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Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework

Online ISBN:
9781479811649
Print ISBN:
9781479829675
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework

Alejandro Camacho,
Alejandro Camacho
University of California, Irvine
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Robert Glicksman
Robert Glicksman
George Washington University
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Published online:
23 January 2020
Published in print:
27 August 2019
Online ISBN:
9781479811649
Print ISBN:
9781479829675
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Reorganizing Government seeks to transform how policymakers and scholars understand relationships between government institutions, and offers a pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority. Regulation is frequently less successful than it could be. This is at least partly because the relationships among regulatory institutions are poorly understood and regulatory structures are routinely poorly designed. The book advances a framework for assessing how governmental authority may be structured along three dimensions-centralization, overlap, and coordination-and demonstrates how differentiating among these dimensions and among particular governmental functions (e.g., standard setting, enforcement) better illuminates the tradeoffs of organizational alternatives. It illustrates these neglected dimensional and functional aspects of interjurisdictional relations through six in-depth explorations involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, environmental protection, and terrorism prevention. In each case study, the authors explore how differentiating among dimensions, and among particular governmental functions, better illuminates the advantages and disadvantages of available structural options. (Re)Organizing Government thus offers a way for officials and scholars to evaluate both adopted and contemplated allocations of authority and to structure intergovernmental authority more effectively. It uses the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, to illustrate the practical value of applying the book's novel analytical framework to future reorganization efforts. The book concludes by proposing an "adaptive governance" infrastructure that provides a way for policymakers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.

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