Reorganizing Government

A pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority and achieving policy goals more effectivelyRegulation is frequently less successful than it could be, largely because the allocation of authority to regulatory institutions, and the relationships between them, are misunderstood. As a result, attempts to create new regulatory programs or mend under-performing ones are often poorly designed. Reorganizing Government explains how past approaches have failed to appreciate the full diversity of alternative approaches to organizing governmental authority. The authors illustrate the often neglected dimensional and functional aspects of inter-jurisdictional relations through in-depth explorations of several diverse case studies involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, pollution control, resource conservation, and terrorism prevention. This volume advances an analytical framework of governmental authority structured along three dimensions—centralization, overlap, and coordination. Camacho and Glicksman demonstrate how differentiating among these dimensions better illuminates the policy tradeoffs of organizational alternatives, and reduces the risk of regulatory failure. The book also explains how differentiating allocations of authority based on governmental function can lead to more effective regulation and governance. The authors illustrate the practical value of this framework for future reorganization efforts through the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, and propose an “adaptive governance” infrastructure that could allow policy makers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.

Reorganizing Government is a crucial contribution to the scholarly literature concerning how policymakers should allocate governmental authority. The pioneering analytical framework it crafts has the potential to make government reorganizations more rational and justifiable. If adopted, its approach can spur much-needed open discussion, clarity, and transparent justification with regard to institutional arrangements., The case studies are fascinating snapshots of agencies at work.

Alejandro E. Camacho is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has contributed dozens of articles to leading legal and scientific journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yale Journal on Regulation, and Harvard Journal on Legislation. Robert L. Glicksman is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at The George Washington University Law School. He is the author of several books on administrative law, environmental law, and natural resources law, and of many articles on these topics which have been published in leading legal journals.