Louis F. Weschler

Theory and the Public Administration Student/Practitioner

The modern theory that dominates our classrooms and training programs meets the needs of staff-oriented practitioners and public administration students. Line managers, present and future, are less well served by our offerings. Open systems and constructed reality describe both postmodern theory and the world faced by the line manager. Incorporating the learning principles imbedded in postmodernism would add diversity and strength to our MPA curricula.

Institutional readiness for integrated watershed management: The case of the Maumee river

Abstract Is there such a thing as “institutional readiness” for integrated watershed management? One element of readiness is the ability of managers with watershed-related responsibilities to identify the policy and management objectives of potential partners. The geographic areas encompassed by large watersheds are under the overlapping jurisdictions of many agencies and organizations from each sector (public, non-profit, and private) as well as private landowners. Developing a watershed-based institutional atlas is a promising strategy for coping with this jurisdictional complexity. The authors examine the potential for developing such an atlas in the Maumee River watershed of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and they assess other signals of readiness and partnerships in progress in the basin.

The Watershed as a Focus for Public Administration: Conventional and Bioregional Approaches

Abstract The watershed, a facet of physical landscape and resources management in the sciences and a symbol of social change among bioregionalists, has become a widely used organizing principle in administrative and community-based settings. This article reviews the roots of the watershed focus in the disparate literatures of water resources management and bioregionalism. The analysis shows that while neither group has seen its initial proposals fully realized, the watershed has indeed become a way to integrate the necessary knowledge and feeling necessary for more sustainable place-based governance.

Romancing the Capstone: The Jewel of Public Value

The Arizona State University (ASU) capstone course focuses on the creation of public value. This capstone course is based on the assumption that students enhance their competency for public service leadership if they learn to create public value through the triangulation of purpose, knowledge, and skills. Faculty and students engage in experientially based cooperative and collaborative learning situations, case analyses, exercises, and research projects to tie MPA experience together. This paper presents and assesses the goals and achievements of the capstone course. Building on the concepts of reflective practice, experiential learning, and professional development, we discuss the following topics: Why ASU moved to the capstone course; the experience of other top-ranked MPA programs; the theoretical foundations of the capstone experience; how the ASU course works; an interim assessment of the outcomes of the course; and lessons and suggestions. We find that this rite-ofpassage experience does alter student vision, competence, and commitment.

The Developer's Role in Coprovision, Cofinancing, and Coproduction of Urban Infrastructure and Services

Municipalities are increasingly shifting costs for urban infrastructure and services to private developers through the use of exactions. A complex system of conjoint arrangements has resulted in which a firm, in bargaining over the conditions of a development permit, may agree to provide and operate a water system, where the use of a facility with a city, or participate in a joint commercial venture with a local government. This exaction process has placed many developers in relationships that are analogous to those of citizen coproviders, cofinancers, and coproducers of public goods and services. In addition to public benefits, a number of potential social costs can be identified with these developer-based relations and suggest that there may be analogous costs involving citizen-governmental conjoint activities. These include equity issues concerning who benefits from developer provided infrastructure and services, whether extensive reliance on cost shifts to developers and on revenue generated from joint commercial ventures can compromise the public interest, and whether implicit demands by cities for exactions is reducing truly voluntary contri butions of a public nature by developers.

Privatism in Local Land Use Development: the Use of Exactions, Impact Fees and Impact Taxes by Municipalities

A decade ago Bosselman and Callies heralded the onset of a so-called ‘Quiet Revolution in Land-Use Control’ (1971). They referred to the increasingly active role that state governments were assuming in regulating the use of land which had traditionally been a local function (Mushkatel and Mushkatel, 1979). Currently, another quiet revolution in local land use planning and development is taking place. A variety of forces, some political and some economic, have resulted in recent, important changes in the way local governments manage development and land use. In extreme cases, local officials and developers are coming to be joint partners as more and more of the up-front costs of infrastructure and services are shifted to developers.