aids-spezifischen Grundlagenforschung im Jahre 2004 eingestellt, bzw. in die Strukturen der allgemeinen Forschungsförderung durch den Schweizer Nationalfonds übergeführt. Das Ziel dieser Expertise ist es, abzuschätzen wie sich diese Entwicklung auf die Erzeugung, Vermittlung und Verwendung von Erkenntnissen der sozialwissenschaftlichen HIV/Aids-Forschung auswirkt. Dazu wird erstens die Entwicklung der sozialwissenschaftlichen HIV/Aids-Forschungsförderung auf nationaler Ebene in der Schweiz aufgezeigt. Zweitens wird die Entwicklung der Forschungslandschaft anhand eines Inventars der geförderten Projekte im Bereich der sozialwissenschaftlichen HIV/Aids-Forschung dargelegt. Drittens werden die Auswirkungen der Veränderungen der HIV/Aids-spezifischen Förderungsstrukturen auf die Erzeugung, Vermittlung und Verwendung von politikrelevantem Wissen in diesem Bereich analysiert. Dazu wird einerseits ein Vergleich mit den Förderungsstrukturen von Frankreich und Deutschland sowie im Bereich der Suchtforschung in der Schweiz angestrebt, anderseits werden Interviews mit Experten aus der Forschung, Politik und Praxis geführt.
This research project suggests to examine ‘foreign policy’ activities developed by city governments in six Swiss city regions, as well as in three European city-regions outside Switzerland. The basic hypothesis is that transnational city-cooperation is pursued as a means of strengthening a city’s or a city-region’s position in the face of global pressures. More precisely, we are interested in whether and how transnational city-cooperation contributes to the integration of (a) the relationships between actors at the level of the city (local governance), (b) the intergovernmental relations between local constituencies within the city-region (regional governance), and (c) the relationships between cities and upper-level governments (multi-level governance). ‘Urban foreign policy’ as the object of this research will be defined as a city’s engagement in transnational cooperation schemes that involve at least one partner city in another country. The research design is based on comparative case studies of six Swiss city-regions (Zurich, Bern, Lucerne, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano), and three European city-regions outside Switzerland (Stuttgart, Lyon, Milano). The analysis will rely on data collected through qualitative research instruments: secondary literature, analysis of documents, as well as an expected total of 90 in-depth interviews. The project is to be executed in a period of 2 years (30 months), starting in November 2004. Besides its scientific interest, the proposed research is also expected to yield results that are of practical relevance. On the one hand, we hope to isolate conditions for success or failure of transnational city-cooperation and identify ‘best practices’ in this realm. On the other hand, we hope to establish to what extent transnational cooperation of Swiss cities can compensate the drawbacks from Switzerland’s non-membership in the European Union.
Seit der Verankerung des ‚Städteartikels’ (Art. 50) in der Bundesverfassung ist die schweizerische Agglomerationspolitik in Bewegung. Sachpolitisch wird im Wirtschaftsraum Zürich in vielen Bereichen schon lange eng zusammengearbeitet. Die institutionellen Strukturen dieser Zusammenarbeit wurden bis jetzt aber noch nie systematisch untersucht und bewertet. Diese Lücke soll mit der vorliegenden Studie geschlossen werden. Ziel ist die Erarbeitung von konkreten Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Zusammenarbeitsstrukturen. Diese sollen zudem mit den neuen agglomerationspolitischen Instrumenten des Bundes kompatibel sein. Die Untersuchung gliedert sich in zwei Teile. In einem Analyseteil werden bestehende Zusammenarbeitsstrukturen auf ihre Stärken und Schwächen untersucht. In einem Validierungsteil werden diese Ergebnisse mit den verschiedenen Partnern diskutiert und mögliche Massnahmen zur Verbesserung der Zusammenarbeit erarbeitet. Diese Vorschläge können sowohl die Optimierung bestehender, als auch die Schaffung neuer Zusammenarbeitsformen betreffen. Auftraggeber des Projekts sind der Regierungsrat des Kantons Zürich, die Stadträte von Zürich und Winterthur, sowie der Gemeindepräsidentenverband. Auftragnehmer ist eine Arbeitsgemeinschaft bestehend aus dem Büro Synergo und dem Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Universität Zürich.