This study examines the social and cultural contexts, and factors of global and local sources, which influence teacher preparation and which may serve to impede or facilitate the training of public and private school English teachers at the "University of Banten," in Serang, Indonesia. A central question of the ethnographic case study is how, and to what extent professors are modeling and encouraging active-learning methods in the students' English and Education courses in response to decentralization reforms. The specific focus is on student-teacher preparation pedagogically and instructionally, knowledge of curriculum utilization and development in relation to Indonesian decentralization policy, and the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC-KTSP) standards for English instruction, the PAKEM Active Learning methods, and the Local Content Curriculum (LCC). Uniquely, it examines English and teacher-training responses representative of the realities of localization and globalization, and is concerned with increased levels of teacher autonomy and decision-making in contemporary Indonesia. The study also explores the implementation of decentralization and English instruction, and how past center-periphery cultural and political traditions affect response to educational reforms. A discussion of theories of educational decentralization builds a framework for situating the present contexts of Indonesian education reform in order to identify specific challenges which impact English teacher preparation and the knowledge and implementation of contemporary decentralization of education policies. The knowledge and implementation of the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC-KTSP) curriculum and instructional standards for English instruction, the concept and implementation of PAKEM Active Learning methods, and the Local Content Curriculum (LCC), which represent major elements of decentralization policy, autonomy, and self-motivation for learning, were explored thematically through ethnographic analysis. The analysis and discussion follow in-depth accounts of professors, teachers and students at the campus over 10 months and provides extensive and diverse evidence of dynamic responses to policy changes. Lecturers and teachers were well informed about and engaged in the implementation of current decentralization of education reforms, including the integration of the CBC curriculum standards with active learning methods in instruction, and the development and implementation of Local Content Curriculum courses. Global influences generally were not viewed as threatening to local, traditional cultural teaching practices, but as potentially advantageous means for improving schooling. / A Dissertation submitted to The Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2011. / Date of Defense: November 29, 2010. / Teacher training, Indonesian education, English education, Globalization, Decentralization / Includes bibliographical references. / Jeffrey Ayala Milligan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Pamela Carroll, Outside Committee Member; Stacey Rutledge, Committee Member; Thomas Luschei, Committee Member.

This research examines the extent to which nonprofit organization engage in collaboration as a strategic tool using the lenses of network theory, strategic alliances, and interorganizational relations literature. It provides a unique insight into the ways in which nonprofit organizations operate by using the lenses of literature developed to examine both for-profits and governments collaborative behavior. This study contributes several important findings to furthering our understanding of collaboration within the nonprofit sector. The findings of this study suggest that there are two key elements that determine the degree to which nonprofit organizations participated in collaborations: demand for the goods and services they provide and the social structure of everyday relationships that the organizations maintain. These findings suggest that the two dominant forces at work in the extent of collaborations between nonprofit organizations are the need to keep up with demands from the community in order to fulfill the organization's mission and access to both information and opportunities to partner with others through a network. The findings also suggest power of organizations within a network setting or betweeness centrality reduces the extent to which nonprofit organizations collaborate. The second area in which this research contributed new understanding was through the examination of the networks themselves and what these examinations suggested about differences between types of nonprofits and functional networks of nonprofit organizations. Specifically, the network findings point to several emerging types of organizations such as management service organizations and volunteer referral organizations that could have important implications for the health and structure networks of nonprofits in local settings. These organizations seem to be key bridge builders between organizations operating in communities and could prove useful tools for creating stability in exchange of information and communication in local communities. In particular, this suggests that the sector itself is creating stability that Provan and Milward (2000) suggested was important to effectiveness of social service delivery networks. In contrast to their findings, the key organizing actors found in the networks of this study did not have the coercive power of control over funding that was suggested as a key feature of delivery networks they described. However, they were powerful in other respects including the potential to control access to resources such as information and/or volunteers. / A Dissertation submitted to the Rueben O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: July 31, 2006. / Strategic alliances, Collaboration, Network theory, Nonprofits / Includes bibliographical references. / Ralph S. Brower, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles Connerly, Outside Committee Member; Frances S. Berry, Committee Member; Lance deHaven-Smith, Committee Member.

The research question is how does institutional change take place? The question is answered in part by the case of the impact of special interest associations on the net ban in Florida. The constitutional ban on the use of most types of nets, including all gill nets by commercial fishers in near-shore Florida waters grew out of a conflict between commercial and recreational fishing interests. Once voted into the state constitution by the citizenry, the amendment banning the use of certain nets became the latest in a series of government regulations focused on limiting saltwater fishing activities in state waters. State regulatory activities related to saltwater fishing began in the 1800's and, over time, a large number of organizations and individuals have focused their activity on the public policies surrounding saltwater fishing. Participant activities in this issue based organizational field which begin in the 1940;s are a useful way to seek insight into how institutional change occurs. This case study about the emergence of the constitutional plebiscite commonly known as the "Florida Net Ban" has been completed to provide the opportunity to increase our understanding of institutional change. The case was developed from three primary independent views provided by professional private sector public policy participants set against a general background drawn from rural fishing informants. Two views were developed from different elements of the commercial fishing industry and the associations that represent them. The third view was provided by organized recreational fishing interests. Institutional persistence in each of the three institutional pillars described by Scott; isomorphic institutional transfer as described by North; and the coevolution of institutions and organizational fields as described by Hoffman are employed in the analysis of the case to build theory about institutional change. The case provides additional insight into institutional change related to organizational fields and the importance of public entrepreneurial activity that is associated with such change. The case provides insight into the importance of making strategic and tactical choices in response to changing institutional environments to ensure maximum long range favorable policy outcomes. The case also provides perspective on how each of the three institutional pillars, provided by Scott, under go independent change / A Dissertation submitted to the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006. / Date of Defense: October 6, 2006. / Third-order change, Fisheries policy regulation, Special interest association, Constitutional change, Institutional change, Institutions / Includes bibliographical references. / Ralph S. Brower, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jeffrey Brooks, Outside Committee Member; Richard Chackerian, Committee Member; Lance deHaven-Smith, Committee Member.

Political fragmentation is often considered superior for advancing allocation efficiency in the provision of public services. On the other hand, the multiplicity of local governments in a metropolitan area, acting alone, can produce diseconomies of scale and externality problems constraining Pareto-efficient supply of public services. Local governments in the U.S. federalist system address this dilemma by engaging in voluntary interlocal cooperation, typically formalized through interlocal service agreements. These service agreements provide an important but little understood aspect of horizontal federalism. Local governments' choice of interlocal cooperation, their resource commitment to interlocal cooperation, and the mechanism they utilize to sustain cooperation are constrained by the asset specificity and measurement difficulty problems they face in interlocal service exchange. This dissertation explains how asset specificity and measurement difficulty influence the choice and the level of interlocal cooperation, as well as how these transaction cost dimensions shape the structure of service agreements that offset the transaction risks and sustain the cooperation for efficient public service provision. Transaction cost analysis provides one approach to understand interlocal service cooperation since it involves exchange between local jurisdictions similar to the private exchanges that transaction cost economics was developed to explain. A national analysis of cities' interlocal expenditures across multiple services shows that interlocal cooperation increases with asset specificity, but it follows an inverted U-shaped relationship with measurement difficulty, implying increased service cooperation up to a certain level of measurement difficulty and then decline thereafter. The main reason for the increase in interlocal exchange is that a rise in transaction costs associated with greater asset specificity and measurement difficulty hinders market exchange. Interlocal cooperation, thus, provides the next best alternative for jurisdictions facing transaction risks. But what do local governments do to mitigate the increased transaction costs in order to maintain the interlocal agreements? The analysis demonstrates that they go beyond dyadic agreements and embed their exchange relationships to mitigate the transaction risks. The micro-level analysis of interlocal service agreements across multiple services for all the general purpose local governments in Pinellas County, Florida reveals that when transactions risks are relatively low, buyer governments tends to confine service relationships to a single provider government that can establish credibility of commitment to protect the buyers. As transaction risk increases with the potential for a reverse hold-up problem, however, buyers avoid dependence on a single provider. Instead, they develop a broader network of agreements with multiple providers to minimize the power of a single provider. This research develops a unique extension of transaction cost theory that includes exchange embeddedness to provide a stronger foundation for understanding interlocal service cooperation specifically, and the broader arena of self-organizing activities of local governments in politically fragmented systems more generally. / A Dissertation submitted to the Reubin O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer, 2008. / Date of Defense: April 23, 2008. / Interlocal cooperation, public goods supply, exchange embeddedness, interlocal agreements, networks, decentralized governments / Includes bibliographical references. / Richard C. Feiock, Professor Directing Dissertation; John T. Scholz, Outside Committee Member; Frances S. Berry, Committee Member; William Earle Klay, Committee Member.

No description available.

Canadian Federalism has grown to incorporate the opposing ideologies of communitarianism and individualism, which compete in both social and political arenas. The cultural industry sector in Canada negotiates this ideological landscape in order to secure favourable public policy in the form of both political support and access to public resources. Within the cultural sector and as a result of the environment, the book publishing industry is active in expressing its value as both community builders and economic worthy enterprises. Drawing upon research in federalism, cultural and policy studies, an analytical framework is developed to assess the underlying intentions of cultural policy and distribution of resources with respect to cultural or economic outcomes. This comparative analysis of federal and provincial policies supporting the book publishing industry in Canada demonstrates divergent policy choices between jurisdictions. These choices gravitate towards either communitarian/collectivist or individualist/economic values, mirroring those values incorporated into the current Canadian federalist structure.

This dissertation consists of three essays examining issues related to fiscal competition. The first essay investigates the Stackelberg equilibrium for public input competition and compares it with the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. Given two asymmetric regions, I show that under the Nash equilibrium, the more productive region tends to spend more on public input, which results in this region attracting more capital than the less productive region. The comparison of the two equilibria reveals that the leader region obtains a first mover advantage under the Stackelberg setting. This suggests that if regions interact with each other sequentially as in the Stackelberg equilibrium, then the regional disparity that is due to the heterogeneity of productivity is likely to be mitigated or enlarged, depending on which region performs the leadership role in the competition process. This second essay examines how a fiscal equalization system affects the disciplining effect of competition for capital among heterogeneous regions in a decentralized economy. I build a model in which regions that are heterogeneous in initial endowments try to attract capital by competing public input that enhances the productivity of capital; meanwhile, a fiscal equalization system is imposed by the central government to reduce regional disparities in fiscal capacity. The key prediction, borne out in data from the German equalization system, is that while competition for capital strengthens discipline in the well-endowed regions, it weakens discipline in the poorly endowed regions. However, a conventional equalization transfer scheme, common to many countries, can be effective in correcting the distortion driven by the heterogeneity of initial endowments across competing regions. This third essay aims to provide empirical evidence on the extent and possible channels of tax competition among provincial governments in China. Using a panel of provincial level data for 1993-2007, I find strong evidence of strategic tax interaction among provincial governments. Tax policy is approximated by average effective tax rates on foreign investment, taking into account the tax incentives available to foreign investors. In line with the predictions of the theoretical tax competition literature, I also highlight the impact of each province's characteristics (including its size and level of industrialization) on the strategic interaction with its neighbors. Finally, I explicitly identify the establishment of development zones as an important conduit for tax competition among provinces.

In the past, people followed the rules or policies by the law or direct administration orders, yet the government should consider how to utilize various ways of communication or channels which people can be easy to understand what these official policies are, and then to achieve the objectives of public propaganda and education in this democratic society nowadays. By doing that, all citizens can not only endeavor to work together with the government but also carry out the future policy purposes. Yunlin County is one of the important agricultural production regions in Taiwan where the irrigated area is up to 123,000 hectares and agricultural water consumption reaches approximate 90 percents of all available water resources in the Choshui River Basin. Moreover, since there is no sufficient surface water supplied, groundwater becomes an another vital resource for every water consumption targets. However, over-extracting groundwater leads to land subsidence which is a permanent damage for our environment. In the recent years, subsidence rate is getting slowing down in Yunlin County, but it is still one of the serious areas of land subsidence in Taiwan, with the maximum subsidence areas and average annual rate of subsidence. After analysis of data from hydrology, physical geography, industries, human culture, land utilization, supply and demand for water resources and land subsidence development, the main problems of land subsidence are listed in the following. 1. Water demand for industries exceeds potential water supply, hence the supplement of water is gradually provided by groundwater. 2. Illegal pumping groundwater becomes widespread and it is quite difficult to punish and control properly. 3. With the aging of employment population, it is not an easy task to counsel and assist in changing their careers. 4. Much concern about further land subsidence due to over-pumping groundwater from deep aquifers continuously. 5. Less achievement of land subsidence prevention has been reached due to lack of manpower and financial budgets. This study will focus on discussing how to integrate public policy with propaganda, knowing which roles volunteers play in policy execution and increasing success rate of policy enforcement through analyzing the past history of water conservancy, orientation, operation system and current management of all relevant water resource volunteer organizations (Yunlin Land Subsidence Prevention Volunteer Service Team is the major example).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Planning and Public Policy." Includes bibliographical references (p. 170-184).

A common theme in immigration studies in the United States is that the discourse around immigration has changed over time. Once a bipartisan issue where unlikely coalitions and partners were common, recent research has shown that partisanship is becoming more important in deciding immigration votes. In this paper, I set out to see if we can see evidence of this change in both congressional discourses around immigration and the legislation itself. To study the discourses around immigration, I analyze the floor debates for two immigration bills. For the legislation, I look at four immigration bills, two that passed and became law, and two that each only passed one chamber of Congress. This study is meant to explore how the framing and problem definition of immigration has changed since 1986 in the United States, and to provide the background for further study into changing discourses about immigration in the U.S. government. / text