This article examines the issues and the problems confronted by those conducting comparative research of charity-state relations in England, Canada and the United States. It also provides an explanation of why the interaction between charities and the state is important for political science: in part this is because in all three countries charities have become increasingly dependent on government for their income. In section I, the article examines the relationship between the concepts of a third sector, voluntary sector, non-profit sector and charity and concludes that the last might be the most appropriate to employ in comparative analysis. In section 2, the authors argue that in both England and Canada the state is formally responsible for the formation of certain kinds of charities; they also argue that in the United States a stricter separation between state and charity exists but that, in practice, the boundaries between charities and the state and the market are not clear ones.

Public choice theory offers a conceptually important means of examining policy decisions and their social and economic consequences in the field of natural resources. Through a public choice analysis of France's ambitious program to nuclearize its electrical industry by the year 2000, I examine the origins, merits and deficiencies of French nuclear policy. Public choice theory's major assumptions – that a policy's costs and benefits are a function of resource abundance and level of development and that a resource's management is shaped by its character and availability – are largely valid. However, the need to reconcile competing social values and to distribute policy benefits fairly may be insufficiently accounted for by current public choice approaches, a fact exemplified by French experience with nuclear power.

This article relates a rich and diverse existing body of literature concerning innovation to an area of research on which it has yet to be brought to bear – the response of local governments to fiscal austerity. After reviewing innovation research literature with respect to its applicability to local government innovation as a response to fiscal stress, it sets forth six research questions for exploring the relationship between innovation and local fiscal austerity. The innovation research literature is then examined with respect to each of these questions to determine what findings or hypotheses emerge from this existing body of research which are relevant to these newly formulated questions.

One goal frequently professed in the research field of multi-actor implementation is to assist those actually involved in the policy process by developing good, empirically-based recommendations. The primary objectives in this article are to investigate the degree of progress attained thus far toward this aim and, as a consequence, to suggest an agenda for future research. The literature is found to impose a number of restrictions on the quality of advice available to practitioners. The field is complex, without much cumulation or convergence. Few well-developed recommendations have been put forward by researchers and a number of proposals are contradictory. Almost no evidence or analysis of utilization in this field has been produced. Two reasons for the lack of development are analyzed: normative disagreement and the state of the field's empirical theory. Yet there remain numerous possibilities for increasing the quality of the latter. Efforts in this direction are a necessary condition of further practical advance.