Presenting an account of the International Labour Organization, this book provides the readers with an understanding of its purpose and structure. It covers key areas such as major moments of change, leadership, membership, organizational structure, decision-making capacity, and contemporary debates in historical perspective.

The Ministry of Justice delivers its services through a wide range of arm's length bodies and agencies, including the courts, prisons and probation services. The Ministry's Spending Review settlement requires a 23% reduction to its resource budget over the next four years. The Ministry has a range of financial management processes in place but lacks a consistent approach across its business, and to date it has not integrated financial management into its policy and operational workings. The Ministry needs to implement its Spending Review settlement on the basis of a full understanding of the cost and value of its services, so that financial cuts are best targeted to minimise the impact on frontline services. The Ministry and its arm's length bodies currently lack the detailed information they would need to do this. A comprehensive understanding of the costs and value of services must be a priority. For its arm's length bodies, having a clear direction, the details of which are formally agreed by both parties, is essential as is strong leadership and a shared sense of purpose. The Ministry now needs to oversee the performance of its arm's length bodies, such as framework documents, operational reviews, and accountability meetings. Fee recovery and fines collection have to be priority areas for improvement and the need to improve recovery rates where it does not currently recover the full cost of services provided. On fines collection, there was little sign of the sustained improvement promised when the Committee last took evidence in 2006.

This is the third of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. This book sets out a measure of authority for seventy-six international organizations (IOs) from 1950, or the time of their establishment, to 2010 which can allow researchers to test expectations about the character, sources, and consequences of international governance. The international organizations considered are regional (e.g. the EU, Andean Community, NAFTA), cross-regional (e.g. Commonwealth of Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation), and global (e.g. the UN, World Bank, WTO). Firstly, the book introduces carefully constructed estimates for the scope and depth of authority exercised by international governments. The estimates are unique in their comparative scope, their specificity, and time span. Secondly, it describes describe broad trends in IO authority by comparing delegation and pooling, over time, across IOs, and across decision areas. Thirdly, it presents the evidence gathered by the authors to estimate international authority by carefully discussing forty-seven international organizations, and showing how their bodies are composed, what decisions each body makes, and how they make decisions. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.

In its report into how priorities are set for publicly funded research, the Science and Technology Committee calls on the Government to make a clear and unambiguous statement setting out their research funding commitments and the periods of time over which those commitments apply.

The Culture Media and Sport Committee says that the main outcomes of the BBC Trust's strategic review do not move the BBC on to the extent required by current circumstances, and that the incoming Chairman will have much to get grips with. The new licence fee agreement was reached "unexpectedly" in October 2010 between the Department for Culture Media and Sport and the BBC, but without any time for wider consultation with viewers or Parliament. The Committee believes the agreement reached is a reasonable one, but the process undermined confidence in both the Government's and the BBC's commitment to transparency and accountability. On the partnership between BBC and S4C, it is unclear how S4C can retain its independence under the new arrangements. It is extraordinary that the Government and the BBC should agree such wide-ranging changes without consultation or giving S4C any notice or say at all. The Committee is particularly concerned that National Audit Office still does not have the promised access to conduct independent assessments of the BBC's value for money. The Committee is also disappointed that banded information on talent salaries is still not in the public domain. The BBC opened itself to predictable ridicule with the decision to hire a "migration manager" who had to commute from the United States to manage the transition to the new Salford site. The report concludes that big questions remain over how radically the BBC needs to reconfigure both content and delivery in the years ahead.