The twin categories of the state and nature collectively embody some of the most fundamental reference points around which our lives and thinking are organized. Despite their combined significance, however, the complex relationships that exist between modern states and nature remain under-theorized and are relatively unexplored. Through a detailed study of different sites, moments, and framing strategies The Nature of the State challenges the ways in which geographers and social scientists approach the study of state-nature relations. The authors analyse different instances of state-nature interaction from all over the world, considering the geo-politics of resource conflicts, the operation of natural history museums, the organizational practices of environmental departments and ministries, the regulation of genetic science, and contemporary forms of state intervention within issues of climate change. Introducing original research into the different institutional, spatial, and temporal strategies used by states to frame the natural world this book provides a critical overview of the latest political and ecological theories and addresses a wide range of pressing socio-environmental debates.

This examination of the fiscal health of local governments offers a "how-to" approach to identifying and solving financial problems. It will serve as a primer for readers interested in understanding financial processes and alternatives, and as a practical guide for those who need access to fiscal measurement tools. Its principal selling point lies in its assumptions: instead of using the vocabulary and research agendas of economists (such as Musgrave, Fisher), finance scholars (Ladd/Yinger) and political scientists (Peterson/Strachota), it will appeal to readers who lack sophisticated knowledge in these areas and nevertheless need practical advice.
The book stems from the "Fiscal Health Education Program," an applied economics program at the University of Minnesota. It uses three measures of fiscal health-financial condition, trend analysis, and financial trend monitoring system-as the basis for advocating particular fiscal strategies. The book examines the tools that can be used to assess the condition of a local government's fiscal health and some of the policy causes or remedies for certain situations, as well as some of the strategies governments can pursue to maintain and improve health.
*How-to approach will appeal to readers who lack sophisticated knowledge
* Contains discussion questions and anonymous case studies of actual cities and municipalities
* Presents practical methods for identifying and solving common fiscal problems

As the title intimates, this title is an introduction to the study of local government finance. It is an enlightening work aimed primarily at undergraduate students studying local government and administration at universities, technikons and technical colleges. The following issues are covered: why local governments need money; the democratic tenets and principles guiding the management of local government finance; the particular roles of a council, its executive committee and the administrative authority in managing local government finance; the nature of local government property and other taxes; user charges, consumer tariffs and nominal levies as other revenue sources; features and functions of local government budgets; debt management and loans administration; inventory management; inter-governmental financial relations and external financial control.

The proper role of government is among the most politically contentious issues of our time. Behind the legal technicalities of recent reforms and disputes in the courts lie issues of profound significance for local democracy. This book shows how fundamental disagreements over the nature of local government and politics permeate the law and how law, in turn, shapes and influences local politics.

Complementing Shearer and Shearer's useful one-volume source of information--"State Names, Seals, Flags, and Symbols-- this book provides the music and lyrics for the official songs adopted by the state governments. Arranged alphabetically by state, each song has a single vocal line over a piano accompaniment, with one verse only under the vocal line and remaining verses appearing separately. Each entry includes the date the song was adopted, the name of the composer, and in some instances, a brief history of the song. The book will be a useful reference for those wanting to perform a state song or to find the official songs of other states.

Despite increasing reports across the globe on renewable development and maintenance, little is known regarding what strategies are required for improved economic growth and prosperity in Africa. Improving an understanding of the methods for promoting growth through reusable resource development and administration is a vital topic of research to consider in assisting the continent's development. The Handbook of Research on Sustainable Development and Governance Strategies for Economic Growth in Africa provides emerging research on the strategies required to promote growth in Africa as well as the implications and issues of the expansion of prosperity. While highlighting sustainable education, pastoral development pathways, and the public-sector role, readers will learn about the history of sustainable development and governmental approaches to improving Africa's economy. This publication is a vital resource for policy makers, research institutions, academics, researchers, and advanced-level students seeking current research on the theories and applications of development in societal and legal institutions.

Framed within the context of comparative international policy discussions, this volume examines how recent public policy design has been influenced by combinations of market based, regulatory and legal mechanisms. Five major public policy areas are discussed: health, education, environment, gun control, and budgeting. The contributors identify competing forces in policy design and implementation and then investigate the benefits of accessible policy structures and policy making processes. They ask whether recent changes in policy design have been beneficial to the public.

The term "intergovernmental relations" refers to the way in which the different spheres of a government hierarchy relate to each other. This concept is of vital importance where there is a division of power at both administrative and legal levels among different spheres of government. Intergovernmental relations in South Africa examines the South African government's quest to enhance effective and efficient service delivery to the people. Case studies are included in all chapters to provide a hands-on approach to relate theory to practice. This book discusses four distinct approaches to the subject: the constitutional/legal approach, the democratic approach, the financial approach and the normative/operational approach. It culminates in a delineation of practical steps for the promotion of well-grounded intergovernmental relations, sustainable capacity building and trustworthy political accountability. The book also focuses on intergovernmental relations network and cooperative governance in South Africa as well as governmental relations in the BRICS countries. Intergovernmental relations in South Africa is suitable not only for academics but also for practitioners in the fields of public administration and management, political sciences, social sciences, law and other related disciplines.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In "Bloomberg's New York," Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor's attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way--a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good. Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan's far west side into the city's next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg's success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements--and opportunities for social justice--remain.

Local government employees have a higher propensity to engage in collective bargaining than do private sector employees. This springs from the tight competition in the local budgeting process among those requesting, paying for, and providing services. Spengler looks at this trend using a fiscal discontent hypothesis. This approach suggests that the taxpayer revolts during the 1970s and 1980s limited the budget discretion of elected officials and forced public sector employees to turn to collective voice and action to better compete for scarce public resources.

Two levels of employee collective voice are examined: the weaker form of organizing and the stronger collective bargaining model. Substantial differences in the use of each are analyzed based on employee occupation, state, and type of local government. Scholars, business practitioners, policy makers, and researchers in public administration, labor relations, public policy, and local government will find this study an important contribution to understanding the phenomenon of organized collective voice.

This book focuses on the training, education, and assistance needs of municipal governments as they prepare to face the challenges of the 21st century. These crises include increased citizen demands, dwindling financial support, technological advances, and demographic trends which result in the additional layering of diversity in the work force. The authors argue that an investment in training represents a commitment to the future of the municipal organization as well as the community itself. An important resource for public administrators and academics.

A revealing look at the changing role of churches in the decades after the American Revolution. Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral failings, or personal squabbles to their kin and neighbors for judgment. But from the Revolutionary Era through the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestants imbued local churches with immense authority. Through their ritual practice of discipline, churches insisted that brethren refrain from suing each other before "infidels" at local courts and claimed jurisdiction over a range of disputes: not only moral issues such as swearing, drunkenness, and adultery but also matters more typically considered to be under the purview of common law and courts of equity, including disputes over trespass, land, probate, slave warranty, and theft. In Law in American Meetinghouses, Jeffrey Thomas Perry explores the ways that ordinary Americans-Black and white, enslaved and free-understood and created law in their local communities, uncovering a vibrant marketplace of authority in which church meetinghouses played a central role in maintaining their neighborhoods' social peace. Churches were once prominent sites for the creation of local law and in this period were a primary arena in which civil and religious authority collided and shaped one another. When church discipline failed, the wronged parties often pushed back, and their responses highlight the various forces that ultimately hindered that venue's ability to effectively arbitrate disputes between members. Relying primarily on a deep reading of church records and civil case files, Perry examines how legal transformations, an expanding market economy, and religious controversy led churchgoers to reimagine their congregations' authority. By the 1830s, unable to resolve doctrinal quibbles within the fellowship, church factions turned to state courts to secure control over their meetinghouses, often demanding that judges wade into messy ecclesiastical disputes. Tracking changes in disciplinary rigor in Kentucky Baptist churches from that state's frontier period through 1845, and looking beyond statutes and court decrees, Law in American Meetinghouses is a fresh take on church-state relations. Ultimately, it highlights an oft-forgotten way that Americans subtly repositioned religious institutions alongside state authority.

A study of how civic culture shaped policy responses to the demographic and economic transformations of Dallas, Texas. Civil Culture and Urban Change analyzes Dallas government's adaptation to shifts in the city's demography and economic structure that occurred after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The book examines civic culture as a product of a governing regime and studies the constraints civic culture has placed on the city's capacity to adapt to changes in its population, economy, and distribution of political power. Royce Hanson traces the impact of civic culture in Dallas on the city's handling of major crises in education, policing, and management of urban development over the past forty years and shows the reciprocal effect of responses to crises on the development of civic capital. Hanson relates the city's civic culture to its economic history and political institutions by following the progression of Dallas governance from business oligarchy to regency of professional managers and federal judges. He studies the city's responses to school desegregation, police-minority conflicts, and other issues to illuminate the role civic and organizational cultures play in shaping political tactics and policy. Hanson builds a profile of political life in Dallas that highlights the city's low voter turnouts, sparse civic and political networks, and relative lack of multiracial institutions and mechanisms. Civic Culture and Urban Change summarizes the "solution sets" Dallas employs in dealing with major issues and discusses the implications of those findings for the future of effective democracy in Dallas and other large cities.

Over the second half of the 20th century, American politics was reorganized around race as the tenuous New Deal coalition frayed and eventually collapsed. What drove this change? In The Cities on the Hill, Thomas Ogorzalek argues that the answer lies not in the sectional divide between North and South, but in the differences between how different kinds of places govern themselves. Using a wide range of evidence from Congress and an original dataset measuring the urbanicity of districts over time, he shows how the trajectory of partisan politics in America today was set in the very beginning of the New Deal. Both rural and urban America were riven with local racial conflict, but beginning in the 1930s, city leaders became increasingly unified in national politics and supportive of civil rights- and sowed the seeds of modern liberalism. As Ogorzalek powerfully demonstrates, the red and blue shades of contemporary political geography derive more from rural and urban perspectives than clean state or regional lines. Moreover, his analysis explains how city institutions can help build bridges over the divides that keep us apart.

Writing of the France of the 1930s, the late Simone Weil declared, The state has morally killed everything smaller than itself. Liebmann asserts that a comparable development has recently taken place in the United States, fostering civic apathy and an inability to address serious social problems, and that, not for the first time, abuse of judicial review has caused the Constitution to be used as a tool of class interests. After a general survey of these consequences, Liebmann discusses the original constitutional debates and understanding. He then assesses First Amendment doctrine, through a discussion of the views of Harry Kalven, the most influential modern commentator on free speech issues, and then discusses the appropriate relationship of constitutional restraints to governmental fostering of public policy, on zoning, education, law enforcement, urban renewal, day care, traffic regulation, and care of the elderly, and illustrates the hopeful developments that are possible if judicial restraint is restored. A significant analysis for all scholars and researchers in the areas of constitutional law and current American public policy and politics.

This pioneering study explores the problems of politics and law that lie behind the growing phenomenon of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), a stance taken by residential property owners attempting to keep various types of facilities out of their neighborhoods. Denis J. Brion argues that the pejorative connotation that NIMBY carries is both unfortunate and unwarranted and seeks to expose the underlying problems for which NIMBY is a symptom. In particular, Brion examines the impact of siting decisions on those who will be the neighbors of a potential project and the political gridlock that so often results when they become aware of the nature of this impact. The discussion is illuminated by a review of the journalistic accounts of particular episodes chosen to demonstrate the pervasiveness and complexity of the NIMBY phenomenon.

Divided into three sections, the study begins by analyzing how a system of public decisionmaking, founded on the ideal of participatory democracy and built on the structure of representative government, is peculiarly subject to capture by small groups intent on pursuing their own narrow agendas. The result, Brion shows, is often allocational choices which yield benefits to few and harm to many. In Part II, he demonstrates the failure of the public remedial process to provide traditional common-law remedies to those harmed by Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs). Brion then looks at the consequences of this remedial failure from both traditional and non-traditional points of view in order to provide a basis for devising an approach to the problems that underly the NIMBY syndrome. The concluding section proposes a solution that involves both expanding the focus of political and constitutional debate to include the notion of communality and narrowing the traditional conception of right to property. As a unique full-length treatment of the subject, this study makes a significant contribution to the ongoing debate over the NIMBY phenomenon and its consequences.

This book examines the governance arrangements in Northern Ireland through a multi-level lens, particularly in the period since the new institutions established through the 1998 Agreement became more firmly embedded.

Designed to present insiders' views on how consular activities work, this collection of oral history interviews with consular officers is an invaluable resource for diplomatic historians and political scientists. The interviews reveal the tasks these officials perform and how they view the substance of the consular function as part of the American role in international affairs both in the Department of State and at embassies abroad. Among the multitude of topics covered are leadership, training, junior officers, Communist regimes, the political milieu in which the consulates operate, American communities abroad, the protection and welfare of American citizens, narcotics problems abroad, visa matters, and passport concerns. These first hand accounts are provided by both retired and presently working consular officials and reflect a broad range and variety of experience. The interviews have been edited and arranged topically into areas of consular specialization or related interests. Explanatory introductions written by the editors provide needed background information. Although much has been written about the history of consular affairs, there has been little else to date about consular operations and achievements. This book fills that gap.

Based on cutting-edge research, this edited volume examines how citizens and political elites perceive the legitimacy of regional integration in Europe and the Americas. It analyses public opinion and political discourse on the EU, NAFTA and MERCOSUR, arguing that legitimation patterns shape the development of regional governance.