1761 books match the query 'Public Policy' and 70 start with e

cover of Environmental Security: Concepts, Challenges, and Case Studies

Environmental Security

Concepts, Challenges, and Case Studies

Edited by John M. Lanicci, Elisabeth Hope Murray, and James D. Ramsay

American Meteorological Society, 2019

Security threats today are increasingly complex, dynamic, and asymmetric, and can affect environmental factors like energy, water, and food supply. As a result, it is becoming evident that the traditional model of nation-state based security is incomplete, and that purely military capabilities, though necessary, are insufficient to protect the United States and other democracies from the array of threats that challenge liberty and the free flow of people and commerce. A more complete picture of modern national security requires a more complete integration of the question of environmental security.

The purpose of text is to better address the many aspects of environmental security and to represent this major area of academic research in an introductory text format that can be used in the rapidly growing number of homeland security studies programs as well as related degree programs. The concepts, challenges, and case studies in this text vitally extended such curricula, giving students a deeper appreciation for the critical role environmental security plays in overall state security, as well as for our nation, our way of life, and indeed for the human race at large. 
 
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cover of Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects

Environmentality

Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects

Arun Agrawal

Duke University Press, 2005

In Kumaon in northern India, villagers set hundreds of forest fires in the early 1920s, protesting the colonial British state’s regulations to protect the environment. Yet by the 1990s, they had begun to conserve their forests carefully. In his innovative historical and political study, Arun Agrawal analyzes this striking transformation. He describes and explains the emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and shows how the two are related. In so doing, he demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combined—in an approach he calls environmentality—to better understand changes in conservation efforts. Such an understanding is relevant far beyond Kumaon: local populations in more than fifty countries are engaged in similar efforts to protect their environmental resources.

Agrawal brings environment and development studies, new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on his ethnographical and historical research. He visited nearly forty villages in Kumaon, where he assessed the state of village forests, interviewed hundreds of Kumaonis, and examined local records. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and archival research, he shows how decentralization strategies change relations between states and localities, community decision makers and common residents, and individuals and the environment. In exploring these changes and their significance, Agrawal establishes that theories of environmental politics are enriched by attention to the interconnections between power, knowledge, institutions, and subjectivities.

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cover of Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century: Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century

Moving to a Mission-Oriented and Learner-Centered Model

Kezar, Adrianna

Rutgers University Press, 2016

The institution of tenure—once a cornerstone of American colleges and universities—is rapidly eroding. Today, the majority of faculty positions are part-time or limited-term appointments, a radical change that has resulted more from circumstance than from thoughtful planning. As colleges and universities evolve to meet the changing demands of society, how might their leaders design viable alternative faculty models for the future? 
 
Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century weighs the concerns of university administrators, professors, adjuncts, and students in order to critically assess emerging faculty models and offer informed policy recommendations. Cognizant of the financial pressures that have led many universities to favor short-term faculty contracts, higher education experts Adrianna Kezar and Daniel Maxey assemble a top-notch roster of contributors to  investigate whether there are ways to modify the existing system or promote new faculty models. They suggest how colleges and universities might rethink their procedures for faculty development, hiring, scheduling, and evaluation in order to maintain a campus environment that still fosters faculty service and student-centered learning. 
 
Even as it asks urgent questions about how to retain the best elements of American higher education, Envisioning the Faculty for the Twenty-First Century also examines the opportunities that systemic changes might create. Ultimately, it provides some starting points for how colleges and universities might best respond to the rapidly evolving needs of an increasingly global society.  
 
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cover of Equality in the Nordic World

Equality in the Nordic World

Carsten Jensen

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

By most measures, the Nordic countries regularly rank among the best in terms of equality and business friendliness. Political scientist Carsten Jensen delves into what is exceptional about equality in the region, and outlines “the four equalities” that set it apart: economic, intergenerational, gender, and health.

The four types of equality have their origins in unique political compromises made in the twentieth century. The resulting social market economies of these countries affect their growth and levels of equality even today.
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cover of Ethical Borders: NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration

Ethical Borders

NAFTA, Globalization, and Mexican Migration

Authored by Bill Ong Hing

Temple University Press, 2010

In his topical new book, Ethical Borders, Bill Ong Hing asks, why do undocumented immigrants from Mexico continue to enter the United States and, what would discourage this surreptitious traffic?  An expert on immigration law and policy, Hing examines the relationship between NAFTA, globalization, and undocumented migration, and he considers the policy options for controlling immigration. He develops an ethical rationale for opening up the U.S./Mexican border, as well as improving conditions in Mexico so that its citizens would have little incentive to migrate.

In Ethical Borders Hing insists that reforming NAFTA is vital to ameliorating much of the poverty that drives undocumented immigration and he points to the European Union's immigration and economic development policies as a model for North America. Hing considers the world-wide economic crisis and the social problems that attend labor migration into homogenous countries, arguing for a spectrum of changes, including stricter border enforcement and more effective barriers; a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants; or a guest worker program.

Hing also situates NAFTA and its effects in the larger, and rapidly shifting, context of globalization—particularly the recent rise of China as the world's economic giant. Showing how NAFTA’s unforeseen consequences have been detrimental to Mexico, Hing passionately argues that the United States is ethically bound to address the problems in a way that puts prosperity within the grasp of all North Americans.

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cover of Ethical Principles for Social Policy

Ethical Principles for Social Policy

John Howie

Southern Illinois University Press, 1983

Abortion, euthanasia, racism, sexism, pater­nalism, the rights of children, the population explosion, and the dynamics of economic growth are examined in the light of ethical principles by leading philosophers in order to suggest reasonable judgments.

Originally prepared for the distinguished Wayne Leys Memorial Lecture Series at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the essayists have addressed themselves to the most pressing ethical questions being asked today. William K. Frankena, Professor Emer­itus, University of Michigan, in “The Ethics of Respect for Life” argues for a qualified view of moral respect for human personality. From his viewpoint it is always prima facie wrong to shorten or prevent human life, but not always actually wrong as other moral conditions may counter the presumed wrong. The late William T. Blackstone in “Zero Population Growth and Zero Economic Growth” contends that justice will require the production of the maximal level of goods to fulfill basic human needs com­patible with the avoidance of ecological catastrophe.

Richard Wasserstrom, Professor of Phi­losophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, proposes an assimilationist ideal in “Racism, Sexism, and Preferential Treat­ment.” Gerald Dworkin, Professor of Phi­losophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, dares to ask “Is More Choice Better than Less?” Joel Feinberg, Professor of Phi­losophy at the University of Arizona, in “The Child’s Right to an Open Future,” offers a defense of “rights-in-trust” of children. Tom L. Beauchamp, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy In­stitute-Center for Bioethics of Georgetown University, considers the paternalism used to justify social policies in the practice of medi­cine and insists that it invariably involves a conflict between the ethical principles of be­neficence and autonomy.

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cover of Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist

Eugene V. Debs

Citizen and Socialist

Nick Salvatore

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) is regarded by many as American history's premier labor advocate. He was the leader of the Socialist party, five-time Socialist candidate for president, outspoken on the rights of all workers, and a persistent defender of America's democratic traditions. 

Nick Salvatore's acclaimed biography offers a major reevaluation of Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions. He also shows the relationship between Debs's public image and his private life as child, sibling, husband, and lover. Salvatore's Debs--weaknesses intact--emerges as a complex man, frustrated and angered by the glaring inequities of a new economic order, and willing to risk his freedom to preserve the essence of democratic society.

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cover of European Energy Challenge: East and West

European Energy Challenge

East and West

George W. Hoffman

Duke University Press, 1985

By examining all of Europe in a single study, an eminent geographer and expert on European development makes, in this volume, a unique contribution to the understanding of the changing energy relations of the European countries, east and west. The book examines the problem of establishing a reliable energy supply base in western Europe through structural changes and alternate and substitute energy sources. The volume also evaluates western European security problems arising from present and future reliance on Soviet energy and relates this to North Sea supplies of gas and oil, indigenous and import supplies, and nuclear power generation.
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cover of Evading the Patronage Trap: Interest Representation in Mexico

Evading the Patronage Trap

Interest Representation in Mexico

Brian Palmer-Rubin

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies.

With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.

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cover of Evaluating Public Health Interventions

Evaluating Public Health Interventions

Edited by Tim Colbourn and James Hargreaves

University College London, 2026

An authoritative student guide for how to evaluate complex public health interventions.

Public health interventions include any effort or policy that attempts to improve the well-being of individuals or an entire population. They can be run by governmental health departments or non-governmental organizations and can include educational programs, screening programs, vaccination programs, environmental improvements, and health promotion campaigns. Interventions that include multiple independent or interacting components are referred to as complex. Evaluating and predicting the efficacy of any public health intervention, as well as calculating the cost effectiveness, is essential. Using examples from multiple published studies conducted around the world, this textbook shows readers how to evaluate public health interventions in real-world settings. It will enable readers to understand how to investigate whether a public health intervention works, for whom, when, where, how, and why. It provides a comprehensive introduction to key areas of evaluation, including understanding complex interventions, developing program theories, community engagement in evaluation, and the main methods used in process, impact, and economic evaluation. It explains how different methods can be used individually and in combination to answer different kinds of evaluation questions and at different phases in an evaluation cycle and considers how the results of evaluations can be brought together to inform action.

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cover of Evaluating Science and Scientists

Evaluating Science and Scientists

Mark S. Frankel

Central European University Press, 1997

The shift to a market economy in post-communist Eastern Europe has had a profound impact on science and scientists across the region, leading to reforms in research management practices and to drastic cuts in funding levels everywhere. Many countries are moving to a system of competitive research grants awarded on the basis of peer review. The introduction of peer review is not simply a technical matter. It signifies a fundamental change in the social structure of science, enhancing profession-al autonomy and giving working scientists a voice in the allocation of resources. This book combines first-hand accounts of the reform process with analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of both peer review and quantitative indicators.
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cover of Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar

Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar

Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows, eking out a living from day to day leaves little time for civic engagement. Citizens have coped with extreme hardship through great resourcefulness. But by making bad situations more tolerable in the short term, these coping strategies may hinder the emergence of the democratic values needed to sustain the country's transition to a more open political environment.

Thawnghmung conducted in-depth interviews and surveys of 372 individuals from all walks of life and across geographical locations in Myanmar between 2008 and 2015. To frame her analysis, she provides context from countries with comparable political and economic situations. Her findings will be welcomed by political scientists and policy analysts, as well by journalists and humanitarian activists looking for substantive, reliable information about everyday life in a country that remains largely in the shadows.
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cover of Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation

Everyday Harm

Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation

Mindie Lazarus-Black

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Exposing the powerful contradictions between empowering rights and legal rites

By investigating the harms routinely experienced by the victims and survivors of domestic violence, both inside and outside of law, Everyday Harm studies the limits of what domestic violence law can--and cannot--accomplish. Combining detailed ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Mindie Lazarus-Black illustrates the ways persistent cultural norms and ingrained bureaucratic procedures work to unravel laws designed to protect the safety of society’s most vulnerable people.

Lazarus-Black’s fieldwork in Trinidad traces a story with global implications about why and when people gain the right to ask the court for protection from violence, and what happens when they pursue those rights in court. Why is itthat, in spite of laws designed to empower subordinated people, so little results from that legislation? What happens in and around courts that makes it so difficult for people to obtain their legally available rights and protections? In the case of domestic violence law, what can such legislation mean for women’s empowerment, gender equity, and protection? How do cultural norms and practices intercept the law?

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cover of Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets

Everything for Sale

The Virtues and Limits of Markets

Robert Kuttner

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In this highly acclaimed, provocative book, Robert Kuttner disputes the laissez-faire direction of both economic theory and practice that has been gaining in prominence since the mid-1970s. Dissenting voices, Kuttner argues, have been drowned out by a stream of circular arguments and complex mathematical models that ignore real-world conditions and disregard values that can't easily be turned into commodities. With its brilliant explanation of how some sectors of the economy require a blend of market, regulation, and social outlay, and a new preface addressing the current global economic crisis, Kuttner's study will play an important role in policy-making for the twenty-first century.

"The best survey of the limits of free markets that we have. . . . A much needed plea for pragmatism: Take from free markets what is good and do not hesitate to recognize what is bad."—Jeff Madrick, Los Angeles Times

"It ought to be compulsory reading for all politicians—fortunately for them and us, it is an elegant read."—The Economist

"Demonstrating an impressive mastery of a vast range of material, Mr. Kuttner lays out the case for the market's insufficiency in field after field: employment, medicine, banking, securities, telecommunications, electric power."—Nicholas Lemann, New York Times Book Review

"A powerful empirical broadside. One by one, he lays on cases where governments have outdone markets, or at least performed well."—Michael Hirsh, Newsweek

"To understand the economic policy debates that will take place in the next few years, you can't do better than to read this book."—Suzanne Garment, Washington Post Book World


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cover of Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement

Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement

Lee Botts

Michigan State University Press, 2005

Water quality concerns are not new to the Great Lakes. They emerged early in the 20th century, in 1909, and matured in 1972 and 1978. They remain a prominent part of today’s conflicted politics and advancing industrial growth. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, became a model to the world for environmental management across an international boundary. Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement recounts this historic binational relationship, an agreement intended to protect the fragile Great Lakes.
     One strength of the agreement is its flexibility, which includes a requirement for periodic review that allows modification as problems are solved, conditions change, or scientific research reveals new problems. The first progress was made in the 1970s in the area of eutrophication, the process by which lakes gradually age, which normally takes thousands of years to progress, but is accelerated by modern water pollution. The binational agreement led to the successful lowering of phosphorus levels that saved Lake Erie and prevented accelerated eutrophication in the rest of the Great Lakes ecosystem. Another major success at the time was the identification and lowering of the levels of toxic contaminants that cause major threats to human and wildlife health, from accumulating PCBs and other persistent organic pollutants

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cover of Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools

Excellence for All

How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools

Jack Schneider

Vanderbilt University Press, 2011

By the early twentyfirst century, a startling consensus had emerged about the overall aim of American school reform. In an era of political discord, and in a field historically known for contentiousness, the notion of promoting educational excellence for all students was a distinct point of bipartisan agreement. Shaped by a corps of entrepreneurial reformers intent on finding "what works" and taking it to scale, this hybrid vision won over the nation's most ambitious and wellresourced policy leaders at foundations and nonprofits, in state and federal government, and in urban school districts from coast to coast.

"Excellence for all" might, at first glance, appear to be nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. Who, after all, would oppose the idea of a great education for every student? Yet it is hardly a throwaway phrase. Rather, it represents a surprising fusion of educational policy approaches that had been in tense opposition throughout the twentieth centurythose on the right favoring social efficiency, and those on the left supporting social justice.

This book seeks to understand why the "excellence for all" vision took hold at the time it did, unpacks the particular beliefs and assumptions embedded in it, and details the often informal coalition building that produced this period of consensus. Examining the nation's largest urban school districts (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), the author details three major reform efforts in chapters titled "The Right Space: The Small Schools Movement"; "The Right Teachers: Teach for America"; and "The Right Curriculum: Expanding Advanced Placement."

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cover of Exclusion and Engagement: Social Policy in Latin America

Exclusion and Engagement

Social Policy in Latin America

Edited by Christopher Abel and Colin M. Lewis

University of London Press, 2002

This collection offers a reappraisal of social policy in response to the scale of the challenges confronting Latin America. Divided into four sections --Concepts, Models and Practice; Health and Social Security; Education; and Household and Community --the book explores the functions of social policy and the prospects of it's performing a new and more dynamic role. The authors place contemporary social policy in historical perspective, study the connection between growth and welfare, and consider the efficacy of the state in the social sphere from both macro and micro perspectives. Underpinning the collection are issues relating to the question of the social contract between state and citizen and how the exercise of citizenship connects society and state.
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cover of Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States

Executing Freedom

The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States

Daniel LaChance

University of Chicago Press, 2016

In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death?

That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.
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cover of Exiting the Fragility Trap: Rethinking Our Approach to the World’s Most Fragile States

Exiting the Fragility Trap

Rethinking Our Approach to the World’s Most Fragile States

David Carment

Ohio University Press, 2019

State fragility is a much-debated yet underinvestigated concept in the development and international security worlds. Based on years of research as part of the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project at Carleton University, Exiting the Fragility Trap marks a major step toward remedying the lack of research into the so-called fragility trap. In examining the nature and dynamics of state transitions in fragile contexts, with a special emphasis on states that are trapped in fragility, David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy ask three questions: Why do some states remain stuck in a fragility trap? What lessons can we learn from those states that have successfully transitioned from fragility to stability and resilience? And how can third-party interventions support fragile state transitions toward resilience?

Carment and Samy consider fragility’s evolution in three state types: countries that are trapped, countries that move in and out of fragility, and countries that have exited fragility. Large-sample empirical analysis and six comparative case studies—Pakistan and Yemen (trapped countries), Mali and Laos (in-and-out countries), and Bangladesh and Mozambique (exited countries)—drive their investigation, which breaks ground toward a new understanding of why some countries fail to see sustained progress over time.

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cover of Extra/ordinary Johannesburg: Centrality, Periphery and the Spaces Between

Extra/ordinary Johannesburg

Centrality, Periphery and the Spaces Between

Lindsay Blair Howe

University College London, 2025

Structured around urban centers and peripheries, Extra/ordinary Johannesburg reimagines the African city as an “ordinary” space. 

In Extra/ordinary Johannesburg, urbanist Lindsay Blair Howe argues that Johannesburg, part of the highly urbanized Gauteng City-Region and often labeled as an “apartheid city,” is an “ordinary” space where spatial changes both marginalize and create opportunities for people in their everyday lives. Structured around the concepts of urbanization and peripheralization and drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial dialectics, the book uses empirical research methods like smartphone applications and volunteered geographic information to draw theoretical conclusions, providing exciting new insights into urban denizens’ daily lives and how urbanization in the Gauteng region relates to the decolonial project. One central premise is that understanding how people navigate the urban fabric of centralities, peripheries, and the spaces in between is crucial for reimagining effective ways to address poverty and inequality in urban Africa.
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