This article seeks light on the main claim of the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework that public policies can help to shape comparative advantage, and, to complement existing assessments that have relied predominantly on qualitative data from a few economic sectors. It examines the distribution of export success in a number of economic sectors, in which competitiveness is characterized by either radical or incremental innovation. Unlike previous studies, it does this across all those OECD countries clearly identified in the VoC literature as either liberal market economies, co-ordinated market economies or unclassified. Moreover, it draws on the latest available data at the lowest level of aggregation. In contrast to previous studies, a more appropriate measure of trade specialization, revealed symmetric comparative advantage, is used. Overall, the evidence supports the VoC framework; however, in some sectors, the data raise important conceptual and methodological issues overlooked in current research.

It is not hard to find the complaint that a group of policies are incoherent, operate in silos or are unintegrated. The aspiration to coherence is widespread across all political systems: it is today's idea in good currency. Scholarship has identified conditions that support coherence: a strong constituency with a shared policy image. This article confirms that these are vital sources of more or less coherence, but explores the question of whether more coherence in one area comes at the cost of incoherence elsewhere.

Case study detail contrasts the Scottish Executive's projection of a unified rural policy, with the reality of a persistent Scottish agricultural sector, with contending (multiple) publics with separate and often conflicting agendas: the case study found no unified policy community with shared perceptions. While a lack of coordination may simply be the manifestation of poor policymaking, this piece argues that in other cases the practical limitations on policy harmonization have to be acknowledged. Imperfectly coordinated rural policy may be inevitable as coordination in particular niches is often a casualty of competing priorities. This article argues against over ambitious expectations about the feasibility of integration. Accordingly it suggests that the project to rid policy practice of incoherence is too heroic: instead this article rediscovers the virtues of bargaining among informed and relevant participants, and incremental politics.

The EU plays a significant role in public policy aspects of Internet governance, having created in the late 1990s the dot eu Internet Top Level Domain (TLD). This enables users to register names under a European online address label. This paper explores key public policy issues in the emergent governance system for dot eu, because it provides an interesting case of new European transnational private governance. Specifically, dot eu governance is a reconciliation resulting from a governance cultural clash between the European regulatory state and what can be described broadly as the Internet community. The EU has customised the governance of dot eu towards a public–private dispersed agencification model. The paper extends the evidence base on agencification within trans-European regulatory networks and the emergence of private transnational network governance characterised by self-regulation.

This paper argues that we need to bring government back into discussions about network governance, via the concept of metagovernance which uses water reform in an Australian state as an example. Metagovernance is defined as the government of governance, and is a vital but under researched and under theorised problem because it is difficult and contentious. The paper identifies a range of metagovernance failures in this case and suggests that the lessons learnt by the Australian authorities from the experience have led to some rethinking about the benefits and desirable scope of network governance.