Wildfires Create New Intergovernmental Challenges

Wildfires in the United States have become more widespread andsevere, more costly, and more likely to affect multiple propertyowners. Once thought of as a potential risk for individual landowners,wildfires increasingly are becoming a common threat for groupsof owners and whole communities. Because federal agencies arevery large owners of wildlands, they have developed the nation'slargest capability for managing wildfires, and they are keyplayers in developing a more collaborative approach to dealwith this growing threat. This approach must involve multiplefederal agencies, state, local, and tribal governments, firedepartments, and many non-governmental cooperators. It createsmany new interagency, intergovernmental, and public-privatechallenges for managing large efforts that cross jurisdictionalboundaries. These new challenges include efforts to improveecological health, fight fires, regulate development, find money,and create common knowledge. This article examines these emergingchallenges to U.S. federalism, finds that a number of changesin current practices are needed, and concludes that a new intergovernmentalapproach would be beneficial.     

Compliance and Non-compliance with International Human Rights Standards: Overplaying the Cultural

This paper interrogates a ‘positive’ view of culture’s (potential) role in widening compliance with international human rights standards, which (1) concentrates on the ‘cultural’ bases of conflict over rights and, in consequence, (2) focuses primarily on cultural interpretation as a means of achieving greater respect for rights norms. The thrust of the paper is that the relationship between culture and human rights norms is much more complex than this positive perspective implies and, this being so, that some of its claims about the potential benefits of cultural interpretation for widening rights compliance are hard to sustain. I substantiate this argument by exploring five challenges to this approach.     

National TV broadcasting and the rise of the regulatory state

Using historical, theoretical and empirical arguments, this paper puts forth the notion that it was the rise of US national TV networks in the late 1960s that led to the expansion of federal social regulation and a simultaneous decline of federal economic regulation in the 1970s. The paper argues that national TV networks changed the relative position of national versus local and regional producers and sellers of goods and services. Instead of preferring state and local social regulation, the emerging national firms preferred federal social regulation. Since national markets were emerging, the same national firms lobbied for regulatory reform in transportation and communication services. The rise of national markets associated with national TV networks also stimulated a demand for mergers and consolidations. Data describing these various phenomena are provided in the paper.     

Entrepreneurial Police and Drug Enforcement Policy

The hypothesis that drug enforcementis relatively high in local jurisdictions where statelaws dictate that police retain seized assets istested in the context of a reduced-form equation ofthe supply and demand for drug enforcement. Theresults are robust across model specifications, someof which directly control for the level of drug use:legislation permitting police to keep seized assetsraises drug arrests as a portion of total arrests byabout 20 percent and drug arrest rates by about 18percent. Police bureaucrats apparently desirediscretionary budget increases, and they haveconsiderable discretion in determining resourceallocation.