Scholarly Works, Center for Public Administration and Policy
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- How Can States Regulate De-Spatialized Phenomena? The Case of Occupational LicensingEdisis, Adrienne T. (SAGE Publications, 2025-01-23)The Covid-19 pandemic compelled U.S. states to forge their own paths to guide their citizens through new dangers and challenges, yet made clear that state borders cannot hold against pathogens, people, or technology. How can states regulate increasingly de-spatialized phenomena? State legislators and regulators face this dilemma in the case of occupational licensing. This paper identifies a spatial mismatch between the individual state jurisdiction of occupational licensing regulations and the interstate reach of services provision by practitioners of licensed occupations. It investigates the origins of this mismatch, as well as a functional mismatch between state occupational licensing regimes established before 1900 and the current context. By building on insights from historical analysis of legacy state occupational licensing regimes; learning from examples of regulation of de-spatialized and digitalized economic activity; enlisting historical institutionalist-defined modes of gradual institutional change; and updating a classic typology of policy tools for regulation, a risk-based classification template for state regulation of services provided by professionals and skilled workers in currently licensed occupations is proposed. More broadly, analysis of the case of occupational licensing illustrates the potential of diversifying regulation of de-spatialized phenomena from authoritative mandates to regulatory programs comprised of a policy mix of mandate, information, incentive, and multi-mechanism tools better suited to porous political borders.
- Comparing priority received by global health issues: a measurement framework applied to tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and dengue feverParashar, Rakesh; Nanda, Sharmishtha; Smith, Stephanie L.; Shroff, Zubin; Shawar, Yusra R.; Hamunakwadi, Dereck L.; Shiffman, Jeremy (BMJ, 2024-07-08)Introduction: The relative priority received by issues in global health agendas is subjected to impressionistic claims in the absence of objective methods of assessment of priority. To build an approach for conducting structured assessments of comparative priority health issues receive, we expand the public arenas model (2021) and offer a framework for future assessments of health issue priority in global and national health agendas. Methods: We aimed to develop a more comprehensive set of measures for conducting multiyear priority comparisons of health issues in six agenda-setting arenas by identifying possible measures and data sources, selecting indicators based on feasibility and comparability of measures and gathering the data on selected indicators. We applied these measures to four communicable diseases - tuberculosis (TB), malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and dengue fever - given their differing impressionistic claims of priority. Where possible, we analysed the annual and/or 5-year trends from 2000 through 2022. Results: We observed that TB and malaria received the highest priority for most periods in the past two decades in most arenas. However, a stagnation in development funding for these two conditions over the last 8-10 years may have fuelled the neglect claims. Despite having a higher disease burden, diarrhoea has been slipping in global priority with reduced spending, fewer clinical trials and stagnating publications. Dengue remains a low-priority condition but has witnessed a sharp rise in attention from the pharmaceutical industry. Discussions: We expanded the arenas model by including a transnational arena (international representation) and additional measurements for various arenas. This analysis presents an approach to enable comparative trend analysis of the markers of agenda status over a multiyear period. More such analyses can bring much-desired objectivity in understanding how attention to global or national health issues changes over time in different arenas, potentiating a more equitable allocation of resources.
- Shifting patterns and competing explanations for infectious disease priority in global health agenda setting arenasSmith, Stephanie L.; Parashar, Rakesh; Nanda, Sharmishtha; Shiffman, Jeremy; Shroff, Zubin Cyrus; Shawar, Yusra Ribhi; Hamunakwadi, Dereck L. (Oxford University Press, 2024-05-16)The highly decentralized nature of global health governance presents significant challenges to conceptualizing and systematically measuring the agenda status of diseases, injuries, risks and other conditions contributing to the collective disease burden. An arenas model for global health agenda setting was recently proposed to help address these challenges. Further developing the model, this study aims to advance more robust inquiry into how and why priority levels may vary among the array of stakeholder arenas in which global health agenda setting occurs. We analyse order and the magnitude of changes in priority for eight infectious diseases in four arenas (international aid, scientific research, pharmaceutical industry and news media) over a period of more than two decades in relation to five propositions from scholarship. The diseases vary on burden and prominence in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 for health and well-being, including four with specific indicators for monitoring and evaluation (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis) and four without (dengue, diarrhoeal diseases, measles, meningitis). The order of priority did not consistently align with the disease burden or international development goals in any arena. Additionally, using new methods to measure the scale of annual change in resource allocations that are indicative of priority reveals volatility at the disease level in all arenas amidst broader patterns of stability. Insights around long-Term patterns of priority within and among arenas are integral to strengthening analyses that aim to identify pivotal causal mechanisms, to clarify how arenas interact, and to measure the effects they produce.
- Publishing priorities in global health: A framework and empirical analysisSmith, Stephanie L.; Cho, Andrew; Rosenberg, Sarah J.; Shiffman, Jeremy; Shawar, Yusra Ribhi (Routledge, 2024-09-24)Though vital to health policymaking processes, little is known about the distribution of attention to issues global health journals focus on or their alignment with commitments to health equity. We developed a new framework and methods to help address these analytical gaps. We used content analysis to systematically identify and novel methods to measure attention to themes, subthemes and geographies represented in more than 2,000 research articles published in two of the longest-running multidisciplinary global health journals, Bulletin of the World Health Organization and Health Policy and Planning, between 2004 and 2018. We found four major themes—health systems and conditions received the most attention, followed by population groups and policy dynamics. Finer grained analysis shows that the broad-based journals feature many common themes and some, including subthemes like communicable diseases, financing and children, are heavily favoured over others, such as workforce and noncommunicable diseases. It reveals publishing gaps for some highly marginalised groups and shows attention to health equity fluctuates. The new framework and methods can be used to (1) check the distribution of publishing attention for consistency with global health and specific journal aims and (2) support inquiry into priority setting dynamics in the broader research publishing arena.
- Establishing an Agenda for Public Budgeting and Finance ResearchMcDonald, Bruce, III; Davis, Stephanie D. (2024-04-01)Public budgeting and finance is a discipline that encompasses communities of research and practice. Too often, however, these communities fail to engage each other, instead choosing to operate independently. The result is that the research being conducted fails to address the questions of the day and our governments’ challenges. In this article, we come together as a community of academics and practitioners to establish an agenda for where future research should be conducted. This agenda aims to align the research being undertaken within the academic community with the needs of those working in the community of practice. After establishing ten areas where research is needed, we followed a ranked-choice voting process to establish a prioritization for them. Based on the outcome of this process, the two primary areas where research is currently needed most are the fiscal health of our governments and the implementation of social equity budgeting.
- Deepening Interlocal Partnerships: The Case of Revenue-sharing Infrastructure AgreementsDavis, Stephanie D.; Gough, Meghan Z. (SAGE Publications, 2020-06-19)
- COVID-19: Financial Impacts on Virginia's Local Governments: A report to support local government decision makingDavis, Stephanie D. (2020-06-01)
- How small communities can leverage strategic planning for ARPA fundsDavis, Stephanie D. (2022-03-01)
- Preparing the next generation of managers: 10th Anniversary of the Graduate Certificate in Local Government ManagementDavis, Stephanie D. (2018-04-01)
- Defining Local Government Financial Capacity in Small Towns: Challenges and OpportunitiesDavis, Stephanie D. (2024-11-23)The purpose of the paper is to investigate the financial condition of towns in Virginia. An article in the Municipal Finance Journal (published by the author in December 2023) examined the financial impacts of the pandemic on cities, counties, and towns in Virginia. The study found that the pandemic resulted in more significant impacts on towns as opposed to cities and counties. This paper continues research into the financial condition of towns in Virginia. This study uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods to determine the town managers' perspectives on financial capacity and to quantify financial condition for each town. The study population includes 35 of the 190 towns in Virginia. Per State Code, local governments with a population of more than 3,500 must submit an annual comprehensive financial report annually to the Auditor of Public Accounts, however, only 35 of the 190 towns meet Virginia State Code requirements for annual comprehensive financial report submissions. Organizational capacity is defined as human, financial and leadership factors. Human capacity is operationalized through the staff expertise, staff time constraints and staff experience in the performance of a local government organization. Financial capacity are the resources available to fund the government service and organization. Leadership capacity refers to the level of support from elected officials including Town council members and mayors. One goal of the study is to understand how town managers view financial capacity and the study seeks to operationalize this concept for locals governments. Operationalizing financial capacity facilitates local government manager's understanding of how revenues and expenditures should be budgeted, planned and utilized in order to achieve the goals of the organization. Next, quantitative, audited financial data will be used to understand the financial condition of the town. The use of the Comparative reports of Local Government Revenues and Expenditures published by the Auditor of Public Accounts of Virginia(APA) serves as the data collection process to evaluate financial condition using established financial ratios by the APA. Reconciliation of perceived financial capacity by managers and actual financial data will be analyzed to determine what gaps are demonstrated by the perceptions of managers on financial capacity and the actual financial condition of the local government. The results of the study will serve as recommendations on financial resiliency for towns in Virginia which may be applicable to towns throughout the United States.
- Town Charters of Virginia: Research findings by Virginia Tech's Center for Public Administration and PolicyDavis, Stephanie D.; Galliher, Haley (2023-06-01)