Ann O'M. Bowman

Local officials in the emergency management field have reached out and increased their connections with other agencies and organizations during the past several years. Collaborative networks have been created in an effort to address the complexities and uncertainties surrounding extreme events. But has this collaboration really taken root? In this article, the authors find that although a collaborative ethos has penetrated local emergency management, it is neither deep nor uniform. Data from a survey of emergency managers in North Carolina counties show that maintaining a functional network—a performance regime in which participants develop consistent management practices and rely on each other for the generation of new ideas—is a difficult task. The explanation for the variation found across the counties largely involves capacity and vulnerability.

In this article, we explore changes in state–local relations. Our interest is the degree to which states have devolved power and authority to their localities … or not. From our empirical tests, we conclude that although centralization was the dominant trend from the mid-1950s until the mid-1980s, the pattern since then has been somewhat uneven and variable across states. A survey of city managers supports a finding of a loss of local power at the hands of the states, but a survey of legislators offers an alternative perspective. We conclude with a discussion of the meaning and implications of state centralization and suggestions about how the concept could be captured more comprehensively.

In this article, we examine the cumulative impact of state environmental protection policies and environmental quality on the health of state residents in the United States. Using a series of path analytic models, we simultaneously analyze the effect of state environmental policies on environmental pollution and health outcomes. Our results indicate that states with stronger environmental programs have lower levels of pollution and better public health. These results are robust across multiple measures and alternative model specifications. We also find some evidence that states that assume authority to implement federal environmental programs have worse health outcomes. Our findings suggest that overall levels of public health may be affected by state choices with respect to environmental policies and highlight the importance of assessing programmatic consequences across policy areas.