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Recommended Readings

  • Recommended Reading

    Ethnic Conflict & Civic Life

    Varshney, A.

    This timely book, updated for the paperback edition, examines how civic ties between Hindus and Muslims in different Indian cities serve to contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence. It is of interest not only to South Asian scholars and policymakers but also to those studying multiethnic societies in other areas of the world.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Citizen, Customer, Partner: Engaging the Public in Public Management: Engaging the Public in Public Management

    Thomas, J. C.

    For almost fifty years, scholars and practitioners have debated what the connections should be between public administration and the public. Does the public serve principally as citizen-owners, those to whom administrators are responsible? Are members of the public more appropriately viewed as the customers of government? Or, in an increasingly networked world, do they serve more as the partners of public administrators in the production of public services?

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  • Recommended Reading

    Public participation for 21st century democracy

    Nabatchi, T. & Leighninger, M.

    Written by two leaders in the field, Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy explores the theory and practice of public participation in decision-making and problem-solving. It examines how public participation developed over time to include myriad thick, thin, and conventional opportunities, occurring in both face-to-face meetings and online settings. The book explores the use of participation in various arenas, including education, health, land use, and state and federal government.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaborative Public Management: Assessing What We Know and How We Know It

    McGuire, M.

    Collaborative public management research is flourishing. A great deal of attention is being paid to the process and impact of collaboration in the public sector, and the results are promising. This article reviews the literature on collaborative public management by synthesizing what we know from recent research and what we’ve known for quite some time. It addresses the prevalence of collaboration (both recently and historically), the components of emerging collaborative structures, the types of skills that are unique to collaborative management, and the effects of collaboration.

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  • Recommended Reading

    The deliberative democracy handbook: Strategies for effective civic engagement in the twenty-first century

    Gastil, J. & Levine, P.

    The Deliberative Democracy Handbook is a resource for democratic practitioners and theorists alike. It combines rich case material from many cities and types of institutional settings with careful reflection on core principles. It generates hope for a renewed democracy, tempered with critical scholarship and political realism. Most important, this handbook opens a spacious window on the innovativeness of citizens in the U.S. (and around the world) and shows how the varied practices of deliberative democracy are part of a larger civic renewal movement.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Collaborative Governance Regimes

    Emerson, K. & Nabatchi, T.

    Whether the goal is building a local park or developing disaster response models, collaborative governance is changing the way public agencies at the local, regional, and national levels are working with each other and with key partners in the nonprofit and private sectors. While the academic literature has spawned numerous case studies and context- or policy-specific models for collaboration, the growth of these innovative collaborative governance systems has outpaced the scholarship needed to define it.

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  • Recommended Reading

    A Practical Guide to Collaborative Governance

    Carlson, C.

    The Practical Guide was developed and written by Chris Carlson, founding director of the Policy Consensus Initiative (now Kitchen Table Democracy) and a leading authority on consensus building, and by Jim Arthur, a long-time facilitator and consultant in the use of dispute resolution to address policy conflicts. The Practical Guide to Consensus will help officials and agencies design the most appropriate, and effective, uses of consensus processes, with "Before, During, and After" instructions on how to:

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  • Recommended Reading

  • Recommended Reading

    The new governance: Practices and processes for stakeholder and citizen participation in the work of government

    Bingham, L. B., Nabatchi, T. & O’Leary, R.

    Leaders in public affairs identify tools and instruments for the new governance through networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. We argue the new governance also involves people—the tool makers and tool users—and the processes through which they participate in the work of government.

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  • Recommended Reading

    Democracy in practice: Public participation in environmental decisions

    Beierle, T. & Cayford, J.

    Democracy in Practice brings together, for the first time, the collected experience of 30 years of public involvement in environmental decisionmaking. Using data from 239 cases, the authors evaluate the success of public participation and the contextual and procedural factors that lead to it.

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  • Recommended Reading

    A ladder of citizen participation

    Arnstein, S. R.

    The heated controversy over “citizen participation,” “citizen control”, and “maximum feasible involvement of the poor,” has been waged largely in terms of exacerbated rhetoric and misleading euphemisms.

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