Changing markets are challenging governance. The growing scale, reach, complexity, and popular legitimacy of market institutions and market players are re-opening old questions about the role of the public sector and redefining what it means to govern well. This volumethe latest publication from the Visions of Governance in the 21st Century program at the Kennedy School of Governmentexplores the way evolving markets alter the pursuit of cherished public goals. John D. Donahue and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. frame the inquiry with an essay on governing well in an age of ascendant markets. Other...

The latest in a series exploring twenty-first-century governance, this new volume examines the use of market means to pursue public goals. Market-based governance includes both the delegation of traditionally governmental functions to private players, and the importation into government of market-style management approaches and mechanisms of accountability. The contributors (all from Harvard University) assess market-based governance from four perspectives: The demand side deals with new, revised, or newly important forms of interaction between government and the market where the public...

Government has become a refuge, and a relic, of America's crumbling middle-class economy. As the public and private worlds of work have veered in different directions, the gaps between them are warping government work in unintended ways.

Three decades of economic turbulence have rendered American workplaces more demanding and less secure, more rewarding for high-end workers and punishing for workers without advanced skills. This workplace revolution, however, has largely bypassed government. Public employees--representing roughly one-sixth of the total workforce--still work under...

In Ports in a Storm a team of Harvard Kennedy School scholars focus diverse conceptual lenses on a single high-stakes management task--enhancing port security across the United States. Their aims are two: to understand how a public manager might confront that complex undertaking, and to explore the similarities, differences, and complementarities of their alternative approaches to public management.

The book takes as its pivot point the singular case of U.S. Coast Guard Captain Suzanne Englebert and her leadership of efforts to secure America's ports after the September 11...