Topics | Speeches

John Stuart Hall

Founder and former director of the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, John Hall is a public policy entrepreneur among academics, helping to invent and advance citistate theory and leading numerous efforts to link the university to pressing community public policy and governance issues.

Among the 20 large-scale, funded public service research projects of which Hall has been director are “The Information Partnership,” a planning and evaluation process for an information sharing collaboration across the Phoenix Citistate, and two recent federally funded initiatives — the Community Outreach Partnership Center and Phoenix Housing Conditions study. All link interdisciplinary faculty/student teams to community problem solving in the Phoenix Citistate (For details, see www.asu.edu/xed/urbandata).

Continuing as a professor of public policy at Arizona State, Dr. Hall has collaborated in studies with several national organizations including the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Public Administration, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Rockefeller Institute of Government (State University of New York, Albany.

Hall is the author of numerous books and articles about urban affairs, intergovernmental politics, finance and governance issues. He was a member of the original Peirce Report interview team in Phoenix in 1987 and is a co-author of Citistates (with Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson). His most recent writings on citistate issues appear in a new book, Metropolitan Governance Without Metropolitan Government? (Donald Phares ed., Sage, in press, 1998).

Beyond the university community, Dr. Hall has been active in Arizona commissions on employment and training, tax reform and school finance, and on the boards of regional civic organizations including the Phoenix Futures Forum and the Valley Citizen’s League. He is currently a member of the Boards of the National Civic League and the American Society for Public Administration. He has served on the editorial board of the Public Administration Review and is the editor of the new journal, Arizona Policy Choices.

Speech Topics

Managing Federalism During Devolution — In what ways are significant governance shifts and enormous technological changes impacting public management? How is public administration at all levels coping with new demands and deploying new resource configurations? What approaches to governance reform are being implemented, what are missing and desperately needed? What are the implications of the management capacity shifts of devolutionary times for citistate evolution?

Visionary Community Building: Tools and Strategies — Fragmented, separate societies seem to be the order of the day. Stronger communities are the frequently suggested Rx for many urban ills. But how? What clues are contained in recent experiments in neighborhood development, conflict resolution, and school based community building? What's to be learned from innovative public problem solving partnerships led by the private sector, universities, and other non-traditional policy making institutions?

Who Will Govern? — The “governance gap” is identified in Citistates as one of the three great disabilities to be overcome for American citistates to develop full capacity and power. What is the essence of the metropolitan governance problem? How is this connected to earlier debates about regional governments? What options, lessons, approaches should be considered to make regional governance coherent and sustainable?

University-Community Connections and Capacities — It is in the enlightened self interest of both universities and communities to intensify collaborations to solve pressing community problems. From recent experiments in university-community partnerships, what lessons have been learned? What hurdles must be overcome? What capacities are built and leveraged? How are these efforts managed and sustained?

Recent Speeches

June 1998 — “Policy Analysis: Broadening the Field of View,” Arizona State performance auditors. Phoenix, State Auditor General’s Office.

May 1998 — “Changing Bureaucratic Behavior for Welfare,” American Society for Public Administration national meeting, Seattle, WA.

March 1998 — “County Management and the Crisis of Competence,” National Association of County Administrators national meeting, Washington, D.C.

January-May, 1998 — “Balancing Acts: Tax Cuts and Public Policy in Arizona,” for various groups, including newly elected city and county officials, Greater Phoenix Leadership and city and state staff.

Last updated January 1, 2001

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