Product Description: The safe and continued functioning of critical infrastructures—such as electricity, natural gas, transportation, and water—is a social imperative. Yet the complex connections between these systems render them increasingly precarious...read more

Product Description: Taking Complexity Seriously applies the advanced policy analysis technique of triangulation to what is now the world's most complex public policy challenge: sustainable development. One central problem of public policy analysis has been to find new ways of analyzing issues of increasing complexity and uncertainty...read more

Product Description: In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe emphasizes that policy messes cannot be avoided or cleaned up; they need to be managed. He shows how policymakers and other professionals can learn these necessary skills from control operators who manage large critical infrastructures such as water supplies, telecommunications systems, and electricity grids...read more

Product Description: "Reliability" has become a watchword in the business community. Increasingly, it refers to anticipation and resilience organizations' ability to plan for, absorb, and rebound from shocks. Across many sectors and cases, the approach to improving reliability in primary technical systems has been remarkably similar...read more

Product Description: Ecology, Engineering, and the Paradox of Management is the first book that addresses and reconciles what many take to be the core paradox facing environmental decision-makers and stakeholders: How do they restore the environment while at the same time provide ever more services reliably from that environment, including clean air, water and energy for more and more people? The book provides a conceptual framework, empirical case analyses, and organizational proposals to resolve the paradox, be it in the US, Europe, or elsewhere...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: It is a commonplace that the problems of African rural development are becoming increasingly complex--that is, they have grown more numerous, interrelated, and varied. This complexity has generated a multitude of development scenarios...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Narrative Policy Analysis presents a powerful and original application of contemporary literary theory and policy analysis to many of today’s most urgent public policy issues. Emery Roe demonstrates across a wide array of case studies that structuralist and poststructuralist theories of narrative are exceptionally useful in evaluating difficult policy problems, understanding their implications, and in making effective policy recommendations.Assuming no prior knowledge of literary theory, Roe introduces the theoretical concepts and terminology from literary analysis through an examination of the budget crises of national governments. With a focus on several particularly intractable issues in the areas of the environment, science, and technology, he then develops the methodology of narrative policy analysis by showing how conflicting policy "stories" often tell a more policy-relevant meta-narrative. He shows the advantage of this approach to reading and analyzing stories by examining the ways in which the views of participants unfold and are told in representative case studies involving the California Medfly crisis, toxic irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley, global warming, animal rights, the controversy over the burial remains of Native Americans, and Third World development strategies.Presenting a bold innovation in the interdisciplinary methodology of the policy sciences, Narrative Policy Analysis brings the social sciences and humanities together to better address real-world problems of public policy—particularly those issues characterized by extreme uncertainty, complexity, and polarization—which, if not more effectively managed now, will plague us well into the next century.