Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States. The city's expansion--at the rate of one acre per hour--comes at the expense of its Sonoran Desert environment. For some residents, the American Dream has become a nightmare.

In this provocative book, Janine Schipper examines the cultural forces that contribute to suburban sprawl in the United States. Focusing on the Phoenix area, she examines sustainable development in Cave Creek, various master-planned suburbs, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation to explore suburbanization and ecological destruction. She also explains why sprawl continues despite the heavy toll it takes on the environment.

Schipper gives voice to community members who have experienced the pressures of sprawl and questioned fundamental assumptions that sustain it. She presents the perspectives of the many players in the sprawl debate--from developers and politicians to environmentalists and property-rights advocates--not merely to document the phenomenon but also to reveal how seemingly natural ways of thinking about the land are influenced by cultural forces that range from notions of a "rational society" to the marketing of the American Dream.

"Disappearing Desert" speaks to land-use dilemmas nationwide and shows that curtailing suburban development requires both policy shifts and new ways of relating to the land. For anyone seeking to understand the cultural basis for rampant development, this book uncovers the forces that drive sprawl and searches for solutions to its seeming inevitability.

In 1997 the United States accepted more legal immigrants than all other countries combined. This large influx of newcomers, however, has alarmed many Americans. Immigration is a controversial issue because it intersects with the most contentious issues of our time: multiculturalism, bilingualism, unemployment, crime, etc. Opinion polls since 1965 show that a strong majority want to reduce immigration. Yet our government has refused to respond to the public's wish. In 1996, Congress scuttled a proposal to reduce immigration by a third. (Earlier, in 1990, Congress voted to increase immigration by a whopping 40 percent.) This is all the more surprising because the United States has had no qualms about severely restricting immigration in the past. Kenneth Lee explains why recent immigration policy has failed to reflect the public opinion by approaching the question from a broad, historical outlook, and from a focused, contemporary perspective. He traces several momentous historical changes that have abetted the pro-immigration block and weakened the restrictionists' clout (mainly, the rise of conservative economics in the 1970s and the growing racial liberalism in America). He also examines immigration policy on a micro-level: detailing the intense lobbying that went on for the 1990 and 1996 immigration bills, and he also shows how unlikely players as, for example, Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed, helped defeat the restrictionist bill in 1996.

This work examines and contrasts U.S. decisions concerning military intervention in Lebanon in 1958 and 1982, and how the decisions made by Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan resulted in certain outcomes and avoided others. To bring each administration's decisions into perspective, the events that shaped foreign policy are examined, while the quality of the decisions are assessed in terms of each leader's managerial style and cognition. Among the topics addressed with regard to the formulation and conduct of U.S. policy are the premises and rationale behind each president's policy decisions, the events that shaped specific responses, and the resulting lessons that apply to crisis situations.

Following a brief introduction, Agnes Korbani offers a concise review of the systematic and motivational opportunities for military intervention in Lebanon. A pair of chapters cover the 1958 intervention, beginning with a survey of the 1955-57 period and the circumstances that shaped U.S. responses, followed by a discussion of how the decision to intervene was formulated and why the action took the form it did. The 1982 interventions are the focus of the next chapters, which review President Reagan's intervention objective, the regional issues that influenced the decision to intervene, and the rationale behind the move. Two concluding chapters suggest ways to apply theory and decision models to the crises, and detail major errors that could have been avoided and lessons that should be learned. This is the first book to deal with decision making in an Arab country from a comparative perspective, and should be an essential reference source for scholars of U.S. foreign policy, Middle Eastern studies, and presidential studies.

How are political systems likely to shape the choices, uses, and effects of technological progress? This important new book addresses that question in a case study of Brazil's national alcohol program, Proalcool. Proalcool's stated goals are economic growth, and the reduction of personal regional income disparities, through the production of alcohol as a substitute for petroleum fuels used in internal combustion engines. Established by presidential decree in 1975, the program sought to save Brazil's floundering sugar industry and today can be counted as one of the world's largest and most advanced alternative energy experiments. To better understand how Brazil's political system has shaped this technology, the author investigates the prograM's actual social and economic consequences. He then seeks explanations for these outcomes focusing on the systemic or structural reasons that determined the development of Proalcool's technology. He concludes that the program is best understood as an agent and as a product of an authoritarian political regime, and goes further to analyze its potential role in Brazil's nascent democracy.

The book offers an evaluation of the ways in which the new democratic regime in Brazil is likely to shape the choice, use and development of technologies with the potential for profound and lasting changes on the Brazilian economy. By comparing and contrasting the essential features of a democratic regime with a bureaucratic authoritarian one, the author outlines the ways in which the new Brazilian regime--and other Latin American regimes--are likely to shape their technological choices and the futures of their citizens.

This book elaborates on how China's previous leaders established, consolidated, developed and improved China's basic modern governance system. It also explores and discusses how to correctly, objectively and scientifically perceive, evaluate and promote the modernization of China's state governance and its capacity. Using detailed and accurate data and extensive background information, this book analyzes the changing history and future perspectives of the relationship between China's government and the market, state-owned economy and private economy. Covering an extensive timespan, this comprehensive book includes contributions from Chinese scholars specialized in contemporary China studies discussing the major breakthroughs and decision-making consultations in Chinese development strategies. It also offers insights into the research mechanism and development levels of Chinese think tanks based at research institutes. Last but not least, it sheds light on the democratic advances in the Chinese decision-making process.

This book analyses the nexus between ideology, the state, and education reforms worldwide. The research evinces the neo-liberal ideological imperatives of current education and policy reforms and illustrates the way these shifts in the relationship between the state and education policy are affecting current trends in education reforms and schooling around the globe. With this as its focus, the chapters represent hand-picked scholarly research on major discourses in the field of global education reforms. Offering a compendium of the very latest thought on the subject, this book is, like the others in the series, a state-of-the-art sourcebook for researchers, practitioners and policymakers alike. Not only do the chapters offer a timely analysis of current issues shaping education policy research; the work also contains ideas about future directions that education and policy reforms could take. By doing so, it provides a comprehensive view of the diverse and intersecting discourses on globalisation and policy-driven reforms in education. The book draws on recent studies in the areas of globalisation, education reforms, and the role of the state. Respective chapters critically assess the dominant discourses and debates on education and policy reforms. Using diverse comparative education paradigms, ranging from critical theory to historical-comparative research, they focus on globalisation, ideology and democracy, and examine both the reasons for and outcomes of education reforms and policy change.

This edited collection highlights the different meanings that have been attached to the notion of energy security and how it is taken to refer to different objects. Official policy definitions of energy security are broadly similar across countries and emphasize the reliability and affordability of access to sufficient energy resources for a community to uphold its normal economic and social functions. However, perceptions of energy security vary between states causing different actions to be taken, both in international relations and in domestic politics. Energy Security in Europe moves the policy debates on energy security beyond a consideration of its seemingly objective nature. It also provides a series of contributions that shed light on the conditions under which similar material factors are met with very different energy security policies and divergent discourses across Europe. Furthermore, it problematizes established notions prevalent in energy security studies, such as whether energy security is 'geopolitical', and an element of high politics, or purely 'economic', and should be left for the markets to regulate. This book will be of particular relevance to students and academics in the fields of energy studies and political science seeking to understand the divergence in perspectives and understandings of energy security challenges between EU member states and in multilateral relationships between the EU as a whole.

In America's foreign affairs there has been a delicate balance between often conflicting imperatives of interests, ideals, and power. How these imperatives have intersected to shape the constellation of American foreign policy decisions throughout the nation's history and, indeed, how they have served to advance or subvert attainment of America's regional, hemispheric and global ambitions, is the subject of this study. This collection of essays explores seminal decisions in American foreign policy and diplomatic history, from the early National period to the Vietnam War, each of which proved to be a turning point, and then asks readers to consider alternative futures based upon different courses of action. Nielson underscores how history could, and perhaps should, have been different. U.S. foreign policy has in large measure been contingent upon decisions made by individuals in positions of power. Their personalities, characters, and assumptions about duty and America's role in the world have uniquely shaped policy choices and, thus, the course of foreign affairs, for better or worse. This book hopes to show that history is ever fluid, unpredictable, and problematic. It will complement traditional texts as a "what if" counterpoint which will stimulate interest in and speculation about leadership roles, national interest, and decision making in foreign policy.

Global Environmental Change reviews the facts and the uncertainties relating to some of the major environmental issues facing us today--greenhouse warming, loss of stratospheric ozone, and acid precipitation--and shows how these facts and uncertainties are dealt with by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Anticipated environmental changes in future decades are described and explained, and the consequences of those projected changes are described for rise of sea level, water resources, agriculture, ecological systems, and other topics. Three chapters of the study are devoted to the roles of academic institutions, government agencies, and nongovernmental agencies in developing and implementing policies. Another chapter discusses the relationship of U.S. research and environmental policy to international research and environmental policy, emphasizing how new concepts relating to global change have emerged from earlier research and out of the growing recognition of the seriousness of environmental problems. Finally, the work addresses the need for more effective interactions of science and policy.

During the past two decades public policy analysis has focused on the role of implementation as a distinct phenomenon in the creation of policy output. More recently, implementation researchers have called for a major reevaluation of the process of policy formation itself. This book presents an overview of why implementation research has contributed to this major reconsideration and offers conceptual frameworks that employ implementation research to develop a fuller understanding of the entire policy process. It attempts to narrow the divide between the assumptions of the earlier and later implementation researchers. The contributors to this book aim at clarifying the relationship between implementation research and public policy analysis. They caution against the error of assuming that implementation is the main factor in policy making and that once implementation is taken care of, policies will be effective. They attempt to place implementation in the broader policy making process and show its relationship to the other parts of the policy cycle. Additionally, several of the contributors develop explanatory models that cut across the research dichotomies of the prevailing top-down and bottom-up approaches and establish an agenda for future research. The book is divided into three parts; within each the chapters are organized by questions that move from the more empirical to more methodological and theoretical concerns. The chapters in the first section deal with policy design issues and empirical aspects of implementation research. Those in part two present implementation's special contribution to the policy field, discussing how policy implementation adapts to changing organizational, intergovernmental, and ideological circumstances. The generalizations made by the authors focus on the contribution implementation research makes to understanding the entire policy process. The final section includes chapters that capture and extend the observations of the other contributors. These essays also develop generalizations and suggest various lines of future research. The final chapter both summarizes implementation's contributions and proposes an interpretive model that will forward future research. This comprehensive work can be used in courses on public policy and administration, and social welfare.

Occupational segregation is an important issue and can be detrimental to women. There is a strong need for more women in science, engineering, and information technology, which are traditionally male dominated fields. Female representation in the computer gaming industry is a potential way to increase the presence of women in other computer-related fields. Gender Considerations and Influence in the Digital Media and Gaming Industry provides a collection of high-quality empirical studies and personal experiences of women working in male-dominated fields with a particular focus on the media and gaming industries. Providing insight on best methods for attracting and retaining women in these fields, this volume is a valuable reference for executives and members of professional bodies who wish to encourage women in their career progression.

Historians commonly point to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act as the inception of a new chapter in the story of American immigration. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from varied disciplines to consider what is genuinely new about this period.

In this volume Rozell and Peterson bring together a collection of new essays exploring the unparalleled impact of Franklin D. Roosevelt on the modern presidency. Of all the modern presidents, FDR looms largest. Indeed, most scholars date the origins of the modern presidency to FDR, and many assert that no one since has achieved his level of greatness in office.

The essays are organized into two broad sections: The first examines FDR's impact on the creation and development of the administrative presidency and the legacy of the New Deal; the second looks at FDR's legacy to presidential leadership and the exercise of presidential powers. An important volume for scholars and other researchers of the FDR era and the modern American presidency.

At a crucial time in American history, John Tyler--elected vice president on the Whig ticket--became president upon the death of William Henry Harrison. The nation, after expanding across the continent, was suffering from sectional tensions, Indian conflicts, issues over slavery, and economic problems. Tyler's becoming president created a crisis for Whigs, who questioned his intentions, his past record, and his irregular political alliances. Soon, the course he set was unacceptable to both Whigs and Jacksonian Democrats. His presidency has not received the extensive scholarly study accorded many presidents. This bibliography provides an excellent beginning for those wishing to research Tyler and this critical period in American history.

The definitive study of Tyler is yet to be written. Much of what has been written about him has been highly opinionated. Yet, as this bibliography reveals, primary material on Tyler is abundant. The volume presents in usable format most of the materials by and dealing with Tyler, including both secondary and primary materials. It also includes relevant information on his contemporaries and covers major works dealing with the period. It provides a good introduction to the literature of the times of Tyler.

The growth in power of government bureaucracies is one of the more profound developments of 20th-century society. Bureaucracies impact the quality of life of every person in this country and many millions outside American borders. The president, governors, mayors, legislators, judges, and the public now are increasingly concerned with how bureaucracies are using their power, and accountability is at the heart of these concerns. For what and to whom are bureaucracies accountable? This acclaimed text examines these questions, primarily in the context of the federal bureaucracy.

Building upon the second edition of the text, Rosen updated the entire work to incorporate significant subsequent developments. Among the most important are the Chief Financial Officer Act of 1990, the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, and the Government Management Reform Act of 1994. These three laws, with the Clinton administration's National Performance Review initiative, could substantially improve performance and accountability. The text clearly and systematically examines issues of accountability that are of concern to students and researchers as well as policymakers in the area of public administration.

Seib explores the many ways in which news coverage shapes the design and implementation of foreign policy. By influencing the political attitudes of opinion-shaping elites and the public at large, the news media can profoundly affect the conduct of foreign policy. Seib's text analyzes important examples of press influence on foreign affairs: the news media's definition of success and failure, as in reporting the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam; how public impatience, fueled by news reports, can pressure presidents, as happened during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81; how presidents can anticipate and control news media coverage, as was done by the Bush administration during the 1991 Gulf War; how press revelation or suppression of secret information affects policy, as in the cases of the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and various intelligence operations; how coverage of humanitarian crises affects public opinion; the challenges of live TV coverage; and the changing influence of news in the post-Cold War world. By covering a wide range of issues and examples, this important text will stimulate thoughtful appraisal of the relationships between the news media and those who make policy. It will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, political communication, and international relations.

This book traces the narrative strategies framing austerity policies through an illuminating analysis of policy documents and political discourses, exposing the political consequences for women, racialized minorities and disabled people. While many have critiqued the ways in which austerity has captured the contemporary political narrative, this is the first book to systematically examine how these narratives work to shift the terms within which policy debates about inequality and difference play out. Gedalof's exceptional readings of these texts pay close attention to the formal qualities of these narratives: the chronologies they impose, their articulation of crisis and resolution, the points of view they construct and the affective registers they deploy. In this manner she argues persuasively that the differences of gender, race, ethnicity and disability have been stitched into the fabric of austerity as excesses that must be disavowed, as reproductive burdens that are too great for the austere state to bear. This innovative, intersectional analysis will appeal to students and scholars of social policy, gender studies, politics and public policy.

Jim Glassman addresses the role of the state in the industrial transformation of what was, before the economic crisis of 1997-98, one of Southeast Asia's fastest growing economies. Approaching this issue from a different angle to those dominating 1980s and 1990s debates about the role of states in East Asian growth, Glassman argues that the Thai state has been both proactive and interventionist in encouraging industrial transformation - contrary to what neo-liberals have asserted - but at the same time has not been a 'developmental' state of the sort championed by neo-Weberian analysts of East Asia. Analyzing the Cold War period, the period of the economic boom, as well as the economic crisis and its political aftershock, Thailand at the Margins recasts the story of the Thai state's post-World War II development performance by focusing on uneven industrialization and the interaction between internationalization and the transformation of Thai labour.

The political practice of declaring victory and coming home has provided a false and dangerous domestic impression of great success for U.S. unilateral and multilateral interventions in failing and failed states around the world. The reality of such irresponsibility is that the root causes and the violent consequences of contemporary "intranational" conflict are left to smolder and reignite at a later date with the accompanying human and physical waste. This book discusses why it is incumbent on the international community and individual powers involved in dealing with the chaos of the post-Cold War world to understand that such action requires a long-term, holistic, and strategic approach.

The intent of such an approach is to create and establish the proven internal conditions that can lead to a mandated peace and stability--with justice. The key elements that define those conditions at the strategic level include: (1) the physical establishment of order and the rule of law; (2) the isolation of belligerents; (3) the regeneration of the economy; (4) the shaping of political consent; (5) fostering peaceful conflict resolution processes; (6) achieving a complete unity of effort toward stability; and (7) establishment and maintenance of a legitimate civil society. These essential dimensions of contemporary global security and stability requirements comprise a new paradigm that will, hopefully, initiate the process of rethinking both problem and response.

This book explores the making of international social science, and the parts which academics, policymakers and research managers play in creating European social environmental research. The authors present and analyse a complex picture of overlapping institutional interests within six countries of the EU - The Netherlands, UK, Spain, Greece, Finland and Austria - and develop new models with which to capture the transnational interaction of researchers and funding agencies.The contributors consider the practical and intellectual challenges facing European research managers charged with the task of building a community of social researchers willing to engage with a policy-relevant environmental agenda. The book analyses the shape and character of European social science and the values and commitments of research activity on the environment. This book will be of special interest to those involved in social environmental research, environmental policy, European studies and research management whether at the practical and policy level or in academia.

This intriguing book investigates the technical information quandary created by post-industrial changes, which have produced demands for citizen involvement in public policy processes while complex scientific and technical issues increasingly make public involvement difficult. Authors Pierce, Steger, Steel, and Lovrich address the degree to which interest groups might serve to bridge the knowledge gap between public policy processes and the citizenry in U.S. and Canadian settings. The focus of the study is on acid rain policy in Michigan and Ontario, an area of considerable scientific and technical complexity as well as political and public interest. The authors examine how the U.S. and Canadian publics acquire, process, and communicate policy-relevant information so that it can influence policymaking. Do interest groups play the information dissemination role in a manner that could address the technical information quandary? Are interest groups playing the same or different roles in the United States and Canada? What different factors cause U.S. and Canadian interest groups to behave as they do in the political arena? Recommended for scholars of Political Science, Communication, Environmental Studies, and Comparative Public Policy.

This book shows how specific historical events and societal forces within Nigeria transcend the choices its political leaders have made to influence the course of the state's political development. Kalu N. Kalu describes a variety of factors that have contributed to the challenges facing state-building and political institutions in Nigeria. Chief among them are the nature of interest aggregation, the dynamics of conflict, and the patterns of state intervention in matters dealing with secularism, distributive politics, economy, security, and autonomy. Kalu succeeds in constructing a more organic concept of political development in Nigeria by creating a model based on rentier politics that captures the critical relationship between state power and economy. By doing so, he goes beyond current scholarship about Nigeria and demonstrates the need for a restructuring of its institutions, offering insight into an enduring narrative that continues to shape Nigerian politics.

The Executive in the Constitution: Structure, Autonomy, and Internal Control is the first constitutional and legal analysis of the inner workings of the executive for many years. It aims to provoke a reappraisal, by constitutional lawyers, of the place of the executive within the constitution, by exploring an area hitherto largely neglected in constitutional law: the legal foundations of the powers and structure of the executive, and the mechanisms through which the centre of the executive seeks to control the actions of departments. The authors, both pre-eminent in the field off constitutional law, show that the machinery of executive co-ordination and control is no less crucial a dimension of the constitutional order than the external machinery of democratic and legal control. These external parliamentary and judicial controls depend for their effectiveness on the executive's ability to control itself. The plural structure of the executive, however, makes the co-ordination and control of its component parts a highly problematical pursuit. Against the background of an analysis of the executive's legal structure, the book examines in detail the controls governing departmental access to staffing, financial, and legal resources, analysing the relationship between these internal controls and the external machinery of democratic and legal control, and showing how the machinery of internal control has been shaped by the structure of the executive branch. The organization of the executive and the way it controls the actions of its departments has changed significantly in recent year. This book explores the impact of the machinery if executive co-ordination and control of the ambitious public service reform project which has been pursued by successive governments over the last twenty years, as well as of changes in the wider constitutional framework, including those stemming from the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union and the growth of judicial review. It shows how public service reforms, judicial review, and European law are changing not just the inner life of the executive government but its place in the constitution as well.