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Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. This book examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. The author explains the pros and cons of collaborative approaches, develops methods to test their effectiveness, and identifies ways to improve their implementation and results. Drawing on extensive case studies of collaboration in the United States and Australia, he shows that collaboration is not just about developing a strategy but also about creating and sustaining arrangements which can support collaborative implementation. The book outlines a typology of collaborative efforts and a typology of networks to support implementation, and uses them to explain the factors that are likely to make collaborations successful, as well as examining the implications for participants. The case studies range from watershed management to transportation planning and include both successes and failures; they also offer lessons in collaboration that make the book suited for classroom use. Additionally, the book, which is designed to help practitioners evaluate and improve collaborative efforts at any phase, has a theoretical framework that provides scholars with a means to assess the effectiveness of collaboration and explain its ability to achieve results.

Children are among the most vulnerable citizens of the world, with a special need for the protections, rights, and services offered by states, and yet, they are particularly at risk from statelessness. Thirty-six percent of all births in the world are not registered, leaving more than 48 million children under the age of five with no legal identity and no formal claim on any state. Millions of other children are born stateless or become undocumented as a result of migration. This book examines how statelessness affects children throughout the world, looking at this largely unexplored problem from a human rights perspective. It identifies three contemporary manifestations of statelessness: legal statelessness, when people lack any nationality because of the circumstances of their birth or political and legal obstacles; de facto statelessness, when nationals of one country live illegally in another; and effective statelessness, when legal citizens lack the documentation to prove their right to state services. The human rights repercussions range from dramatic abuses (detention and deportation) to social marginalization (lack of access to education and health care). The book provides a variety of examples, including chapters on Palestinian children in Israel, undocumented young people seeking higher education in the United States, unaccompanied child migrants in Spain, Roma children in Italy, irregular internal child migrants in China, and children in mixed legal/illegal families in the United States.

Recent years have seen a series of intense, increasingly acrimonious debates over the status and legitimacy of the natural sciences. These “science wars” take place in the public arena—with current battles over evolution, and global warming—and in academia, where assumptions about scientific objectivity have been called into question. Given these hostilities, what makes a scientific claim merit our consideration? This book examines what makes scientific arguments cogent—that is, strong, convincing, and “logically compelling”—and how we should assess that cogency. Drawing on the tools of argumentation theory, the author proposes a multidimensional, context-sensitive framework both for understanding and for conducting cooperative interdisciplinary evaluation of the cogency of actual scientific arguments. He closely examines Jürgen Habermas’s argumentation theory and its implications for understanding cogency, applying it to a case from high-energy physics. A series of problems, however, beset Habermas’s approach. In response, the author outlines his own “critical contextualist” approach, which uses argumentation-theory categories in a new and more context-sensitive way that is inspired by the ethnography of science.

At the core of liberal theory is the idea--found in thinkers from Hobbes to Rawls--that the consent of the governed is key to establishing public justification and political legitimacy. But in a diverse liberal polity like the United States, disagreement runs deep, and a segment of the population will simply regard the regime as illegitimate. This book argues that if citizens were to approach politics in the spirit of public reason, couching arguments in terms that others can reasonably accept, institutional and political legitimacy would be enhanced. Liberal theory has long relied on the theory of a unified self, that individuals are unified around a single set of goals, beliefs, attitudes, and aptitudes. Drawing on empirical findings in psychology, this book argues instead that we are complex creatures whose dispositions and traits develop differently in different domains; we hold different moral commitments in different parts of our lives. This book further argues that this domain differentiation allows us to be good liberal citizens in the public domain while remaining true to private commitments and beliefs in other domains. The book proposes that educational and institutional arrangements can use this capacity for differentiation to teach public reason without overwhelming conflicting commitments. The psychology and pedagogy of public reason proposed by Newman move beyond John Rawls’s strictly political liberalism toward what Newman terms practical liberalism. Although we cannot resolve every philosophical problem bedeviling theories of liberalism, we can enjoy the myriad benefits of liberalism in practice.

This book argues that the traditional theory of social choice offers no acceptable solution to the problems of how to elect, judge, or rank. It finds that the traditional model—transforming the “preference lists” of individuals into a “preference list” of society—is fundamentally flawed in both theory and practice. The authors propose a different model, which leads to a new theory and method: majority judgment. Majority judgment is meaningful, resists strategic manipulation, elicits honesty, and is not subject to the classical paradoxes encountered in practice, notably Condorcet’s paradox and Arrow’s paradox. The authors offer theoretical, practical and experimental evidence—from national elections to figure skating competitions—to support their arguments. Drawing on wine, sports, music, and other competitions, they argue that the question should not be how to transform many individual rankings into a single collective ranking but rather, after defining a common language of grades to measure merit, how to transform the many individual evaluations of each competitor into a single collective evaluation of all competitors. The crux of the matter is a new model in which the traditional paradigm—to compare—is replaced by a new paradigm: to evaluate.

Global public goods (GPGs)—the economic term for a broad range of goods and services that benefit everyone, including a stable climate, public health, and economic security—pose notable governance challenges. At the national level, public goods are often provided by government, but at the global level, there is no established state-like entity to take charge of their provision. The complex nature of many GPGs poses additional problems of coordination, knowledge generation, and the formation of citizen preferences. This book considers traditional public economy theory, which considers the provision of public goods as oversimplified because it is state-centered and fiscally focused. It develops a multidisciplinary look at the challenges of understanding and designing appropriate governance regimes for different types of goods in such areas as the environment, food security, and development assistance. The chapter authors explore the misalignment between existing GPG policies and actors’ incentives and understandings. They analyze the complex impact of incentives, the involvement of stakeholders in collective decision-making, and the specific coordination needed for the generation of knowledge. The book shows that governance of GPGs must be democratic, reflexive—emphasizing collective learning processes—and knowledge-based, in order to be effective.

The growth of voluntary programs has attracted the attention of policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and scholars. Thousands of firms around the world participate in these programs, in which members agree to undertake socially beneficial actions that go beyond the requirements of government regulations, such as following labor codes in the apparel industry, adhering to international accounting standards, and adopting internal environmental management systems. This book analyzes the efficacy of a variety of voluntary programs using a club theory, political-economy framework, and examines how programs’ design influences their effectiveness as policy tools. It finds that voluntary programs have achieved uneven success because of their varying standards and enforcement procedures. The club theory framework views voluntary programs as institutions that create incentives for firms to incur the costs of taking progressive action beyond what is required by law in exchange for benefits which nonmembers do not enjoy (such as enhanced standing with stakeholders). The book develops this theoretical framework and applies it to voluntary programs sponsored by industry associations, governments, and nongovernmental organizations, organized around policy issues such as “blood diamonds,” shipping, sweatshops, and the environment.