Partnerships between government and community-based development organizations (CBDOs) have proven to be central to long-term neighborhood revitalization in many settings. These successes, coupled with the political popularity of community-driven projects, have stimulated further reliance on this approach. Unfortunately, scant research has been done on the organizational capacity of local community-based development organizations to administer these projects. It may be that many of them do not have the capacity to do the job. This article examines elements of organizational capacity in CBDOs developing affordable housing in a United States-Mexico border community. Evidence of capacity was limited, raising serious questions about the implementation of public policy in the hollow state. In their haste to contract with not-for-profits to create affordable housing, government officials may not be considering the serious possibility that CBDOs do not have the capacity to deliver services or effectively administer projects over time
This article reports on the results of a study of innovation in programs and practices on the part of city and county governments in four western states. The objective of the research was to identify any patterns or “profiles” of innovative and noninnovative behavior that might serve the interest of promoting the “reinvention of government” at the local level. An unanticipated finding concerning how “innovation” is perceived emerged when a quantitative, four-state survey was followed up with an intensive study of six matched jurisdictions (small cities/towns) in the state of Washington. The implications of this finding for the conduct of community-oriented research are discussed.
As the professional world of public administration explores the difficult terrain of &dquo;reinvention,&dquo; &dquo;re-engineering,&dquo; &dquo;quality processes,&dquo; and the progressive empowerment of employees and the more extensive involvement of agency customers in the design and management of public programs, the pressure upon the personnel function in government to explain and help develop these concepts has become intense. Personnel agencies and offices themselves have been reinvented along more service --and less regulatory --lines in many jurisdictions, and in others the demand for practical assistance in reassessing and rethinking fundamental policies and practices has been unprecedented.Given this broader context, what can be said of the academic side of the professional personnel enterprise? Does the typical contemporary course in personnel administration reflect the current tumultuous public management environment? Do the content and pedagogical practices of these courses match up with the dynamic character of the times? How do public administration and business administration courses and instructors compare in this regard? Are they moving along parallel paths in course content and pedagogy, or are they reflecting very different values and practices? Are research universities more or less likely to reflect newer thinking in course subject matter and teaching methods as compared to teaching-oriented colleges? Are women instructors more or less likely than their male counterparts to be making use of somewhat nontraditional topics and pedagogical approaches in their teaching of the personnel course? These are the sorts of questions which need to be examined periodically, and the present circumstances would seem to make this a particularly good time to be taking a measure of how the academic side of the professional public personnel community is meeting its challenge.
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