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This book discusses the role good governance plays in achieving sustainable development and eradicating extreme poverty in Africa. It examines a number of the roadblocks to development in Africa and analyzes the complexity and interrelatedness of these problems. It looks at economic development from the perspective of human security, with a focus on strengthening the human resource component of African economies to achieve better governance as part of a sustainable development process. The book includes contributed chapters from leading practitioners and scholars on global development.

Presents and compares nonideological resolutions to environmental pollution and toxic waste, urbanization and transportation, homelessness, health-care policies around the world. This book evaluates industrial interventions and energy sources. It also explores flow control and corporate growth, and privatization and liberalization.

This book offers the single most comprehensive reference on public administration in the Caribbean to date. Drawing together some of the best researcher and practitioner perspectives on these small and developing states, it covers the lesser-known experiences of the Dutch, French, and English Caribbean, as well as Cuba and Haiti, showing the rich legacies, themes, and contemporary issues affecting the region. It also considers a number of critical policy issues, some old, some new, and others yet emerging that are of significant import for successful governance and development across the region.

The economic history of the recent decade has been volatile at best, and devastating at its worst. The effects have tended to be most severe in the small, isolated towns of America. This book presents a detailed discussion of the economic challenges facing these small towns, looking at why some have survived, while others have not. Through 51 case studies, this book gives a voice to the real, living realities and administrative strategies of small-town America.

This book takes a much-needed holistic approach to the problem of human rights violations around the globe. It unpacks the questions of human advocacy and policy, identifies traps in discussions about violations of rights, and presents best practices for a variety of disciplinary approaches. It narrows its focus from global to local concerns, beginning with a structural examination of international governmental institutions, followed by analyses of specific contexts and their unique challenges to the establishment, maintenance, and strengthening of human rights.

This edited volume brings together the most prominent names in constitutional school scholarship in an aim to make it more visible, accessible, and central to the field of public administration's pedagogy, scholarship, and intellectual development. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of public administration with an interest in constitutional / administrative law and political theory around the globe.

Democracy and Civil Society in a Global Era addresses challenges to the strengthening of active citizenship. In this highly-structured work, the themes presented are linked to fostering a culture of peace and non-violence, the lessening of fear and insecurity in political, economic, social, and cultural terms inherently detached from the conceptualization of political delineations and physical boundaries, and the ability to live dignified lives. The various regions that are represented in the case studies include: the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, China, the Middle East, Nigeria and the EU. The commonality and universality of the topics allows readers from any region of the world to relate to them.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of what constitutes local sustainability and why it matters, focusing closely on local sustainability policy covering everything from environmental initiatives, economic development issues, and social equity concerns.

The Public Performance and Productivity Handbook, Third Edition is required reading for all public administration practitioners, as well as for students and scholars interested in the state of the public performance and productivity field.

"This book analyzes American administrative reform, taking a multidisciplinary approach, challenging existing notions of the nature, scope, and power of the American state and, with these, important aspects of today's conventional wisdom in public administration"--

This book demonstrates that a good grounding in cost basics, especially those related to cost accounting, operations management, and quality control can help all organizations, in particular government, increase efficiency, improve performance, and, in the end, do a better job of running its everyday operation.

A conflict management reference which covers theoretical perspectives, strategic models, and situational contexts. It sets precedents for furthering academic study and real-world progress in managing diverse instances of conflict. It provides techniques to promote peaceful negotiation, cooperation, and consensus.

Covers diverse issues, aspects, and features of public administration and policy around the world. This book focuses on bureaucracy and bureaucratic politics in developing and industrialized countries. It emphasizes administrative performance and policy implementation, as well as political system maintenance and regime enhancement.

The right turn in U. S. politics has increased conflict over both ends and means in government budgeting and financial management. Overlapping and competing views of the way the world works drive finance officials' practice. Taking a new look at public financial management that acknowledges the multiple, competing realities, Government Budgeting and Financial Management in Practice: Logics to Make Sense of Ambiguity examines transaction cost economics and other small government, managed-by-the-market techniques as the latest reincarnation of public budgeting and financial management orthodoxy. Gerald J. Miller reviews new research on the continuing validity of the political dimension of government finance decisions and the multiple, intensely argued constructions of reality the finance official must make sense of.Miller discusses major advances in interpretive approaches to budgeting and finance and how they dominate writing in the broader field of public administration. He also examines the effects of the explosion of information systems, new budget techniques, nonconventional ways of spending, and new technologies. The book uses a question as the motivating force to understand some facets of today's government budgeting, finance, and financial management: where do the critical assumptions come from to drive financial management? Miller takes the history of reform, developments in the field and the logics finance officials say they use as sources for these assumptions and examines what they reveal about constructions of the government finance world. Exploring new avenues of financial management thinking, the book discusses ambiguity and interpretations that move the unclear preferences, ends, and goals toward consensus. The author identifies an alternative approach to research that explains important facets of financial management. This approach is drawn directly from practice, events and problems in public organizations and from the creedal bent of many political actors in competition.

Using rich ethnographic data and first-hand experience, Ball presents a detailed account of Australia's attempts to incorporate behavioural insights into its public policy.Ball identifies three competing interpretations of behavioural public policy, and how these interpretations have influenced the use of this approach in practice. The first sees the process as an opportunity to introduce more rigorous evidence. The second interpretation focuses on increasing compliance, cost savings and cutting red tape. The last focuses on the opportunity to better involve citizens in policy design. These interpretations demonstrate different 'solutions' to a series of dilemmas that the Australian Public Service, and others, have confronted in the last 50 years, including growing politicisation, technocracy and a disconnect from the needs of citizens. Ball offers a detailed account of how these priorities have shaped how behavioural insights have been implemented in policy-making, as well as reflecting on the challenges facing policy work more broadly.An essential read for practitioners and scholars of policy-making, especially in Australia.

This book provides state-of-the-art tools for best practice in the procurement of services at state and local levels, throughout the procurement cycle.