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AbstractPublic authority addresses how actors, ranging from officials to gang leaders, and cultural innovators, interact via cooperation, competition and conflict to generate shifting degrees of social order within territories. This paper summarises four key components that directly relate to power. First, power underlies public authority. Second, public authority entails and engenders institutional bricolage. Third, public authorities utilise functions, structures, ideas and symbols of statehood. Fourth, public authorities seek legitimacy. A systematic exposition of power informs analysing public authority—notably the degree to which it facilitates inclusive or exclusive participation and distribution of benefits. This paper outlines a conceptual framework, with attention to basic elements of power, using a triadic approach that incorporates seven basic formats (or strategic templates) for exercising such power. This framework can inform subsequent inquiry and policy analysis.

An examination of the public function of civil courts, & of the public aspects of "private" courts, ie, private mediation, considering how various tribunals might function as private courts, whether it may be desirable to have them, & in what ways they should be private or public. Many such courts vary in their privateness, but virtually all contain significant public elements (as public courts encompass important private aspects). Consequently, it is contended that the policy issue is not whether cases should be processed by public or private courts, but rather, what dimensions of courts should be public or private. The need for research & regulation focused on specific characteristics of particular tribunals is emphasized. 1 Table, 44 References. S. Millett

Law is a fundamental aspect of public management, but many public management scholars and jurists view each other with mutual incomprehension. The misunderstanding stems in part from incompatible concepts about the nature of government and the nature of people. By combining a legal perspective on the nature of government with a managerial perspective on the nature of people, this article produces law-based management principles that are relevant in any common law country. Officials' actions could be improved by observing three simple rules of thumb: every action needs legal authority; every decision needs relevant facts; and every person may make a case. These principles are not law, but they are derived from court judgments: they are judge-made lore. A central aspect of judge-made lore is the importance and implications of the use of public authority.

We examine the influence of introducing public authority liability in the context of disasters. In an ideal setting a rule of comparative negligence would incentivise the government to take an optimal amount of care. The citizen, being the residual bearer of the loss, would consequently also take optimal care. However, in the specific context of disasters, public authority liability may backfire and lead to more losses than without such liability. We argue that under some circumstances perverse incentives of citizens may increase with liability. We focus inter alia on (1) the difficulties that may exist to incentivise public authorities through liability rules, (2) the specific characteristics of comparative negligence that may make public authorities liable for the lion's share of the damages, (3) the problem of negative expected value suits and (4) the fact that public authorities may be much more inclined to intervene ex post when damages exceed a threshold.

AbstractDrawing upon research across multiple countries, the papers in this special issue explore how public authority dynamics affect development and humanitarian practices and processes. Some focus on places commonly labelled as in crisis or understood to be subject to multiple overlapping crises, where responses to epidemics, persistent conflict and migrations are in progress. Others examine how public authority dynamics affect the everyday governance of development in outwardly more stable contexts. The seven empirical papers are complimented by a conceptual framework for analysing how power permeates the foundations of public authority dynamics. Viewed together, they illuminate why exclusions, coercion and violence are often used by those claiming the legitimacy to govern, and how grasping what this may mean for well‐intended interventions or reform efforts remains a challenge for practitioners. However, they also point towards a pressing need for outsiders to recognise their own roles in constructing and legitimising, sometimes harmful, forms of public authority in the places they work. And they suggest the first step is to confront a reluctance to acknowledge public authority dynamics in their official depictions of programmes' progress, learnings and impacts.