The Federal Concessioner System: Linking Policy to Opportunities for Local Service Providers

Every year millions of tourists hit the open road to enjoy America's public recreation lands. Upon arrival at their destinations, visitors enjoy a host of service amenities ranging from hotels and lodges to ski resorts and back country adventures, all compliments of concessioners. These public lands concessioner operations are a multibillion dollar business. This decades‐long analysis finds that local service providers have generally failed to secure concessioner contracts on public lands. A focus among more politically adept participants upon other policy priorities has eclipsed local provider preferences despite periodic opportunities for change and economic need.     

A Preliminary Assessment of Water Institutions in India: An Institutional Design Perspective

Water institutions in India play a crucial role in managing scarce water resources and are central to economic development and poverty alleviation. Designing appropriate institutional mechanisms to allocate scarce water and river flows has been an enormous challenge due to the complex legal, constitutional, and social issues involved. The Indian water sector has been grappling with poor performance and deterioration of public (canal and tank) irrigation systems, high extraction levels of groundwater, and related economic and environmental problems. The objective of this article is to carry out a preliminary assessment of institutional mechanisms available to manage water resources in India. The article surveys various formal and informal institutional arrangements that are used at present and their design features in order to identify those institutions related to superior performance. The analysis indicates that crafting “winning institutions” and the policy frameworks to strengthen them should take into account not only the proven criteria of institutional design but also the changing socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors.     

A Tale of Two Towns: Assessing the Role of Political Resources in a Community Electronic Network

In this study we examine responses to the recent expansion of information technology in two rural Minnesota towns. One of these towns took a cooperative approach to technology access, developing a community electronic network, while the other town relied on a more individualistic, entrepreneurial model. The present study examines citizens' attitudes concerning social, political, and technological issues in these two communities, with the goal of uncovering what kinds of attitudes and resources citizens need to have in order to help support and sustain a community electronic network. Structural equation modeling is used to specify the relationships among individuals' economic, political, and social resources, technology ownership and use, and awareness of and support for the community network. Drawing on a theory of social capital, we consider the relative importance of privately- oriented social engagement versus publicly- oriented political engagement in relation to collective outcomes. Our analysis shows that in the town with the broadly- based community electronic network, individuals' political as well as economic resources are linked to knowledge and use of computer resources, whereas in the comparison community, economic stratification alone drives computer access. The implications of these findings for issues of equity, access to technology, and the development of strong community ties are discussed.     

Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Research

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to present an accessible way of introducing students to the key generic terms of social science research. There is an obvious need for clarifying the generic tools and terminology of the social sciences across the disciplines, as academics argue past each other, using identical terms but attaching different meanings to them. Secondly, this article presents the interrelationship between the core concepts of social science (ontology, epistemology, methodology, methods and sources). This 'directional' and logical relationship needs to be understood, if students – and academics – are to engage in constructive dialogue and criticism of each others' work.     

Australian Antecedents of the Third Way

New Labour theorists have been prone to identify American New Progressivism as the proximate source of 'third way' ideas. In this article we argue that, if the focus is on the governing practice rather than on the naming of a governing orientation, a case can be made for seeing Australian Labor in government from 1983 to 1996 as a progenitor of third way thinking and as a specific source of New Labour policy development in a number of areas. Taking Stuart White's account of the main dimensions of third way programmatic realignment as our guide, we discuss the success of the Hawke/Keating Labor governments in reducing the direct provider role of state, developing new forms of collective provision, reforming the tax system, making social policy more employment-friendly and creating the institutions of an asset-based egalitarianism. We conclude by pointing out that, whilst there are many common themes in Australian Labor practice and New Labor rhetoric, and some evidence of specific policy transfer from one to the other, a plausible case can also be made for seeing many of the policy initiatives of the Hawke/Keating era as a reworking of an older Australian Labor tradition of regulatory state activism.