Jan 1
The January e-newsletter for Governance is now available here. The current issue of Governance (25.1, January 2012) features a set of articles that examine the impact of the financial crisis on public governance, as well as a lead commentary by Charles Kenny, Does Governance Matter? With this issue, Governance begins its twenty-fifth year.
I’ll be one of the speakers at the 10th World Conference of the International Ombudsman Institute in Wellington, NZ in November. Working title for the talk: Transparency in Troubled Times.
“A new age of uncertainty,” coauthored with David Coen of University College London, is now available online. This is an introduction to a special issue of Governance that has just been published (January 2012). Excerpt: “After a period typified by delegation and technocratic decisionmaking, we are entering a new phase of governance that is distinguished by the reconcentration of authority, intensified conflict over the ends and means of governmental action, and volatility in policy outputs. The critical point today is not that one paradigm has been replaced by another. Rather, it is that — for the time being — there is no dominant paradigm at all.”
Back row: Matthew Wood, Daria Gritsenko, Shana Starobin, Ole Andreas Danielsen, Hedva Eyal, David Levi-Faur, Alasdair Roberts Front row: Hanan Haber, Josué Mathieu, Ronit Justo Hannani
Last week I attended the Seventh Graduate Student Conference in Political Science, International Relations and Public Policy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With Professor David Levi-Faur, I chaired the conference workshop on globalization and the changing architecture of government. There were six great papers by Matthew Wood (University of Sheffield), Daria Gritsenko (University of Turku), Josué Mathieu (Université libre de Bruxelles), Shana Starobin (Duke University), Hanan Haber (Hebrew University) and Ole Andreas Danielson (University of Bergen).
Cornell University Press’ Spring 2012 catalog is now published, with details about America’s First Great Depression. Professor Richard John of Columbia University, a former president of the Business History Conference, says: “America’s First Great Depression is an intriguing history of American financial policy in the 1830s and 1840s. Alasdair Roberts’s contention that international financial considerations shaped U.S. policymaking is well sustained, the writing is sprightly, and the argument is nicely documented with a wealth of judiciously culled evidence.” Download the catalog information here. The book is also available for pre-order on Amazon.
The December Governance e-newsletter is now available. The lead item: In January, Governance celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. Open access to the lead commentary in issue 25.1 is now available. Charles Kenny asks: Does governance matter?
David Paleologos, a polling specialist and Director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center, talked to Law and Public Policy today. Here’s a story about one of his recent polls on the New Hampshire primary.
I’ve just written a short and preliminary precis for a new project: Crowd Control: Economic Disruption and the Regulation of Mass Protest, which I’ve posted on SSRN. I’ll talk about it at the Graduate Student Conference at Hebrew University next month.
Sam Tyler, President of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, spoke about its role in contributing to policy discussions in yesterday’s Law and Public Policy class.
I’m looking forward to participating in the GRIP/SPEA conference on “Converging and Conflicting Trends in the Public Administration of the US, Europe, and Germany” in Speyer next July 19-20. More conference details are here.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
