Interdisciplinary analysis that highlights the role of incentives in sustainable rural infrastructure. Survey of ideas and many project examples.

Tired of trying to keep up with the pace in public policy research? Ta-da! Theories of the Policy Process offers some nice introductory essays on current public policy research, with a focus on (guess what...) theoretical developments. Each major theory is given a chapter of its own, written by distinguished scholars, often the actual parents of the theories. Among the theories covered are Institutional Rational Choice (by Ostrom), Multiple Streams and Garbage Can (by Zahariadis - not Kingdon), Advocacy Coalitions (by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith) and Punctuated Equilibrium (by True, Baumgartner and Jones). The collection ends with a very good synthesizing chapter by Schlager, where the theories are compared and essential diffrences are higlighted.

This collection is extremely useful to get updated on the latest developments in Public Policy. Lots of good, fresh references, and very accessible and authoritative introductions to the field. Yet, since the collection does not offer anything substantially new, a fifth star is not motivated. Still a very good buy.

I would not recommend it for use in introductory public policy-courses, though. Too abstract and theoretical for that. This is for people already familiar with the field.

Professor Sabatier's long-out-of-print work is the ur-text of Francis biographies, the one to which most of the contemporary biographers refer most centrally in their own work (Julien Green in particular). Therefore, reading this text in its particular historical and scholarly context is essential; to truly appreciate Sabatier's intervention into the popular and scholarly understanding of St. Francis is to have ready reference to the body of work, and the weight of tradition, to which Sabatier was responding. Unfortunately, Mr. Sweeney sees fit to excise just this apparatus in his "edition" of Sabatier; he cuts out Sabatier's Introduction, condenses several chapters, and replaces Sabatier's footnotes and bibliography with his own commentaries and explanations of the text, set right into the margins of Sabatier's own text, and a cursory bibliography that cuts out the vast majority of Sabatier's own points of reference. Scholars are left without resources for critical or comparative study, and readers who wish to learn more about Francis are pushed into Mr. Sweeney's particular framework of understanding with little warning. I hope another more reputable publisher sees fit to reprint Sabatier's seminal work in an uncompromised edition; until that happens, let the reader beware.