interests include food policy and practice, centering on community and state governance of food systems, the policy process, and community engagement. Her current research topics include food policy coalitions, food system planning, healthy food access, and food security. Abstract :The twin forces of globalization and devolution have created administrative circumstances that strain the problem-solving capacity of local governments and increase the importance of nongovernmental processes and institutions. The literature suggests that locally owned firms are more likely to engender higher levels of civic engagement critical to buttressing that problem-solving capacity. This research adds an additional dimension, investigating to whom those firms sell and through which supply channels. Using survey results from hundreds of local firms across five study sites, this research demonstrates that locally facing firms-that is, firms that intentionally interface with community members and other local businesses-are associated with greater levels of civic and political engagement compared with locally owned firms that sell their products to customers elsewhere. Findings suggest that local governments should look beyond the local/nonlocal ownership binary to consider how private firms can be partners in serving and supporting their communities. Practitioner Points• Local governance efforts to build community engagement might benefit more from specific collaborations with locally owned businesses that intentionally serve local community members rather than locally owned businesses generally. • Owners of local business who are affirmatively motivated by serving the needs of their community have higher levels of civic and political engagement than business owners who are motivated exclusively by conventional economic incentives. • Civic engagement of local business owners may provide a framework for understanding and perhaps even predicting whether some communities are better prepared for the benefits and burdens that come with devolution and privatization of services.

Between the late 1970s through 2013, state Housing Finance Agencies (HFAs) financed nearly $300 billion in mortgages to low‐ and moderate‐income first‐time homebuyers. Descriptive evidence indicates that HFAs help households retain their homes at higher rates than similar households purchasing homes in the private mortgage market. Using a matched sample of HFA originations between 2005 and 2014, we estimate a multinomial logit model of mortgage default (or foreclosure) and prepayment. We find that HFA borrowers are about 30 percent less likely to default or foreclose on their mortgages than otherwise similar non‐HFA borrowers. We find that 37 percent of this HFA effect can be explained by HFA origination and service delivery practices including direct servicing and homeownership counseling.

One of the most challenging facets of encouraging student participation in classroom discussions is navigating the complex dynamics of personal behavior and interpersonal interaction that leads to what the research refers to as student “silence." Despite a nominal desire to avail themselves of the attention of their professor and peers in class, students will often decline to participate for a number of reasons including personality characteristics which disfavor speaking publicly, gender dynamics and expectations, a lack of comfort with the dominant in-class language and a fear of embarrassment/social sanction. In-class technology provides one possible mechanism for bridging this gap. This study seeks to ascertain whether the use of an online participation platform (Peardeck) is associated with increased participation of students who, for various reasons, are less likely to participate than their cohorts in a public affairs/governance classroom.

Affordable housing policy in the developed world has been undergoing a systematic commodification for several decades, including a push for homeownership as the normalized tenure and a commodity unto itself. Scholars suggest this push for homeownership is part and parcel of a neoliberal asset-based welfare to supplement, or even outright replace, traditionally defined benefit pension schemes. These policies individualize risk and re-fashion individual citizens as long-term financial planners, navigating the uncertainty inherent in international financial markets and general financial management. Less deeply explored, however, are the perverse incentives this system creates for homeowners to protect their home “investment” by leveraging planning policies, zoning, and land-use restrictions to preserve the community status quo and lock in the value of their home. In a policy environment in which long-term financial risk is individualized and public social welfare and pension systems are relegated to the smallest number of individuals possible, this type of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) is rather rational behavior, even as it simultaneously staunches the supply of new housing and drives up prices for non-homeowners. As such, this analysis synthesizes the existing research to make a formal theoretical connection between the neoliberal push for commodified housing, asset-based welfare, and the intractable political problem of NIMBYism.