“It is no small thing to win the adoption of general-interest reforms in the United States,” says Erik Patashnik in his new book, Reforms at Risk: What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted?, “But what is required to initiate policy reform should not be confused with what is required to sustain it”  Patashnik’s book is reviewed by Michael Moran of the University of Manchester in the new issue of Governance.   Moran says the book is “an example of American political science at its best . . . fine scholarship indeed.”

Also reviewed in the new issue:  Sustainable Development for Public Administration, by Denise Zeynep Leuenberger and John Bartle.  Fred Thompson of Willamette University says that this “very good book . . . introduces public administrators to the basics of sustainable development and to the design and implementation of public policies . . . which are systemically sustainable, intertemporally and distributionally equitable, and economically efficient.”

And Arthur Goldsmith of the University of Massachusetts Boston reviews Governance and the Depoliticisation of Development, edited by Wil Hout and Richard Robison.  Hout and Robison “challenge the new orthodoxy about governance,” Goldsmith says.  The book’s theme is that “the governance approach to global development represents less improvement than advertised over the market fundamentalism it superseded.”