The aims of EU competition law are contested. The mainstream view that competition law prohibits conduct that harms consumer welfare leads to discussion about the proper economic approach to apply. EU competition law has often been applied in ways that address other public policy considerations, presently focusing on promoting digital markets and a green agenda. The procedures to apply competition law must safeguard the fundamental rights of undertakings and the Court of Justice has helped shape the degree of protection as well as the right to a robust judicial review of Commission decisions. Since 2004, national competition authorities have been tasked with applying EU competition law. Cooperation among national authorities and the Commission is facilitated by the European Competition Network and the ECN+ Directive has conferred on each national competition authorities the same enforcement powers that the Commission enjoys. Each national authority focuses on cases that affect its jurisdiction, the Commission retaining responsibility for cross-border infringements. Private enforcement has been facilitated by the EU legislature and a system of collective redress by which consumers secure compensation is emerging slowly in some jurisdictions.

With economic reforms in the 1980s, the opening up of political space and the end of war in the early 1990s, Mozambique embarked on a decentralisation process. As in other sub-Saharan Africa countries, the impact of the decentralisation reforms on local development and the strengthening of democracy has been modest. How can this be explained? This chapter addresses this question analysing how institutional dynamics shaped their results. The main argument is that the nature of the political system shaped reform results, in the context of institutional dynamics. Of these, those linked to state capacity and independence from private interests, stand out. Reforms are implemented according to group interests, particularly political parties’ interests, which capture the state and use them for maintaining and bolstering political power. Rather than being a means of improving the provision of public goods and strengthening democracy, decentralisation reinforces state control and panders the elite. Probably the biggest challenge facing decentralisation, this makes it a fundamental issue in any reform, within the context of strengthening democracy and promoting local development.

This chapter focuses on state coordination brought about by the relationship between central and local governments, using local tax collection as a practical example. The dominant fact discussed in this chapter is the vacillation of the Tanzanian government between deconcentration, with centrally appointed civil servants in charge of local affairs, and full devolution to local governments. An ambitious local government reform was voted through in 1998, but never fully implemented. Responsibility for the collection of the property tax has changed three times in the last decade. As capacity is clearly missing at a local level, tax collection should optimally be under the central government for the time being. It is suggested that oscillating responsibilities in the recent past reflect hidden rent-seeking competition between local politicians, central government tax collectors, and ruling party members. In effect, corruption has been observed with both central and local tax collection. An important conclusion that comes out of the chapter and the discussion by Jan Willem Gunning is the role of capacity in the design of institutional structures in developing countries.

Chapter 2 recovers a distinct interpretation of ‘modern socialism’ that focused on diffusing power to producers, consumers, and communities. Over the 1970s and 1980s, several left-wing thinkers and politicians championed redistributing economic and social power through industrial democracy or consumer and community empowerment. These explorations were fuelled by critiques of the post-war state, trade union assertiveness, corporatist experiments, municipal socialism, and market socialism. In the 1980s, they were championed as ‘modern socialism’, mainly as a response to Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policies like popular share ownership and the ‘right to buy’ a council house. Drawing on maverick academics and Eurocommunist journalists, ambitious Labour MPs argued that a ‘modern socialism’ needed to diffuse power through schemes like employee share ownerships. They embraced socioeconomic democracy as ‘modernisation’. However, while some decentralist ideas remained influential, the popularity of diffusing economic power peaked in the late 1980s. This helped scotch subsequent attempts to make the ‘stakeholding economy’ a foundation of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’.

Traditional principles studied in this chapter – mission command (decentralisation) and partnership between a commander and his chief of staff – are seen as a special characteristic of German command. Part of the mechanism for handling the first command task, co-ordinating a mass army. Why mission command’s implementation was limited in Western Front conditions, and how granting autonomy of action could go badly wrong. Lack of trust in subordinates, risk aversion, the growing complexity of battle, shortages of manpower and matériel and good communications led to increased micro-management.

Mission command linked to the partnership between a commander and his chief staff officer, the command team. Composition, strengths and weaknesses of the commander and general staff officer cadres. Great efforts to create effective command teams: reasonably successful in terms of their duration, less so in the vital combined arms balance required by modern battle. General staff officers increasingly influential, but commanders remained important.

I argue that one of the basic tenets of classical liberalism is that, if left free, people will cooperate and reciprocate with others as a means to pursue their own individual desires. Yet, if one is not careful, the rules and institutions that evolve within society over time may crowd out the motivation for people to reciprocate, and may instead crowd in their tendency towards selfish egoism. Policy makers therefore have a role to play in nurturing the conditions that, ideally, protect and foster the intrinsic human tendency to reciprocate. However, one should not try to force people to be cooperative; the tendency to reciprocate ought to be autonomously driven, and the extent to which people are driven to reciprocate – both positively and negatively – will often be influenced heavily by perceptions of desert. I finish by proposing a few ways for reciprocity to be nurtured: namely, for policy makers to emphasise the importance of this basic human tendency in their rhetoric; to address the extreme concentrations in income and wealth that have been allowed to accumulate in many countries over recent decades; and to decentralise, as far as possible, public policy decision making.

Industry is a major contributor to climate change. Many industrial sites, supply chains and customers are vulnerable to climate change and policy and consumer responses to climate change. Profits from industrial production depend on consumer demand, and how products are provided. Powerful forces such as digitalisation, dematerialisation, decentralisation, electrification, efficiency improvement and circular economies influence production and emissions Industrial firms face pressure from regulators, investors and customers. However, there is enormous potential to capture multiple benefits through aggressive, innovative decarbonisation strategies that target growth markets and involve cooperation along supply chains. Economic productivity and business competitiveness improvement can cut business costs and reduce extreme weather risk exposure, whilst positioning manufacturing companies for fast-growing markets in low-carbon resilient products and services. The chapter overviews policies national and subnational government policymakers can consider to support transition to a zero-carbon resilient industrial sector.

This chapter provides a reassessment of competence allocation and exercise under the UK constitution. It shows how the existing allocation needs to be understood through the prism of EU membership, and supports previously provided by the EU’s governance system. In particular, the EU’s commitment to subsidiarity, under which decisions should be taken at the lowest effective level, and its openness to regional concerns, carved out space for the exercise of devolved competence within a system of cooperative multilevel governance. This is in stark contrast to the near autonomous coexistence of the different governments within the UK nation state. As the UK embarks on the process of leaving the EU, its internal distribution of power is subjected to a recentralisation of competence. Informed by the literature on comparative federalism, it argues that there is a need for an effective domestic replacement for the shared competence space previously provided by the EU’s cooperative federalist system of governance. Powerful challenges have come from an attachment to the model of autonomous coexistence of central and devolved levels of government, reinforced by a resurgent principle of Westminster parliamentary sovereignty. Without an effective commitment to shared governance however, the Union’s future is in serious doubt.

In 1994, many responsibilities of Statistics Sweden were transferred to new statistical units operating within policy areas. Statistics Sweden has gradually accrued greater formal powers to oversee and coordinate official statistics in the country, leading to a partial reversal of the decentralisation reforms. Chapter 4 shows how credibility imperatives and institutional settings have shaped these developments. Decentralisation emerged following the end of social democratic political hegemony, when centrist and new-right governments demanded greater responsiveness and efficiency and sought to break up bureaucratic monoliths. Depoliticisation pressures, driven by the EU context, have resulted in a political push for recentralisation of authority. Statistics Sweden historically pursued credibility by emphasising competency, but shifted to stressing usefulness and demystification of official statistics. Sweden’s statisticians enjoy formal independence thanks to constitutional provisions that protect the autonomy of Swedish government agencies, but continuous informal dialogues are used to secure policymakers’ influence over statistical agendas.

The USA has a decentralised statistical system of 13 ‘principal statistical agencies’ and numerous smaller official statistical programs. Formal arrangements for autonomy differ between the agencies, including various models for appointing agency heads. The Chief Statistician has a unique role, not directly overseeing statistical production but with power to review and veto existing and proposed data collection initiatives in the federal government. There is a strong political imperative to steer statistics in support of policy agendas, resulting in practice incremental expansion of statistical collections to meet new needs. Support for statistical autonomy has a pronounced partisan flavour. The US separation of powers creates a greater number of political access points into statistical programs, but also a higher degree of transparency that discourages political meddling. Administrative traditions create an imperative to secure access to the White House, and the office of the Chief Statistician acts as a gatekeeper for this access, channelling statisticians’ demands for new resources and authorities to key central agencies in the executive.

Britain has a partly decentralised arrangement where most official statistics are produced in government departments at the direction of ministers. A parallel set of centralised statistical institutions and organisations has grown up over time, culminating in the 2007 legislative reforms instituting a formally independent central statistical authority. Chapter 6 traces the different credibility imperatives bearing on UK official statistics and shows how these produced demands for centralisation, legislation, and independencewith attention to the political fallout from the Thatcher Government’s defunding of and interference in official statistics, along with subsequent efforts to find arrangements enhancing statistical independence while preserving the decentralised model. The chapter illustrates impacts of UK government statisticians’ behaviours, highlighting problems in the management of the central statistical agency, and conflicts between statisticians over reform. It shows that the distribution of statistical authority in the UK reflects efforts to reconcile post-Thatcher depoliticisation with a decentralised arrangement and Westminster conventions of ministerial prerogative.

Global governance is a particularly challenging area of global politics in which to assess and develop Green contributions because the nature of global governance reform that Greens would like to see is far less clear than for Green visions regarding related areas such as the economy, the state or security. I argue, nevertheless, that there is a clear need for a Green account of global governance, one which uniquely assesses the project and practice of global governance as a whole from the point of view of its ability to create a sustainable society rather than its ability to preserve order as an end in itself. This chapter firstl outlines Green critiques of prevailing global governance arrangements, focused on their democratic deficits and poor levels of accountability, the concentration of power in global neoliberal institutions such as the World Trade Organization,the World Bank and the IMF and their failure to advance a more sustainable model of development. Second, it proposes a vision for Green global governance in which there is a rebalancing and repurposing of global governance institutions around the need to move towards a sustainable society. Third, it evaluates strategies for achieving Green global governance.

Reciprocity, if harnessed in the right way, can serve as a force for good, but it can wither and thus needs to be nourished. This chapter suggests three nutrients. First, reciprocity should be emphasised in the political discourse. If we want social structures that support the basic human motivation to reciprocate and hence cooperate, then how they do so ought to be explained clearly. Second, the decentralisation of more of the management of public services to local planners, purchasers and providers is advisable, partly because securing reciprocal motivations and actions and abating egoistical ones is more difficult the larger the group, partly because this would afford greater local level innovation, which, if good results were shown, could be disseminated cross-regionally, and partly because local level actors will be more in tune with the objectives and priorities of the people they serve. Third, there ought to be policy action on reducing the high concentrations of income and wealth within small percentages of the population, because if one wants people to give and take it makes sense to create conditions where they do not feel that others are merely taking.