Review of Policy Research, 2006

Since World War II the civic leadership of St. Louis has overcome the extreme fragmentation of public authority by building civic capacity through a variety of strategies and means. Three successive strategies for building civic capacity have unfolded in St. Louis to facilitate the revitalization of the downtown and other large-scale initiatives. Between 1950 and 1965 a regime strategy was employed in which city hall and the city's corporate elites shared a common vision for urban renewal and the significant national resources that were provided to meet that end. By the mid-1960s, however, a second strategy for downtown revitalization emerged that featured a corporate-centered politics during which time the successful assembly of civic capacity hinged largely on the ability of the mayor to present and provide projects in which corporate elites and their companies would be willing investors. Since the early 1990s, building the civic capacity to undertake large initiatives has been made possible through the creation of a constellation of quasi-public corporations and special districts. This third strategy of "shadow governments" are the most recent means of achieving civic capacity in St. Louis and we argue in this article that these new institutions are transforming the local state because they are capable of forging political coalitions, mobilizing resources, and making decisions that transcend general-purpose governmental jurisdictions. For cities and for urban regions, the importance of this development is far-reaching.

SSRN Electronic Journal

, President Trump declared that the United States would "cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country." 1 The United States' de facto withdrawal from the Paris Agreement represented an important inflection point for conceptualizing the role of nonstate actors in addressing climate change. President Trump's announcement was met with an outpouring of resistance and widespread and concerted efforts to mobilize substate, nonprofit, and private actors to step into the void created by his announcement and to help keep the United States on track to pursue domestic and international commitments to address climate change despite federal recalcitrance. Within the leadership void created by the Trump Administration and amidst the increasingly extensive body of sub-and nonstate climate efforts, it is tempting to decenter the role of the state or to underestimate the persistent power of the state to shape the approach and effectiveness of nonstate actions. Failing to recognize that the state retains significant power in this field undermines efforts to understand the realities within which nonstate actors operate. This creates a set of heightened expectations for these actors that defies the reality of the political, economic, and social resources available to them and masks the challenges inherent in relying upon a fragmented, shifting, and differently accountable set of actors to effect pervasive change. This essay situates the current up-swelling of nonstate climate actions in the United States within the context of state power and presidential leadership. It first identifies the implications of the shift from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration on international and domestic efforts to address climate change. It then offers a perspective on the implications of this shift for the evolving interplay between the state and nonstate actors in the United States. The Trump Administration's approach to climate change demonstrates simultaneously the continuing, emphatic power of the state to enable or to cripple large-scale change, and the increasingly diverse and sophisticated range of nonstate actors that operate individually and collectively in interstitial spaces to effect change in response to perceived deficiencies of the state. Ultimately, while the state remains a dominant and indispensable actor within this arena, nonstate actors are finding new and creative ways to push the boundaries of the interstitial spaces within which they operate in such a way as to influence the state's willingness and ability to respond to climate change in the long term.

Latin American Research Review, 2018

Under new democratic regimes, civil society organizations (CSOs) alter their political strategies to better engage public officials and citizens as well as to influence broader political debates. In Brazil, between 1990 and 2010, CSOs gained access to a broad participatory architecture as well as a reconfigured state, inducing CSOs to employ a wider range of strategies. This article uses a political network approach to illuminate variation in CSOs' political strategies across four policy arenas and show how the role of the state, the broader configuration of civil society, the interests of elected officials, and the rules of participatory institutions interact to produce this variation. Data for this article's analysis come from a survey of three hundred CSO leaders in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. The survey identified the strategies they employed to promote policy change and direct resource allocation in the arenas of participatory budgeting, health care, social services, and housing. Sociographs generated from survey results reveal a distinct clustering within each policy arena of the strategies employed by CSOs, providing further support to the usefulness of the analytical framework.

In D.T. Herbert and R.J. Johnston (eds.) Geography and the Urban Environment Volume Six, Wiley, Chichester, 1984

Over the last dozen years, reviewers have contrasted the past, pitiful perform ance and the future promise of political geography (Hall, 1974; Logan, 1978; Johnston, 1980). Within both damning critiques and wishful expectations about the subdiscipline is a belief that the exercise of power lies at the heart of politics and should be a central focus of political geography. If 'the ultimate answer to every geographical problem is a political question' (Dear, 1979, p. 63), the future of power analyses in geography should be secure. Yet the word 'political' in political geography has most commonly been equated with 'governmental' when the two are not synonymous (Taylor. 1980). If power relations are critical in the operation of governments, this is because they are critical to the organization of society as a whole. To emphasize that deeper understanding of "power relations is needed in political geography is commendable, but does not go far enough. Analyses of power processes should not be compartmentalized into one subdiscipline, when they infiltrate every aspect of the discipline. That political geography houses researchers who emphasize the theoretical merit of power investigations in no sense makes the subdiscipline the natural 'home' for power analyses. Statements about the need to study power relations in political geography stem largely from a recognition of their importance in determining government behaviour. Yet it is equally important to inquire where government institutions themselves stand in power networks. The study of government behaviour requires not only that we examine where, when, how and with what consequences governments act, but also where, when, how and with what consequences they do not act. Embodied in both of these is the more fundamental question of why governments do and do not act, the answer for which is strongly affected by power relations within government institutions, amongst government institutions and between government institutions and non-government organizations. Power is one of the main dimensions along which society is stratified (Weber, 1948). Consequently, an understanding of power relations should shed light on * Throughout this chapter, State as a concept is capitalized, whereas examples of particular states are not.

2010

provided much needed humor and direction throughout the process, as well. This study was made possible by the participation of public officials and business leaders in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, North Carolina. Moreover, I appreciate the members of CHANGE for sharing their experiences, insights, and questions honestly and without hesitation. Finally, I am grateful to IAF Southeast Director, Gerald Taylor; former CHANGE Lead Organizers, Mr. Chris Baumann and Mrs. Deltra Bonner; current Lead Organizer, Reverend Ryan Eller; and CHANGE leaders, Dr. Steve Boyd and Reverend Kelly Carpenter, for agitating me to think more critically and creatively about community organizing and my work in the world. v PREFACE Stories are powerful because they are readings of daily life and human interactions. Perhaps conduits to the soul or simply one's way of making meaning in a chaotic world, stories give us insight into how human beings come to know and be known. This study is a story of sorts-a chronicle of a particular time, a particular place, and a particular group of people who share a mission of bettering their community. The differences arise around what community actually means and what strategies are used to achieve their objectives. This is a story about a town trying to reinvent itself in the face of globalization and economic uncertainty. This is a story of the ghosts that persist in southern communities, and it's a story about an unexpected journey that has challenged me to question the sources of my deepest values and how I interpret them into daily life. At its core, this study is a meditation, a wrestling match, a lament, and a vision about a single question, "Am I my Other's keeper?" and the implications of answering this question. This study grows out of my experiences helping to build a community organizing group, Communities Helping All Neighbors Gain Empowerment, or CHANGE, through my roles as a founding member, volunteer leader, and professional organizer. It has also developed in response to my academic voyage and my inexhaustible struggle with a faith journey. There has been a confluence between these three paths that has significantly shaped my perspectives of fellow human beings and my internal life. These corridors have afforded meaning and a language for the work that I feel called to do in the world. County versus issue-based actions?; 2) How do elected and appointed public officials and corporate leaders define and view the work of CHANGE?; and 3) What are the indicators which suggest that, as a result of the organization's efforts, changes in governance 2 , participation in public life, individual agency, and the development of meaningful relationships across diverse groups have occurred? For the purposes of this study, my use of the term political and cultural transformation is intended to broadly capture evidence of the dismantling of the master's house and the master's tools; that is to say, transformation means addressing power imbalances and inequities through a demonstration of transparent and shared decision-making, access to resources, public policies that are responsive to all segments of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, and a general sense that everyone is considered a valuable, necessary member of the community. This study grows out of my experiences as a founding member, volunteer leader, and professional organizer with CHANGE. The specific concentration on evaluating changes in governance and power relations developed out of discussions with Mr. Gerald Taylor (Southeast Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation), CHANGE leaders, and North Carolina United Power (NCUP) 3 staff regarding the ways in which our respective 2 The term, governance, has emerged from a contemporary global discourse about democracy and civic agency and suggests a broader meaning than government (Boyte, 2005). Marschall (1999) defines governance as the methods used by individuals and institutions to "manage their common affairs, control resources, and exercise power to achieve public purposes" (p. 168). 3 North Carolina United Power is comprised of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliates in North Carolina: Charlotte HELP, Durham CAN, Winston-Salem CHANGE, Lexington Citizens for CHANGE, and the North Carolina Latino Coalition. Organizers and leaders from these groups meet together regularly in order to share information about the work happening in their local communities and to create shared campaigns at the statewide level.

Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term "state" was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes. The contributors to this volume, which includes some of the best recent interdisciplinary scholarship on states in relation to social structures, make use of theoretically engaged comparative and historical investigations to provide improved conceptualizations of states and how they operate.

Snow/Social, 2004

20 The Legislative, Organizational, and Beneficiary Consequences of State-Oriented Challengers Edwin Amenta and Neal Caren After years of neglect, scholars have now turned their attention to the consequences of social movements (compare the reviews of McAdam et al. 1988 ...

This paper seeks to synthesize theories from the comparative politics and international relations literature about what leads to state building and the growth of state capacity. It draws upon these theories to develop a range of empirical propositions and test them using the State Capacity Dataset (Hanson and Sigman 2013). The objective is for these findings to help determine the relative importance of different explanatory factors and facilitate the process of bringing them together into a holistic framework.

2019

How have interest group populations in the fifty states changed in the 21st Century so far, and have factors like population growth, changing state ideology, economic performance, legislative professionalism, personal wealth, and shocks like the Great Recession shaped these changes? Using new data on state interest groups originally gathered by the National Institute for Money in State Politics, which I cleaned and introduced at last year, combined with several other measures of state politics, economic performance, and demographic change, I study these questions. With data covering the years 2006 to 2015 allowing for cross-state, as well as timeseries, analysis, I explore the extent to which change in economic, political, and social variables lead to changes in state interest group systems, some of which replicates Gray and Lowery's work. Their work holds-up well in the replications, but new extensions are also explored, including a new "capacity" term for the ESA model.