Public Management and Departments: Contemporary Themes – Future Agendas

The purpose of this article is to review themes in recent academic research on public management at the national level and to see how it aligns with emerging agendas within the Australian public service. This provides an opportunity to identify strengths and gaps and to explore options for research.     

The impact of suicide on the family

Little research has examined the consequences of a suicide for social or family networks. Because suicide occurs within families, the focus on the aftermath of suicide within families is an important next step to determine exactly how to help survivors. In this article, we review and summarize the research on the impact of suicide on individuals within families and on family and social networks. We begin with a discussion of family changes following suicide. Next, we discuss the effects of suicide on social networks overall and responses of children and the elderly to a suicide in the family. Finally, we identify key issues that remain to be resolved in family survivor research and make recommendations for future studies.     

Visas and work permits: Possible global negotiating initiatives

We discuss global options for initiatives intended to ameliorate adverse impacts of visa and work permit systems used by national governments around the world. We first describe and document some of their effects, noting the relative lack of other research work on these issues. We then discuss proposals for a new and supplemental global visa structure which have been made as part of the Mode 4 GATS negotiations in the WTO, suggesting that the GATS/WTO may be an imperfect institutional location for negotiating on these matters. We then evaluate other approaches, including what realistically could be possible if a new body specifically created for global negotiation in the area were to be used.

When Did Health Care Become a Campaign Issue?

Most people mistakenly assume that health care first became a major political issue in 1945 because President Harry S. Truman’s special address to Congress on Nov. 19 of that year marked the first time a sitting president publicly endorsed a national health-care program. But the question of whether—or to what extent—it is the responsibility of government to subsidize health care for its citizens has been around for a much longer amount of time. Now that health care has become a major focus of domestic political debate, especially in light of the impending presidential election, this article, modified from an entry in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Campaigns, Elections, & Electoral Behavior (Sage Publications), serves to inform the reader of the origins and history of health care as a campaign issue.

Debt,democratization, and development in Latin America: How policy can affect global warming

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis conjectures a nonlinear relationship between pollution and economic growth, such that pollution per capita initially increases as countries economically develop, but then reaches a maximum point before ultimately declining. Much of the EKC literature has focused on testing this basic hypothesis and, in studies that find evidence of an EKC, estimating the “turning point” level of development at which the per capita pollution‐growth relationship changes sign. This approach has not emphasized the policy relevance of specification issues or the potential role of policy variables. This research explores a modified EKC specification which conditions the pollution‐growth relationship on a country's level of debt and degree of democratization. These variables turn out to be significant, implying that different political and economic contexts can shift EKCs and their turning points. These findings suggest that policies to relieve debt burdens and institute political reform, in addition to their usual justifications, also could be used as a strategy to reduce carbon emissions from developing countries. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Partnering for e‐government: Challenges for public administrators

Abstract: Governments around the world are spending huge sums of money implementing electronic government. Public‐private partnerships with information and communication technology firms have emerged as the vehicle of choice for implementing e‐government strategies. Concerns are raised about the capacity of governments to manage these complex, multi‐year, often multi‐partner relationships that involve considerable sharing of authority, responsibility, financial resources, information and risks. The management challenges manifest themselves in the core partnering tasks: establishing a management framework for partnering; finding the right partners and making the right partnering arrangement; the management of relationships with partners in a network setting; and the measurement of the performance of e‐government partnerships. The article reviews progress being made by governments in building capacity to deal with these core partnering tasks. It concludes that many new initiatives at the central agency and departmental/ministry level seem designed to centralize control of e‐government projects and wrap them in a complex web of bureaucratic structures and processes that are, for the most part, antithetical or, at best, indifferent to the creation of strong partnerships and the business valuethat e‐government public‐private partnerships promise.     

Overview of: “Getting the Law Involved a Quasi-Experiment in Early Intervention Involving Collaboration Between Schools and the District Attorney's Office”

Research Summary Precursors to serious and chronic delinquency often emerge in childhood, stimulating calls for early interventions. Most intervention efforts rely solely on social service programs—often to the exclusion of the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice system has been reluctant to become involved in the lives of relatively young children fearing net widening or further straining resources that could be used for older youth with documented delinquency histories. We report here the results of an early intervention program sponsored by and housed in a district attorney's office in Louisiana. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined outcomes associated with program involvement as well as whether the obvious involvement of the prosecutor's office was associated with further reductions in problem behavior.

• 1 : The results revealed that significant reductions in problem behaviors of young children could be attributed to program participation.
• 2 : The obvious involvement of the district attorney's office, however, was associated with limited, albeit significant, reductions in specific problem behaviors.
• 3 : These findings show that successful early intervention efforts can be made part of the juvenile justice system and that in some limited situations prosecutorial involvement can result in positive outcomes.

Policy Implications The expansion of early intervention programming into the juvenile justice system offers opportunities to address early problem behavior. Our study and its results have the following policy implications.

• 1 : Closely coupled partnerships between schools and the juvenile justice system can effectively address, mitigate, and perhaps prevent an early onset of antisocial behavior.
• 2 : Even so, coupling early intervention efforts to the mission of the juvenile justice system warrants debate. Net-widening, resource diffusion, and the potential for officials to rely too heavily on the deterrent characteristics of the justice system represent serious threats to the integrity of effective early intervention programs.
• 3 : We suggest substantial debate and consideration is given before coupling early intervention efforts to the juvenile justice system.