It is gradually being recognised by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that getting contemporary Indigenous governance right is fundamental to improving Indigenous well-being and generating sustained socioeconomic development. This collection of papers examines the dilemmas and challenges involved in the Indigenous struggle for the development and recognition of systems of governance that they recognise as both legitimate and effective. The authors highlight the nature of the contestation and negotiation between Australian governments, their agents, and Indigenous groups over the appropriateness of different governance processes, values and practices, and over the application of related policy, institutional and funding frameworks within Indigenous affairs. The long-term, comparative study reported in this monograph has been national in coverage, and community and regional in focus. It has pulled together a multidisciplinary team to work with partner communities and organisations to investigate Indigenous governance arrangements-the processes, structures, scales, institutions, leadership, powers, capacities, and cultural foundations-across rural, remote and urban settings. This ethnographic case study research demonstrates that Indigenous and non-Indigenous governance systems are intercultural in respect to issues of power, authority, institutions and relationships. It documents the intended and unintended consequences-beneficial and negative-arising for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians from the realities of contested governance. The findings suggest that the facilitation of effective, legitimate governance should be a policy, funding and institutional imperative for all Australian governments. This research was conducted under an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, with Reconciliation Australia as Industry Partner.

A rich analysis of the increasingly important engagement between international institutions and global social movements.

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal forms of governance largely dominated Latin American political and social life. Neoliberalism, Interrupted examines the recent and diverse proliferation of responses to neoliberalism's hegemony. In so doing, this vanguard collection of case studies undermines the conventional dichotomies used to understand transformation in this region, such as neoliberalism vs. socialism, right vs. left, indigenous vs. mestizo, and national vs. transnational. Deploying both ethnographic research and more synthetic reflections on meaning, consequence, and possibility, the essays focus on the ways in which a range of unresolved contradictions interconnect various projects for change and resistance to change in Latin America. Useful to students and scholars across disciplines, this groundbreaking volume reorients how sociopolitical change has been understood and practiced in Latin America. It also carries important lessons for other parts of the world with similar histories and structural conditions.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of spatial and environmental governance in contemporary Bali. In the era of decentralisation, Bali's eight district governments and one municipality acquired a strong sense of authority to extract revenues from within their territorial borders while disregarding the impacts beyond them which has exacerbated environmental, cultural and institutional issues. These issues are addressed through reorganising space. In reality, however, such re-organisation has predominantly been in order to provide space for tourism investments and market expansion. The outcomes of reorganising space are in fact shaped by the dynamics of power that interface with increasingly complex legal and institutional structures. These complex structures provide more arenas for vested interests to manoeuvre, but at the same time provide different forms of legitimacy for local forces to challenge the dominant process. The book demonstrates the mechanisms through which social actors mobilise legal-institutional arrangements to advance their interests.

Examines European food safety regulation at the national, European, and international levels as a case of "contested governance," illustrating issues of institutional trust and legitimacy.

Contested Governance in Japan extends the analysis of governance in contemporary Japan by exploring both the sites and issues of governance above and below the state as well as within it. All contributors share a common perspective on governance as taking place in different sites of activity, and as involving a range of issues related to the norms and rules for the management, coordination and regulation of order, whether within Japan or on the regional or global levels. This volume discusses the contested nature of governance in Japan and the ways in which a range of actors are involved in different sites and issues of governance at home, in the region and the globe. Including chapters on global governance, local policy-making, democracy, environmental governance, the Japanese financial system, corruption, the family and corporate governance, this collection will be of interest to anyone studying Japanese politics and governance.

This innovative and interdisciplinary book makes a major contribution to common pool resource studies. It offers a new perspective on the sustainable governance of common resources, grounded in contemporary and archival research on the common lands of England and Wales - an important common resource with multiple, and often conflicting, uses. It encompasses ecologically sensitive environments and landscapes, is an important agricultural resource and provides public access to the countryside for recreation. Contested Common Land brings together historical and contemporary legal scholarship to examine the environmental governance of common land from c.1600 to the present day. It uses four case studies to illustrate the challenges presented by the sustainable management of common property from an interdisciplinary perspective - from the Lake District, Yorkshire Dales, North Norfolk coast and the Cambrian Mountains. These demonstrate that cultural assumptions concerning the value of common land have changed across the centuries, with profound consequences for the law, land management, the legal expression of concepts of common 'property' rights and their exercise. The 'stakeholders' of today are the inheritors of this complex cultural legacy, and must negotiate diverse and sometimes conflicting objectives in their pursuit of a potentially unifying goal: a secure and sustainable future for the commons. The book also has considerable contemporary relevance, providing a timely contribution to discussion of strategies for the implementation of the Commons Act of 2006. The case studies position the new legislation in England and Wales within the wider context of institutional scholarship on the governance principles for successful common pool resource management, and the rejection of the 'tragedy of the commons'.