This study evaluates the initial effectiveness of California’s Assembly Bill 617 (AB 617), enacted to address air pollution impacts in communities designated as environmental justice priorities, a policy approach that has recently been touted as a successful start. These claims of initial success stand in contrast to much of the research on remediation of environmental justice, particularly with respect to air pollution. Despite well-documented disparities in air pollution exposure and its health impacts among racial-ethnic minorities, previous policy efforts to mitigate these effects have had, at best, marginal effects. AB 617 mandates local air districts and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to reduce air pollution in the most impacted communities by developing monitoring and reduction plans together with affected communities. In this study, we analyzed the PM _2.5 levels and asthma incidence rates in three communities selected to participate in the new program—before and after AB 617 implementation, and compared the results in these selected communities with four other communities nearby. Our findings indicate limited evidence of significant reductions in PM _2.5 levels or asthma incidence rates in the early stages of the post-intervention period. The study discusses potential reasons for the limited impact, including implementation challenges and socio-economic factors, concluding with recommendations for enhancing policy effectiveness in future initiatives.

Although power has frequently been noted as a key to understanding administration, the concept of administrative power has remained ill-defined. In this essay I offer a definition of administrative power based on the social contract, arguing that administrative power is the transactional granting of power by the people in exchange for services and a reduction in uncertainty that agencies provide. I elaborate on the role of communication and persuasion in garnering administrative power and conclude by offering arguments, based on both risk communication and political spin, for how agencies acquire and maintain administrative power in the 21(st) Century.

As the wickedness of public challenges increases, strategies for policy development involve some effort to cordon off complexity to the point where action can be taken. There are multiple ways that this can be done, and all have limitations. I describe two common ways that this can happen, decomplexification and simplification. Decomplexification is based in science and uses knowledge to place boundaries around a problem and make it manageable, with the result often being a siloing of efforts in different disciplines with the potential for myopia and groupthink. Simplification is based on narratives and causal stories that are appealing in the political environment but are often foolish or malignant. In both cases, the process is reinforced because people want to belong to groups with shared identities, and they signal to one another this urge to belong. And in either case, the result can be a policy approach that is nonsensical.

In this paper, we investigate how an organization’s position within its nonprofit marketplace influences how nonprofits convey images about themselves to their stakeholders. We discuss the nature of competition in the nonprofit sector and explore the different competitive positions that nonprofits find themselves in. We assess how this positionality affects the ways that nonprofits attempt to convey images, or senses, of themselves to external audiences. We find that these sensegiving approaches are affected by competition, particularly when considered together with the stage of the organization’s lifecycle.

This study examines when and how community involvement occurs in the remediation processes of brownfield sites in Los Angeles County, California. Although community participation is usually considered important for determining what happens with these sites, our results indicate that, except in sometimes triggering evaluation by alerting authorities about it, community involvement almost never occurs when important decisions are made. Participation does sometimes occur, but when and how cleanup occurs is driven by administrative processes, with bureaucrats following procedure, rather than following community preferences. The findings suggest that the best space for communities in the process may be the identification of sites that need remediation.

Fairfax County, Virginia is the Commonwealth's largest county, and one of the largest and wealthiest local jurisdictions in the United States. Its economy is large and diverse, as is its population, so measuring the success of the economy extends beyond traditional measures of economic development. In this paper, we describe a multi-year effort to conceive of performance management from a strategic planning perspective and develop a set of metrics that move beyond the traditional instrumentally focused metrics and views performance management as a governance process that builds relationships between stakeholders and fosters mutual learning. The metrics that emerged from this process were developed by engaging the public early and working with key county stakeholders to arrive at a set of metrics that encompassed not just county leaders' views of what makes a county economy work, but those of citizens, businesses, schools, nonprofits and other members of the public as well.

In a culture with institutionalized racial disparities, administrative norms that attempt to ensure rational decisions through the use of aggregation and quantification can exacerbate the racial disparities that policy attempts to address. We argue that it will be difficult for policy to address the problem without a fundamental reorientation of the ways that administrators make decisions based on race. We conclude by offering some suggestions for how this reorientation can begin.

Participation and administration have long had an uneasy coexistence. On one hand, public participation in decisions that affect citizens is consistent with citizenship and democracy; on the other hand, much of what government does is complex and requires some level of technical understanding to make decisions. In this article, we report on public administrators’ perceptions of public participation and the ways that they understand the participation process. We find that public participation is managed by public administrators; they determine the extent of participation, shape the ways that the participation takes place, and decide whether or not participation is valuable for their work. In some cases, the process is rather democratic, whereas in others, it is not. We find that it is up to administrators to shape the spaces for participation and select the participants in a manner consistent with their understanding of the task to be accomplished. We explore this process in the context of Environmental Impact Analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act.

In exurban areas, there are commonly issues and tensions associated with development and rural life. We assess how two counties located approximately one hour west of Washington, DC manage these tensions. Although both have enabled development, they have done so in different ways and neither has simply succumbed to exurban development as a given. Utilizing stakeholder interviews and document analysis, we note the different policy approaches that the two counties have taken and contrast them with the more common imagery of areas that fully acquiesce to suburban style development. Our findings suggest that tensions between the pressures of development and the persistent appeal of the rural identity occupy much time and attention in these two counties. Both counties have adopted observable policy changes driven by development pressures in recent years, underscoring a policy landscape that is in flux and the modern tension between the commercial economy of modernity, and the rural identity that is retained from the past. We observe that rural governance is largely about land, while urban governance is largely about people. As these two cases suggest, exurban governance has to be about both issues and this tension may lead to governance that is inherently unstable.

We are excited to welcome you to our new feature, Perspectives, and its inaugural essay. Through this new feature, we will provide a venue for an exchange of ideas about administration and society. The focus will be on theoretical, philosophical, and methodological issues and controversies in the study and practice of administration in society. We expect the feature to offer a space for creative, novel, critical, and cross-disciplinary essays that challenge our understanding of administrative theory and literature. We particularly welcome commentary that pushes the boundaries of existing theory and research and offers different perspectives that are not well represented in public administration scholarship. To that end, in our first essay, Udo Pesch and Pieter Vermaas provide a critical re-reading of Rittel and Webber’s classic 1973 essay Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Pesch and Vermaas argue that, although the paper is unquestionably influential, its influence has been limited to the discussion of the wickedness of problems in administration and policy, largely ignoring the discussion of the ‘dilemmas of planning’ upon which Rittel and Webber based their argument. Pesch and Vermaas argue that the fixed institutional set-up of administration, in its interplay with an evolving society, is ill suited to “re-solve” wicked problems because the institutional setting is itself one of the contributing factors of wickedness. We expect Perspectives to offer more such stimulating analyses and reflections in future issues, enriching the content of Administration & Society and sparking lively exchanges of ideas.