Community Commitment in Special Districts

ABSTRACT

Special districts now constitute about 42% of all U.S. jurisdictions, yet little is known about them. Some critics are concerned that special districts and their staffs have insufficient community commitment. This study, based on a national survey of senior managers in large special districts, examines activities and programs of special district managers that foster community building and engagement, including correlates of these. Study results reveal that special districts are committed to their communities and several strategies and conditions are associated with increased community commitment, such as jobs that focus on community interactions, service type, and ethics management, as well as, to a lesser extent, graduate degree qualifications and charters that specify the role of managers in promoting the public interest and in relation to the board.     

Building Network Implementation Capacity: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Network research increasingly draws attention to capacity affecting outcomes. This study examines network implementation capacity and develops a framework that focuses on three dimensions: financial, managerial, and technical capacity. It also contributes by focusing on the Network Administrator Organization (NAO)-type network. Based on a case study of two large eco-financing networks in China, this study finds positive impacts of network implementation capacity on policy outcomes. It also draws attention to network strategies and their impact on capacity. It identifies the positive effect of efforts to maintain network stability as well as negotiation and participation strategies on network implementation capacity. This study draws attention to implementation capacity as a determinant of network outcomes and suggests that studies in public administration give greater attention to NAO-type networks.     

Innovation in local government homelessness strategies

This study examines innovations in local government homelessness policy, specifically, the use of comprehensive and targeted programs. Traditionally, homelessness efforts have focused on emergency assistance, and have not included efforts in homelessness prevention or long-term care responding to the housing, job training and placement, health and mental health needs of homeless persons. In this article, findings are reported from a national survey of local homelessness efforts in cities over 50,000. It is found that 13 percent of cities have adopted the innovation of comprehensive homelessness efforts. Driving forces of this innovation include a broad range of private and public actions, including the use of community-based action strategies, as well as local conditions such as increased domestic violence and the use of emergency shelters. Popular apathy and a lack of city funding are important barriers to the adoption of this innovation.     

Rehabilitating Retributivism

This review essay of Victor Tadros’s new book, “The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law,” responds to Tadros’s energetic and sophisticated attacks on retributivist justifications for criminal punishment. I argue, in a nutshell, that those attacks fail. In defending retributivism, however, I also sketch original views on two questions that retributivism must address but that many or most retributivists have skated past. First, what do wrongdoers deserve – to suffer? to be punished? something else? Second, what does it mean for them to deserve it? That is, what is the normative force or significance of valid desert claims, either with respect to retributivist desert in particular or with respect to all forms of desert? Because the answers that this essay offers are preliminary, the essay also serves as a partial blueprint for further work by criminal law theorists with retributivist sympathies.     

The negative relationships between employee resilience and ambiguity,complexity, and inter-agency collaboration

Employee resilience (ER) is often needed to face demands inherent in public sector work. Some types of demands, however, may hinder its development, rather than provide the type of challenging adversity from which resilience can develop. Public sector job demands have been a long-standing issue for public workplaces and employees but are also growing in salience as organisations face an increasingly variable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources model and the challenge/hindrance stress literature, this multi-level study of Aotearoa New Zealand civil servants (n = 11,533) in 65 public sector organisations shows that ER is negatively affected by demands such as job insecurity, unclear job and organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration. However, organisational resource constraints are positively associated with ER. This study identifies core PA job and organisational demands that hinder ER and offers practical implications and suggestions for further research.

Points for practitioners

• Job role ambiguity, job insecurity, unclear organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration are common job and organisational demands in public sector workplaces.
• For employees, these demands are stressors that employees do not feel they control, and may therefore hinder employee resilience: the ability to learn, adapt, and leverage networks in the face of challenges.
• Surprisingly, resource constraints, where employees have to ‘do more with less’, might help employees develop ER.
• While inter-agency collaboration has potentially many benefits, it appears to have negative spillover effects on employees unaware of it or not involved in it.
• To encourage ER, agencies should clarify both organisational and job goals, and assure job security, control, competency development, and supervisor support.