The GOVERNANCE blog

“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governance approach to global development represents less improvement than advertised over the market fundamentalism it superseded.”

A major argument for delegating power to independent regulatory agencies is that they will make decisions based on scientific knowledge rather than political considerations.  But what do we know about how independent regulators actually use scientific knowledge?  Not enough, says Lorna Schrefler of the University of Exeter, in the new issue of Governance (23.2, April 2010).  Regulators might not rely on scientific knowledge at all; or they might use it to buff their legitimacy rather than solve regulatory problems.  Schrefler develops a framework to explain when and how scientific knowledge is likely to be used, and uses decisions from the US EPA and NHTSA to illustrate her approach.  When political conflict over an issue is intense, and a regulatory problem is relatively intractable, the odds increase that scientific knowledge will be neglected or used for symbolic purposes alone.  Read more: The Usage of Scientific Knowledge by Independent Regulatory Agencies.

Individuals who take a new subscription to the print version of Governance in April 2010 will receive a complimentary copy of Kishore Mahbubani‘s book, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, published by PublicAffairs in 2008.