Everywhere we turn in Canadian local politics - from policing to transit, education to public health, planning to utilities - we encounter a peculiar institutional animal: the special purpose body. These "ABCs" of local government - library boards, school boards, transit authorities, and many others - provide vital public services, spend large sums of public money, and raise important questions about local democratic accountability. In Fields of Authority, Jack Lucas provides the first systematic exploration of local special purpose bodies in Ontario. Drawing on extensive research in local and provincial archives, Lucas uses a "policy fields" approach to explain how these local bodies in Ontario have developed from the nineteenth century to the present. A lively and accessible study, Fields of Authority will appeal to readers interested in Canadian political history, urban politics, and urban public policy.

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, but in the subsequent ten years, the city has demonstrated both remarkable resilience and frustrating stagnation. In Reforming New Orleans, Peter F. Burns and Matthew O. Thomas chart the city's recovery and assess how successfully officials at the local, state, and federal levels transformed the Big Easy in the wake of disaster. Focusing on reforms in four key sectors of urban governance-economic development, education, housing, and law enforcement-both before and after Katrina, they find lessons for cities hit by sudden shocks, such as natural disasters or large-scale financial crises.One of their key insights is that post-disaster recovery tends to limit local control. State and federal officials, national foundations, and local actors excluded by pre-Katrina politics used their resources and authority to displace entrenched local interests and implement a public agenda focused on institutional and governmental change. Burns and Thomas also make clear reform in New Orleans was already underway before Katrina hit, but that it had focused largely on upper- and middle-class residents, a trend that accelerated after the storm. The market-centered nature of the reforms have ensured that they largely benefited city and regional elites while not significantly aiding the city's working-class and impoverished populations. Thus reform has come at a cost and that cost, in the long term, could undermine the political gains of the post-Katrina era.

In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages. Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical ""judicial activism"" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit the policy choices available to lower court judges, introducing complications the Supreme Court would not anticipate. He demonstrates that the Kansas City case is a model lesson for the types of problems that develop for lower courts in any area in which the Supreme Court attempts to create significant change. Dunn's exploration of this landmark case deepens our understanding of when courts can and cannot successfully create and manage public policy.

Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has had a major impact on social life and, in turn, research in the social sciences. Emerging from the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state, neoliberalism describes a social transformation that has impacted relationships between citizens and the state, consumers and the market, and individuals and groups. Neoliberal Contentions offers original essays that explore neoliberalism in its various guises. It includes chapters on economic policy and restructuring, resource extraction, multiculturalism and equality, migration and citizenship, health reform, housing policy, and 2SLGBTQ communities. Drawing on the work of influential Canadian political economist Janine Brodie, the contributors use Brodie's scholarship as a springboard for their own distinct analyses of pressing political and social issues. Acknowledging neoliberalism's crises, failures, and contradictions, this collection contends with neoliberalism by "diagnosing the present," situating the phenomenon within a broader historical and political-economic context and observing instances in which neoliberal rationality is reinforced as well as resisted.

In "Reconstituting Whiteness," sociologist Jenny Irons explores the tactics and legacy of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency of the state that existed from 1956 to 1977 and was devoted exclusively to defending and supporting the institution of segregation. Using a myriad of surveillance and public relations efforts, the commission was unique in its expanse and resistance during a time of change.
Going far beyond a mere institutional history, however, Irons uses the commission as a tool to explore the intersection of state-organized defense of white supremacy and the dramatically shifting racial constructs of the civil rights era. Ultimately, the commission failed to protect segregation, but as a state entity, it adapted racism in new terms.
"Reconstituting Whiteness" is an insightful study of the methods Mississippi state government used to move the goal posts of what was considered "decent" and "acceptable" white supremacy and racism, as it raced against time to define whiteness while the boundaries of segregation fell all around it.

In 1975, after vigorous campaigning by the United Farm Workers union, the state of California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), a pioneering self-help strategy granting farm workers the right to organize into unions. A quarter century later, only a tiny percentage of farm workers in the state belong to unions, and wages remain less than half of those of nonfarm employees. Why did the ALRA fail? One of the nation's foremost authorities on farm workers here explores the reasons behind its unfulfilled promise.Philip L. Martin examines the key features of the farm labor market in California, including the shifting ethnicity of the worker pool and the evolution of the major unions, beginning with the Wobblies. Finally, he reviews the impact of immigration on agriculture in the state.Today, many states look to the California experience to assess whether the ALRA can serve as a model for their own farm labor relations laws. In Martin's view, California's efforts to grant rights to farm workers so that they can help themselves have failed because of continued unauthorized migration and the changing structure of farm employment. Martin argues that alternative policies would make farming profitable, raise farm worker wages, and still keep groceries affordable.

In 1975, after vigorous campaigning by the United Farm Workers union, the state of California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), a pioneering self-help strategy granting farm workers the right to organize into unions. A quarter century later, only a tiny percentage of farm workers in the state belong to unions, and wages remain less than half of those of nonfarm employees. Why did the ALRA fail? One of the nation's foremost authorities on farm workers here explores the reasons behind its unfulfilled promise.Philip L. Martin examines the key features of the farm labor market in California, including the shifting ethnicity of the worker pool and the evolution of the major unions, beginning with the Wobblies. Finally, he reviews the impact of immigration on agriculture in the state.Today, many states look to the California experience to assess whether the ALRA can serve as a model for their own farm labor relations laws. In Martin's view, California's efforts to grant rights to farm workers so that they can help themselves have failed because of continued unauthorized migration and the changing structure of farm employment. Martin argues that alternative policies would make farming profitable, raise farm worker wages, and still keep groceries affordable.

This is the first book in South Africa - and internationally - to bring together a theoretical and empirical review of the impact of cost recovery on basic municipal services such as water and electricity. There has been a dramatic shift worldwide from welfare municipalism to a neoliberal vision of balanced budgets and fiscal restraint. Cost recovery is at the heart of this new municipal vision with far reaching implications for access to services, affordability and privatization. The book describes the theory and practice of cost recovery and lays out the conceptual framework for six case studies. The book offers two distinct sets of alternative possibilities. The first are reformist in nature, arguing for more equity-oriented models of cost recovery. The second are more radical and explore ways of reversing the insidious effects of commodification, the role of the market in shaping the moral and economic fabric of service delivery, and the way we "value" essential goods such as water. This book will be of interest both theoretically and empirically to anyone interested in local governance, service delivery, public goods and social movements.

Over the past century, solutions to natural resources policy issues have become increasingly complex. Multiple government agencies with overlapping jurisdictions and differing mandates as well as multiple interest groups have contributed to gridlock, frequently preventing solutions in the common interest. Community-based responses to natural resource problems in the American West have demonstrated the potential of local initiatives both for finding common ground on divisive issues and for advancing the common interest.

The first chapter of this enlightening book diagnoses contemporary problems of governance in natural resources policy and in the United States generally, then introduces community-based initiatives as responses to those problems. The next chapters examine the range of successes and failures of initiatives in water management in the Upper Clark Fork River in Montana; wolf recovery in the northern Rockies; bison management in greater Yellowstone; and forest policy in northern California. The concluding chapter considers how to harvest experience from these and other cases, offering practical suggestions for diverse participants in community-based initiatives and their supporters, agencies and interest groups, and researchers and educators.

Can governments do anything right? Can they do anything at all about the problems of poverty and inequality? Despite the recent boom in the U.S. economy, many millions of Americans have been left behind. Poverty rates remain higher than in most other industrialized countries. Income inequality has increased sharply. Yet we are sometimes told that government cannot or should not do anything about it: either these problems are hopeless, or government action is inevitably wasteful and inefficient, or globalization has made governments impotent.
"What Government Can Do" argues, on the contrary, that federal, state, and local governments can and should do a great deal. Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons detail what programs have worked and how they can be improved, while introducing the general reader to the fundamentals of social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicaid, tax structures, minimum wage laws, educational programs, and the concept of "basic needs." Through their discussions of high-profile campaign plans, proposals, successes, and failures, they have written a readable, optimistic, and clear-headed book on government and poverty. And they find that, contrary to popular belief, government policies already do, in fact, help alleviate poverty and economic inequality. Often these policies work far more effectively and efficiently than people realize, and in ways that enhance freedom rather than infringe on it. At the same time, Page and Simmons show how even more could be-and should be-accomplished.
The authors advocate many sweeping policy changes while acknowledging political obstacles (such as the power of money and organized interests in Americanpolitics) that may stand in the way. Yet even those who disagree with their recommendations will come away with a deepened understanding of how social and economic policies actually work. Exploring ideas often ignored in Beltway political discourse, "What Government Can Do" challenges all Americans to raise the level of public debate and improve our public policies.

Defining Global Justice offers the first comprehensive overview of the history of the United States' role in the International Labor Organization (ILO). In this thought-provoking book, Edward Lorenz addresses the challenge laid down by the President of the American Political Science Association in 2000, who urged scholars to discover "how well-structured institutions could enable the world to have 'a new birth of freedom'." Lorenz's study describes one model of a well-structured institution. His history of the U.S. interaction with the ILO shows how some popular organizations, including organized labor, the women's movement, academics, the legal community, and religious institutions have been able to utilize the ILO structure to counter what the APSA president called "self-serving elites and ... their worst impulses." These organizations succeeded repeatedly in introducing popular visions of social justice into global economic planning and the world economy.

By underscoring the role of women in this process, he highlights the importance of gender relations in the development of labor standards policy. Lorenz also shows how transformations in the economic and social reproduction of knowledge gradually displaced academics from the cutting edge of research on labor issues.

Throughout this fascinating study, Lorenz reminds his readers that the development of decent labor standards has come in large part from the efforts of religious groups and a host of other nongovernmental, voluntary civic organizations that have insisted labor is a human activity, not a commodity.

Defining Global Justice reveals why the United States, despite showing exceptional restraint in domestic social policymaking, played a leading role in the pursuit of just international labor standards. Lorenz's lucid volume covers a century's worth of efforts, charting the development of a body of international law and an institutional structure as important to the global economy of the twenty-first century as the battle against slavery was in the nineteenth century.

The authors of this volume argue that urban education is in urgent need of reform and that, although there have been plenty of innovative and even promising attempts to improve conditions, most have been doomed. The reason for this, they agree, lies in the failure of our major cities to develop their "civic capacity"--the ability to build and maintain a broad social and political coalition across all sectors of the urban community in pursuit of a common goal.

Drawing upon an ambitious eleven-city study funded by the National Science Foundation, the authors synthesize and make sense of the enormous amount of data from Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Not only is this a vivid report from the front lines of big city schooling, but this work challenges us to rethink our approach to the crisis in our schools.

The authors vigorously contend that it is essential for all (or most) important actors in an urban community to join together in a shared vision of what is wrong in the schools and how to fix it, and to pursue that vision strongly and systematically over a long time. That can only happen, however, if those same actors develop the ability and willingness to set aside narrow aims and opportunistic behavior in favor of pursuing the collective good.

Written for a wide spectrum of potential readers--including educators, social scientists, policymakers, and every citizen who cares about his or her child's education--this book restores coalition politics to the center of educational reform and reminds us to look well beyond pedagogy and management theory for solutions to problems that are immune to the usual remedies. Drawing on select cases, the authors show that effective civic coalitions can be built. The struggle for reform can be won.

This volume challenges librarians to demand a place at the community planning and development table. Describing the experiences and insights of librarians who have blazed trails of community involvement, it outlines practical ways to become involved in policy-making.

This book addresses various federal, state, and institutional policies affecting community colleges and speculates about future policy options within the current policy context. While attempting to be comprehensive, the book does not include every policy issue affecting community colleges but rather examines most of the major policy issues considered salient for community college at the onset of the 21st century. Written by various experts on the community college and addressed to those concerned with policies affecting higher education as well as those interested in the future of the community college, the book begins with a macro look at the policy context affecting community colleges, including federal policies, state governance structures, and the impact of globalization on community colleges. At the state level, chapter authors focus on timely and critical issues challenging state policy: links with K-12 education, workforce preparation, dual credit policies, transfer and articulation, remediation, and technology. At the institutional level, policies on general education and student persistence are examined. The book concludes with a plea for a more critical approach to community college policy for the 21st century. This timely work provides an update on the status of policies affecting community colleges and possible future directions for policy decisions.

Since the late 1970s, the high-rise developments of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) have been dominated by gang violence and drugs, creating a sense of hopelessness among residents. Despite a lengthy war on crime, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the CHA has been unable to reduce the violence that makes life intolerable. Focusing on three developments--Rockwell Gardens, Henry Horner Homes, and Harold Ickes Homes--Sue Popkin and her co-authors interview residents, community leaders, and CHA staff. The Hidden War chronicles the many failed efforts of the CHA to combat crime and improve its developments, offering a vivid portrait of what life is like when lived among bullets, graffiti, and broken plumbing. Most families living in these developments are headed by African American single mothers. The authors reveal the dilemmas facing women and children who are often victims or witnesses of violent crime, and yet are dependent on the perpetrators and their drug-dominant economy. The CHA--plagued by financial scandals, managerial incompetence, and inconsistent funding--is no match for thegang-dominated social order. Even well-intentioned initiatives such as the recent effort to demolish and "revitalize" the worst developments seem to be ineffective at combating crime, while the drastic changes leave many vulnerable families facing an uncertain future. The Hidden War sends a humbling message to policy makers and prognosticators who claim to know the right way to "solve poverty."

Civil rights rhetoric has been central to the debate over U.S. immigration policy since at least the 1960s. A coalition of interest groups, including churches, ethnic organizations, civil rights groups, and employer associations has played a fundamental role in advancing civil rights norms in the immigration arena. The growing importance of civil rights rhetoric in the debate over U.S. immigration policy, DeLaet asserts, helps to explain the liberalization of U.S. immigration policy in spite of growing evidence that the public opposition to immigration has grown during the same period. In turn, the liberalization of U.S. immigration policy has contributed to rising numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants. Thus, high levels of immigration reflect the basic provisions of current U.S. immigration policy, rather than a loss of governmental control.

Many analysts have suggested that the immigration policy reforms passed by Congress in 1996 marked the beginning of a new era of restrictionism. However, as DeLaet illustrates, the new restrictions adopted in 1996 contain many of the same loopholes as previous legislation, indicating the coalition of interest groups supporting immigration still pose a significant obstacle to efforts to restrict immigration.

Educational reform is one of the most critical issues facing our cities, but some cities are better at it than others. To explain why, this book relates education to politics, showing how the "whole village" can be mobilized to better educate tomorrow's citizens.

City Schools and City Politics is based on an eleven-city NSF study of civic capacity and urban education. As participants in that study, the authors conducted research in three rustbelt cities that have lost much of their tax base and have legacies of machine politics. They analyzed the ways in which government, business, and community leaders create, or fail to create, civic support for public education, focusing on why certain cities show greater initiative than others in addressing these problems.

The authors reveal that, of the cities examined. Pittsburgh has made the most strides in educational reform, followed by Boston. while St. Louis has consistently lagged behind Their observations show that cross-sectorial coalitions are essential for bringing about change; that organizational arrangements in the business community and their relationship to local government affect whether there is the capacity to address school reform; that leadership is critical in bringing about change: and that municipal institutions and culture influence a city's ability to take action.

Packed with empirical data and analysis. City Schools and City Politics demonstrates the citywide and long-term character of successful efforts to reform public schools, relating education to the priorities of municipal governments and describing the conditions under which reform becomes possible. It extends regime theory to public education and shows thateducation policy is inextricably linked with urban political life and is an issue of real concern to political science.

Deindustrialization, white flight, and inner city poverty have spelled trouble for Baltimore schools. Marion Orr now examines why school reform has been difficult to achieve there, revealing the struggles of civic leaders and the limitations placed on Baltimore's African-American community as each has tried to rescue a failing school system.

Examining the interplay between government and society, Orr presents the first systematic analysis of social capital both within the African-American community ("black social capital") and outside it where social capital crosses racial lines. Orr shows that while black social capital may have created solidarity against white domination in Baltimore, it hampered African-American leaders' capacity to enlist the cooperation from white corporate elites and suburban residents needed for school reform.

Orr examines social capital at the neighborhood level, in elite-level interactions, and in intergovernmental relations to argue that black social capital doesn't necessarily translate into the kind of intergroup coalition needed to bring about school reform. He also includes an extensive historical survey of the black community, showing how distrust engendered by past black experiences has hampered the formation of significant intergroup social capital.

The book features case studies of school reform activity, including the first analysis of the politics surrounding Baltimore's decision to hire a private, for-profit firm to operate nine of its public schools. These cases illuminate the paradoxical aspects of black social capital in citywide school reform while offering critical perspectives on current debates about privatization, site-based management, and other reform alternatives.

Orr's book challenges those who argue that social capital alone can solve fundamentally political problems by purely social means and questions the efficacy of either privatization or black community power to reform urban schools. Black Social Capital offers a cogent conceptual synthesis of social capital theory and urban regime theory that demonstrates the importance of government, politics, and leadership in converting social capital into a resource that can be mobilized for effective social change.

"The purpose of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 is to offer opportunity, not an opiate. . . . We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls."--President Lyndon B. Johnson

"I would just provide that every person in this country is given a certain minimum income. If he wants to work in addition to that, he keeps what he earns."--Senator George S. McGovern

Between LBJ's statement in 1964 and McGovern's in 1972, American liberals radically transformed their welfare philosophy from one founded on opportunity and hard work to one advocating automatic entitlements. Gareth Davies' book shows us just how far-reaching that transformation was and how much it has to teach anyone engaged in the latest round of debates over welfare reform in America.

When Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty," he took great care to align his ambitious program with national attitudes toward work, worthiness, and dependency. Eight years later, however, American liberals were dominated by those who believed that all citizens enjoyed an unqualified right to income support with no strings or obligations attached. That shift, Davies argues, was part of a broader transformation in political values that had devastating consequences for the Democratic Party in particular and for the cause of liberalism generally.

Davies shows how policy failure, the war in Vietnam, domestic violence, and the struggle for black equality combined to create a crisis in national politics that destroyed the promise of the Great Society. He reevaluates LBJ's role, demonstrating that while detractors such as McGovern and Robert Kennedy embraced the "new politics of dissent," LBJ remained true throughout his career to the values that had sustained the New Deal coalition and that continued to retain their mass appeal.

Davies also explains in rich detail how the dominant strain of American liberalism came to abandon individualism, one of the nation's dogmas, thus shattering the New Deal liberal hegemony with consequences still affecting American politics in the mid 1990s. Placing today's welfare debates within this historical context, Davies shows that the current emphasis on work and personal responsibility is neither a liberal innovation nor distinctively conservative.

Based on a wide range of previously untapped archival sources and presented in a very accessible style, From Opportunity to Entitlement will be especially useful for courses concerned with the 1960s, the decline of the New Deal political order, the history of social welfare, the American reform tradition, and the influence of race upon American politics.

Gerard Comeau, a retiree living in rural New Brunswick, never thought his booze run would turn him into a Canadian hero. In 2012, after Comeau had driven to Quebec to purchase cheaper beer and crossed back into his home province, police officers participating in a low-stakes sting operation tailed and detained him, confiscated his haul, and levied a fine of less than $300. Countries routinely engage in trade wars and erect barriers to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. Comeau, however, was detained by the full force of the law for engaging in commerce with a Canadian business on the other side of a domestic border. With Comeau's story as its starting point, Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups tells the fascinating tale of Canadian interprovincial trade. Ryan Manucha examines the historical, political, and legal forces that gave rise to the regulation of interprovincial commerce in Canada, the trade-offs that come with liberalized domestic free trade, and Canada's enduring pursuit of economic union. The pandemic laid bare the vulnerability of global supply chains, the fickleness of foreign trading partners, and the surprising slipperiness of domestic trade. In a global climate of increasingly isolationist geopolitics, the history and possibility of Canada's economic union, quirks and all, deserve careful attention.

This encyclopedia presents important research on Turkey. Some of the topics discussed herein include the prospects and challenges involved in Turkey and United States defense cooperation; Turkey-Kurdish regional government relations after the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq; Turkey's new regional security role's implications for the U.S.; and Turkey's background and relations with the United States.

Loss of jobs, loss of young people, the ageing demographic, the apparently irresistible magnet of Auckland . . . the economic fortunes of New Zealands regions are of great concern to politicians, the business community, schools, employers and indeed most citizens. What is the dynamic at work here? Is there a remedy? Is there a silver lining? What works? What doesnt? What are the smart regions doing that shows promise? This collection of expert articles by planners, demographers and politicians investigates the reasons for population loss and smart new plans and policies that accept that the end of growth does not have to mean the end of prosperity.