In the age of digitalization, even the way we govern is adapting. Recently, with the successful implementation of e-governments, the way our systems are organized has changed. Here, Israel Patino Galvan suggests a specialized design structure as an alternative to the new, digital governments that are becoming increasingly more common. Through a thorough exploration of the history of these structures, and through field research in Mexico, serious deficiencies have been identified in the ways in which these e-governments have been implemented. Instead, Galvan offers a tri-phase solution to designing local governments, placing the direction and division of Information Technologies at the core to support the modernization and optimization process. For researchers and practitioners in public administration, information technologies, or information systems, this is a vital text providing a detailed case study as support for a new organizational system.

City management in developing countries is a quickly growing area in current public administration literature. However, little research material can be found regarding the management of cities. Demonstrating the issues in this field, Challenges in City Management: A Case Study Approach brings the sometimes dry theories and concepts of urban planning and management to life. The author uses case studies to demonstrate "who," "what," "why," and "how," dramatically increasing readers' ability to comprehend and apply the theories. Incorporating urban management and organizational management theories with actual practice, the author presents case studies based on observations made during her extensive experience. She offers multiple examples of common contemporary city topics ranging from personnel, policy-making, housing, homelessness, transportation, and budgeting. Each study describes and analyzes a scenario, identifying the economic and political factors as well as the often conflicting players and interest groups. The book provides enhanced understanding of the complex environment city administrators work in, helping readers develop improved decision-making and problem-solving skills through the study of real issues city administrators have experienced. The case study methodology used supplies information that is immediately applicable to real-world situations, making it a resource that city administrators can use to improve their public administration and governance skills.

In the Loop: A Political and Economic History of San Antonio, is the culmination of urban historian David Johnson's extensive research into the development of Texas's oldest city. Beginning with San Antonio's formation more than three hundred years ago, Johnson lays out the factors that drove the largely uneven and unplanned distribution of resources and amenities and analyzes the demographics that transformed the city from a frontier settlement into a diverse and complex modern metropolis. Following the shift from military interests to more diverse industries and punctuated by evocative descriptions and historical quotations, this urban biography reveals how city mayors balanced constituents' push for amenities with the pull of business interests such as tourism and the military. Deep dives into city archives fuel the story and round out portraits of Sam Maverick, Henry B. Gonzales, Lila Cockrell, and other political figures. Johnson reveals the interplay of business interests, economic attractiveness, and political goals that spurred San Antonio's historic tenacity and continuing growth and highlights individual agendas that influenced its development. He focuses on the crucial link between urban development and booster coalitions, outlining how politicians and business owners everywhere work side by side, although not necessarily together, to shape the future of any metropolitan area, including geographical disparities. Three photo galleries illustrate boosterism's impact on San Antonio's public and private space and highlight its tangible results. In the Loop recounts each stage of San Antonio's economic development with logic and care, building a rich story to contextualize our understanding of the current state of the city and our notions of how an American city can form.

This book discusses the current demographic shifts of blacks, Latinos, and other people of colour out of certain strong-market cities and the growing fear of displacement among low-income urban residents. It documents these populations' efforts to remain in their communities and highlights how this leads to community organizing around economic, environmental, and social justice. The book shows how residents of once-neglected urban communities are standing up to city economic development agencies, influential real estate developers, universities, and others to remain in their neighbourhoods, protect their interests, and transform their communities into sustainable, healthy communities. These communities are deploying new strategies that build off of past struggles over urban renewal. Based on seven years of research, this book draws on a wealth of material to conduct a case study analysis of eight low-income/mixed-income communities in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. This timely book is aimed at researchers and postgraduate students interested in urban policy and politics, community development, urban studies, environmental justice, urban public health, sociology, community-based research methods, and urban planning theory and practice. It will also be of interest to policy makers, community activists, and the private sector.

Despite the large number of regional and global summits there is very little known about the functioning and impact of this particular type of diplomatic practice. While recognizing that the growing importance of summits is a universal phenomenon, this volume takes advantage of the richness of the Americas experiment to offer a theoretically grounded comparative analysis of contemporary summitry. The book addresses questions such as: How effective have summits been ? How have civil society and other non-state actors been involved in summits? How have summits impacted on the management of regional affairs? Filling a significant void in the literature, this volume offers an original contribution helping to understand how summitry has become a central feature of world politics. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of diplomacy, international organizations, and global/regional governance.

The field of intergovernmental relations has changed substantially over the past five decades. It maintains a critical and evolving role in the US federal system as well as in public policy and administration. Building upon the legacy of Deil S.Wright's scholarship, this collection of essays by distinguished scholars, emerging thought leaders, and experienced practitioners chronicles and analyzes some of the tensions and pressures that have contributed to the current state of intergovernmental relations and management. Although rarely commanding media attention by name, intergovernmental relations is being elevated in the public discourse through policy issues dominating the headlines. Many of these intergovernmental issues are addressed in this book, including health insurance exchanges under the now-threatened Affordable Care Act, and the roles of the federal, state, and local governments in food safety, energy, and climate change.Contributors interpret and assess the impacts of these and other issues on the future directions of intergovernmental relations and management. This book will serve as an ideal text for courses on intergovernmental relations and federalism, and will be of interest to government practitioners and civic and nonprofit organization leaders involved in public policy and management.

Metropolitan government and metropolitan governance have been ongoing issues for more than sixty years in the United States. Based on an extensive survey and a review of existing literature, this book offers a comprehensive overview of these debates. It discusses how the centrifugal forces in local government, and in particular local government autonomy, have produced a highly fragmented governmental landscape throughout America. It argues that in order for 'governance' to occur in metropolitan areas (or anywhere else, for that matter), there has to be some form of an actual governmental institution that possesses the power and ability to compel compliance. Everything else is just some form of cooperation, and while cooperation is not trivial, it does not enable metropolitan areas to address the really tough and controversial issues that divide rather than unite governments in those areas. The book examines the principal factors that prevent the development of either metropolitan government or metropolitan governance in the USA. Norris looks at several examples where some form of metropolitan government or governance can be said to exist, from voluntary cooperation (the weakest) to government (the strongest). He also examines each type of arrangement for its ability to address metropolitan-wide problems and whether each type is or is not in use in the USA. In sum, the book uncovers the extent of metropolitan government and governance, the possibility for its existence, what attempts (if any) have been made in the past, and the problems and issues that have arisen due to the lack of adequate metropolitan governance.

Conflict, Improvisation, Governance presents a carefully crafted and edited collection of first hand accounts of diverse public sector and non-profit urban practitioners facing the practical challenges of "doing democracy" in the global/local context of the interconnected major European city of Amsterdam and its region. The book examines street level democratic processes through the experiences of planning and city governance practitioners in community development, youth work, public service delivery, urban public administration, immigration and multi-cultural social policy. These profiles and case studies show widely shared challenges in global and local urban environments, and new, "bottom-up," democratic and improvisational strategies that community members and public officials alike can use to make more inclusive, democratic cities.

Across many parts of the postcolonial world, it is everyday reality for people to cross regularly between state-based and customary governance, institutions and norms. This book examines this phenomenon in the context of the villages of Timor-Leste, and the state-building efforts that have been conducted by the Timorese government and international development agencies since the vote for independence in 1999. Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork in the remote, rural areas of Timor-Leste, the book provides a critical analysis of the challenges that communities face when navigating coexisting customary and state-based structures and norms in a context where customary law continues to be the central guiding force. It also explores the various creative ways in which local leaders and community members make sense of their local governance environment. It then draws on these insights to provide a more nuanced, contextualised account of the impact of institutional interventions, state-building and democratisation within these villages. While set in the context of state- and nation-building efforts following Timor-Leste's vote for independence, the book also provides a broader examination of the issues that arise for the postcolonial state adequately meeting the needs of its citizens. Further, it explores the challenges that are met by communities when incorporating state influences and demands into their everyday lives. Expanding the scope of empirical Timor-Leste scholarship by moving beyond anthropological description and providing the first detailed political analysis of local-level governance in contemporary Timorese communities, this book is a valuable contribution to studies on Asian Politics, Governance and International Studies.

This book is a collection of texts on one of China's boldest social experiments in recent years: the rural reconstruction project in Bishan. The Bishan Project (2011-2016) was a rural reconstruction project in a small village Bishan, Anhui Province, China. The writings describe and criticize the social problems caused by China's over-loading urbanization process and starts a a contemporary agrarianism and agritopianism discourse to resist the modernism and developmentalism doctrine which dominated China for more than a century, answering a global desire for the theory and action of the alternative social solution for today's environmental and political crises.This practical utopian commune project ran for 6 years and caused a national debate on rural issues in China, when it was invited to be exhibited and presented abroad. This collection of writing will be of interest to artists, China scholars, architects, and the cultural community at large.

Government-by-proxy and intergovernmental relations profoundly affect the public administration of foster care. Using examples from foster care systems in the states of Delaware, Michigan, New York, and Rhode Island, Rebecca Padot eloquently combines a rigorous methodology and theory work to expose the conditions under which foster care outcomes can be improved. The cases selected suggest that the federal government has increased its focus on measuring the performance of state programs while simultaneously decreasing its funding of state foster care programs and offering the states very little management or mentorship. Padot turns the page and recommends administrators place a greater priority on building community partners, integrating the advice of mentors, providing leadership from public managers, and cultivating relationships with the federal government.

An original and timely resource for scholars and practitioners, this book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of how leadership and management variables may be associated with more positive foster care practices and performance in the United States.

Most contemporary public managers will work in some type of collaborative or networked arrangement at some time in their professional careers. More and more work in public administration and policy is now being done in collaborative formats, and while there are many studies, articles, and cases describing successful endeavors, a good deal of confusion persists about what, exactly, makes them work. What are the best practices? This book focuses on the processes, protocols, and incentives needed for successful collaborative endeavors. Moving beyond new public governance theories and the limits of new public management, Chandler uniquely focuses on the facilitative skills and tools that members and facilitators need for success in collaborative work. Written by an author with both academic and practical experience in organizing, developing, leading, and facilitating public-private collaboratives, this book has both an academic thrust and an action focus, drawing on case studies from the fields of health and human services to highlight important theoretical and/or practice points. Making Collaboratives Work is required reading for undergraduate and graduate public-administration students of collaborative management, nonprofit administration, organizational theory and practice, communications, public policy, and leadership. The book is also ideally suited to public administrators and nonprofit managers asked to work in public-private partnerships and collaboratives to solve complex problems.

The Routledge Handbook of International Local Government conducts a rigorous, innovative and distinctive analysis of local government within a comparative, international context. Examining the subject matter with unrivalled breadth and depth, this handbook shows how different cultures and countries develop different institutions, structures and processes over time, yet that all have some features in common - the most obvious of which is the recognition that some decisions are better made, some services better delivered, and some engagement with the state better organised if there is structured organisational expression of the importance of the local dimension of all these factors . Thematically organised, it includes contributions from international experts with reference to the wider context in terms of geographies, local government modes, recent developments and possible further lines of research. It has a wide academic appeal internationally and will steer a course between the two dimensions of mono-jurisdictional studies and 'cataloguing' forms of comparison. The Routledge Handbook of International Local Government will be essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners involved in, and actively concerned about, research on local government.

Interest and research on regionalism has soared in the last decade. Local governments in metropolitan areas and civic organizations are increasingly engaged in cooperative and collaborative public policy efforts to solve problems that stretch across urban centers and their surrounding suburbs. Yet there remains scant attention in textbooks to the issues that arise in trying to address metropolitan governance. Governing Metropolitan Areas describes and analyzes structure to understand the how and why of regionalism in our global age. The book covers governmental institutions and their evolution to governance, but with a continual focus on institutions. David Hamilton provides the necessary comprehensive, in-depth description and analysis of how metropolitan areas and governments within metropolitan areas developed, efforts to restructure and combine local governments, and governance within the polycentric urban region. This second edition is a major revision to update the scholarship and current thinking on regional governance. While the text still provides background on the historical development and growth of urban areas and governments' efforts to accommodate the growth of metropolitan areas, this edition also focuses on current efforts to provide governance through cooperative and collaborative solutions. There is also now extended treatment of how regional governance outside the United States has evolved and how other countries are approaching regional governance.

Upstate New York is in a malaise. This husband and wife team of sociologists, Alexander Thomas and Polly Smith, wanted to know why. They take the reader on a tour of New York in order to diagnose the problems affecting the state and what can be done to address the issues. New York was built on the strengths of its strategic location and growing population to become the 'Empire State' during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But a combination of unfortunate decisions and the creation of new technologies in which New York was no more competitive than other states translated into New York losing its dominant position in the world economy. The result has been several decades of deindustrialization and population loss. This book includes recommendations for ideas that can be further developed by the public.

The rise of large and rapidly growing nations is having a significant impact on the global order, as their expanding influence reshapes the structure of power in the international system. These emerging powers are increasingly asserting themselves as major actors on the global scene. Leading this cadre of emerging powers are five nations referred to as the BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. This book takes inventory of both the individual and collective soft power of this rising bloc of nations. Having embraced the potential of this newly emphasized type of power as a means of generating international influence, these nations have dedicated substantial effort and resources to implementing a soft power offensive. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Political Power.

New Mexico and Arizona joined the Union in 1912, despite the opposition from some of their residents. The Fiscal Case against Statehood examines the concerns of the people who lost the battle over statehood in the two territories. Moussalli examines their territorial and early state governments' fiscal behavior and reveals that while their fears of steep increases in the cost of government were well-founded, statehood also significantly improved their governments' accountability for their use of the public purse. She concludes that fiscal officials enabled statehood's growth in government by improving the financial reports and processes. Moussalli examines New Mexico's and Arizona's financial reports before and after statehood, and compares them to the state of Nevada's reports as a control. Through detailed, systematic analysis, Moussalli reveals the fiscal costs and accountability gains of statehood for the residents of New Mexico and Arizona.

San Diego and Tijuana are the site of a national border enforcement spectacle, but they are also neighboring cities with deeply intertwined histories, cultures, and economies. In Unequal Neighbors, Kristen Hill Maher and David Carruthers shift attention from the national border to a local one, examining the role of place stigma in reinforcing actual and imagined inequalities between these cities. Widespread "bordered imaginaries" in San Diego represent it as a place of economic vitality, safety, and order, while stigmatizing Tijuana as a zone of poverty, crime, and corruption. These dualisms misrepresent complex realities on the ground, but they also have real material effects: the vision of a local border benefits some actors in the region while undermining others. Based on a wide range of original empirical materials, the book examines how asymmetries between these cities have been produced and reinforced through stigmatizing representations of Tijuana in media, everyday talk, economic relations, and local tourism discourse and practices. However, both place stigma and borders are subject to contestation, and the book also examines "debordering" practices and counter-narratives about Tijuana's image. While the details of the book are particular to this corner of the world, the kinds of processes it documents offer a window into the making of unequal neighbors more broadly. The dynamics at the Tijuana border present a framework for understanding how inequalities that manifest in cultural practices produce asymmetric borders between places.

This volume provides a unique insight into the ways local governments have maintained financial resilience in the face of the significant challenges posed by the era of austerity. Taking an international perspective, it provides an enlightening and practical analysis of the different capacities and responses that local governments deploy to cope with financial shocks.Moving beyond traditional approaches dealing with financial stress, the financial resilience perspective reveals a wider range of organisational responses and enables consideration of the dynamic role played by internal and external contextual factors. The international case study approach allows for a comparative analysis of financial resilience in the context of different administrative and policy environments. By providing a unifying view of financial resilience, the importance of building resilience into organisational financial management is demonstrated, uncovering the relative effectiveness of different resilience building approaches. This edited volume is a valuable source for practitioners and academics, as well as students of public policy, public management and financial management.

Local Tax Policy: A Primer provides the definitive discussion of how local governments raise revenue. The fourth edition addresses the fundamental influences on local tax and revenue policy including interjurisdictional competition, the politics of anti-taxation, and the relationships with state and federal governments. The primary sources of revenue are discussed from a policy perspective noting the pros and cons of the property tax, local sales and income taxes, and nontax revenue such as intergovernmental aid and user fees.

As migration alters the southern political landscape, partisan battle lines will be drawn between the Democrat-leaning areas of growth and the increasingly Republican areas of decline and stagnation. The Democratic Party is gaining support in the South, but the prevailing explanations of partisan shift fail to capture how and why this transformation has come about. In Movers and Stayers, Irwin Morris develops a new theory that explains the Democrats' renewed influence in the region and empirically demonstrates the influence of population growth. As Morris shows, migratory patterns play a significant role in politics, and urbanization is driving polarization in the South. Those who move to cities-the "movers" of Morris's framework-do so for jobs, and they tend to be progressive, young, well-educated Democrats. Their liberal views tend to be reinforced by the diversity of the communities in which they choose to live, and their progressivism fosters similar values among long-term residents. At the same time, "stayers" (long-term residents) absorb the consequences-or "community threat"-of this large-scale migration. While white stayers tend to become more conservative, the effects on voter behavior play out differently across racial lines. Both movers and stayers are altering the southern political landscape and polarization nationwide. Powerfully counterintuitive, Movers and Stayers provides a game-changing way of understanding one of the most confounding trends in American politics.

This series is designed to cover all aspects of sound financial management for local governments in developed and developing countries and economies in transition. Concepts of good governance, transparency and accountability are woven into the text of every chapter, and the needs and potential obstacles to greater decentralization and democracy are highlighted. Each volume is self-contained with its own Trainer 's Guide, exercises and web resources. Chapters are divided into basic and advanced concepts and the detailed relationship of each topic to the others covered in the series is explained.

In the mid-Victorian period, when British international influence and power were at their height, concerns about local economic and social conditions were only slowly coming to be recognised as part of the obligations and expectations of central government. Adopting a legal history perspective, this study reveals how municipal authorities of this period had few public law powers to regulate local conditions, or to provide services, and thus the more enterprising went direct to Parliament to obtain - at a price - the passing specific local Bills to address their needs. Identifying and analysing for the first time the 335 local Parliamentary Bills promoted by local authorities in the period from the passing of the Local Government Act 1858 to the first annual report of the Local Government Board in 1872, the book draws three main conclusions from this huge mass of local statute book material. The first is that, far from being an uncoordinated mass of inconsistent, quixotic provisions, these Acts have a substantial degree of cohesion as a body of material. Second, the towns and cities of northern England secured more than half of them. Thirdly, the costs of promotions (and the vested interests involved in them) represented a huge and often wasteful outlay that a more pragmatic and forward-looking Parliamentary attitude could have greatly reduced.