Preventing Local Government Fiscal Crises: The North Carolina Approach

Some local governments face fiscal challenges due to mismanagement and declining economies. In particular, manufacturing states like Michigan and Ohio have been hard hit by the effects of international competition. To prevent fiscal distress from becoming a crisis, states exercise oversight over local government fiscal management. The three bond rating agencies consider the North Carolina oversight system a model. This paper discusses the North Carolina oversight system, including audit review, technical assistance, debt issuance, and power to take over the financial operations of distressed local units.     

Current Criminal Justice Projects Here and Abroad

The present survey is based mainly, as far as the United States is concerned, on the files of the Smithsonian Science Information Exchange (SSIE), from whom we received—with the financial support of the University of Central Florida—the most recent five hundred or so project reports in the field of criminal and juvenile justice and related areas, including crime-related drug and alcohol abuse projects. As to foreign projects, only a few are listed with SSIE; most of the following information is the result of an admittedly incomplete inquiry among organizations, research institutes, and universities abroad. May we say here that we received excellent cooperation from them which we greatly appreciated. Space being limited, we can describe in the following article only a few of the some one-thousand projects we examined.     

Fireworks and Festivals and Tigers! Oh My!

The barrage started on a Friday morning——a few distant booms that soon led to louder explosions and fizzling sounds drawing closer to my apartment. As the day progressed, sotoo did their frequency until night fell and a     

Humanitarian Intervention and Communal Civil Wars:

How do policymakers in democratic nations mobilize support for hard-line strategies? Existing answers to this question emphasize the exaggeration of external threats. Yet this overlooks an important dilemma: because democratic citizens expect their leaders to explore peaceful solutions or less aggressive alternatives when foreign dangers are ambiguous, the same conditions that make threat inflation necessary also make it difficult to employ successfully. To mobilize support for hard-line measures when the public wants its leaders to demonstrate restraint, policymakers may therefore attempt to shift blame onto an adversary by using “counterfeit diplomacy.” Specifically, democratic leaders may adopt more cooperative or less coercive options than they believe are necessary, but which they anticipate will fail. This approach can be a risky one, however, because an opponent might accept a nation's demands, accede to its conditions, or offer counterproposals in the hope of diffusing support for more confrontational measures.     

FACTORS INFLUENCING THE USE OF PERFORMANCE INFORMATION FOR DECISION MAKING IN AUSTRALIAN STATE AGENCIES

Is the state of a performance measurement system the most important element for promoting the utilization of performance indicators (PIs) in the public sector? Or are there other more influential factors, such as organizational culture, or even individual perceptions on the merit of performance measurement for their agency? Through a survey on a small group of managers specializing in performance measurement in 21 Australian state government agencies, this research examines the relative influence of the following factors on the use of PIs for internal decision making: the agency's performance measurement system, stakeholder support for the agency's performance measurement, organizational culture, the external environment, and individual perceptions on the impact of performance measurement in the agency.     

INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS OF CASCADING ECOLOGICAL CRISES

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by ‘cascading’ ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision‐making capabilities and the cross‐scale dynamics of social‐ecological change.     

A Foreigner's Five-Year Plan

<正>Three years ago, the thought of moving to and working in China was just about as foreign as the country itself. I certainly had the means and interest to visit, but I really had no desire to     

The Tale of the Three Gyms

<正>As if hunting for an apartment in Beijing wasn’t difficult enough-trying to find the perfect fit between proximity to work,price and life’sother little conveniences(such as Jenny Lou’s and other Western grocery stores)-Iadded another requirement to my search fora new pad: a nearby gym.