Books on Google Play

Search Images Maps Play YouTube News Gmail Drive More »

Public policy

Suiting Themselves: How Corporations Drive the Global Agenda

In this brilliantly researched expos 'communications Rottweiler' Sharon Beder blasts open the backrooms and boardrooms to reveal how the international corporate elite dictate global politics for their own benefit. Beder shows how they created business associations andthink tanks in the 1970s to drive public policy, forced the worldwide privatization and deregulation of public services in the 1980s and 1990s (enabling a massive transfer of ownership and control over essential services) and, still not satisfied, have worked relentlessly since the late 1990s to rewrite the very rules of the global economy to funnel wealth and power into their pockets. Want a globalized and homogenized world of conflict, poverty and massive environmental degradation run by a corporate oligarchy that wipes its feet on democracy? Or a democratic world, where poverty is history, companies work for people and clean water is a right, not a privilege you pay for? Beder‘s message is clear - it‘s your world, and it‘s time to fight for it.

Understanding Public Policy: Edition 15

Thomas R. Dye

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. For courses in Public Policy

An introduction to public policy that helps students learn how to think critically about politics.
Understanding Public Policy provides an introduction to the study of public policy, as well as an overview of the models that political scientists use to describe and explain political life. Offering students the tools needed to analyze public policy, author Thomas Dye highlights why governments pursue particular policies, and helps students understand the consequences of these policy choices. The fifteenth edition has been updated to reflect the key issues that have defined President Obama’s second term, with plenty of examples drawn from the headlines to help students see how public policy affects their own lives.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice

Thomas Sowell

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom -- amounting to a quiet repeal of the American revolution.
The Quest for Cosmic Justice is the summation of a lifetime of study and thought about where we as a society are headed -- and why we need to change course before we do irretrievable damage.

Introduction to the Policy Process

Birkland

Thoroughly revised, reorganized, updated, and expanded, this widely-used text sets the balance and fills the gap between theory and practice in public policy studies. In a clear, conversational style, the author conveys the best current thinking on the policy process with an emphasis on accessibility and synthesis rather than novelty or abstraction. A newly added chapter surveys the social, economic, and demographic trends that are transforming the policy environment.

Implementing Public Policy: An Introduction to the Study of Operational Governance, Edition 3

Michael Hill

Building on the success of the previous two editions, this book provides students with an exemplary overview of the theory and practice of public policy implementation and how it relates to contemporary public management. In doing so, this new edition makes use of more illustrative examples, delves further into researching implementation and explores issues about the relationship between policy formulation and implementation in greater depth.

Written for an international audience, this is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students studying or conducting research in public policy, social policy, public management, public administration and governance.

The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy

Eldar Shafir

An interdisciplinary look at the behavioral roots of public policy from the field's leading experts

In recent years, remarkable progress has been made in behavioral research on a wide variety of topics, from behavioral finance, labor contracts, philanthropy, and the analysis of savings and poverty, to eyewitness identification and sentencing decisions, racism, sexism, health behaviors, and voting. Research findings have often been strikingly counterintuitive, with serious implications for public policymaking. In this book, leading experts in psychology, decision research, policy analysis, economics, political science, law, medicine, and philosophy explore major trends, principles, and general insights about human behavior in policy-relevant settings. Their work provides a deeper understanding of the many drivers—cognitive, social, perceptual, motivational, and emotional—that guide behaviors in everyday settings. They give depth and insight into the methods of behavioral research, and highlight how this knowledge might influence the implementation of public policy for the improvement of society.

This collection examines the policy relevance of behavioral science to our social and political lives, to issues ranging from health, environment, and nutrition, to dispute resolution, implicit racism, and false convictions. The book illuminates the relationship between behavioral findings and economic analyses, and calls attention to what policymakers might learn from this vast body of groundbreaking work.

Wide-ranging investigation into people's motivations, abilities, attitudes, and perceptions finds that they differ in profound ways from what is typically assumed. The result is that public policy acquires even greater significance, since rather than merely facilitating the conduct of human affairs, policy actually shapes their trajectory.

The first interdisciplinary look at behaviorally informed policymaking
Leading behavioral experts across the social sciences consider important policy problems
A compendium of behavioral findings and their application to relevant policy domains

The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy

Adam Oliver

The use of behavioural science to inform policy is one of the main developments in the social sciences over the last several decades. In this book, Adam Oliver offers an accessible introduction to the development of behavioural public policy, examining how behavioural economics might be used to inform the design of a broad spectrum of policy frameworks, from nudges, to bans on certain individual behaviours, to the regulation of the commercial sector. He also considers how behavioural economics can explain and predict phenomena as a challenge to economists' assumptions around how people perceive time, utility and money. The book offers an intellectual foundation for all those concerned with behavioural public policy, from academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students with a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, such as economics, political science, sociology and anthropology, to policy makers and practitioners working directly with behavioural public policy in their everyday working lives.

Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Second Edition

Frank R. Baumgartner

When Agendas and Instability in American Politics appeared fifteen years ago, offering a profoundly original account of how policy issues rise and fall on the national agenda, the Journal of Politics predicted that it would “become a landmark study of public policy making and American politics.” That prediction proved true and, in this long-awaited second edition, Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner refine their influential argument and expand it to illuminate the workings of democracies beyond the United States.

The authors retain all the substance of their contention that short-term, single-issue analyses cast public policy too narrowly as the result of cozy and dependable arrangements among politicians, interest groups, and the media. Jones and Baumgartner provide a different interpretation by taking the long view of several issues—including nuclear energy, urban affairs, smoking, and auto safety—to demonstrate that bursts of rapid, unpredictable policy change punctuate the patterns of stability more frequently associated with government. Featuring a new introduction and two additional chapters, this updated edition ensures that their findings will remain a touchstone of policy studies for many years to come.

The Public Policy Primer: Managing the Policy Process, Edition 2

Xun Wu

Fully revised for a second edition, this essential guide provides a concise and accessible overview of the public policy process: agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation.

The book provides an introduction to the key policy functions, the challenges they entail, and how the challenges may be addressed by policy actors. Written from a comparative perspective, the authors include examples from a diverse range of countries at different stages of development, highlighting key principles and practices through which policy actors can effectively manage their policy processes and outcomes.

Key features of the second edition:

fully updated and revised content throughout;

expanded references and further reading;

more guidance towards understanding the key concepts in public policy.

This important tool offers students of public policy and policy practitioners guidance on how to make, implement, and evaluate public policies in ways that improve citizens' lives.

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis: Reissued with a new introduction by B. Guy Peters

Aaron Wildavsky

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis is a classic work of the Public Policy discipline. Wildavsky’s emphasis on the values involved in public policies, as well as the need to build political understandings about the nature of policy, are as important for 21st century policymaking as they were in 1979. B. Guy Peters’ critical introduction provides the reader with context for the book, its main themes and contemporary relevance, and offers a guide to understanding a complex but crucial text.

Public Policy Analysis: New Developments

Book 179

Traditional policy analysis approaches are characterized by a focus on system modeling and choosing among policy alternatives. While successful in many cases, this approach has been increasingly criticized for being technocratic and ignoring the behavioral and political dimensions of most policy processes. In recent decades, increased awareness of the multi-actor, multiple perspective, and poly-centric character of many policy processes has led to the development of a variety of different perspectives on the styles and roles of policy analysis, and to new analytical tools and approaches – for example, argumentative approaches, participative policy analysis, and negotiation support. As a result, the field has become multi-faceted and somewhat fragmented.

Public Policy Analysis: New Developments acknowledges the variety of approaches and provides a synthesis of the traditional and new approaches to policy analysis. It provides an overview and typology of different types of policy analytic activities, characterizing them according to differences in character and leading values, and linking them to a variety of theoretical notions on policymaking. Thereby, it provides assistance to both end users and analysts in choosing an appropriate approach given a specific policy situation. By broadening the traditional approach and methods to include the analysis of actors and actor networks related to the policy issue at hand, it deepens the state of the art in certain areas. While the main focus of the book is on the cognitive dimensions of policy analysis, it also links the policy analysis process to the policymaking process, showing how to identify and involve all relevant stakeholders in the process, and how to create favorable conditions for use of the results of policy analytic efforts by the policy actors.

The book has as its major objective to describe the state-of-the-art and the latest developments in ex-ante policy analysis. It is divided into two parts. Part I explores and structures policy analysis developments, the development and description of approaches to diagnose policy situations, design policy analytic efforts, and policy process conditions. Part II focuses on recent developments regarding models and modeling for policy analysis, placing modeling approaches in the context of the variety of conditions and approaches elaborated in Part I.

Public Policy in the United States

Mark E. Rushefsky

This widely respected book offers a unique dualistic view of the policy process. First, it introduces readers to the American approach to public policy making as it has been shaped by our political institutions, changing circumstances, and ideology. Second, it informs readers concisely and even-handedly about U.S. policies in eight major policy realms, with well selected illustrations, case studies, and study questions. In addition to providing analytical tools and empirical information, the book imparts an appreciation of the widely shared but often competing values that must be balanced and rebalanced in the ongoing policy-making process, affecting issues of the highest concern to the American public. For this new edition, all of the policy chapters, especially those on economic policy, foreign policy, the environment, and education, have been very substantially revised and updated.

Advanced Introduction to Public Policy

B. Guy Peters

Making effective public policies is a difficult task, but considering policymaking as a problem of design analogous to architecture or engineering can assist in that process. This book outlines three vital components of policy design: understanding the

Public Policy in the 'Asian Century': Concepts, Cases and Futures

Sara Bice

This volume explores the defining features, critical approaches, challenges and opportunities for public policy in the ‘Asian Century’. This is the first book to systematically analyse the key institutions and practices that comprise public policy, administration and governance to investigate how they are changing in the context of increasing Asian influence. Its authors argue that the Asian Century holds the potential to generate a paradigm shift equivalent to the impacts of neo-liberalism and the New Public Management of the late 20th century.
Divided into three parts, this volume interrogates the theories underpinning contemporary public policy; explores case studies from different policy arenas across the Asian region; and imagines what a future of globalised public policy might look like. It examines the implementation measures necessary to support policy and administration in an era of transnational governance networks, tightly linked economic markets and progressively fluid cultural exchanges. This book provides the concepts and tools necessary to navigate these shifting sands successfully. It is essential reading for scholars of public policy, public management, international relations, and politics and social sciences, as well as for administrators and public servants.

Critical Theory, Public Policy, and Planning Practice

John Forester

Challenging those who say that contemporary critical social theory is too ethereal to carry any practical payload, Forester (city and regional planning, Cornell U.) demonstrates its application both to public policy itself and to the analysis of it, by considering them both as political communicative practices amenable to the ideas of Jurgen Habermas. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

The Public Policy Process: Edition 7

Michael Hill

The Public Policy Process is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the process by which public policy is made. Explaining clearly the importance of the relationship between theoretical and practical aspects of policy-making, the book gives a thorough overview of the people and organisations involved in the process.

Fully revised and updated for a 7th edition, The Public Policy Process provides:

Clear exploration, using many illustrations, of how policy is made and implemented.

A new chapter on comparative theory and methods.

New material on studying advocacy coalitions, policy changes, governance, and evaluation.

More European and international examples.

This edition appears at a time when its concern to emphasise the complex implications of modern ‘governance’, and the way in which the ultimate outcome of a new policy initiative will depend on policy formulation and implementation processes, is particularly relevant to the UK government’s efforts to leave the European Union.

The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America

Frank R. Baumgartner

How does the government decide what’s a problem and what isn’t? And what are the consequences of that process? Like individuals, Congress is subject to the “paradox of search.” If policy makers don’t look for problems, they won’t find those that need to be addressed. But if they carry out a thorough search, they will almost certainly find new problems—and with the definition of each new problem comes the possibility of creating a government program to address it.

With The Politics of Attention, leading policy scholars Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones demonstrated the central role attention plays in how governments prioritize problems. Now, with The Politics of Information, they turn the focus to the problem-detection process itself, showing how the growth or contraction of government is closely related to how it searches for information and how, as an organization, it analyzes its findings. Better search processes that incorporate more diverse viewpoints lead to more intensive policymaking activity. Similarly, limiting search processes leads to declines in policy making. At the same time, the authors find little evidence that the factors usually thought to be responsible for government expansion—partisan control, changes in presidential leadership, and shifts in public opinion—can be systematically related to the patterns they observe.

Drawing on data tracing the course of American public policy since World War II, Baumgartner and Jones once again deepen our understanding of the dynamics of American policy making.

Natural Capitalism

Paul Hawken

There are no more reespected voices in the environmental movement than these authors, true counselors on the direction of twenty-first-century business. With hundreds of thousands of books sold worldwide, they have set the agenda for rational, ecologically sound industrial development. In this inspiring book they define a superior & sustainable form of capitalism based on a system that radically raises the productivity of nature's dwindling resources. Natural Capitalism shows how cutting-edge businesses are increasing their earnings, boosting growth, reducing costs, enhancing competitiveness, & restoring the earth by harnessing a new design mentality. The authors offer dozens of examples of businesses that are making fourfold or even tenfold gains in efficiency, from self-heating & self-cooling buildings to 200-miles-per-gallon cars, while ensuring that workers aren't downsized out of their jobs. This practical blueprint shows how making resources more productive will create the next industrial revolution

Triumph of Conservatism

Gabriel Kolko

A radically new interpretation of the Progressive Era which argues that business leaders, and not the reformers, inspired the era’s legislation regarding business.

Public Policy in Action: Perspectives on the Policy Process

Victor Bekkers

This comprehensive textbook explores the policy process from a multitude of perspectives, including rationalism, culturalism, institutionalism and from a political point of view. This allows students to discover key concepts from the policy science literature and gain a deeper understanding of how public policy is discussed academically and shaped empirically.

Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why

Frank R. Baumgartner

During the 2008 election season, politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to rid government of lobbyists’ undue influence. For the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change, the most extensive study ever done on the topic, these promises ring hollow—not because politicians fail to keep them but because lobbies are far less influential than political rhetoric suggests.

Based on a comprehensive examination of ninety-eight issues, this volume demonstrates that sixty percent of recent lobbying campaigns failed to change policy despite millions of dollars spent trying. Why? The authors find that resources explain less than five percent of the difference between successful and unsuccessful efforts. Moreover, they show, these attempts must overcome an entrenched Washington system with a tremendous bias in favor of the status quo.

Though elected officials and existing policies carry more weight, lobbies have an impact too, and when advocates for a given issue finally succeed, policy tends to change significantly. The authors argue, however, that the lobbying community so strongly reflects elite interests that it will not fundamentally alter the balance of power unless its makeup shifts dramatically in favor of average Americans’ concerns.

Analyzing Public Policy: Edition 2

Peter John

The fully revised and updated new edition of this textbook continues to provide the most accessible overview of the main approaches in the study of public policy. It seeks to review the most common and widely used frameworks in the study of policy analysis:

institutions
groups and networks
society and the economy
individual interests
ideas.

The book explains each one, offers constructive criticisms and explores their claims in the light of a variety of American, British and European examples.

Arguing that no one framework offers a comprehensive explanation of public policy; John suggests a synthesis based on different aspects of the approaches, introducing concepts/approaches of advocacy coalitions, punctuated equilibrium and evolution as more effective ways to understand public policy.

Combining both a clear summary of debates in public policy and a new and original approach to the subject, this book remains essential reading for students of public policy and policy analysis.

The Regulatory Craft: Controlling Risks, Solving Problems, and Managing Compliance

Malcolm K. Sparrow

The Regulatory Craft tackles one of the most pressing public policy issues of our time—the reform of regulatory and enforcement practice. Malcolm K. Sparrow shows how the vogue prescriptions for reform (centered on concepts of customer service and process improvement) fail to take account of the distinctive character of regulatory responsibilities—which involve the delivery of obligations rather than just services.In order to construct more balanced prescriptions for reform, Sparrow invites us to reconsider the central purpose of social regulation—the abatement or control of risks to society. He recounts the experiences of pioneering agencies that have confronted the risk-control challenge directly, developing operational capacities for specifying risk-concentrations, problem areas, or patterns of noncompliance, and then designing interventions tailored to each problem.

At the heart of a new regulatory craftsmanship, according to Sparrow, lies the central notion, "pick important problems and fix them." This beguilingly simple idea turns out to present enormously complex implementation challenges and carries with it profound consequences for the way regulators organize their work, manage their discretion, and report their performance. Although the book is primarily aimed at regulatory and law-enforcement practitioners, it will also be invaluable for legislators, overseers, and others who care about the nature and quality of regulatory practice, and who want to know what kind of performance to demand from regulators and how it might be delivered. It stresses the enormous benefit to society that might accrue from development of the risk-control art as a core professional skill for regulators.

Public Policy Making: Process and Principles

Larry N. Gerston

This brief text identifies the issues, resources, actors, and institutions involved in public policy making and traces the dynamics of the policymaking process, including the triggering of issue awareness, the emergence of an issue on the public agenda, the formation of a policy commitment, and the implementation process that translates policy into practice. Throughout the text, which has been revised and updated, Gerston brings his analysis to life with abundant examples from the most recent and emblematic cases of public policy making. At the same time, with well-chosen references, he places policy analysis in the context of political science and deftly orients readers to the classics of public policy studies. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

Richard Wilkinson

Groundbreaking analysis showing that greater economic equality-not greater wealth-is the mark of the most successful societies, and offering new ways to achieve it.

"Get your hands on this book."-Bill Moyers

This groundbreaking book, based on thirty years' research, demonstrates that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them-the well-off and the poor. The remarkable data the book lays out and the measures it uses are like a spirit level which we can hold up to compare different societies. The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem-ill health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations-is more likely to occur in a less equal society. The book goes to the heart of the apparent contrast between material success and social failure in many modern national societies.

The Spirit Level does not simply provide a diagnosis of our ills, but provides invaluable instruction in shifting the balance from self-interested consumerism to a friendlier, more collaborative society. It shows a way out of the social and environmental problems which beset us, and opens up a major new approach to improving the real quality of life, not just for the poor but for everyone. It is, in its conclusion, an optimistic book, which should revitalize politics and provide a new way of thinking about how we organize human communities.

The Political Process of Policymaking: A Pragmatic Approach to Public Policy

P. Zittoun

Philippe Zittoun analyses the public policymaking process focusing on how governments relentlessly develop proposals to change public policy to address insoluble problems. Rather than considering this surprising Sisyphean effort as a lack of rationality, the author examines it as a political activity that produces order and stability.

Analysis and Public Policy: Successes, Failures and Directions for Reform

Stuart Shapiro

How do we incorporate analytical thinking into public policy decisions? Stuart Shapiro confronts this issue in Analysis and Public Policy by looking at various types of analysis, and discussing how they are used in regulatory policy-making in the US. By looking at the successes and failures of incorporating cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, and environmental impact assessment, he draws broader lessons on its use, focusing on the interactions between analysis and political factors, legal structures and bureaucratic organizations as possible areas for reform.

Utilizing empirical and qualitative research, Shapiro analyzes four different forms of analysis: cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, environmental impact assessment, and impact analysis. After interviewing nearly fifty individuals who have served in high levels of government, and who have made countless regulatory policy decisions in their careers, Shapiro argues that advocates must become less ambitious and should craft requirements for simpler and clearer analysis. Such analysis, particularly if informed by public participation, can do a great deal to improve government decisions.

As this book details the relationship between analysis and institutional factors such as politics, bureaucracy, and law, it is appropriate for a variety of readers, such as scholars of policy, students, scholars of regulation, and congressional and state legislative staff looking to create new analytical requirements.

Beyond Machiavelli: Policy Analysis Reaches Midlife, Second Edition, Edition 2

Beryl A. Radin

In this new edition of Beyond Machiavelli, Beryl Radin updates her popular overview of the field of policy analysis. Radin, winner of the John Gaus Award from the American Political Science Association, considers the critical issues that confront the policy analysis practitioner, changes in the field, including the globalization of policy analysis, and the dramatic changes in the policy environment. She examines schools and careers; the conflict between the imperatives of analysis and the world of politics; the analytic tools that have been used, created, or discarded over the past fifty years; the relationship between decision makers and analysts as the field has multiplied and spread; and the assumptions about the availability and appropriateness of information that can be used in the analytic task.

Once found largely in the United States, policy analysis has become global, and Radin discusses the field’s new paradigms, methodologies and concepts of success. This new edition considers changes in expertise, controversies in the field, today’s career prospects, and the impact of 9/11 on the field. She profiles three additional policy analysis organizations and updates the profiles of the organizations in the first edition. Continuing the trajectory of the fictional characters from the first edition, Radin adds a character representing the new generation just entering the field. The book discusses the shifts in society’s attitudes toward public action, the availability of resources to meet public needs, and the dimensions of policymaking.

Written for students, faculty, and practitioners, the book concludes with a look at the possible dimensions of the policy analysis field and profession as it moves into the future.

Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices

Frank Fischer

In recent years a set of radical new approaches to public policy has been developing. These approaches, drawing on discursive analysis and participatory deliberative practices, have come to challenge the dominant technocratic, empiricist models in policy analysis. In his major new book Frank Fischer brings together this new work for the first time and critically examines it. In an accessible way he describes the theoretical, methodological, and political requirements and implications of the new "post-empiricist" approach to public policy. The volume includes a discussion of the social construction of policy problems, the role of interpretation and narrative analysis in policy inquiry, the dialectics of policy argumentation, and the uses of participatory policy analysis. The book will be required reading for anyone studying, researching, or formulating public policy.

Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice: Discourses, Ideas and Anomalies in Public Policy Dynamics

John Hogan

The contributors investigate policy paradigms and their ability to explain the policy process actors, ideas, discourses and strategies employed to provide readers with a better understanding of public policy and its dynamics.

Handbook of European Policies: Interpretive Approaches to the EU

Hubert Heinelt

This definitive Handbook addresses the current lack of research into European policymaking and development using an interpretive perspective. Questioning areas that mainstream approaches tend to neglect, contributors target the ways in which ideas, arguments and discourses shape policies in the institutional context of the EU.

Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire

James K. Galbraith

This work contains James K. Galbraith's most influential recent writings on current affairs along with new commentary, and explores both the descent to disaster in Iraq and the ongoing transformation of the American economy under the steerage of Alan Greenspan.

Green Political Theory

Robert E. Goodin

With their remarkable electoral successes, Green parties worldwide seized the political imagination of friends and foes alike. Mainstream politicians busily disparage them and imitate them in turn. This new book shows that 'greens' deserve to be taken more seriously than that.

This is the first full-length philosophical discussion of the green political programme. Goodin shows that green public policy proposals are unified by a single, coherent moral vision - a 'green theory of value' - that is largely independent of the `green theory of agency' dictating green political mechanisms, strategies and tactics on the one hand, and personal lifestyle recommendations on the other. The upshot is that we demand that politicians implement green public policies, and implement them completely, without committing ourselves to the other often more eccentric aspects of green doctrine that threaten to alienate so many potential supporters.

Planning with Complexity: An Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy, Edition 2

Judith E. Innes

In an era of rapid change, uncertainty, and hyperpartisanship, when wicked problems abound, tools for solving public problems are more essential than ever. The authors lay out a new theory for collaborative practice in planning, public administration, and public policy. Planning with Complexity provides both theoretical underpinnings and extensive case material on collaboration and offers ways of understanding and conducting effective practice. Collaborative rationality means collaboration that is inclusive, informed, grounded in authentic dialogue, and that results in wise and durable outcomes.

The scholar-practitioner author team builds on more than 40 years of research, teaching, and practice addressing environmental issues, housing, and transportation. This second edition updates the case studies and adds new examples reflecting the global spread of collaborative practices. It builds on insights that have recently emerged in the literature. More than 75 new references have been incorporated, along with new tables. This book is essential for students, educators, scholars, and reflective practitioners in public policy fields in the 21st century.

Contemporary Approaches to Public Policy: Theories, Controversies and Perspectives

B. Guy Peters

This book considers a range of contemporary approaches to public policy studies. These approaches are based on a number of theoretical perspectives on decision-making, as well as alternative perspectives on policy instruments and implementation. The range of approaches covered in the volume includes punctuated equilibrium models, the advocacy-coalition framework, multiple streams approaches, institutional analyses, constructivist approaches, behavioural models, and the use of instruments as an approach to public policy. The volume concludes with a discussion of fundamental issues of democracy in public policy.

Policy Capacity and Governance: Assessing Governmental Competences and Capabilities in Theory and Practice

Xun Wu

This book provides unique insights into the role of policy capacity in policymaking and policy change, as it is being uncovered at the research frontier in contemporary policy studies. The book is structured into a series of sections on policy capacity in theory and practice, each focusing on a specific aspect of policy capacity and its influence on policy formulation, decision-making, implementation and evaluation. In addition to making a significant contribution to the body of literature on the theoretical approaches to researching the role of capacity in policymaking, it also provides practical examples of the application of these approaches through a variety of national and sectoral case studies. Including contributions from authors working in a wide variety of disciplines, the book demonstrates, across the various topics investigated, many commonalities and consistencies in relation to the study of policy capacity and policy-making. This work has interdisciplinary appeal and will engage scholars in fields ranging from geography to communications, health, social work and political science, amongst others with an interest in public policy.

Institutional Entrepreneurship and Policy Change: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations

Caner Bakir

This book is about the role of agents in policy and institutional change. It draws on cross-country case studies. The focus on ‘agency’ has been an important development, enabling researchers to better reveal the causal mechanisms generating institutional change (i.e., how institutional change actually takes place). However, past research has generally been limited to specific intellectual silos or scholarly domains of inquiry. Policy scholars, for example, have tended to focus on the various mechanisms and levels at which agency operates, drawing on institutionalist perspectives but not always actively contributing to institutionalist theory. Institutionalist perspectives, by contrast, have tended to operate at macro-levels of enquiry, embracing the ontological primacy of institutions in processes of isomorphism but not necessarily contributing to or embracing policy perspectives that engage in more granular analyses of policy making processes, implementation, and the instantiation of institutional and policy change. Despite the obvious complementarities of these two intellectual traditions, it is surprising how little collaborative work, or indeed cross fertilization of theory and analytical design has occurred. The core novelty of this volume is thus its focus on agential actors within institutional settings and processes of entrepreneurship that facilitate isomorphism and policy change. The book’s theoretical framework is grounded in variants of institutional theory, especially historical, sociological and organisational institutionalism and policy entrepreneurship literature. The overall conclusion is that that both institutionalists and public policy scholars have largely overlooked the importance of complex interactions between interdependent structures, institutions, and agents in processes of institutional and policy change.

Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy

Nel Noddings

Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought.

Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy.

With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life.

Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, Starting at Home highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy.

The Dynamics of Public Policy: Theory and Evidence

Adrian Kay

. . . this is a first rate book. It draws on a wide range of reading philosophy, economics and politics and teases out a number of important ideas. . . for academics and postgraduates it surely will be essential reading and I think has pushed the study of

Handbook of Public Policy

B Guy Peters

′The new handbook by Peters and Pierre provides an invaluable addition to the literature. It offers new scholars and practitioners a means to navigate many of the complex theoretical and practical issues in contemporary policy analysis′ - Mark Considine, University of Melbourne

The public policies of governments affect the lives and livelihoods of citizens every day in every country around the world. This handbook provides a comprehensive review and guide to the study, theory and practice of public policy today.

Section One, Making Policy, introduces the policy making process - the means by which public policies are formulated, adopted and implemented - and serves to review the many competing conceptualizations within the field.

Section Two, Substantive Policy Areas, focuses on a number of substantive policy areas to consider both diversity and commonalties across different sectoral policy areas.

Section Three, Evaluating Public Policy, addresses issues of policy analysis more directly and assesses successes and failures in public policy in an attempt to answer the question ′what is good policy?′.

The concluding chapter considers the different disciplinary contributions to the research and study of public policy both retrospectively and prospectively.

Drawing contributions from leading academics and policy analysts from around the world, the handbook illustrates the changing role of governments vis-à-vis the public and private sector and the different policy actors (national and international, governmental and non-governmental) involved in the policy making process.

It will be an essential companion for all advanced undergraduates, graduates, academics and practitioners across public policy and public administration, public management, government and political science.

Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net

Isabel V. Sawhill

The Brookings Institution's Welfare Reform & Beyond Initiative was created to inform the critical policy debates surrounding the upcoming congressional reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and a number of related programs that were created or dramatically altered by the 1996 landmark welfare reform legislation. The goal of the project has been to take the large volume of existing and forthcoming research studies and shape them into a more coherent and policy-oriented whole. This capstone collection gathers twenty brief essays (published between January 2001 and February 2002) that focus on assessing the record of welfare reform, specific issues likely to be debated before the TANF reauthorization, and a broader set of policy options for low-income families. It is a reader-friendly volume that will provide policymakers, the press, and the interested public with a comprehensive guide to the numerous issues that must be addressed as Congress considers the future of the nation's antipoverty policies. The collection covers the following topics and features a new introduction from the editors: - An Overview of Effects to Date - Welfare Reform Reauthorization: An Overview of Problems and Issues - A Tax Proposal for Working Families with Children - Welfare Reform and Poverty - Reducing Non-Marital Births - Which Welfare Reforms are Best for Children? - Welfare and the Economy - What Can Be Done to Reduce Teen Pregnancy and Out-of-Wedlock Births? - Changing Welfare Offices - State Programs - Welfare Reform and Employment - Fragile Families, Welfare Reform, and Marriage - Health Insurance, Welfare, and Work - Helping the Hard-to-Employ - Sanctions and Welfare Reform - Child Care and Welfare Reform - Job Retention and Advancement in Welfare Reform - Housing and Welfare Reform - Non-Citizens - Block Grant Structure - Food Stamps - Work Support System - Possible Welfare Reform in the Cities

Handbook of Public Policy Agenda Setting

Nikolaos Zahariadis

Setting the agenda on agenda setting, this Handbook explores how and why private matters become public issues and occasionally government priorities. It provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the perspectives, individuals, and institutions involved in setting the government’s agenda at subnational, national, and international levels.

Drawing on contributions from leading academics across the world, this Handbook is split into five distinct parts. Part one sets public policy agenda setting in its historical context, devoting chapters to more in-depth studies of the main individual scholars and their works. Part two offers an extensive examination of the theoretical development, whilst part three provides a comprehensive look at the various institutional dimensions. Part four reviews the literature on sub-national, national and international governance levels. Finally, part five offers innovative coverage on agenda setting during crises.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

James Howard Kunstler

A “frightening and important” look at our unsustainable future (Time Out Chicago).

A controversial hit that has sparked debate among business leaders, environmentalists, and others, The Long Emergency is an eye-opening look at the unprecedented challenges we face in the years ahead, as oil runs out and the global systems built on it are forced to change radically.

From the author of The Geography of Nowhere, it is a book that “should be read, digested, and acted upon by every conscientious U.S. politician and citizen” (Michael Shuman, author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age).

The Story of My Life

Helen Keller

*The Story of My Life* may be the most extraordinary autobiography ever written. Its author was only 22 when it was published, in 1903, but her life to that point had already been most uncommon: she had been rendered deaf, blind, and later mute by an illness at the age of 19 months, and only years later learned to read, speak, and understand others through the dedication of a teacher extraordinary in her own right. American author and activist HELEN ADAMS KELLER (1880-1968) became famous thanks to *The Story of My Life,* which was later adapted for stage and screen in various incarnations under the title *The Miracle Worker,* a reference to that special teacher, Annie Sullivan. Here, in her own words, is Keller's firsthand experience of the dawning of enlightenment on the severely isolated child she was, and her evolution into the educated and erudite young woman she became.

Scarce Goods: Justice, Fairness, and Organ Transplantation

Tom Koch

In 1841 the American sailing ship William Brown struck an iceberg. About half of the passengers and all of the crew were saved in two small, open boats. The next night, half of the passengers in the larger long-boat were thrown overboard because the boat was overfull. This was the first case of lifeboat ethics, of hard choices in the face of scarcity. Since then the question has been who should die so that others, equally needy, might live? Both the case of the William Brown and the ethics it spawned have been used in recent years to describe the problem of health care rationing generally, and organ transplantation specifically.

Koch reexamines and reinterpretes the paradigm case of lifeboat ethics, the story of the William Brown, not as an unavoidable tragedy, but as an avoidable series of errors. Its relation to more general issues of distributive justice are then considered. The lessons learned from both the historical review and its application to distributive principles are then applied to the problem of graft organ distribution in the United States. Through the use of maps, the problem of organ distribution is considered at a range of scales, from the international to the urban. The contextual issues become more evident as one moves from international to hemispheric, fron national to regional, and then local systems. Finally, Koch reviews the lessons in light of other problems of distribution in the face of scarcity. The central lesson-that scarcity is exacerbated where it is not in fact created by our distributive programs-is explored thoroughly. The result is no good choices for anyone and the continuation of the scarcity that for most seems inevitable, but, from the evidence provided, is itself an outcome of inequalities of distribution at different scales of society. Of particular interest to students, scholars, and policymakers involved with issues of planning and health care economics, medical geography, and concepts of justice.

Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation

Stuart S. Nagel

Handbook of Public Policy Evaluation
is the only book of its kind to present aspects of public policy evaluation that relate to economic, technology, social, political, international, and legal problems. Rather than looking at specific narrowly focused programs, this book emphasizes broad-based evaluation theory, study, and application, providing a rich variety of exceptional insights and ideas.

Designed to facilitate integration and coherence, key features in this volume include:

Systematic evaluation,

Win-win evaluation,

Policy evaluation,

The book targets the need for improvement in the methods, processes, and substance of public policy and opens the gate of public policy to be more effective, efficient, and equitable. Policymakers, administrators, analysts, and practitioners alike will find the Handbook a necessary resource of alternative public policies that are placed in context with a direct course to positive results.

Public Opinion

Walter Lippmann

"The manner of presentation is so objective and projective that one finishes the book almost without realizing that it is perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy … ever penned."—John Dewey, The New Republic
Controversial and compelling, this 1922 work by a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner remains ever vital. Walter Lippmann is ranked among the most influential public figures of his era, and his reputation endures as one of history's greatest journalists. In Public Opinion, Lippmann examines democratic theory, citizenship in a democratic society, and the role of the media in forming public perceptions, expectations, and actions.
"Where mass opinion dominates the government," the author observes, "there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society," he warned, adding, "It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West."
Public Opinion explores censorship and privacy, stereotypes, leadership, and the image of democracy. In doing so, it changed the nature of political science as a scholarly discipline, helped launch the profession of public relations, and introduced concepts that continue to play an important role in current political theory. It remains essential reading for students and others with an interest in politics, journalism, and history.

Policy Analysis in Canada

Laurent Dobuzinskis

The growth of what some academics refer to as 'the policy analysis movement' represents an effort to reform certain aspects of government behaviour. The policy analysis movement is the result of efforts made by actors inside and outside formal political decision-making processes to improve policy outcomes by applying systematic evaluative rationality to the development and implementation of policy options. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the many ways in which the policy analysis movement has been conducted, and to what effect, in Canadian governments and, for the first time, in business associations, labour unions, universities, and other non-governmental organizations.

Editors Laurent Dobuzinskis, Michael Howlett, and David Laycock have brought together a wide range of contributors to address questions such as: What do policy analysts do? What techniques and approaches do they use? What is their influence on policy-making in Canada? Is there a policy analysis deficit? What norms and values guide the work done by policy analysts working in different institutional settings? Contributors focus on the sociology of policy analysis, demonstrating how analysts working in different organizations tend to have different interests and to utilize different techniques. They compare and analyze the significance of these different styles and approaches, and speculate about their impact on the policy process.

The End Of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War

Alan Brinkley

At a time when liberalism is in disarray, this vastly illuminating book locates the origins of its crisis. Those origins, says Alan Brinkley, are paradoxically situated during the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal had made liberalism a fixture of American politics and society. The End of Reform shows how the liberalism of the early New Deal—which set out to repair and, if necessary, restructure America’s economy—gave way to its contemporary counterpart, which is less hostile to corporate capitalism and more solicitous of individual rights. Clearly and dramatically, Brinkley identifies the personalities and events responsible for this transformation while pointing to the broader trends in American society that made the politics of reform increasingly popular. It is both a major reinterpretation of the New Deal and a crucial map of the road to today’s political landscape.

Accountability in Public Policy Partnerships

J. Steets

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. This book presents a new model of accountability which ensures that public-private partnerships don't erode public accountability. It defines concrete accountability standards for different types of partnerships.