Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Cycles eliciting spirals (Editor's Note)

Better Perspectives in Research for Engineering UD.

The ideas of the New Public Management and the emulation of European policies have extended public-private collaboration as a horizontal governance instrument in the provision of welfare. However, the search for greater participation of the private sector in the management of certain public services presents difficulties. A clear case is the reform of labor intermediation carried out in Spain since 2013, whose final scope has been very limited due to factors such as the crisis, the multilevel government context and the ideology of governments. This article analyzes the specific case of the Valencia Region to try to understand the difficulties of reform of this public program and contribute to the literature with new empirical evidence on the importance of the factors cited in the degree of success of the reforms that seek to increase public-private collaboration in the sector of social policies.

What does public sector management provide to society and how can it be measured? This article aims at identifying what a public leader should take into account in order to plan an ad hoc assessment of the intangible public value of public management. Methodology combines theory analysis with empirical observations. Conceptual relations are explored in the literature of assessment and evaluation in public relations and corporate communication, public sector intangible assets, and the stream of studies titled Public Value, in order to elaborate the criteria to analyze practical cases of public value creation in public administrations. The analysis reveals that assessing public management with the approach of intangible public value implies looking at both organizational behavior as well as at the society’s feedback; it also enables calibrating the gap that there might exist between real government performance and what people perceive of that performance, as well as exploring causes for this gap. Finally, and subsequently, the article elucidates the levels, areas, and foci that a public leader should take into account in assessing public management.

E-government is conceived as a tool to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of public services. However, in spite of the efforts to achieve a widespread adoption of e-government, it has lower usage rates than expected. Although this fact has been studied from different viewpoints, in the present work the behavioral perspective is presented as an approach that may answer to this challenge. To get it, the relationship between different cognitive biases linked to the SQB (habit, inertia and resistance) with the intention (of use for users and continuation for users) is analyzed. The data were collected after a qualitative (two group sessions) and a quantitative work (923 questionnaires), aimed at two different samples of citizens (non-users and users of e-government). The results confirm the presence of the trend towards the status quo in the use of e-government. Besides, while in the case of non-users of e-government the cognitive biases analyzed are present, leading to delay its use, among the users of e-government habit lacks relevance, so they remain in use as a channel of access to public services.

The Spanish municipal plant is characterized by being a reality in permanent adaptation to the circumstances and exceptional departure from its heterogeneous structure. It is necessary to analyse the behaviour of the Local Administration in its normative and financial level during the last years; to verify if the objectives marked in the questioned local reform have been achieved; to see in what economic-financial situation the local plant is and what needs and challenges are posed for the future of these territorial entities.

For years, the European Union has placed special emphasis on the promotion of the institutional capacity of administrations that, through various financing instruments, promote local and urban development programs. So far there are few works aimed at the analysis of institutional capacity among Spanish local administrations as a result of these initiatives. This work is intended to study the promotion of this capacity in Spanish cities that have implemented urban development programs, more precisely, the URBAN 2007-2013 initiative. Through the administration of a questionnaire among Spanish municipalities, the aim is to analyse the extent to which the institutional capacity has been developed, as well as the relationship between its level of development and other elements of the local context, such as the previous experience accumulated in similar programs and the management model within which the program is implemented, elements that will be revealed key factors in the degree of development of institutional capacity.

This paper carries out an in-depth analysis of four Spanish cities (Alicante, Cádiz, Córdoba and Coslada). These municipalities implement urban initiatives co-financed with European funds in the 2007-2013 call. The aim of this work is to clarify the gap between the design and the implementation of public policies. In this sense, the paper tries to identify the factors that would introduce inconsistencies between both phases of the public policy in each case. Starting from an extensive methodology the paper analyzes the design and implementation of urban regeneration policies in four Spanish cities through the development of in-depth interviews.

The long-lasting development of urban policies based on an integrated approach and aimed at disadvantaged neighborhoods’ regeneration in the European framework has largely influenced the Spanish context (De Gregorio, 2012; González, 2011). However,  the Spanish context has had its own evolution and characteristics, both in urban practice as in the legislative and administrative framework  (Matesanz and Hernández, 2014). The present article seeks to analyze the evolution of the parameters linked to the integrated approach (areas, agents and urban integration) in the legal-administrative discourse of urban policies aimed at «regenerating» the consolidated city in Spain, especially the vulnerable neighborhoods. As a result of this analysis, variations are observed, not only in the intensity of the integration proposed in their plans and programs, but also in their approaches and objectives, inseparable from the type of projected performance and city model linked to it.

Current Integrated Sustainable Urban Development politics require a continuous and reiterative monitorization of the in-progress actions or proposed initiatives. Thus, a European countries-based consortium created and made available to the planners a tool specifically designed to evaluate the integrated vision of plans, projects and interventions devised and/or developed within small, medium or big cities all over Europe: The Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities (RFSC). This work aims to present the outcomes of the compared analysis between two strategic plans developed in Lucena, a medium-sized city in the South of Cordoba (Spain), focusing on their integrated vision. Medium-cities have been considered by the European guidelines as the urban category with the best qualities for urban-territorial sustainability.