Planning / Governance

METROPOLITAN GROWTH PLANNING IN CALIFORNIA, 1900-2000
Report/Study, Elisa Barbour, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), 12/15/2002
Summary: This report, published by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) (http://www.ppic.org), offers a historical overview of California's regional planning and growth management efforts. The report
examines the state's reform efforts through the prism of transportation, land use and environmental planning. The report finds "that effective regional planning will require active support from Sacramento," and the
state should "support a collaborative process to align state, regional, and local investments and plans."
Click here for the full text, 246-page pdf , 476 K.

Government’ s 50 Greatest Endeavors of the Past Half Century, a project of the Brookings Institution, supported by the Ford Foundation, provides survey data on what the federal government tried to do to solve some problem such as racial discrimination, air pollution, terrorism, or poverty. and what it achieved. The project began with a cataloging of major laws passed since World War II, followed by the grouping of these statutes by their objective, and the selection of the top 50 endeavors from a national survey of historians and political scientists. The survey results identify government’s greatest achievements and failures taking success, difficulty and importance into account. The list of summaries were written to provide background, not as complete histories. Readers are encouraged to use the references and web links in each summary for detailed information.

National Center for Digital Government Research and Practice
With support from the NSF, the National Center for Digital Government Research and Practice was established at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As noted on their web site, the Center is building a national capacity for research and practice in digital governance, fostering collaboration among societal sectors. The goal of the Center is to apply and extend the social sciences for research at the intersection of governance, institutions and information technologies.