Editor of Agenda for a Sustainable America (2009) and author of Stumbling Toward Sustainability (2002) provides an empirically-based framework to explain progress made in the US to date on sustainability – and the most significant obstacles standing in the way of greater success. Explains how law can provide an even better environment for sustainability, and how public opinion and leadership can be engaged more effectively to support sustainability.

(SUSTAINABILITY AND LAW * SUSTAINABILITY: U.S. PROGRESS)

The public sector is characterized by a profound transformation across the globe; to convert transformation into improvement, policy-makers need to learn to implement and evaluate change. Discusses uses and abuses of transparency, the “audit explosion,” public service motivation and job satisfaction, leading public sector reforms over the last decades, international perspectives on public sector reforms, public sector strategic management, and how to make a difference in public sector performance.

(GOVERNMENT * PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM * TRANSPARENCY)

Discusses the key elements of a modern, comprehensive, and effective legal framework for successful management of protected areas. Provides practical guidance for all those involved in developing, improving, or reviewing national legislation on protected areas. The 15 case studies deal with the protected area legislation of individual countries and for specific sites.

(ENVIRONMENT * PROTECTED AREAS * GOVERNMENT * LAW: PROTECTED AREAS LEGISLATION)

Since the 1990s, global regulatory leadership shifted from the US to Europe in regard to vehicle air pollution, ozone depletion, climate change, beef and milk hormones, genetically modified agriculture, antibiotics in animal feed, pesticides, cosmetic safety, and hazardous substances in electronic products. Explains why Europe and the US have often regulated risks differently. Concerns over these risks, and pressure on political leaders to do something about them, have risen among the European public, but declined among Americans. European policymakers have thus grown more willing to regulate risks on precautionary grounds, while increasingly skeptical American policymakers call for higher levels of scientific certainty before imposing additional regulatory controls on business.

(GOVERNMENT * REGULATION * RISK REGULATION: U.S. AND EUROPE * TOXIC SUBSTANCES)

In recent decades, governments and NGOs have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. More and more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, and assessments are unreliable. The practice of international election monitoring is worth fixing. Analyzes original data on over 600 monitoring missions and 1,300 elections to pinpoint the weaknesses of international election monitoring and discuss how practitioners and policymakers might help to improve them.

(GOVERNMENT * ELECTIONS * INTERNATIONAL ELECTIONS MONITORING)

The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens’ rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Brettschneider’s theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints. Public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through state’s expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints.

(GOVERNMENT * DEMOCRACY * DEMOCRATIC VALUES)

Calls for a Democracy Index that would rate the performance of state and local election systems, and provides a blueprint for quantifying election performance and reform results. It would work because no one wants to be at the bottom of the list. The Index would consider areas with the shortest lines at polling stations, easiest places to cast an absentee ballot, cities with the most accurate voter rolls, leading states for accurate voting machines, and best registration processes.

(GOVERNMENT * ELECTIONS * DEMOCRACY INDEX)

Governing the United States will be extremely difficult for whoever emerges in November 2012. Explores key questions facing the White House hopefuls: fiscal policy (Ron Haskins), policies in South Asia (Michael O’Hanlon) and the Middle East (Kenneth Pollack and Shadi Hamid), health care (Alice Rivlin), political and institutional reform (William Galston), housing, energy and climate, and rethinking Federalism.

(GOVERNMENT * U.S. PUBLIC POLICY: 12 IDEAS)

Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. Looks at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests – membership organizations such as trade associations, unions, professional organizations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality,how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down over generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, and how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities.

(GOVERNMENT * INEQUALITY * DEMOCRACY: BROKEN PROMISE)

Campaigning for political office calls for a mindset that blocks compromise – standing tenaciously on principle to mobilize voters and mistrusting opponents in order to defeat them. Good government calls for an opposite cluster of attitudes and arguments – the compromising mindset – that inclines politicians to adjust their principles and to respect their opponents. Proposes changes in our political institutions, processes, and mindsets that would encourage a better balance between campaigning and governing.

(GOVERNANCE * POLITICAL COMPROMISE * GOVERNMENT AND COMPROMISE)