Christine M. Reed

New Public Management and Substantive Democracy

The authors are concerned that a remaining refuge of substantive democracy in America, the public sector, is in danger of abandoning it in favor of the market model of management. They argue that contemporary American democracy is confined to a shrunken procedural remnant of its earlier substantive form. The classical republican model of citizen involvement faded with the rise of liberal capitalist society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Capitalism and democracy coexist in a society emphasizing procedural protection of individual liberties rather than substantive questions of individual development. Today’s market model of government in the form of New Public Management goes beyond earlier “reforms,” threatening to eliminate democracy as a guiding principle in public-sector management. The authors discuss the usefulness of a collaborative model of administrative practice in preserving the value of democracy in public administration.

Wild Horse Protection Policies: Environmental and Animal Ethics in Transition

Abstract Wild horse protection policies in the United States and the Netherlands reflect ethical claims and scientific arguments, often cast as opposing positions favoring the integrity of self-sustaining ecosystems versus the welfare of individual animals. Neither holistic eco-centric, nor individualistic bio-centric ethical claims provide guidance to public sector practitioners who care for wild horses removed from U.S. public rangelands and living in holding facilities awaiting adoption; or who manage herds of de-domesticated horses in Dutch nature reserves. Wild horses are becoming increasingly dependent on transitional environments that are neither wild nor domestic. New ethical and scientific arguments are therefore needed to support revisions to existing policies.

Pastoral, Progressive and Postmodern Ideas in Environmental Political Thought: Restoring Agency to Nature

Abstract The pastoral and progressive traditions have played an integral role in shaping ideas about nature. Both traditions have contributed to an antidualistic view of the relationship between nature and culture; however, the linguistic turn in political theory appears to limit our relationship to nature to that of a social construction. What has been lost in the social constructionist perspective is the idea of “agency” in nature that was an essential feature of identity, as captured in Hegel’s synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Romantic expressivism. An environmental ethic that restores agency to nature justifies efforts to rehabilitate nature by supporting its capacity for self-healing.

Institutional Reform Litigation in an Era of Governance

This article examines the effects of governance reforms on the role of the courts in institutional reform litigation. It also explores the impact on governance of judicial deference to executive control of local provider networks. The 1999 Olmstead decision and its aftermath illustrate these mutually reinforcing tendencies. State home and community-based Medicaid waiver programs support de-institutionalization but create no legally enforceable rights to services. Conversely, lower federal court cases since Olmstead have resulted in settlement agreements and only incremental expansion of waiver services. These trends stand in stark contrast to institutional reform litigation in the 1970s. Judicial deference to executive control is consistent with an emerging model of legitimacy based on political accountability to a general public interest. To conclude, an outline is presented of a new jurisprudence of community to replace the current jurisprudence of rights that subordinates the right to belong to ones community to the individuals right to be free from the confines of state programs.

The Role of the Judiciary in New Governance

In his recent book, Democratic Governance, Mark Bevir characterizes recent reforms as a change in the role of the state “that we might characterize less as a hollowing out and more as a shift in its activity from something like governance to something more like meta-governance” (2010, pp. 89–90). He views the shift as an increase in state control over aspects of civil society (p. 90). In particular, Bevir argues that the role of the courts has expanded in Great Britain, initially through legal regulations associated with the rise of contracting out (p. 153). Adversarial legalism was associated with “the spread of concepts of economic rationality and the theories of governance to which these have given rise” (p. 160). Reforms that later emerged as a “second wave” of network governance also promoted an expansion of expertise by the judiciary: