Season's greetings and best wishes for the new year

Season's greetings to all blog visitors and those receiving the daily email updates. I hope that you have found the contents useful and interesting over the past year.

Year ends are often a time for looking back and for reflection. You may not know that the blog has its origins in a monthly newsletter on governance that I produced for work colleagues about ten years ago. It quickly moved online - at the suggestion of a colleague now working in Australia - and the facility for daily email updates was added. My aim was to create a resource that would be useful for me, my students and my colleagues: a notepad of interesting developments to which I could return; a starting point for further research and inquiry; a way of keeping up-to-date.

What I did not envisage when I began was that the blog would be used more widely by academics across the world, by practitioners and by policymakers. Something else that I did not predict was my broadening purview. The blog started with a UK focus, but I am now particularly keen to provide updates from across the world (especially jurisdictions that do not receive much attention elsewhere) because these help to demonstrate, amongst other things, why context matters and why the UK framework is different from that found elsewhere. It can also help to illustrate similarities and, increasingly, the extent to which developments in one jurisdiction influence (appropriately or inappropriately) developments elsewhere.

I have resisted requests for advertising space (call me old fashioned, but I think that the presence of advertising can raise questions about the independence of the choices that are made about content) and, more regrettably, I have declined offers of guest contributions because I lack the time to act as editor. I do, however, welcome updates on developments from across the world and will happily acknowledge the contributor if a public acknowledgment is sought.  Whilst it's only me working on the blog, it is far from being a lonely endeavour. In this regard, I thank everyone who has been in contact with me during 2016: it has been wonderful to hear from you. Any and all feedback is welcome.

The first blog post and email update for 2017 will appear on January 3. A major task for the new year - and this is probably something I said I would do last year - will be updating the collections of links.

With best wishes for 2017,
Robert.