Forging Creative Partnerships

While much public attention focuses on the impact of immigration policy at the national level or in major metropolitan areas, the realities of political policy regarding refugees and immigrant populations are also felt in smaller, more rural communities as well. Local decisionmakers increasingly face new community needs at a time when mandated programs are being shifted as federal responsibility changes. This article recounts the work of a unique, ongoing collaborative effort that began in 1996 establishing a partnership between health care and public safety services in support of low-income and immigrant populations in the city of Portland, Maine. The project seeks to address two of the most pressing problems associated with immigrant populations: preventive medical care and the reduction of neighborhood violence. The project is predicated on the belief that community building works best when all residents are stakeholders in a vision that includes strong schools, safe neighborhoods, and healthy families. The elements of the Portland experience in service provision are recounted for other state and local policymakers in forging new and collaborative working relationships among service providers and government agencies     

The regulation of employment services: Private employment agencies and labour market policy

Public policy relating to the labour market has undergone significant change over recent years. These changes reflect demands for greater flexibility in the labour market, and respond to pressures of growing levels of unemployment and consequent exacerbation of divisions within the labour market. A conflict is apparent, however, in the mix of policies adopted. Accompanying moves towards a more ‘active’ style labour market policy has been a trend towards greater reliance on private means of delivery such that the dividing line between public (CES) and private employment agencies is becoming increasingly blurred. Evidence from a survey of private employment agencies and employers conducted in Brisbane in 1992/93 suggests that such a trend may reduce the capacity to regulate employment services and facilitate a commitment to employers’ interests at the expense of those of many entrants to the labour market.     

Narratives of de-secularization in international relations

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a particular narrative of de-secularisation, the ‘restorative narrative,’ is shaping US foreign religious policy and practice. It develops two arguments about efforts to stabilize religion as an object of governance and restore it to international politics and public life. First, this narrative re-instantiates and energizes particular secular-religious and religious-religious divides in ways that echo the narratives of secularisation that it claims to challenge and transcend. Second, it contributes to the emergence of new forms of both politics and religion that are not only subservient to the interests of those in power but marginalize a range of dissenting and nonconforming ways of life. This has far-ranging implications for the politics of social difference and efforts to realize deep and multidimensional forms of democratization and pluralization. The argument is illustrated through discussions of recent developments at the US State Department, the evolving practices of US military chaplains, and the politics of foreign religious engagement in the context of the rise of Turkish Islamist conscientious objectors.     

Muslims in Europe: Managing Multiple Identities and Learning Shared Citizenship

Abstract

This article offers a tour d'horizon of the new Muslim communities formed in western Europe in the last forty years, now numbering some 13 million. After some idiosyncratic, historic notes, a summary ethnic, socio-economic and demographic profile is given, followed by a suggested four phase development cycle. The differential incorporation of Muslims in public and civic life turns on a consideration of a number of factors: the presence of at least three different models for managing diversity within western Europe, as well as the institutional space accorded to "religion" in public life across Europe. Muslims are not presented as passive victims of exclusion but social actors carving out space for a distinctive "identity politics." Within the various Muslim communities a debate is taking place on whether or not they should participate in electoral politics - the contours of this debate are drawn. Attention is also drawn to inter-generational tensions and the issue of "radicalization" amongst sections of the Muslims educated and socialised in the West. The article concludes by reflecting on the whether the churches can act as an antidote to far right politics and "religious nationalism."     

Longing for the New Jerusalem

Abstract

The following article is concerned with the changing nature of religion in Northern Europe. It considers first the concepts of "believing without belonging" and "vicarious religion," pointing out the limitations of each and drawing extensively on previously published work. The following section discusses in more detail a shift that is currently taking place—that is from forms of religion that are imposed or inherited to forms of religion that are primarily chosen. Particular attention is paid to the implications of these changes for the rites of passage. The final section reflects on the theological consequences of these changes, first with a more detailed discussion of notion of vicariousness and second by examining the complex relationship between the public and the private in religious life. It argues that forms of religion that are chosen rather than inherited have implications for the public as well as the private sphere. They are ill-served by an over-rigorous application of the concept of privatization.     

Building the Reservoir to Nowhere: The Role of Agencies in Advocacy Coalitions

The purpose of the advocacy coalition framework is to explain policy change over time through an examination of the stability of advocacy coalitions within policy subsystems. Recently, scholars have confirmed that advocacy coalitions are held together by shared belief systems, specifically in distributive policy arenas. We contend that federal agencies, in distributive policy arenas, provide both the anchors and support systems for the development and maintenance of belief systems. This anchoring helps provide adequate resources, access to political institutions, ability to control administrative process, and/or the capacity to deliver public goods and services. We conducted an analysis of the policy changes that occurred during the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act for the construction of the Bureau of Reclamation's Animas‐La Plata project. This is an example where administrators, through the management of information, were able to control the policy process. The analysis provides a needed replication of previous findings regarding policy change and offers new insights into how institutions are critical to subsystem stability over time.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.     

Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces: Common Agency and Human Service Provision

The "congressional dominance" literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative: a common agency model of human service policy as the outcome of interest group bargaining. We illustrate its implications with an analytic narrative of service provision for the seriously mentally ill.     

Mission Impossible: "Nonsectarian" Prayer in the Military Chaplaincy

Abstract

Recent media-saturated events such as then-Navy Chaplain Klingenschmitt's hunger strike in front of the White House, an ultimately unsuccessful class-action lawsuit against the Navy that alleged discrimination against evangelical Christians, and formal charges of religious bias at the US Air Force Academy have renewed concerns about the content of chaplain-led public prayers in ostensibly secular contexts. Some have accordingly touted the advantages of offering "nonsectarian" prayer in command-hosted settings, where attendance by service personnel is mandatory in a real or de facto sense. This paper argues that this push toward nonsectarian prayer ultimately does a disservice to the chaplains themselves and the religious communities from whence they come, whether civic prayer is interpreted as an instance of "ceremonial deism" or a rite of civil religion. But the solution it offers is not for public prayers to become more religiously particular, but for military commanders to cease requesting that chaplains lead public prayer of any kind in such settings.     

Religious Speech in the Public Square

Abstract

I examine the reasons often given for restricting religious language to the private domain. Despite acknowledging their force, I argue that suppressing religious speech in public conversations is inherently dangerous, suggesting that such a policy undermines mutual trust and confidence, is corrosive of individual integrity and that such marginalization of religious language deprives social discussions of vital resources. Finally I propose a set of qualities and virtues that should underpin the way that religious languages and perspectives are deployed in public so that fears about this can be overcome in service of a more harmonious and enriched level of exchange in the public sphere.     

Voluntary Agencies as Development Organizations: Theorizing the Problem of Efficiency and Accountability

Co-operatives, NGOs and community groups are being increasingly used as development agencies by policy-makers, because they are thought to provide more accountable, effective and equitable services in many areas than public or private agencies. This article attempts to consider some of the theoretical and practical implications of this growing role by treating them as ‘value-driven’ organizations, and asking how this differentiates them, in terms of efficiency and accountability, from public or private agencies. It notes the lack of developed theoretical models capable of dealing with this question, and examines the relevance of existing theories (neo-classical economics, public administration and especially varieties of organization theory including the New Institutional Economics) in dealing with agencies which claim to be dominated by motivations based on democracy and altruism rather than self-interest. The author looks at problems associated with the measurement of efficiency and enforcement of accountability in organizational life and at the need for effective incentives and sanctions which provide a stable basis for maintaining commitment. He then considers the issues involved in the enforcement of accountability to ensure the efficient use of resources in producer co-operatives on the one hand and service delivery NGOs on the other. In the former, the focus is on the strengths and weaknesses of market competition and the costs of collective management; in the latter on the varied relationships between ‘principals and agents' involved in the production and management of services.     

City with or without God? Features of post-secularism in religious landscape of post-communist Prague

The religious climate caused significant changes over the last few decades which led to intense debates about post-secularism in Western Europe. However, there is particularly a distinct lack of analyses of the features of post-secularism in post-communist cities. The paper draws on the case study of Prague where the religious landscape is in many ways unique in a European context because of its highly secularized society. Nevertheless, Prague also experienced a revival of religious life, which has found expression in the religious landscape (not only) through the emergence of new sacral structures, pluralization of religion and post-secular rapprochement in religious institutions. The paper examines the convergent and contradictory processes shaping the religious and non-religious landscape in Prague and therefore opens the discussion about post-secularism in post-communist context. The results point to the importance of historical, social, and urban development for the new geographies of religion. New areas of research should also draw attention on the new religious movements and alternative spirituality which helps to explain the relationship between sacred and secular phenomena in current European society and space and the re-definition of the minority role of religion in the secular society.     

辽宁省城市基本公共服务质量差异的时空分析

基于基本公共服务的内涵,从教育服务、文化服务、卫生服务、基础设施服务、社会保障服务、生态环境服务和信息服务7个方面构建了基本公共服务质量评价指标体系,运用熵值法对2003-2011年辽宁省城市基本公共服务质量进行综合测度,并以此为变量,利用差异系数和基尼系数对辽宁省各市基本公共服务质量差异的演变过程与空间格局进行定量分析。结果发现:辽宁省各市基本公共服务质量整体为上升的趋势,表现出较为明显的规模特征,沈阳市和大连市两极突出;2003-2011辽宁省城市基本公共服务质量区域差异总体扩大的基础上,呈现先扩大后缩小的演变趋势,且以文化服务、卫生服务和基础设施服务的差异为主;空间上,公共服务质量空间提升极化作用不断增强,表现为不断向"沈阳-大连、盘锦-本溪"的"十字"轴线紧靠。     

After the Death of God: Postsecularity?

These recent volumes clearly show that the work of the recent generation of French philosophers, and the philosophy they continue to inspire, offer a splendid resource for theologians and theorists of religion. They stage a challenge to received divisions between philosophy and theology, deconstructing the secular/non-secular bifurcation on which they rest. In this vein, the contribution of the 'postsecularists' is to emphasise the centrality of issues of social justice at the heart of the religious sensibility.     

Is There a National Policy For Children and Youth With Serious Emotional Disturbance?

This article examines the status of a national mental health policy for children in need of mental health services. The need for systems planning and services integration involving multiple agencies is presented. The different programs of the major governmental agencies involved in the delivery of services to children are reviewed, as are the range of services provided. This article demonstrates the fragmentation and duplication that is endemic in all aspects of mental health, and that consequently makes policy implementation exceedingly difficult.     

The Politics of Service Delivery Reform

This article identifies the leaders, the supporters and the resisters of public service reform. It adopts a principal–agent framework, comparing reality with an ‘ideal’ situation in which citizens are the principals over political policy‐makers as their agents, and policy‐makers are the principals over public service officials as their agents. Reform in most developing countries is complicated by an additional set of external actors — international financial institutions and donors. In practice, international agencies and core government officials usually act as the ‘principals’ in the determination of reforms. The analysis identifies the interests involved in reform, indicating how the balance between them is affected by institutional and sectoral factors. Organizational reforms, particularly in the social sectors, present greater difficulties than first generation economic policy reforms.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

Nationalist Religious Broadcasting: The Case of the 2004 US Presidential Nominating Conventions

Abstract

In televised broadcasts from the 2004 US Presidential nominating conventions, religion played a somewhat surprising role at gatherings of ostensibly secular political parties. Across Democratic and Republican conventions, three streams of religious discourse and practice were evident, in varying emphases and shadings: revivalist Protestantism, civil religion, and a cultural religion of "innocent domination." These three aspects of religious discourse and practice sought to associate "America" with an innocent, pure and persuasive form of transcendent authority. Republicans marshaled assertions of both innocence and domination to the service of their candidate, President George W. Bush, more effectively than Democrats did for their candidate, Senator John W. Kerry, thereby lending Bush a convention "bounce" in polls that Kerry lacked. A close reading of the role of religion in these conventions suggests, in short, that something more complex and pervasive than a theocratic conspiracy by "the religious right" was at work.     

From subjects to authors – reconnecting community organisations to their core practice

ABSTRACT

The widely observed erosion of the policy capacity of governments and their public services is mirrored by decay in the practice and program capacity of community organisations. This capacity once depended on the practical expertise of a values-driven workforce employed in organisations focused on a social purpose. Governments relied upon this core competency to inform their approach to investment, program design and the delivery of community services, but this has changed. Social purpose in community service organisations have been frustrated by a preoccupation with funding models, procurement approaches and contract details at the expense of the delivery of outcomes. It has resulted in community organisations becoming subjects of service delivery rather than authors of it. The paper frames these dilemmas and provides a theoretical framework for community organisations to reposition from subjects to authors in the system. The paper takes the form of a reflective assessment from a practice perspective.