Federal Government Officials Research Articles

Understanding Government Capacity in Tourism Development as a Poverty Alleviation Tool: A Case Study of Tanzanian Policy-Makers

Good governance is a prerequisite in achieving sustainability objectives, especially in an industry such as tourism which is gaining support as a tool for poverty alleviation in developing countries. Good governance is described as a state's capacity to develop efficient and effective public management processes, and entails participatory, transparent, and accountable processes by government. Economic participation, such as job and small business creation, is dependent on support from federal policy and can be stalled by uncoordinated governments, both intentionally and unintentionally. Tanzania considers tourism to be a leading engine in economic growth and a catalyst in its fight to alleviate poverty. Therefore, tourism as a wage and self-employment option is dependent on policy directives that span many government agencies and are influenced by government advisors and industry partners. Drawing on Kooiman's socio-political theory of governance, this article, first, accesses the images, tools, and action potential held by policy advisors that dictate the use of the poverty alleviation resources, and second, investigates the diversity, complexity, and dynamics of the governance system within the growing Tanzanian tourism economy. Twenty-five interviews of Tanzanian policy-makers, including federal and local government officials, academic policy advisors, and non-governmental administrators at the national level were conducted and analyzed. Five themes were developed from the interviews including economic performance measures, barriers to economic participation, government actions, public/private partnerships, and tourism development. Policy-makers in Tanzania have a thorough understanding of macro-economic development and rural community needs; however, the lack of communication between departments often creates redundancy and gaps in development objectives. Tourism-specific knowledge is absent, and while community tourism initiatives are highly praised by Tanzanian officials, their unfamiliarity with the tourism value chain continues to exclude rural populations. Continued focus on foreign direct investment as a financing mechanism is creating foreign-owned monopolies in tourism destinations. Lastly, aid dependence has left many policy-makers searching internationally for poverty solutions. This paper concludes that while the intentions to solicit involvement of the poor is high, the practical application of poverty alleviation strategies through increased tourism expansion is log jammed by the very administrators tasked with finding solutions.

Political-Administrative Relations in Collaborative Environmental Management

Do local elected and staff officials play different roles in collaborative environmental management? Local elected officials express more concern about threats to property rights and excessive government taxes and are more likely to participate in watershed partnerships to head off state and federal regulations. In contrast, local staff officials express more concern about excessive population growth, impaired water quality, and threats to species. Local elected officials associate more with resource users and local districts whereas local staff officials associate more with federal and state government officials, environmentalists, and scientists. The conclusion extends the findings into an exploration into the respective roles of elected and staff officials in sustainable politics.

Bringing The Medicaid Story Up To Date

Bringing The Medicaid Story Up To Date

Suing Putin: Patterns of Anti-Government Litigation in Russia, 2000-2008

This paper examines litigation patterns in two categories of court cases, in which Russian government agencies are sued by individuals or companies: lawsuits against unpaid monetary obligations of Russian government agencies, and lawsuits brought by the victims of wrongful actions or decisions of federal government officials. It argues that despite Russia's turn away from democracy and despite their deep cynicism about judiciary, Russians increasingly use courts to fight for their rights and that judges are willing to rule in their favor in many cases. Moreover, the conditions are ripe for the expansion of anti-government litigation, as Putin’s successor, current Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev, attempts to bring more transparency into the judicial system.Proliferation of anti-government litigation in Russia is possible because the ruling regime faces conflicting goals. On the one hand, it wants to make courts “user-friendly” to promote economic growth and social peace. This is why it does not roll back the scope of judicial protection of individual rights and tolerates judicial decisions, which are contrary to the wishes of the President or Prime Minister. Yet Russia’s rulers are unable to improve judicial performance overnight. On the other hand, they encourage government officials to abuse individual rights: extorting bribes, exploiting subordinates and torturing enemies is acceptable as long as officials are loyal to the regime. Yet rulers are unable to capture courts to cover up unlawful government actions. As a result, Russian courts order federal government to pay billions of rubles in compensation to aggrieved individuals and companies.

Agrarian Reform and Revolutionary Justice in Soconusco, Chiapas:Campesinosand the Mexican State, 1934–1940

AbstractDuring the mid- to late 1930s, rural activism surged in the coffee-growing region of southern Chiapas and north-western Guatemala. This article examines the causes and impacts of sustained campesino protests at the grassroots level on the Mexican side of the border. The porous border between the two nations hindered the development of centralised power networks that prevailed in other parts of Chiapas. Campesinos and reformist federal government officials such as teachers and agrarian engineers built alliances that challenged the power of the coffee growers. This article explores the process of negotiation that occurred among campesinos, federal bureaucrats, regional authorities and elite coffee planters in order both to implement and to challenge agrarian reform.

Small to Mid-Size Sporting Events: Are We Prepared to Recover from an Attack?

This article describes a fictional deadly attack by a lone-wolf terrorist during a high school football event in a small town, here in the United States. The authors begin by describing an attack and then focus on the response from the medical community, city, county, state, and federal government officials. Next, the authors make several recommendations on what actions are needed to develop an effective plan to combat terrorist activities during a small- to mid-size sports event. Among the actions needed, the authors focus on the following: response planning, emergency action plan, incident command, policies and procedures, and security staff training.

Canada's Jews: A People's Journey (review)

Reviewed by: Canada's Jews: A People's Journey Andrew Gow Tulchinsky, Gerald — Canada's Jews: A People's Journey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 597. This one-volume condensation of Gerald Tulchinsky's magisterial Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (1992) and Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community (1998) adds some further references to scholarship and events since 1998, but fundamentally covers the same ground as the two original volumes did. Since their contents are presumably well known, I focus here on issues of emphasis, construction, and coverage in this immense 600-page compendium. As the subtitle suggests, this book is intended for a generalist audience with little or no knowledge of Jewish history in Canada. Although Tulchinsky is always advancing arguments that bear on the causes of this or that phenomenon or its origins, arguments that belong to the order of historiographical discourse, he never engages directly with the scholarship to which he is responding, which feels a bit like shadow-boxing. Historians of Canada or Jewish historians will know the debates about the origins of antisemitism in twentieth-century Canada, but general readers will have to take Tulchinsky's word that there was no real antisemitism or anti-Jewish feeling in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century "Canada" (or its predecessor polities) — rather, it appeared sometime before the end of massive Eastern European Jewish immigration to Canada in 1925 and caused the change in that policy to boot (p. 236). Furthermore, while the antisemites responsible for the end of mass immigration — just as things were getting really bad for Eastern European Jewry and not long before the Shoah — were federal civil servants and government officials (especially Frederick Blair and William Egan), Tulchinsky feels that the main nexus of Canadian antisemitism was to be found in "clerico-fascist" Catholic circles in Quebec. This is only one example of the contradictory and sometimes downright asymmetrical arguments Tulchinsky advances (while refusing to engage the specialist literature or debates explicitly). Some of these problems result from duplication, probably due to merging two previous books that somewhat overlapped into a single volume. There are two distinct and very detailed sections on the Jewish role [End Page 273] (of employers and of workers) in the Montreal and Toronto garment (shmattes) trade, overlapping around the 1910s and 1920s. Tulchinsky's work on the "rag trade" is excellent, it should be noted, and forms the core of his historical insights into the conditions of recent Jewish immigrants, their class consciousness, and their experience of life in Canada. These sections, despite the overlaps, will be of particular interest to readers of this journal for classroom use. The other notable example of this doubling is the dual coverage of the Montreal school crisis, an event that emerged with an almost rigorous logic from the provisions of the British North America Act for separate schooling for children of Protestant denominations and for Catholics. In 1867, the few German and Sephardic Jews in Montreal were no more reliant on public schools for their children than were other well-to-do urban merchants, and so there was no provision for the public education of Jewish children. In the wake of bloody pogroms in Eastern Europe, the exploding population of mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews without private resources quickly outnumbered the established, largely well-to-do German and Sephardic Jews of North America in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This led to a crisis in the funding and provision of public education for Jewish children in Montreal. Although the Protestant school board took Jewish children and exempted them from Christian religious instruction, Jews had no right to representation on the Protestant school board, and no Jewish teachers were hired in its schools. While a separate Jewish school board very nearly materialized before the Second World War, the Protestant school board and representatives of the Jewish community eventually yielded to government pressure to compromise. Tulchinsky's careful and detailed examination of this crisis is one of the great merits of his work. The school crisis deeply affected many Montreal families. In 1919, my great-grandfather Albert Freedman and his wife Mabel left Montreal with their...

Nursing Home Organizational Change: The “Culture Change” Movement as Viewed by Long-Term Care Specialists

A decade-long grassroots movement aims to deinstitutionalize nursing home (NH) environments and individualize care. Coined "NH Culture Change" the movement is often described by its resident-centered/directed care focus. While empirical data of "culture change's" costs and benefits are limited, it is broadly viewed as beneficial and widely promoted. Still, debate abounds regarding barriers to its adoption. We used data from a Web-based survey of 1,147 long-term care specialists (including NH and other providers, consumers/advocates, state and federal government officials, university/academic, researchers/consultants, and others) to better understand factors associated with perceived barriers. Long-term care specialists view the number-one barrier to adoption differently depending on their employment, familiarity with culture change, and their underlying policy views. To promote adoption, research and broad-based educational efforts are needed to influence views and perceptions. Fundamental changes in the regulatory process together with targeted regulatory changes and payment incentives may also be needed.

How Federal Implementation Choices Can Maximize The Impact of CHIPRA on Health Care of Children With Developmental and Behavioral Needs

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of health reform, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 set the stage for the potential to transform children's health care in the United States. The legislation included landmark provisions to find and enroll eligible low income children, as well as an unprecedented investment in quality measurement and demonstrations focused on improving health care delivery for children. However, many choices remain for the Federal government and states in implementing these provisions that could significantly affect their ultimate success. This commentary summarizes a larger report developed from legislative analysis and expert input and provides a set of recommendations for the federal government officials charged with implementing Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act. It focuses on two key provisions of the legislation which will be important regardless of the outcome of current health reform debates, enrollment and outreach and the broad set of quality related provisions, and explores the importance and specific potential impact of this legislation on children with developmental and behavioral needs.

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: A Conceptual Overview

The author explores some of the factors that have influenced the public debate in Canada over issues of crime and victimization, particularly with reference to children and youth as both perpetrators and victims. Focusing specifically on various approaches to crime prevention, he discusses some of the key elements of a comprehensive crime prevention strategy and argues that for such a strategy to be meaningful and effective, it should be a community-based social development approach.

Surveillance, Screening, and Reporting Children's BMI in a School-Based Setting: A Legal Perspective

The rising epidemic of childhood and adolescent obesity is placing a heretofore unprecedented physical and fiscal burden on individuals and communities. Federal and state government officials who seek to determine the scope of the problem are using a spectrum of tools that include reporting, screening, and surveillance initiatives. The extent of authority to use these public health tools is yet to be determined, especially in the area of data use, privacy, and liability as government officials balance the need to improve public health with individual freedom and autonomy.

El Departamento de Contraloría y la búsqueda del control del presupuesto en México, 1917-1932 : una aproximación

<p><span lang="ES-TRAD">El establecimiento del Departamento de Contraloría formó parte de los cambios institucionales que aplicaron los gobiernos de la posrevolución para asegurar y centralizar la hacienda pública. La lucha armada había trastocado su funcionamiento con la dispersión de las oficinas recaudadoras, fugas de pagadores y poco control sobre los gastos, entre otras anomalías. Con este departamento se pretendió supervisar a todas las oficinas y aduanas que recaudaban impuestos federales, y fiscalizar el manejo de recursos públicos de las secretarías, departamentos y demás dependencias del gobierno federal. Todos los actos de la administración pública que manejaron recursos públicos pasaron por las manos de esta dependencia. Con ello resalta el interés del Ejecutivo por afianzar su preeminencia en el proceso presupuestario. Además, este poder tuvo facultades extraordinarias en materia hacendaria, lo que le dio un gran margen de acción para establecer impuestos y llevar a cabo sus gastos.</span></p>

Why Social Work Practitioners Need Research Ethics Knowledge

Social work practitioners are under increasing pressure to understand and use evidence-based practice approaches. At the same time, clinicians, scientists, and government officials have noted that only a handful of assessment and intervention approaches have been adequately tested so they might be disseminated for widespread use. To remedy this situation, a significant increase in the number of community-based research projects is necessary. Although researchers and practitioners seem to come from different worlds, successful community-based research requires closing the researcher-practitioner gap. Researcher-practitioner partnerships are underway in many agency settings. For example, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network ([NCTSN] http://www.nctsn.org) is a group of researchers and practitioners who work in 70 rural and metropolitan sites in the United States. NCTSN members use innovative child trauma treatments such as parent--child interaction therapy and trauma--focused cognitive--behavioral therapy. Funded by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, NCTSN enables clinicians to work closely with researchers to test the local effectiveness of their work and participate in cross--site evaluation studies to demonstrate the network's national effects. If such trends continue it will become commonplace for social work practitioners to join research projects. And it will be no surprise that social workers will work hard to ensure that their clients' rights as research participants are respected. Human subjects protection is a great challenge for community-based researchers because most clients belong to groups who present as among the most vulnerable to unethical practices. What follows is a brief review of standards that social work practitioners and other researchers should aim to follow when conducting research, including a discussion of the complexities and challenges involved. All projects should be vetted by an institutional review board (IRB) that is affiliated with a university or other entity that is registered with the federal government's Office of Human Research Protections. One easy way to verify IRB approval (besides checking with the investigator or university) is to inspect the informed consent form that clients are required to understand and sign before they are enrolled into a study. The official IRB stamp or current IRB contact information is always listed on the form. A consent form that contains no such information might mean the study was not approved or that approval has expired. The Code of Federal Regulations (also known as the Common Rule) designates three major categories of vulnerable people: 45 CFR 46 Subpart B discusses pregnant women, fetuses, and neonates; Subpart C discusses prisoners; and Subpart D discusses children. The reader can see that each of these groups might be exploited because of their compromised status in society, cognitive limitations associated with age, or their medical vulnerabilities. In addition, history has taught us that these groups have been improperly treated by researchers in the past. As an illustration, I discuss some of the complexities of research, especially because so many social workers employed in child welfare agencies, schools, hospitals, and mental health settings are now or soon will be involved in projects investigating child assessment and treatment technologies. Historically, U.S. federal policies effectively excluded children from all research to protect them from exploitation. Relatively recently this policy was revised because it had created a pediatric gap in research knowledge about critical interventions such as medications, surgical procedures, and psychotherapies. In addition, the lack of evidence did not routinely prevent many practitioners from using unproven therapies with children. Although practitioners often use treatments demonstrated to be effective with adults, there are no guarantees that they are safe and effective for children and adolescents who have unique, developmental sensitivities. …

The Standardized Curriculum and Delocalization: Obstacles to Critical Pedagogy

This essay explores the nature of standardized curricula and the ideological motivation behind the standards movement, beginning with President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. It focuses on how the standardizing of curricula and the embedded hierarchy of information and knowledge—produced by few and mandated for all—not only reflects a privileged epistemology but does so with the intention of maintaining a social structure that will continue to serve the elite. We address the deskilling of teachers in the K-12 classroom through centralized, mandated curricula as a means of encouraging teachers' complicity in promoting an anti-intellectual, hegemonizing school structure. In particular we examine how the New York City public school teacher is stifled by such an approach to education. In addition to a critique of the standards movement and the bureaucratized, hierarchical approach to schooling, this essay offers an alternative approach. The alternative we suggest focuses attention on the classroom over the district office. It also privileges the wants and needs of the community over those of the corporate economy and its influence on education policy. The teacher in the classroom should have the authority to engage students in a living curriculum that pertains to their daily lives. The community must determine what this curriculum is rather than federal government officials who lack local knowledge.

Jordan's principle: Editorial update

Jordan's principle: Editorial update

Should the chiropractic profession embrace the doctrine of informed consent?

This commentary provides a narrative review of the literature focusing on the use of a health care informed consent process in the United States. This article reviews the current positions of the World Medical Association, American Medical Association, American Chiropractic Association, Wisconsin and New Jersey State Courts, US Federal Government Office of Health Policy and Clinical Outcomes, and 1 college of chiropractic regarding the doctrine of informed consent. The authors recommend that the chiropractic profession embrace the doctrine of informed consent and promulgate it as a standard of care. The implementation of this doctrine by chiropractic physicians promotes and improves the safety of chiropractic interventions.

Cultural Competency at the Community Level: A Strategy for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities

In the United States, healthcare providers, institutions, and society have failed to ensure the conditions necessary for racial and ethnic minority communities to be in good health. Many scholars and federal government officials consider racial and ethnic disparities in health to be an injustice and have called for national attention and strategies to eliminate them. Several of these strategies, including cultural competency, focus on addressing deficiencies within the health care system. Cultural competency is the ability of a healthcare provider to function effectively in the context of cultural differences with the clients they serve. Increasing cultural competency among healthcare providers has been shown to improve the quality of healthcare received by racial and ethnic minorities, which contributes to reducing health disparities. Achieving equity in the quality of healthcare received is a necessary strategy, but is insufficient for eliminating disparities in the health status of racial and ethnic minority populations. A growing body of literature reveals that health disparities are determined, not only by inequities in health care, but by social factors. The implication is that strategies that focus solely on healthcare perpetuate the misconception that health status is determined by access to or quality of healthcare. To eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health status, the fundamental conditions for good health, which include but are not limited to healthcare equity, must be acknowledged and ensured for all people.Special thanks to the editors of this issue, John R. Stone and Erika A. Blacksher, as well Eugenia Eng, Shelley Golden, and Mondi Mason, for their helpful comments.

EMR Systems Face Hurdles Especially in Geriatrics

Timothy F. Kirn is with the Sacramento bureau of Elsevier Global Medical News. SEATTLE – Despite the government's push to encourage the development of the electronic medical record system, only a quarter of physicians keep medical records electronically, and only 11% of hospitals have fully implemented them, according to Dr. Karen M. Bell, director of the federal government's Office of Health IT Adoption. In addition, of the electronic record systems in use, probably fewer than half are fully operational, that is, able to take notes, make lab and pharmacy orders, and get lab results, Dr. Bell said at the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society. “The reality of it is that adoption of really good functionality is really very low,” she said. The barriers to widespread adoption continue to be the lack of good, accepted computer applications, and the time and cost, said Dr. Bell. While it is thought that the use of electronic health records eventually would result in financial savings, start-up costs continue to be prohibitive, she said. The cost to get every record interface–every office, laboratory, pharmacy, etc.–up to speed with appropriate software and hardware may be $5,000 for each one, and for the nation as a whole it may cost $50 billion, Dr. Bell said. At the same time, those who are using electronic medical records are finding that they are not exactly time saving. In part, that is because there is a learning curve involved. The records also generally require more information than what went into records previously, as part of an effort to improve and ensure quality. The government currently has public policy advisory committees to encourage more adoption and to deal with privacy issues–significant challenges, Dr. Bell said. In the meantime, her office is continuing to develop an exact definition of what is going to be needed in an electronic health record, she added. “There are no standard definitions for any of this stuff.” Other speakers at the meeting described the significant hardship they went through acquiring a system specifically for geriatrics. The electronic health record industry and its products are geared to the acute care environment, and when they can be used for a facility that cares for older persons, they need to be modified significantly, the speakers said. “As I was trying to figure out which electronic health records system we would use for geriatrics, I really ran into a lot of roadblocks,” said Dr. Irene Hamrick of the division of geriatrics at East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C. “There really is nothing out there that is very good.” Her institution finally chose General Electric Company's Centricity system because it can be used in many locations, such as the home for health care visits. But, the institution found that it needed to tailor the system for specific geriatric needs, adding records of diet and activities of daily living, and changing the physical exam form to include sections for foot and mental status exams. “Very little out-of-the-box software is user friendly for geriatrics. None is totally acceptable to my mind. If you want to use them, you have to adapt them,” Dr. Hamrick said. When the Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center of Commack, N.Y., began to look for an electronic medical record system, the institution had no idea it would take so long to find and implement one, said Dr. Suzanne Fields, the medical director. The center found Internet sites (such as www.providersedge.com/ehr_links_products_services.htm) that can help one find a system, and that the American Academy of Family Practice has a rating form that one can send to vendors to get information on their systems for comparison. And, the center found a number of products for long-term care. But, the center has both outpatient day care and clinics, and inpatient beds, and none of the products adequately accommodated both, Dr. Fields said. They, too, found that they had to adapt a system to their needs. In the end, the center combined two products, one for long-term care and another for physician care. The system is not yet up and running. “It has to be individualized. That's what I didn't realize,” she said.

Burying Atomic History: The Mound Builders of Fernald and Weldon Spring

Abstract The Fernald, Ohio and Weldon Spring, Missouri uranium refinery sites performed critical functions in the nation's nuclear weapons manufacturing complex during the Cold War. Now, the U.S. Department of Energy has created two radioactive tombs on the former grounds of these industrial centers. These mounds may be viewed as unofficial monuments to the billions spent building and maintaining the country's atomic arsenal. Radioactive contamination precludes the adaptive reuse of Fernald and Weldon Spring. Yet these two sites reside in counties that continue to experience steady population growth. The present and future generations need to be informed about the activities conducted at the sites for health, environmental, and educational reasons. Policy choices made by federal government officials concerning Weldon Spring and Fernald indicate a pattern shift from disclosure/preservation to exclusion/destruction by 2005.

Russia, China, and the Immigration Security Dilemma

Since the opening of the Sino-Soviet border in 1988, governors of Siberian and Russian Far Eastern territories, Russian federal government officials, and the media have been warning the Kremlin and the Russian public about peaceful Chinese infiltration and Sinification of the Russian Far East (RFE).1 In national polls conducted by the Levada Analytical Center, Russia's leading survey agency, the number of respondents who wanted to restrict the settlement of ethnic Chinese in Russia rose from 39 percent to