International experience of Policy Councils on food and nutrition has developed over recent decades but they have not received the attention that is due to them. The 1992 International Conference on Nutrition recommended that governments create Food Policy Councils but few have been created. There has been more experience in local and sub-national policy councils, particularly in North America....

E-waste refers to both electronic and electrical waste materials; namely any items which rely on an electric current or electromagnetic fields in order to operate, and contain a hard-drive or significant electronic components and/or a printed circuit board. E-waste is outstripping the general growth of the municipal waste stream. Increasingly, smaller and cheaper electronic items are being disp...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other “research” activities, such as software. Second, argument still rages about the efficacy of direct public spending on R&D via spending on academic research councils, univers...

This paper describes a two-year study conducted in 24 English councils to evaluate the implementation of the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families. The Framework promotes a holistic, multi-agency approach towards the assessment of children in need. The study was carried out in two phases. Phase one explored how councils implemented the Framework and accompanying as...

A large number of food policy councils (FPCs) exist in the United States, Canada, and Tribal Nations (N = 278), yet there are no tools designed to measure their members' perceptions of organizational capacity, social capital, and council effectiveness. Without such tools, it is challenging to determine best practices for FPCs and to measure change within and across councils over time. This stud...

in a unitary state, the decentralization consists to give the legal personality of the public law to the parts of the territory (village, city, province and region) will be liberally administrate. therefore, the authorities of these units (the members of the councils) are elected by the people and they have their administration, attributions, budget and employees. in this paper, we examine the ...

This article reviews the results of second tranche assessments for CouncilMARK™ , Local Government New Zealand’s voluntary quality enhancement programme. Those councils that were reassessed generally showed either a modest improvement or no change in four priority areas assessed (governance, financial decision making, service delivery and communication). The business corporate focus CouncilMARK...