The Water Quality Act of 1987 ushered in a new era of clean water policy to the US. The Act stands today as the longest-lived example of national water quality policy. It included a then-revolutionary funding model for wastewater infrastructure - the Clean Water State Revolving Fund - which gave states much greater authority to allocate clean water infrastructure resources. Significant differences between states exist in terms of their ability to provide adequate resources for the program,...

Policy Making and Southern Distinctiveness examines the uniqueness of southern politics and their policy choices.While decades of scholarship on the politics of the American South have focused on partisanship and electoral outcomes as the primary elements of interest in southern politics, few works have focused on the more practical outcomes of these political processes, specifically, comparing state policy choices of southern states to non-southern states. This book exami...

Water policy in United States is one of the most complex topics in the field of public policy. This book, a comparative study of Texas, California, and Alabama’s drought response, provides for the first time a common framework for analysis to investigate how water scarcity and droughts have interacted with various state-level factors to produce a wide degree of variance in policy innovations. Using Toddi Steelman’s (2010) conceptual framework, the authors examine multiple variables that im...

In this book Pragati Rawat and John C. Morris identify and evaluate the impact of factors that can help explain the difference in e-participation, public participation using information and communication technology, in different countries.While cross-sectional studies have been covered, few have taken an in-depth look at cross-national studies. This book attempts to fill the gap using quantitative panel data to explore the influence of technology and institutions, and the impact of...

The nation’s approach to managing environmental policy and protecting natural resources has shifted from the national government’s top down, command and control, regulatory approach, used almost exclusively in the 1970s, to collaborative, multi-sector approaches used in recent decades to manage problems that are generally too complex, too expensive,, and too politically divisive for one agency to manage or resolve on its own. Governments have organized multi-sector collaborations as a way ...

This book determines that watershed protection and restoration in the 21st century requires adaptive and responsive strategies that incorporate regulatory frameworks in conjunction with community stakeholder engagement. The severity and pervasiveness of watershed pollution require building resource capacity through the formation of multi-sector strategic alliances. Given the complexities of watershed management and the need to leverage resources to achieve better environmental outcomes, un...

After a great deal of discussion and debate across all levels of government, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law in March 2010. Since President Trump's election into office, the ACA has stayed in the headlines. Trump has continued to call for the replacement and repeal of the ACA, and several efforts have spawned in both the House and the Senate to accomplish this goal. Unlike welfare reform, which was generally embraced by all states, the ACA has proven very divi...

The brilliantly compelling new biography of the treacherous and tyrannical King John**, published to coincide with the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.**King John is familiar to everyone as the villain from the tales of Robin Hood — greedy, cowardly, despicable and cruel. But who was the man behind the legend?Drawing on contemporary chronicles and the king's own letters, bestselling historian Marc Morris brings the real John vividly to life. We see how a y...

Following the success of their Locus Award–winning anthology The New Space Opera, editors Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan up the ante with The New Space Opera 2, in which more of the most beloved names in science fiction spin stunning tales of interstellar adventure and wonder. Authors include:Neal AsherJohn BarnesCory DoctorowJohn KesselJay LakeJohn MeaneyElizabeth MoonGarth NixMike ResnickJustina RobsonKristine Kathryn RuschJohn ScalziBruce SterlingPeter Wat...

If you were looking for the definitive Christmas anthology, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! This book is everything you want Christmas to be — loving, warm and celebratory. Timeless and adorable, beautifully designed, "The Big Book of Christmas" is a great big stocky book — stuffed with novels, novellas, short stories, poems, carols and songs. Inside you'll find: · Novels, novellas and short stories from Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Andersen, O. He...

There are some nightmares from which you can never wake.Dread: A Head Full of Bad Dreams, from the Bram Stoker Award-nominated editoral team of Anthony Rivera and Sharon Lawson, is Volume One in the Best of Grey Matter Press series. Selected by readers and horror fans, the twenty short stories contained within the pages of Dread include some of the darkest hallucinatory revelations from the minds of the most accomplished award-winning authors of our time.T...

The struggle to rebuild Sanctuary continues in the eleventh entry in this shared-world fantasy series.The storms of war have passed Sanctuary by, and ordinary folk are confident the worst is behind them. Citizens work to restore their lives as the reconstruction brings new life to the city in more ways than one. However, it's not sunny skies for everyone. Some residents are opting to settle old debts by the sword, and others are still vanishing off the streets. Mean...