Prevention, Policy, and Public Health provides a basic foundation for students, professionals, and researchers to be more effective in the policy arena. It offers information on the dynamics of the policymaking process, theoretical frameworks, analysis, and policy applications. It also offers coverage of advocacy and communication, the two most integral aspects of shaping policies for public health.
Known for encouraging step-by-step problem solving and for connecting techniques to real-world scenarios, David Ammons’ Tools for Decision Making covers a wide range of local government practices—from the foundational to the advanced. Brief and readable, each chapter opens with a problem in a hypothetical city and then introduces a tool to address it. Thoroughly updated with new local government examples, the second edition also incorporates chapters devoted to such additional techniques as sampling analysis, sensitivity analysis, financial condition analysis, and forecasting via trend analysis. Numerous tables, figures, exhibits, equations, and worksheets walk readers through the application of tools, and boxed features throughout each chapter present other uses for techniques, helpful online resources, and common errors. A handy guide for students and an invaluable resource and reference for practitioners.
The widespread popularity of evaluation is based on the need to provide evidence of the effectiveness of policies and programmes. This book sees evaluation as an inherently political activity, and using a wide range of examples it relates practical issues in evaluation design to their political contexts.
Despite the recent economic upswing in many Latin American countries, rural poverty rates in the region have actually increased during the past two decades. Experts blame excessively centralized public administrations for the lackluster performance of public policy initiatives. In response, decentralization reformshave become a common government strategy for improving public sector performance in rural areas. The effect of these reforms is a topic of considerable debate among government officials, policy scholars, and citizensÕ groups. This book offers a systematic analysis of how local governments and farmer groups in Latin America are actually faring today. Based on interviews with more than 1,200 mayors, local officials, and farmers in 390 municipal territories in four Latin American nations, the authors analyze the ways in which different forms of decentralization affect the governance arrangements for rural development Òon the ground.Ó Their comparative analysis suggests that rural development outcomes are systemically linked to locally negotiated institutional arrangementsÑformal and informalÑbetween government officials, NGOs, and farmer groups that operate in the local sphere. They find that local-government actors contribute to public services that better assist the rural poor when local actors cooperate to develop their own institutional arrangements for participatory planning, horizontal learning, and the joint production of services. This study brings substantive data and empirical analysis to a discussion that has, until now, more often depended on qualitative research in isolated cases. With more than 60 percent of Latin AmericaÕs rural population living in poverty, the results are both timely and crucial.
The Logic Model Guidebook offers clear, step-by-step support for creating logic models and the modeling process in a range of contexts. Lisa Wyatt Knowlton and Cynthia C. Phillips describe the structures, processes, and language of logic models as a robust tool to improve the design, development, and implementation of program and organization change efforts. The text is enhanced by numerous visual learning guides (sample models, checklists, exercises, worksheets) and many new case examples. The authors provide students, practitioners, and beginning researchers with practical support to develop and improve models that reflect knowledge, practice, and beliefs. The Guidebook offers a range of new applied examples. The text includes logic models for evaluation, discusses archetypes, and explores display and meaning. In an important contribution to programs and organizations, it emphasizes quality by raising issues like plausibility, feasibility, and strategic choices in model creation.
Updated in its 3rd edition, Basic Methods of Policy Analysis and Planning presents quickly applied methods for analyzing and resolving planning and policy issues at state, regional, and urban levels. Divided into two parts, Methods which presents quick methods in nine chapters and is organized around the steps in the policy analysis process, and Cases which presents seven policy cases, ranging in degree of complexity, the text provides readers with the resources they need for effective policy planning and analysis. Quantitative and qualitative methods are systematically combined to address policy dilemmas and urban planning problems. Readers and analysts utilizing this text gain comprehensive skills and background needed to impact public policy.
This book offers an overview of the legal, political, and broad intergovernmental environment in which relations between local and state units of government take place, the historical roots of the conflict among them, and an analysis of contemporary problems concerning local authority, local revenues, state interventions and takeovers, and the restructuring of local governments. The author pays special attention to local governmental autonomy and the goals and activities of local officials as they seek to secure resources, fend off regulations and interventions, and fight for survival as independent units. He looks at the intergovernmental struggle from the bottom up, but in the process examines a variety of political activities at the state level and the development and effects of several state policies. Berman finds considerable reason to be concerned about the viability and future of meaningful local government.
This reference work offers detailed guidance on subnational systems of government in advanced democracies. It describes and compares local and regional systems world-wide, with extensive treatment of those in France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Britain, the United States and Japan.
This book appears at an opportune time in the history of evaluation. Its detailed and up-to-date account of the organization and use of evaluation in eight Western, democratic countries—Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Holland, Norway, and Switzerland—shows how evaluation functions at different levels of development. Focusing on the national or federal level of government, this volume presents a systematic and comparative view of eight nations at different stages of the development, institutionalization, and utilization of evaluations. All of these original contributions have been written by academics and government officials involved in the production and use of evaluation findings. Each shows how their respective country has moved to institutionalize evaluation at the federal level, and each explores the reasons for that institutionalization. Among them are managerial accountability, the increased complexity of the decisions facing policymakers, federally sponsored social change that needs to be tracked and assessed, and the increasing recognition that political power comes to those who possess such information. Program Evaluation and the Management of Government is tightly integrated. The contributions share coherence, a common analytic framework and use of key terms, resulting from the authors’ three-year dialogue as members of the Working Group on Policy and Program Evaluation sponsored by the International Institute for Administrative Sciences located in Belgium. Their shared commitment to working together has given us the first systematic effort to assess evaluation across such a large number of countries. It will be of interest to applied social scientists and policymakers, especially those interested in comparative research.
