Nazarbayev University (NU) in Astana, Kazakhstan, has aspirations both to be an internationally renowned research university and to serve as a model for the nation’s universities. NU began by partnering with elite international research universities and creating an admissions system based solely on academic merit and English-language proficiency. It benefited from sustained State support and continued institutional leadership but faces challenges in maintaining its focus while responding to shifts in the nation’s real politick.

Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh offers a rigorous liberal arts education to promising young women from across Asia. Established with the support of donors and the national government, AUW has built relationships with many low-resourced and marginalized communities. Its educational offerings prepare students for academic success and cultivate their leadership potential. It faces challenges balancing its founding purpose with the long-term imperative financial stability.

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings of the book by juxtaposing the workings of Accra’s old, established station with the designated function of a government-mandated and top-down administered public road transport terminal – the ‘new station’, as Accra’s urbanites have pithily dubbed it. It scales up the comparison to consider the significance of urban infrastructure as a ‘hard’ technical system and as a ‘soft’ system of sociality in relation to questions of governance, social order, and the significance of usage. Finally, it reflects on the broader implications of this study by pointing out empirical and theoretical continuities with the practices, places, and politics of urban hustle that go beyond this particular case of a West African bus station.

The introduction of bioprocessing in industry will increase the demand for biomass from agricultural fields, forests, and the marine environment (see Chapter 2). Chapter 3 will give you an understanding of the challenges related to extraction and production of biomass, which have spatial effects on land and marine use, ecosystems, and biodiversity. The collection and production of biomass must be sustainable, and contribute to biodiversity and an ethical environment as described in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 15 Life on land, SDG 14 Life below water, SDG 13 Climate action, and SDG 11 Methods. You will be introduced to life cycle analysis (LCA), which is a tool designed for broader analyses of products or whole production systems as well as analyses of the categories of policies societies implement in order to guide and regulate the production and processing of biomass.

This chapter reviews the development and implementation of English school education policy following an exploratory report by the Department for Education and Skills on the future of primary school collaboration and three major Blair (Labour) government initiatives focused on inter-school collaboration: the New Labour Academies; the Secondary Leadership Incentive Grant programme; and the Networked Learning Communities programme (and their further evolution under Brown (Labour)) until 2010. It traces the dramatic intensification of these policies under the Conservative–Liberal Coalition including incentives to create new academies and Teaching Schools. The Conservative policy also revolutionised school administration and performance by removing the remaining state schools from local government control. The stated aim of a 2016 White Paper ‘Education Excellence Everywhere’ was that, by 2022, every English state school would be in a multi academy trust. It is now past 2022 and, while this goal has not been attained, there is no doubt that ten years of a combination of policy and austerity have transformed England’s state school systems.

The rule of law is considered an essential element to guarantee the development of modern societies. Despite this and the democratizing waves that emerged after the Cold War, in recent years the world seems to have entered a stage of institutional stagnation, democratic erosion, and, more broadly, a rule-of-law backsliding at the transnational level. In this chapter, we present evidence of the deterioration of the rule of law at the transnational level and on how this phenomenon has come about. To do so, we use data from the WJP Rule of Law Index produced by the World Justice Project covering more than 100 countries for the period 2015 to 2022. We find that the rule of law has deteriorated in recent years around the world. This trend, however, masks variation in different indicators. Using cluster analysis of the change over time in the main indicators of the Index, we identify three groups of countries. The first is composed of countries that have experienced a deterioration in all indicators, but most notably in those measuring limits to state power, open government, and respect for human rights. The second group is composed of countries where overall rule-of-law trends have declined slightly. These countries have also experienced considerable decline in the indicators measuring limits to state power and respect for human rights, albeit of lesser magnitude. The third group is composed of countries where most indicators show slight improvements. These results suggest that the deterioration in the rule of law has been driven by the weakening of limits to state power. In contrast, except in those cases that have experienced a sharp decline, the weakening of the rule of law has not been driven by an acute deterioration in the application or enforcement of the law or in access to justice. We also find that the weakening of the rule of law appears to be associated, in part, with an increase in the authoritarian tendencies of already authoritarian regimes and, in part, with the rise of anti-pluralist and populist leaders.

This chapter examines Kenya's use of debt-based financial statecraft, revealing an uneven track record. It first describes how the Kenyan government diversified its portfolio of external finance with both international bonds and Chinese loans. Drawing on interviews with government and donor officials, the chapter then shows Kenya's mixed success in extracting bargaining leverage from its new sources of finance. While the Kenyan government achieved increased flexibility from donors on governance issues, it encountered greater resistance on financial management practices. The chapter highlights that donors' strategic interests in their relationship with Kenya encouraged them to be more flexible when Kenya diversified its portfolio of external finance, but that their concerns about accountability and use of funds led them to be more stringent on issues of financial management.

Over the past decade, ethnographers have increasingly paid attention to the ways in which practices and principles of financial speculation have been adopted in the governance of public and private resources. Those interested in matters of tax and taxation have typically associated speculation with tax evasion and fraud, paying less attention to other ways in which speculative thinking has entered the relationship between the taxpayer and the state. In this chapter, I examine the design and public reception of the Slovak National Receipt Lottery, one example of the way speculative logic has become part of governing the fiscal subject. I show how the Lottery both reflected and challenged established ideas of fiscal citizenship and redistributive justice, triggering novel anxieties about fraud, disclosure, and privacy amongst citizens and policymakers alike. It revealed a profound disconnect between the way policymakers imagined taxpayer behaviour and motivation, and citizens’ own perception of themselves as morally and socially embedded subjects. Finally, I suggest that the National Receipt Lottery is an example of speculative governance: a particular way of administering public life which combines elements of audit culture, behavioural policy, and gamification to generate social goods and shape citizen subjectivities.

Egypt is the most populous state in the Arab world, with just over 100 million citizens residing in the country, and Egyptian nationals have long looked abroad for opportunities. This chapter examines the evolution of the country’s policies toward its diaspora and seeks to understand how the Egyptian government has attempted to protect, assist, and cultivate loyalty among its citizens abroad, as well as how it has sought to exert further control over this population. Beginning with targeted secondment policies that aimed to spread pan-Arabist ideology in the 1950s and 1960s, and broadening to mass labor exportation agreements directed primarily toward other Arab nations in the 1970s, Egypt sought to address demographic concerns of overpopulation and an overburdened and underfinanced public sector, and to reap the benefit of remittances as a major contribution to the country’s GDP. But the chapter also addresses Egypt’s failure to establish effective governance of, and engagement with, its diaspora. This includes the overlapping responsibilities of the numerous ministries in charge of emigration, an unwillingness to resolve domestic economic issues in order to prevent further brain drain and to incentivize the return of Egyptians abroad, and the state’s continued use of transnational repression toward its citizenry.

The British State intervened in the Port of London in 1800. It did so again a hundred years later by appointing a Royal Commission, which provided the basis for eventual reform in 1908. The immediate reason for the Royal Commission was a dock proposal to abolish free entry to docks by river. But the wider context was long-standing, loudly voiced, shipping company grievances about river governance, licensing of lighterage and compulsory pilotage. The Commission’s conclusion that London should have a port authority was generally accepted. However, issues of constitution and compensation bedevilled the Conservative attempt to legislate. In the event, it was a Liberal government, with all-party support, which established the Port of London Authority, effectively nationalising London’s port. In an ironic coda, the port unions soon discovered their new public employer to be a more formidable opponent than their dock company predecessors had ever been.

Governor of the Marwanid period in Iraq for fourteen years, Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī was dismissed from his office in 120/738. The narratives of his downfall – the reasons for his dismissal as well as his killing — are found in the Abbasid historiography about him. Next to these narratives, a letter that the caliph Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik addressed to him in 119/736–37 can be found in two different sources. This contribution offers a study of this letter and its transmission. It investigates the relationship between the letter and the most developed narratives about Khālid. Unpacking these relationships allows us to look beyond them and provide insights into Khālid’s removal. Finally, this paper looks at this correspondence as an expression of the writing of power and explores how it helps us better understand the ties that bind a caliph and his subordinate.

The Conclusion provides a very brief recap of the issues discussed in the preceding chapters. It reflects on the larger context of regulatory change, and touches upon contemporary challenges of regulation such as the role of gender, race, sustainability, and future generations in the regulatory process.

This chapter offers an introduction to the book. It defines regulation, distinguishing it from other concepts such as governance. We define regulation as ‘intentional, organised attempts to manage or control risk or the behaviours of a different party through the exercise of authority, usually through the use of mechanisms of standard-setting, monitoring and information-gathering and behaviour modification to address a collective tension or problem’. The Introduction reflects upon the most important changes in regulation in the last two decades and the growing relevance of regulation in society. The chapter explains significant changes in the practice and context of regulation that have occurred since the first editions was published.