No abstract

Competitive sourcing, meaning public-private competitions to perform work in the federal civil service, was made a priority management policy of the George W. Bush administration. Competition, it is believed, will greatly enhance administrative efficiency whichever bidder, public or private, wins. Introduction of such market-based human resource policies into the federal civil service has engendered debate over long-term effects on merit principles, public service motives and ethics, and administrative performance. This article contributes to that discussion by examining the policy origins and purposes behind competitive sourcing and by analyzing implementation of the policy during the Bush administration. Results show that the market ideology expressed in competitive sourcing has been moderated and mediated by the implementation process. Congressional and public employee involvement alongside that of the administration produced policy outcomes of mixed results.

Environmental legislation enacted in the last two decades contains many provisions and mechanisms for public participation. However, little systematic information is available on actual use of different mechanisms of participation in different stages of policy implementation. This study describes the use of various mechanisms by participants in one major environmental policy, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). Our data indicate that the enforcement stage of policy implementation generates most individual citizen involvement, and citizen complaints are the most widely used mechanism for citizen participation. However, our aggregate data indicate that overall citizen participation in the implementation of SMCRA has been modest. The paper concludes with thoughts on why extensive legislative provisions for citizen participation are nevertheless justified.

The US government has been actively engaged for the last 15 years in foreign assistance programs for building democratic governance institutions and enhancing overall government capacity in the former Soviet bloc countries. Transfers of public policies, administrative structures and management practices from one country to another are problematic. In this article we suggest that there are some fundamental constraints inherent in the framework of cross-national transfers. It identifies two major transferability challenges: (1) feasibility of transfer and (2) appropriateness of transfer. This article discusses three institution building programs of short duration (three to five years), whose broad purposes were institutional and professional capacity building. Many powerful forces, domestic and international, shape the likelihood of democratic consolidation in the transitional democracies. While fundamental questions about the transferability of institutional norms and structures from one country to another remain, our experiences indicate that thoughtful and flexible implementation strategies are likely to increase the chances that soft technology transfer projects will contribute to building institutional capacity. A great degree of uncertainty, nevertheless, will always remain in determining the long-term impacts of foreign technical assistance programs for transfer of institutional norms and structures. Points for practitionersInternational projects for institution building encounter two critical challenges:(1) constraints on transfer of political, social and economic institutions from one society to another; and (2) designing and managing a project that establishes