Homeland Security Preparedness: The Rebirth of Regionalism

The homeland security mission has placed many new demands onthe U.S. system of federalism. The successful implementationof homeland security policy requires cooperation among all levelsof government—federal, state, and local. Regionalism offersa powerful tool for encouraging greater intergovernmental cooperationand improved homeland security preparedness. We assess the impactof regionalism on intergovernmental cooperation and the implementationof the homeland security mission in Florida, an early proponentof the regional approach. From a regional perspective, we evaluatehow intergovernmental complexity, the quality and quantity ofintergovernmental networks, and security vulnerabilities contributeto perceived improvements in intergovernmental cooperation andhomeland security preparedness. The results of a 2004 mail surveyof city and county officials suggest that regional organizationalstructures are most effective in promoting intergovernmentalcooperation and preparedness where the intergovernmental landscapeis the most complex and where security vulnerabilities are themost intense.     

Reorganizing for National Security and Homeland Security

This article considers the post–September 11 challenges faced by the U.S. national security machinery and analyzes the relationship between the new threat environment, the United States's role in the world, and decision–making structure. Homeland security is defined as a subset of national security. The threat of foreign terrorist organizations acting on U.S. soil should be seen in the political context of the pursuit of U.S. national interests in an often anarchic world. Two models for homeland security organizational structures are considered: a departmental model and an interagency model. The interagency model, embodied in the Homeland Security Council, is a better fit given the nature of the threat, the crucial need for coordination, and the realities of governmental decision making. The organizational challenges that may complicate the government's preparations, decisions, and implementation of a major homeland defense mission stem from three rivalries: executive–legislative, cabinet–staff, and Homeland Security Council–National Security Council.     

The Academic Discipline of Management and Homeland Security

The aim of this article is to examine the role the academic discipline of management can play in terms of homeland security (which has emerged as a very major policy area). Specifically, this article analyzes how the accumulated research knowledge in various areas of the management discipline (for example, organizational culture studies, organizational change studies, organizational relations studies, and leadership studies) can be used (together with research knowledge from numerous other academic disciplines) to help advance homeland security as a policy area and policy phenomenon and as a field of study. In its areas shown above and other areas, this article is of the view that the academic discipline of management can make unique and important contributions to the effectiveness and efficiency of homeland security.     

Challenges to Federalism: Homeland Security and Disaster Response

This article examines the state of federalism in the Bush Administrationfrom the perspective of the policy area of homeland securityand disaster response. The article uses the International Cityand County Management Association homeland security survey completedin the spring and summer of 2005 as a source of data. The articleargues that while it is tempting to look for one single agencyto control homeland security and disaster response, a networkedmodel is better supported by the survey data and by recent experiencein terrorist and natural disaster response.     

The Politics of Vulnerability: Constructing Local Performance Regimes for Homeland Security

Paradoxically, the greater the national security threats, the more important the role of local policy in the United States. In this article we examine homeland security initiatives—particularly the tension between risk and vulnerability—and the governance dilemmas they pose for local communities. In contrast to the usual emphasis on coordination and capacity, we argue for conceptualizing local imperatives attendant to homeland security as collective action problems requiring the construction of local performance regimes. Performance regimes must engage three challenges: (1) to enlist diverse stakeholders around a collective local security goal despite varying perceptions of its immediacy; (2) to persuade participants to sustain their involvement in the face of competing demands, and (3) to create a durable coalition around performance goals necessary for reducing local vulnerability. Using these analytic categories casts local homeland security issues in strategic terms; it also encourages comparisons of local governance arrangements to respond to risk and vulnerability.     

Securing Mass Transit: A Challenge for Homeland Security

Securing America's mass transit systems presents a real challenge for federal, state, and local agencies and for the transit systems themselves. Long routes and open facilities make the systems vulnerable and very limited financial resources make it difficult for systems to reduce those vulnerabilities. Thus far, the new Department of Homeland Security has done little to assist in securing the systems or even to fund security measures, despite warnings that terrorist attacks might be imminent. Transit systems have largely been left to their own devices to reduce their vulnerabilities to terrorism.     

Shifting Priorities: Congressional Incentives and the Homeland Security Granting Process

Small states receive more homeland security grant money per capita than large states because of the structure of representation and decision making in Congress. Beyond per capita allocations, the homeland security granting process affects the structure of state and local emergency management agencies, shifting priorities away from natural and technological disasters toward counterterrorism. I suggest using competitive grants, increasing the salience of the granting process, and changing the institutional setting in order to rationalize the granting process.     

Seeing around Corners: Crafting the New Department of Homeland Security1

The development of the nation's homeland security agenda, including building the behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, will for decades to come provide a rich laboratory for scholars, public managers, consultants, and other observers and analysts. In this article, we begin to describe some of the history, key players and institutions, major policy instruments, and organizational challenges in the rapidly evolving arena of homeland security. This article carries with it two primary purposes: (1) to identify some of the key documents and federal-level initiatives since September 11, and (2) to suggest several areas that beg for additional attention from those who care about effective public policy and administration, whether the particular bent be toward scholarship or practice.     

Financing Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness: Use of Interlocal Cost‐Sharing

Before this study, much of the research on interlocal collaboration has focused broadly on interlocal service agreements, of which interlocal cost‐sharing is but one dimension. This study is one of the first to examine the nature of interlocal cost‐sharing agreements for a specific (and critically important) functional area. A mail survey of Florida city and county finance officers finds that the most common interlocal cost‐sharing partnership is between local general purpose governments rather than with local special purpose governments. The strongest incentives for interlocal cost‐sharing are (1) inadequate funding for emergency management in a jurisdiction's capital budget, (2) the perceived inadequacy of federal and/or state homeland security funding, and (3) greater faith in horizontal (local‐to‐local) than vertical (federal‐state‐local) intergovernmental agreements. The research also highlights the importance of asking fiscal condition survey questions in a more functionally specific manner rather than as an “overall fiscal condition” question.     

Organizing the Federal System for Homeland Security: Problems, Issues, and Dilemmas

Improving the capacity of U.S. governments to provide greater homeland security will require numerous changes in the way federal, state, and local governments are organized and operate. It also will require significant alterations in intergovernmental relations. Changes will be required in intergovernmental dimensions, including operational, financial, legal, and political dimensions. A dual–track approach to rearranging intergovernmental relationships in order to provide a coordinated intergovernmental response to the requirements of homeland security is to be expected.     

The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to Detainability in the Aftermath of “Homeland Security”

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, the virtually instantaneous hegemony of a metaphysics of antiterrorism has radically reconfigured the politics of race, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. In the extended historical moment beginning with the United States' proclamation of a planetary “War on Terrorism” and encompassing our (global) political present, the US sociopolitical order has been racked by several interlocking crises—convulsively careening between heightened demands on citizenship and the erosion of civil liberties, imperial ambition and nativist parochialism, extravagant domestic law enforcement and global lawlessness. In relation to the parallel but contradictory hegemonic projects of “American” national identity and attachment, on the one hand, and the expansion or refortification of US empire, on the other, the cumulative crisis-as-opportunity for US nationalism that has ensued is replete with unpredictable dilemmas and unresolved possibilities for both citizens and denizens alike. This essay examines significant new deployments of migrant “illegality” as this sociopolitical condition has been significantly reconfigured in the United States in the aftermath of the proclamation of a purported War on Terrorism, and the concomitant implementation of draconian police powers domestically that the author calls the Homeland Security State.     

Homeland Security and the U.S. Public Management Policy Agenda

The U.S. has been described as an "uninteresting laggard" in comparative public management policy. The passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002 demands a reevaluation of this label. The Act created the Department of Homeland Security, but also marked a dramatic shift toward greater public personnel flexibility, both for the new Department and the entire federal government. It is tempting to suggest that the Act is an effort to "catch up" with the New Public Management benchmark countries. However, such an argument is overly simplistic and misleading. This article argues that the Act represents a triumph of a preexisting management agenda that was successfully tied to the issue of security during a political window of opportunity. The management agenda of the Bush administration pursues many of the concerns of the Clinton era, but does so with a more top-down and centralized interpretation of flexibility, reflecting an executive-centered philosophy toward government and a willingness to tackle the dominant stakeholder in this area, public service unions.     

Disasters,Catastrophes, and Policy Failure in the Homeland Security Era1

The September 11 attacks triggered federal policy changes designed to influence emergency management in the United States, even though these attacks did not suggest a need for a wholesale restructuring of federal policy in emergency management. Instead, for several reasons, federal policy's emphasis on terrorism and emergency management significantly degraded the nation's ability to address natural disasters. The federal government sought to create a top‐down, command and control model of emergency management that never fully accounted for, positively or normatively, the way local emergency management works in practice. The Obama administration will have to address the questions raised by the reorganization of federal emergency management responsibilities. While the context in which these changes have occurred is unique to the U.S. federal system, there are interesting implications for emergency management in nonfederal systems.     

全球化视野下的中国社会保障制度的改革与选择

经济的全球化和全球性的治理运动加速了社会保障全球化,面对这一机遇与挑战,中国加快了社会保障制度改革的步伐并取得较大的成果:即保障模式从“企业 社会”到“企业保险”再到“社会保险”;改革取向变单位保障为社会保障;机制转换:由单一责任主体到多主体,社会统筹到社会统筹与个人帐户相结合;保障项目从短缺到充实;保障范围从按所有制覆盖到不分所有制的全覆盖;保障层次由单一到多层。但上述改革成果适应社会保障全球化趋势有一定差距,因此,中国未来社会保障改革须向市场化、民营化和社区化三个方向迈进,以全面应对全球化的挑战。     

区别革命党与执政党的四个维度

革命党与执政党到底有什么区别?这是我们正确认识革命党与执政党问题,以执政党思维来加强党的执政能力建设的逻辑起点。区别革命党与执政党的四个维度是:党政关系的维度、党法关系的维度、党群关系的维度和党内关系的维度。从党政关系的维度看,革命党与执政党的区别在于与政权的关系不同、与政治体制的关系不同、与政府的关系不同、党的政治任务的不同、作用于政权和政治体制的方式不同。从党法关系的维度看,区别在于法律地位不同、对法统的态度和行为不同、党的政策与国家法律的关系不同、对法的重视程度不同。从党群关系的维度看,区别在于群众概念的外延不同、脱离群众的危险程度不同、分析群众的方法论不同、判断群众政治上先进落后的标准不同。从党内关系的维度看,区别在于对党员和干部的要求不同、党内的领导方式不同、党的建设方式的不同、党的活动方式不同。