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AbstractResearch partnerships between scholars and local governments offer promise to advance scholarly understanding of local public administration and to improve the lives of people living and working in local communities. Yet political fragmentation complicates the prospect of broader learning from these partnerships and creates the risk that research partnerships will amplify disparities in local government performance. If scholars and practitioners are attentive to these risks, they can design research to facilitate learning across local government settings. Lessons from policy diffusion, program evaluation, and team science inform a set of recommendations for the conduct of local government research partnerships and the distribution of results.

Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management. By Henrik Selin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 235p. $44.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.In his book, Henrik Selin introduces readers to the complex and fragmented international regime governing the management of hazardous chemicals. He presents a compelling account of the environmental and human health threats posed by international trade and the transboundary movement of hazardous chemicals and waste, building a strong case for this problem as an appropriate target for international cooperation and governance. He then analyzes the development and contents of the chemicals regime, with particular emphasis on the way that linkages among issues and actors contribute to the design of chemicals management policy.

In his careful and generous review of my book, Henrik Selin asks why I selected responsiveness and intergovernmental coordination as dependent variables for my analysis, therefore setting aside other policy effects that special district governance might produce. This is an important question: the delegation of policy authority to autonomous, specialized governments is a significant departure from the normal politics that takes place in a multidimensional legislature and could have a variety of consequences. To the extent that special districts have received any scholarly attention, it has focused mostly on estimating how specialization affects the level of public spending. My interest lies more in the quality of governance. What do we want from representative government? Central among our goals should be policy outcomes that are responsive both to public preferences and to public problems.