The provision of legal technical assistance has in recent years become a major concern for international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and for Western-based bilateral donor agencies. This book offers critical perspectives for the evaluation of legal technical assistance projects and contains proposals for action and research. Five chapters offer general perspectives on law, state and civil society and the remaining six case studies on themes such as economic regulation, agrarian reform, representation of women and access to justice.

The years after World War I have often been seen as an era when Republican presidents and business leaders brought the growth of government in the United States to a sudden and emphatic halt. In When Good Government Meant Big Government, the historian Jesse Tarbert inverts the traditional story by revealing a forgotten effort by business-allied reformers to expand federal power—and how that effort was foiled by Southern Democrats and their political allies. Tarbert traces how a loose-knit coalition of corporate lawyers, bankers, executives, genteel reformers, and philanthropists emerged as the leading proponents of central control and national authority in government during the 1910s and 1920s. Motivated by principles of “good government” and using large national corporations as a model, these elite reformers sought to transform the federal government’s ineffectual executive branch into a modern organization with the capacity to solve national problems. They achieved some success during the presidency of Warren G. Harding, but the elite reformers’ support for federal antilynching legislation confirmed the worries of white Southerners who feared that federal power would pose a threat to white supremacy. Working with others who shared their preference for local control of public administration, Southern Democrats led a backlash that blocked enactment of the elite reformers’ broader vision for a responsive and responsible national government. Offering a novel perspective on politics and policy in the years before the New Deal, this book sheds new light on the roots of the modern American state and uncovers a crucial episode in the long history of racist and antigovernment forces in American life.

'Everyone wants good government, but how do we know when we have it? The path-breaking Quality of Government Institute cuts through the tiresome ideological debate with theoretically grounded empirical analyses of the components, measures, and outcomes of good government. The book's contributors demonstrate the relevance of political science, and they do so with arguments and evidence that should improve policy and, ultimately, peoples' lives.' – Margaret Levi, University of Washington, US 'All too often today research in political science is irrelevant and uninspiring, shying away from the "big" questions that actually matter in people's lives. Good Government shows that this does not have to be the case. Tackling some of the "biggest" questions of the contemporary era – What is good government? Where does it come from? How can it be measured and how does it matter? – this book will prove invaluable to academics and policy makes alike.' – Sheri Berman, Barnard College, US 'What is "Good Government?" Few doubt that it is better to have a "good government" than a "bad" one, but few of us have thought carefully about what makes for good government vs. bad. Sören Holmberg and Bo Rothstein's excellent volume helps fill in this gap. Though the book is more than this, the focus on corruption is particularly fascinating. We know that corruption is "bad" but where does it come from? Why are some legislatures more corrupt than others? Why does the media sometimes collude? Why are women less easily corrupted than men? These are just a few of the many fascinating questions this volume explores. By bridging democratic theory, public policy and institutional analysis, it is one of the first to give us some practical insight into the obviously important question: what makes some governments "better" than others?' – Sven Steinmo, European University Institute, Italy In all societies, the quality of government institutions is of the utmost importance for the well-being of its citizens. Problems like high infant mortality, lack of access to safe water, unhappiness and poverty are not primarily caused by a lack of technical equipment, effective medicines or other types of knowledge generated by the natural or engineering sciences. Instead, the critical problem is that the majority of the world's population live in societies that have dysfunctional government institutions. Central issues discussed in the book include: how can good government be conceptualized and measured, what are the effects of 'bad government' and how can the quality of government be improved? Good Government will prove invaluable for students in political science, public policy and public administration. Researchers in political science and the social sciences, as well as policy analysts working in government, international and independent policy organizations will also find plenty to interest them in this resourceful compendium.

"Common-sense solutions to America's government crisis from the former two-term governor of New Mexico and 2012 Libertarian Party candidate for president of the United States." --From publisher's description.

In Good Government in the Tropics, Judith Tendler questions widely prevailing views about why governments so often perform poorly and about what causes them to improve. Drawing on a set of four cases involving public bureaucracies at work under the direction of an innovative state government in Brazil, the book offers findings of significance to the current debates about organization of the public-sector workplace, public service delivery, decentralization, and the interaction between government and civil society. The case chapters represent four different sectors, each traditionally spoken for by its distinct experts, literatures, and public agnecies -- rural preventive health, small enterprise development, agricultural extension for small farmers, and employment-creating public works construction and drought relief. With findings that cut across these sectoral boundaries, the book raises questions about the policy advice proferred by the international donor community. It shifts the terms of the prevailing debate away from mistrust of government toward an understanding of the circumstances under which public servants become truly committed to their work and public service improves dramatically. "The traditional focus on trying to eliminate 'rent-seeking' by reducing the state's role has made a contribution but lost much of its charisma. Theoreticians and practitioners alike are looking for new ideas and Tendler offers a quite intriguing set of them. The cases demonstrate surprising counter-intuitive results that will be of interest even to those with little substantive interest in the particular setting described. Theoretical novelty and elegant use of evidence combine to make this book a clear winner." -- Peter Evans, University of California at Berkeley

A pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority and achieving policy goals more effectively Regulation is frequently less successful than it could be, largely because the allocation of authority to regulatory institutions, and the relationships between them, are misunderstood. As a result, attempts to create new regulatory programs or mend under-performing ones are often poorly designed. Reorganizing Government explains how past approaches have failed to appreciate the full diversity of alternative approaches to organizing governmental authority. The authors illustrate the often neglected dimensional and functional aspects of inter-jurisdictional relations through in-depth explorations of several diverse case studies involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, pollution control, resource conservation, and terrorism prevention. This volume advances an analytical framework of governmental authority structured along three dimensions—centralization, overlap, and coordination. Camacho and Glicksman demonstrate how differentiating among these dimensions better illuminates the policy tradeoffs of organizational alternatives, and reduces the risk of regulatory failure. The book also explains how differentiating allocations of authority based on governmental function can lead to more effective regulation and governance. The authors illustrate the practical value of this framework for future reorganization efforts through the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, and propose an “adaptive governance” infrastructure that could allow policy makers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.

Reliance on the private military industry and the privatization of public functions has left our government less able to govern effectively. When decisions that should have been taken by government officials are delegated (wholly or in part) to private contractors without appropriate oversight, the public interest is jeopardized. Books on private military have described the problem well, but they have not offered prescriptions or solutions this book does.