Faculty Bookshelf - Public Policy
| Title & Authors | Description |
|---|---|
The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century Alasdair Roberts (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) | Shifting geopolitics, regional conflicts, climate change, and technology shocks: these are just some of the factors that will make the twenty-first century dangerous for Canada. Adaptability, the capacity to anticipate and manage dangers, is essential for the country to survive and thrive. But Canada is not as adaptable as it once was. In The Adaptable Country Alasdair Roberts explains what this vital ability means and why we are currently falling short. The Adaptable Country outlines straightforward reforms to improve adaptability and reminds us about the bigger picture: in a turbulent world, authoritarian rule is a tempting path to security. Canada’s challenge is to show how political systems built to respect diversity and human rights can also respond nimbly to existential threats. |
Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports Elizabeth Sharrow & James Druckman (Cambridge University Press, 2023) | The year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women's athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics remain the reality. Equality Unfulfilled explains why. The book identifies institutional roadblocks – including sex-based segregation, androcentric organizational cultures, and overbearing market incentives – that undermine efforts to achieve systemic change. Drawing on surveys with student-athletes, athletic administrators, college coaches, members of the public, and fans of college sports, it highlights how institutions shape attitudes toward gender equity policy. It offers novel lessons not only for those interested in college sports but for everyone seeking to understand the barriers that any marginalized group faces in their quest for equality. |
Insurgent Terrorism: Intergroup Relationships and the Killing of Civilians Victor Asal, Brian J. Phillips, and R. Karl Rethemeyer (Oxford University Press, 2022) | Insurgent groups consist of individuals willing to organize and commit acts of terror to achieve their goals. By nature, they depend on public support, yet they sometimes target private civilians in addition to military personnel and government officials. This book examines insurgent embeddedness--the extent to which an insurgent group is enmeshed in relationships with the state, other insurgents, and the public--in order to understand why they attack civilians. |
Nonprofit Law: The Life Cycle of a Charitable Organization Elizabeth Schmidt and Allen Madison (Wolters Kluwer, 2021) | This book provides up-to-date information about the legal issues that can arise at every turn of a Section 501(c)(3) organization—from inception to termination. The book is designed to satisfy the highest academic requirements for law, business, and public policy students and to provide a helpful desk reference to practicing nonprofit professionals. It uses cases, hypothetical questions, and examples from current events to explore the corporate, tax, and other regulatory issues that nonprofit managers, board members and their lawyers ultimately face. |
Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them Ethan Zuckerman (W.W. Norton, 2021) | Mistrust introduces a set of "levers"—law, markets, code, and norms—that all provide ways to move the world. Zuckerman helps readers understand what relationships they want to have with existing institutions—Do they want to hold them responsible and make them better? Overthrow them and replace them with something entirely new? While some contemporary leaders weaponize mistrust to gain power, activists can use their mistrust to fuel something else. |
Strategies for Governing: Reinventing Public Administration for a Dangerous Century Alasdair Roberts (Cornell University, 2019) | With the fields of public administration and public management suffering a crisis of relevance, Alasdair Roberts offers a provocative assessment of their shortfalls. The two fields, he finds, no longer address urgent questions of governance in a turbulent and dangerous world. Strategies for Governing offers a new path forward for research, teaching, and practice. Leaders of states, Roberts writes, are constantly reinventing strategies for governing. Experts in public administration must give advice on the design as well as execution of strategies that effective, robust, and principled. Strategies for Governing challenges us to reinvigorate public administration and public management, preparing the fields for the challenges of the twenty-first century. |
Have a new addition to this list? Email mworoner [at] umass [dot] edu (Morgan Woroner) with the details!