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In this chapter, we draw on the data collected during our evaluations of six TAACCCT grants to describe the challenges, successes, and transformative effect of adopting a developmental evaluation approach for community college programs.

This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a "hidden developmental state" that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden administration have added considerable new funding. Nevertheless, this set of programs has not yet become a part of political debates outside of the federal government. It remains hidden to most of the electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inability of labor markets to function effectively to satisfy the needs of employers and workers suggests that there is a growing need for policy interventions to promote workplace cultures of learning and innovation. Past research suggests that publicly funded incumbent worker training programs are a promising antidote against market failures. With only a handful of studies published in the last two decades, however, this is one of the least-researched types of business support programs. This paper examines the impact of a state program in California that uses a pay-for-performance approach to reimburse employers that train their employees: the California Employment Training Panel (ETP). Based on a mixed-methods study of ETP, the authors found that, overall, ETP had positive and significant impacts on company sales and firm size. The study suggests the need to abandon ideological debates and engage in more evidence-based policy discussions about incumbent worker training programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant literature has emphasized the role of significant inconveniences for participants as a chief reason for under-enrollment in a variety of social safety net programs. Consequently, a variety of policies have been proposed to address this issue. This paper asserts that the capacity of states, especially of frontline workers, to implement these policies should not be taken for granted. Our analysis of two policies aimed at increasing elderly participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program suggests that policies that increased burdens for frontline workers were implemented less faithfully and more unevenly, possibly leading to more administrative burden on program participants. The article proposes several methods to decrease implementation burden on frontline workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As dynamic collaborations between networks of specialists have become more central to developing cutting‐edge innovations, designing and sustaining innovation policies that foster them has become an increasingly central concern. This article reviews the characteristics of the "developmental network" or "neo‐developmental" states that have been shown to foster innovations at the technological horizon. It then analyzes the US case to suggest why some developmental network approaches to governance have proven relatively durable, while others have not. We conclude with a discussion of what can – and cannot – be learned from the US case, and suggest the importance of comparative work on the sustainability of effective innovation‐centered approaches to governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we draw on the data collected during our evaluations of six TAACCCT grants to describe the challenges, successes, and transformative effect of adopting a developmental evaluation approach for community college programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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One of the most pressing questions in comparative social science is whether, and to what extent, the rapid advance of globalization has negatively affected states' capacity to initiate successful economic and social policies. This paper puts forward the notion that states continue to be relevant because they have the potential to build and sustain networks of production and learning, which are sorely needed in the current era of globalization when productive arrangements are dominated by decentralized production networks. The paper argues that government efforts aimed at building and sustaining such networks, labeled as 'networked industrial policy,' have become predominant. The study features a series of fixed-effects time series cross-section ( TSCS) regressions linking innovation performance to several networked industrial policies in 17 countries from western and central Europe. The study finds that several of the policies have a robust effect on innovation performance and technology competitiveness, even after controls are included. These findings constitute considerable support for the notion of networked industrial policy. However, the results of the present study must be treated less as a definitive answer to the research question and more as a first step in an ongoing research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]