My goal is to make a persuasive case for theory-and evidence-based public policy and management. Much of the argument as it relates to theory and policy has been made by Carol Weiss, 1 among others, and is well represented in practice by the work of the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office at the national level and their many counterparts at the state and local levels of government in the United States. What remains is to make the case for theory-and evidence-based public management. DEMOCRATIC DECISION-MAKING Let me be clear from the outset about the limited role in a democracy of theory and evidence in public decision making, whether at the constitutional, collective, or operational level. 2 Every decision involves values and facts. While the forms of presidential and parliamentary systems vary significantly, they have in common the notion of popular sovereignty, that ultimately through a representative process citizens get to choose policies and assess their implementation. As a champion of evidence-based policy and management, but also of democracy, I have no illusions that public decisions can be based solely on calculation or made by computers, nor any desire for either. In a system that resulted "from reason and choice rather than accident and force," my aspiration is for a society where public policy and management decisions use systematic thinking to clarify value issues and use empirical evidence to resolve factual disputes. The model (Figure 1) presents my own contingency approach to theory-and evidence-based policy and management. In contrast to the depoliticized presentation of managing for results in Reinventing Government, 3 politics and political institutions are central to my model. In my view, performance measurement is policy analysis at the operational, implementation level of decision making. the classic problems with use of evaluation information. That is clearly an area that could be of future interest to the public policy profession.
Buying Greenhouse Insurance uses the Global 2100 model to analyze the economic costs of varying degrees of global CO2 emission reduction for a wide range of assumptions concerning the prospect for future improvements in the efficiency with which energy is used, the cost and availability of natural gas, and the long term cost and timing of renewable energy resources. The stated objectives are not to provide definitive forecasts-an admittedly impossible task-but rather, to identify the impact of alternative assumptions on the projected cost of CO2 emission constraints, to clarify specific areas of disagreement, and to provide a logical framework for thinking about the trade-offs between costs and emission reductions. The book opens with an overview chapter which acknowledges that the impacts associated with unrestrained emissions of greenhouse gases could be large, that there are major disagreements concerning the cost of reducing emissions, and that there are cost-effective opportunities for improving energy efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions. Unlike some of their colleagues, Manne and Richels do not assume that energy markets are behaving perfectly and that every option is already being adopted for costless improvements of energy efficiency. They allow for a continuous, non-priced induced improvement in energy efficiency through the autonomous energy efficiency improvement parameter, or AEEI, and accommodate the spectrum of opinion concerning how large this efficiency potential is and how fast it can be delivered by altering the value of AEEI. Buying Greenhouse Insurance is divided into two sections, the first of which presents the main results of the authors' modelling exercise and policy implications, the second of which delves into the details of the model structure. Those not interested in technical details might be tempted to skip the second part. However, an understanding of the model structure is essential if one is to make an informed judgement concerning the robustness of the results, and thus the validity of the policy implications presented in the first part. The Global 2100 model divides the world into five major geopolitical groups. Within each region, total economic output is computed based on a simple function * Editor's Note: The Editor received two copies of this book and inadvertently asked for two reviews, one by W. R. Cline (Climatic Change 23: 2, February 1993), and this one. But due to the importance of the topic felt both should be published.
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