Managing Federalism Through Metropolitan Human Services Intergovernmental Bodies

This article examines the emerging role of metropolitan intergovernmentalhuman services bodies (IGBs). As a result of changes in federalismduring the past few decades, a growing number of metropolitanareas have found the need to replace their defunct health andwelfare planning councils with new metropolitan groups involvinglocal governments as well as private sector funders. These humanservices bodies, comprised of top level elected and appointeddecision-makers, conduct interjurisdictional planning and policymakingfocused on social problems and also perform other intergovernmentalroles. In dealing with social problems locally, they accessfederal and state programs, match them with local funds andservices, and thus manage federalism from a community perspective.This article focuses on nine of the twenty-five known IGBs.     

Making Connections: Performance Regimes and Extreme Events

Local officials in the emergency management field have reached out and increased their connections with other agencies and organizations during the past several years. Collaborative networks have been created in an effort to address the complexities and uncertainties surrounding extreme events. But has this collaboration really taken root? In this article, the authors find that although a collaborative ethos has penetrated local emergency management, it is neither deep nor uniform. Data from a survey of emergency managers in North Carolina counties show that maintaining a functional network—a performance regime in which participants develop consistent management practices and rely on each other for the generation of new ideas—is a difficult task. The explanation for the variation found across the counties largely involves capacity and vulnerability.     

Managing Intergovernmental Relations in Australia: The Case of Agricultural Policy Cooperation

In June 2004, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) announced changes to the guidelines and protocols of some 40 ministerial councils and intergovernmental fora which comprise the web of intergovernmental consultative arrangements. This article examines the impact of the guidelines on the operation of the oldest of the sectoral ministerial councils, those relating to agriculture. The COAG guidelines aim to increase the strategic focus of the councils. However, in the case of agricultural policy there appears to have been a centralising of policy control, both within state governments and towards the Commonwealth, which undermines that objective and leaves the ministerial councils focusing on the more technical issues which they are more effective at addressing.     

Government Responses to Terrorism: Critical Views of Their Impacts on People and Public Administration

Following the tragic, massive terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, many antiterrorist laws, policies, and institutions have emerged to wage war on terrorism. These antiterrorist initiatives have major consequences for individuals, societies, and nations all over the world. Although controversies have proliferated with regard to the implications of counterterrorism for people's basic rights, the debate remains fragmented and often unfocused. This article examines the critical impact of new antiterrorist initiatives on the fundamental rights and responsibilities of citizens and others, with special reference to public administration.     

Intergovernmental Management: Federal Changes, State Responses, and New State Initiatives

This article surveys state responses and new state initiativesin 1983 to three sets of successive federal changes in domesticpolicy. Collectively referred to as the New Federalism, thesechanges include the block grants and accompanying regulatoryreforms of 1981, the changes in Medicaid reimbursement policyof 1982, and the job training and development programs of late1982 and early 1983. Following a brief overview of these changesin intergovernmental management perspective, state responsesin 1983 are examined in three areas—policy development,policy and program management, and service delivery management.     

Addressing Public Risks: Extreme Events and Critical Infrastructures

We consider noncoercive means for harnessing the efforts of the private sector as partners with public authorities for addressing potential harms from widely dispersed risks. Our focus is the public and private sector approach in the United States to protecting the nation's critical infrastructures. We empirically address how two key elements of this approach—mobilization of attention and planning partnerships—work to foster “communities of interest” that pursue common sets of solutions for risk reduction. Our depiction of the varied communities of interest underscores differences in starting points in creating such communities, in the ability to mobilize and focus attention within them, and in the likelihood of sustaining efforts to address threats to critical infrastructures. The fundamental issue raised by our research is striking an appropriate balance between governmental and private sector roles in addressing risks for which it is hard to create and sustain protective actions.     

Rethinking Security: Organizational Fragility in Extreme Events

Providing public security is a fundamental function of government. As the class and degree of threat vary, government agencies must adapt to changing conditions or risk failing their basic mission. The events of September 11, 2001, illustrated the limits of governmental performance in identifying and interrupting actions intended to harm innocent citizens. These events are examined against the resources, range, and limits of governmental capacity to adapt to the emerging threat of terrorism, and an alternative perspective on administrative performance as a complex adaptive system is proposed. This perspective redefines the search for public security as a dynamic process that balances mechanisms of control with processes of information search, exchange, and feedback among public, private, and nonprofit organizations and is supported by a well–designed information infrastructure. The article concludes that the search for public security is an interactive learning process that, while guided by public organizations, must involve responsible participation by private and nonprofit organizations as well as an informed citizenry.     

Decision Making for Extreme Events: Modeling Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies to Aid Mitigation and Response Planning

Recent tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake have revealed a need for methods to evaluate and plan for the impact of extreme events on critical infrastructure. In particular, awareness has been raised of the threat that a major disruption will lead to cascading failures that cross boundaries between interdependent infrastructure sectors, greatly magnifying human and economic impacts. To assist in planning for such extreme events, researchers are developing modeling tools to aid in making decisions about how best to protect critical infrastructures. We present some of the capabilities of this modeling approach as well as some of the challenges faced in developing such applications based on our experience with the Critical Infrastructure Protection Decision Support System (CIPDSS) model, developed for use by the Department of Homeland Security. A set of disruptions to road and telecommunication infrastructures is implemented in CIPDSS and the modeled disruptions to the original infrastructure as well as cascading effects on other infrastructure sectors are discussed. These simulations provide insights into the potential of this approach.     

基层政府治理农村群体性事件的问题与路径探析

农村群体性事件根植于社会转型与体制转轨的时代背景下,是农村多元利益主体之间各种矛盾和摩擦的突出体现和过激表现。基层政府作为事件的直接面对者与化解冲突的关键力量,在事件治理过程中反映出公共危机管理机制的缺失,公共权力行使方式的欠妥及公共治理能力建设的薄弱。基于此,基层政府可以尝试综合治理的路径,切实加强自身的机制建构与能力塑造,进而实现"标本兼治"。     

Intergovernmental Relations and Base Closing

Military base closings have accelerated since the end of theCold War, and an independent decisionmaking process is in placefor deciding which bases to close. With more closures has comeincreased debate about the appropriate federal role in assistingcommunities faced with base closures. There has been a gradualincrease in the salience of the issue and in the range of federalassistance provided to the affected communities. This has ledto questions regarding the determination of the bounds of affectedcommunities, and the measures to be used in determining successin the base-closure process. The federal government defers tostate decisions regarding community definition, broadening itsown definition of success to include entire communities, andnot just acreage within the fence posts of the closed facilities.Issues of homelessness and environmental cleanup now play alarger role in reuse decision than in the past     

Threat-Inducing Violent Events Exacerbate Social Desirability Bias in Survey Responses

A key challenge in survey research is social desirability bias: respondents feel pressured to report acceptable attitudes and behaviors. Building on established findings, we argue that threat-inducing violent events are a heretofore unaccounted for driver of social desirability bias. We probe this argument by investigating whether fatal terror attacks lead respondents to overreport past electoral participation, a well-known and measurable result of social desirability bias. Using a cross-national analysis and natural and survey experiments, we show that fatal terror attacks generate turnout overreporting. This highlights that threat-inducing violent events induce social desirability, that researchers need to account for the timing of survey fieldwork vis-à-vis such events, and that some of the previously reported post-violent conflict increases in political participation may be more apparent than real.     

Unconditional Intergovernmental Transfers to Finance Decentralization in Albania

The Government of Albania embarked on a comprehensive program to decentralize decision‐making powers with the passage of the Law on Organization and Functioning of Local Governments in 2000. A centerpiece of the policies undertaken to implement that legislation was an unconditional transfer program which, using a formula‐based allocation mechanism, transferred substantial financial resources to the local communes and municipalities beginning in 2002. This paper describes that system and its evolution. It illustrates how the transfer was designed to take into account the transition from a centralized system to a decentralized arrangement for provision of local public services and how the formula has undergone some “fine‐tuning” while retaining its simplicity. Analysis of the outcomes reveals how it has achieved its mandated objective of equalizing resources across local governments; however, it does so while running the risk of substantially discouraging local governments from mobilizing resources of their own.     

Competing Approaches to the Study of American Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations

The development of theory in the study of American federalismand intergovernmental relations has long been marked by divergentapproaches. This article reviews the literature produced byfive "schools" within the field: (1) dual federalism, (2) cooperativefederalism, (3) pragmatic federalism, (4) noncentralized federalism,and (5) nation-centered federalism. As different as these approachesare, scholarly work in this field has made only sparing useof two other potentially useful approaches: distributive justiceand public choice theory. This article suggests how these alternateapproaches might contribute to reinvigorating a field that appearsto be otherwise at an intellectual impasse.