Rescuing Policy

Policy Analysis in the United States gathers a group of original contributions by scholars and leading practitioners of public policy analysis. Originating in the United States, the field of public policy analysis has affected nations around the world and been enhanced by contributions of scholars and practitioners in other regions, but it remains most highly developed and practiced in education and government here. This volume explores the nature of policy analysis in different sectors and at different levels of government, as well as by nongovernmental actors, such as unions, businesses, NGOs, and the media.

In 2009, Canada's Public Policy Forum launched the Public Engagement Project to explore new ways of thinking about how governments, stakeholders, communities and ordinary citizens can work together--collaborate--to find and implement solutions to complex problems, such as climate change, poor public health or the failure to innovate. The project involved seven provincial/territorial governments-- British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Nunavut--the Canada School of Public Service, the City of Hamilton and the Government of Australia. It established an online dialogue with more than 500 officials from participating governments, and held some 30 workshops across Canada and in Australia. In addition, the project drew on several innovative projects, three of which are discussed at length in this book: the Canadian Sport Policy Renewal Process, Australia's Community Engagement Project and New Brunswick's Poverty Reduction Initiative. This book is the final report of the Public Engagement Project.

Leo Cherne's life brimmed with paradox and improbability. He was born in the Bronx to a poor, immigrant, Jewish family, and yet rose to the heights of economic and political power in WASP America. A successful entrepreneur and an unofficial advisor to nine presidents, he nevertheless devoted the majority of his time to humanitarian causes, particularly the International Rescue Committee, which he chaired for forty years. From Hungary to Cuba to Cambodia, Cherne traveled across the globe on behalf of political refugees. A consummate networker, he also had the uncanny ability to attract and cultivate talented people before they became prominent, including such figures as John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Patrick Moynihan, Claiborne Pell, Tom Dooley, William Casey, John Whitehead, and Henry A. Kissinger. He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 by Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed that although never elected to governmental office, Leo Cherne had more influence on American foreign policy than most elected officials. The underlying theme of his life was that one person, without family contacts or wealthy connections, could make a difference worldwide in political and humanitarian affairs.

From the author of the critically acclaimed Blue Plate series comes the second novel in the How To Score series about a rescue dog shelter owner and a wide receiver who needs a little rescuing himself. Caught between the media’s crosshairs and his own questionable decisions, Colorado Blizzards wide receiver Chris Lalonde has a choice: watch his storied career burn to the ground or rehab his bad-boy image at the local dog shelter. His goal: rescue the oldest, saddest, most mange-infested canines in the hopes that the pups can rescue his reputation in return. What he doesn’t expect? Hazel Grant, shelter owner, do-gooder, and beautiful all-American girl next door. She has no time for Chris’s excuses, antics, or cheesy pick-up lines…challenge accepted. Hazel Grant can’t believe she got saddled with Denver’s cockiest—and most eligible—football player for a volunteer—she needs people she can trust and count on, not a man packaged in abs and wrapped in confidence who thinks scoring touchdowns is an honest day’s work. But since the shelter is in need of some serious TLC, she can’t afford to turn away help. Chris and Hazel get along like cats and dogs. But when it comes to Chris Lalonde, there’s a new surprise around every corner, and Hazel finds that, like the pups she cares for, Chris has hidden depths, secret talents, and meets every test she throws at him. As the pressure mounts to save the shelter—and Chris’s career—lust bubbles to the surface, and suddenly love becomes anybody’s game…

John F. Kennedy said, 'Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer.' In that spirit, Richard G. Clemens wrote Rescuing America: The Bipartisan Path, which discusses a wide range of domestic policy issues facing the federal government in a nonpartisan way. These issues include: the demographic trends resulting from the rapidly growing aged population, Social Security, Medicare, the US trade deficit, the Iraq war, the mushrooming national debt, and tax and fiscal policy. Clemens identifies leaders of both political parties in Congress who are striving to follow the bipartisan path to find solutions. With the national debt rising at the rate of $40 million each hour, Rescuing America is a compelling read for anyone who is concerned about the unsustainable trajectory of mounting federal spending and the potential financial catastrophe that our nation faces in the years ahead."

This book proposes a new institution - the 'People's Forum' - to enable democratic governments to effectively address long-running issues like global warming and inequality. It would help citizens decide what strategic problems their government must fix, especially where this requires them to suffer some inconvenience or cost.The People's Forum is first based on a new diagnosis of government failure in democracies. The book tests its own analyses of government failure by seeing whether these might help us to explain the failures of particular democracies to address (and in some cases, to even recognize) several crucial environmental problems. The essential features of a new design for democracy are described and then compared with those of previous institutional designs that were also intended to improve the quality of democratic government. In that comparison, the People's Forum turns out to be not only the most effective design for developing and implementing competent policy, but also the easiest to establish and run. The latter advantage is crucial as there has been no success in getting previous designs into actual trial practice. It is hoped that this book may inspire a small group to raise the money to set up and run the People's Forum. Then, as citizens see it operating and engage with it, they may come to regard the new Forum as essential in helping them to deliberate long-running issues and to get their resulting initiatives implemented by government. Smith also discusses how the People's Forum must be managed and how groups with different political ideologies may react to it.An Afterword sets out the method by which this design was produced, to help those who might want to devise an institution themselves. The new concepts in environmental science that the book develops to test its diagnosis are applied in an Appendix to outline crucial options for the future of Tasmania. Similar options apply to many countries, states and provinces. As indicated above, those choices are currently beyond the capacity of democratic governments to address and in some cases, even to recognize. But the People's Forum may lift them out of that morass.