Jack H. Knott

If Dissemination Is the Solution, What Is the Problem?.

and request the study. Another is the computerized retrieval system; only the user’s request for information will initiate the exchange of information; without that request the computer slumbers, and dissemination does not occur. The passive information exchange is an access-oriented system designed to place what is known at the disposal of policy-makers. Its primary objective is to reduce the cost of obtaining information, a cost which Rose has noted is not insignificant: The cost of obtaining information ... can be nil if it is part of the free stream of information available to anyone ... Information will be costly to obtain if it requires scarce resources. Money is one of these scarce resources. Skilled manpower to collect and analyze information another. Time is also ... a constraint, in that many of the needs of politicians are immediate ... The resource cost of collecting information is also nontrivial [Rose, 1972: 124]. Juxtaposed to passive exchanges are active ones in which the disseminator initiates the search for and transmission of information. An active information exchange transfers information to needy policymakers. To accomplish this, active information exchanges try to reduce both the cost of obtaining and of consuming information; the former is reduced because the disseminator initiates the exchange and anticipates policy-makers’ needs; the latter, because the information is presented in clear, understandable language, and in limited quantities. Option 2: Moving People Diffusion fails when interaction between and among policy-makers and policy-researchers does not take place because the underlying social relationships have broken down. The strategy of moving people to achieve dissemination substitutes artificial for natural interactions. What are the specific strategies for moving people? We can move the policy-makers who need knowledge; for example, incentives

Social welfare, corruption and credibility

Abstract Economic development requires that investments by entrepreneurs are not subject to expropriation by government. Unfortunately, public agencies often serve as the instruments by which political elites engage in corruption and extracting rents from the economy. The question is how to design institutions that credibly commit to a stable system of guarantees of property rights and contract enforcement. Principal agent theory and the new public management favor greater accountability of public managers to elected officials or eliminating public agencies through privatization. We argue for institutional designs that provide a degree of public agency autonomy. We show that public agency autonomy is a by-product of the competition between elites in democracies with multiple veto players. We show that transparency, professionalism, and legality help ensure that public managers do not engage in rent-extraction. The institutional design problem is how to induce public managers to serve the public interest without being fully responsive to elected political officials.

Policy Venture Capital Foundations, Government Partnerships, and Child Care Programs

This article seeks to understand how foundations decide to invest their funds in social programs and, in particular, what role government policy plays in that decision. The article develops the concept of foundations as venture capitalists who invest in particular communities and government programs expecting a return on their investment. It analyzes the risks and rewards of the investment decision, given the vagaries of the public policy decision process. The concept of foundations as policy venture capitalists is applied to child care programs to illustrate these policy investment strategies in a concrete way. The findings show that in seeking to achieve their policy agenda for children and families, only a few foundations have acted as policy venture capitalists to lead and innovate in child care. Most foundations have played an important but targeted investment role of partnering with government, filling in gaps and inconsistencies, and evaluating the implementation of government initiatives.

Education and the Health Professions: Explaining Policy Choices among the States

Recent calls for restructuring of the nations health care system have highlighted the deficiencies in the current system of education for the health professions. Of particular concern are the dominance of specialization and hospital-based training and the tendency of new health care providers to settle in communities without substantial health needs. The states are the key actors in reforming health professions education, serving as a primary funding source for health professions schools, chief licensors and regulators of health professions, regulators of private health insurance, key providers of Medicaid, and architects of a variety of subsidy and regulatory programs providing incentives for health professionals to choose specialties and locations for practice. This article provides a taxonomy of state policies affecting health professions education reform and classifies the states according to the choices they have made. Findings show that few states take advantage of their policy options across the four policy types and that most tend to concentrate their efforts on a few policies--ignoring potential means of encouraging more primary care providers in underserved areas. Results from regression models explaining state choice of policy adoption highlight the political nature of policy choice and the highly variable nature of state response in health professions education reform.

The Fed Chairman as a Political Executive

Regulatory agencies are governed by a top committee rather than a single, chief executive, but the chair of the committee (or board) often dominates decisions. This article addresses the question of why the Federal Reserve Board chairman dominates the decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee—the monetary policy arm of the Fed-even though he has little formal authority. It examines four internal strategies of the chair: side payments, policy trade-offs, use of expert staff and control of policy implementation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these strategies for the conduct of monetary policy.

When (not if) evaluation flexibility is desirable. Examples from the CPHPE initiative.

The evaluation literature often debates whether evaluators should be flexible in evaluation design and activities in order to collaborate with program directors and be responsive to programming needs. Two conditions are specified under which evaluation flexibility is not only desirable but essential. Two examples from the cluster evaluation of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Partnerships for Health Professions Education initiative are provided to illustrate why flexibility under these conditions proved to be essential. One of the examples, related to the “community” involvement in the initiative, illustrates the need for flexibility as programs experience goals clarification. The other example, related to the coincidental national health care reform efforts, illustrates the need for flexibility both to capture programs’efforts to protect their integrity and to ensure against spurious conclusions as a result of external turbulence in policy environments. How the cluster evaluation team addressed these issues is also described.

Evaluating the impact on public policy of foundation-sponsored programs in the health professions

The leaders of national philanthropic foundations have long been active in informing public policy makers about their organizations’ accomplishments and lessons learned in health care and other issues. The public policy context also is seen increasingly as an important factor influencing changes in the health care market. This article outlines how public policy was monitored and evaluated in a recent initiative in health care by a prominent national foundation. The markers of policy change in the evaluation of this initiative represented a mixture of the initiative’s efforts to inform policy makers, the success the participant projects had in making policy makers aware of the initiative’s goals, and actual changes in policy outcomes.

Looking Outward: The Changing Context of Public Service Education

Good afternoon! I am truly honored and humbled to be selected as the president of NASPAA. I care deeply about our profession and the education of our students and look forward to working with all of you over this coming year as we continue to build a great professional association for our schools and programs. Before I begin my remarks, let me first thank Nadia for her service to NASPAA and to her great year as president! She has been a delight to work with on the Council and the Executive Committee. I especially appreciated her initiation of the Strategic Planning process and her dedication to furthering NASPAA’s international agenda. I also want to thank Fran Berry, the past, past president of NASPAA who has served with Nadia and me on the Executive Committee. What a privilege to work with these smart and capable individuals! In addition, a hearty thank you to the members of the Executive Council for their dedication and hard work in helping to deal with the issues facing the organization and in shaping a vision for the future. And, I thank the very fine NASPAA staff: Crystal Calarusse and Stacy Drudy for managing accreditation; Peter Green for keeping the finances growing and in the black; Stuart Heiser for good work on policy issues; Monchaya Wanna for her work behind the scenes with web services and membership; Meihua Zhai for her work on data, and Jackie Lewis for conference planning. I especially thank Laurel McFarland, an efficient and creative Executive Director, who among many other accomplishments over the past few years has extended NASPAA’s presence externally, especially in Washington, D.C. But most important, I thank all of you for the amazing work you do in your schools and programs and your commitment to working with NASPAA to truly make us the “Global Standard for Public Service Education!”

Governance and the economy in Asia and the United States: institutions, instruments and reform

Effective governance involving the use of various institutions and instruments is very important for economic development. While many states fail to achieve even the minimal features of effective governance, state capitalism has proven to be a successful model economically. The problem is that state capitalism is frequently associated with authoritarian and corrupt regimes. Over time, such regimes limit economic efficiency, ignore the environment, and under-invest in social and health services. In the West and some Asian countries, these conditions have led to substantial reform in democratic governance. Singapore and possibly the People’s Republic of China offer alternative models of reform, reducing corruption and somewhat liberalising their economies in the absence of well-developed democratic governance.

Book Review: Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law

public interest. This is the paradox. The business interests in Dallas are charged with entrepreneurial energy, yet its public sector is plagued by “institutional entropy.” For Dallas to advance, the civic function of the city would require greater attention from its citizens. Dallas’s preference for managerialism and a resistance to a full-time mayor is not without a price. The result is an approach to public policymaking that is market driven rather than an open, deliberative process. This constrains the public sector and fosters a disdain for government. Is there hope for Dallas? Can it address and adapt to urban problems in the future? Hanson is not very optimistic. He finds that the city is less in control of its own destiny than in the past when the growth-machine regime was in place. He concludes that like changing any organizational culture, institutionalizing competent performance of civic functions will take more than a few months; it will take years of conscious effort.