term.subject="administration"

Summary: Challenging some of the established practices of public policy and administration, which have been called into question in recent years by the financial and banking crises of 2008, the authors specifically seek to investigate current public sector management and the public managers acting in the interests of civil society to get to the heart of best practice

Summary: What does it take to design effective government institutions and sustain positive changes? What have we learnt about the attempts to deliberately design and redesign public sector institutions in different countries? What works and what doesn't, and why? What happens when reforms fail? This book looks at what the existing academic literature tells us about these questions, and intends to answer these questions to generate and define theoretical and practical knowledge about deliberate (vs. evolutionary) public sector institutional change. It analyzes lessons from changes implemented by international development agencies working to reform public sector institutions in developing countries over the last five decades. The book details reforms in one such country; Kyrgyzstan, one of the more diligent nations in undertaking donor-guided reforms since its independence in 1991. It then presents a conceptual framework and analytical tools essential for understanding the processes used in deliberate institutional change, and in planning for and implementing institutional reform

Summary: How "New Political Governance" has led to the erosion of the impartial public service and the undermining of democratic governance

Summary: Public policy is a process that evolves from a coalition of actors. In this book the authors take us through the step by step process of decision making and implementation of policy initiatives in the country of Ghana. Although the desired outcomes did not always occur, these initiatives can tell scholars and policy-makers what works and does not work in a developing country along with contingency variables that make a difference in policy areas

Summary: "Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials--do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence. It also explains what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information."--Provided by publisher

Summary: By highlighting the degree to which meaning making in public policy is more a cultural struggle than a rational and analytical project, Governing Narratives brings public administration back into a political context. In Governing Narratives, Hugh T. Miller takes a narrative approach in conceptualizing the politics of public policy. In this approach, signs and ideographs-that is, constellations of images, feelings, values, and conceptualization-are woven into policy narratives through the use of story lines. For example, the ideograph "acid rain" is

Summary: The Canadian health care system is so indisputably tied to our national identity that its founder, Tommy Douglas, was voted the greatest Canadian of all time in a CBC television contest. However, very little has been written to date on how Medicare as we know it was developed and implemented. This collection fills a serious gap in the existing literature by providing a comprehensive policy history of Medicare in Canada.Making Medicare features explorations of the experiments that predated the federal government's decision to implement the Saskatchewan health care model, from Newfoundland's cottage hospital system to Bennettcare in British Columbia. It also includes essays by key individuals (including health practitioners and two premiers) who played a role in the implementation of Medicare and the landmark Royal Commission on Health Services. Along with political scientists, policy specialists, medical historians, and health practitioners, this collection will appeal to anyone interested in the history and legacy of one of Canada's most visible and centrally important institutions

Summary: This valuable book examines the development of evaluation and its impact on public policy by analysing evaluation frameworks and criteria which are available when evaluating public policies and services

Summary: Public Policy and Citizenship analyses the two dominant public-policy approaches in India-managerialism and neoliberalism-and argues that they have had a profoundly damaging impact. Drawing upon a substantial body of published work, the book shows how managerialist and free-market systems are fundamentally incoherent and destructive. The discussion in this volume revolves primarily around Indian public policy on health, agriculture, and education. The author argues that the condition of these areas, and therefore the condition of hundreds of millions of people, is worse than many analysts clai

Summary: Understanding Policy Domains: Their Salient Forces and Organisational Challenges examines the complexity of policy making processes within the context of human action arising from culture, life necessities and politics. It provides an understanding of human, environmental and institutional behaviour, and identifies the policy factors that underline the success or failure of governments and institutions. This book provides policy-makers, practitioners and other researchers in the field with a clear understanding of the process of policy-making and who is responsible for what. It sets the tone for academics and policy practitioners to confront the problems and challenges that countries face as they seek to improve governance and service delivery. The author provokes debate on the cause and effect of past, present and future human actions, bringing into play the issues of honesty, transparency and political will. He promotes policy as a way towards achieving social harmony in the human struggle for survival. User-friendly for both students and lecturers, as well as for researchers, government and NGO policy "gurus", Understanding Policy Domains, their Salient Forces, and Organisational Challenges is also valuable for political parties whose members are often unaware of this important aspect of government responsibility