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In addition to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions many European countries have begun to develop adaptation strategies. However, developing and implementing these is not easy due to all kind of institutional complexities. Many of the current governance institutions are the product of times in which the climate issue was hardly of any importance. This paper deals with the question if our institutions are able to adapt to climate change. The paper presents a theoretical framework to assess the capacity of institutions to deal with climate adaption and applies it to adaptation strategies in four different European Countries: the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden. It concludes that institutions in these countries provide the basic qualities to adapt. Using the theoretical framework, five institutional weaknesses have been identified which can cause tensions on the long term: 1) the lack of openness of the political system towards learning and variety; 2) the strong onesided reliance on scientific experts; 3) the tension between top down policy development and bottom-up implementation; 4) the institutionalized mistrust in the problem solving capacity of civil society and 5) the wickedness of reserving funding for the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the policy transformation of pension regimes is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the recent pension reforms in the U.S., Great Britain, Sweden and Japan, and the relationship between income inequality and pension regimes.

Recently, two of the strongest social democratic parties in the world, the British Labour Party and the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) have taken puzzlingly different policy trajectories. Far from narrowing?as a consequence of imperative structural conditions, predicted by a number of theorists?the institutional configuration of their welfare regimes has widened. Nor have the trajectories followed the institutional logics of divergence that would be projected by historical institutionalist scholars. In order to map welfare policy we introduce two dimensions: the ?quantitative? and the ?qualitative? dimension of social democracy. ?Quantitatively? (distribution of life-chances and resources, social expenditures) there has been far less change than critics tend to hold. Policies are distinctly separate from the ?liberal? model of welfare state. The real change in Labour?s position has occurred in the character of the welfare state programmes?the ?qualitative? dimension of social democracy (aspirations for altering the ethos of social relations)?a surprisingly neglected dimension. In SAP changes have been far less deep. Non-municipal schools and private care-sector sub-contractor may form growing parts of the social state, but the core make-up of the welfare state is still solidly universal with public sector financing and provision. In conclusion the two-dimensional approach provides a tool for description and enables us to pose new questions for future research. Structuralist and historical institutionalist accounts are too deterministic. There does not seem to be an overall neo-liberal logic. The construction of political problems and possibilities is laden with agency, which calls for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary studies of delegation tend to focus on the discretion that law-makers give to administrators when applying regulations or delivering services. One almost entirely unexplored aspect of delegation is that which occurs when administrative officials are given the task of developing policies in the first place. Politicians frequently have only very sketchy ideas of what is needed to put together a "policy" - for example what mix of laws, regulations, internal guidance, financial arrangements and guidelines have to be finalised before sets of measures can be presented to the legislature and/or a wider public. They delegate crucial aspects of this work to bureaucrats. How this delegation is managed, the kind of discretion that dealing with "detail" brings and the wider implications of this form of bureaucratic involvement in policy making for our understanding of the policy process in general and theories of delegation in particular are explored using evidence from the United Kingdom and Sweden. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]