CGM Insights

In Western Alaska, restrictions on subsistence fishing threaten the traditional way of life of Yup’ik Alaska Native communities. To make more fish available for subsistence, community members call for the federal government to curtail commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. Yet there are no direct avenues to ensure public influence in the policymaking process of the relevant federal agencies, and community demands have thus far been largely ignored. This policy brief explains why administrative policymaking fails to incorporate relevant knowledge into policymaking and why community decision-making is a better alternative.

This policy brief discusses the fundamentals and governance of block clubs and then delves into the Center for Poverty Solutions’ 10-year collaborative plan to reduce poverty in Chicago. It describes how community engagement has benefited the center’s Civics and Service Incubator program and has led to the development of a blueprint for a neighborhood employment co-op.

The recent conference on Self-Governance and Pluralism in Divided Times invited scholars to address the power of attachment to local government in the current climate of heightened polarization. As a principle of organizing political power, subsidiarity favors devolving political control to the lowest (or smallest) governmental entity capable of doing the work. This policy brief explores the lessons for subsidiarity from New York State’s debate over the dissolution of village government. The contestation of which unit of government best serves citizens is rarely partisan; it is, however, often bitterly divisive. This truth thus reaffirms and challenges scholarly conjunctures about political behavior related to matters distinctive to local concerns.

This policy brief examines whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) compliance rules have reduced investment in the energy and defense sectors and, if so, identifies the channels through which this effect has occurred. The analysis contrasts regulatory trajectories in the European Union (EU) and the United States from 2019 to 2025, highlighting significant divergences that have created asymmetric impacts on capital flows.

Federalism divides power between the federal government and state governments and, in theory, brings government closer to the people. It restrains arbitrary power, encourages policy experimentation, and offers multiple points of access to public life. Federalism seems like the ideal design for securing these advantages in a territorially diverse democracy, including in the United States, where one in five Americans still live outside metropolitan areas. For rural communities—geographically dispersed, institutionally peripheral, and often culturally distinct—these features ought to be especially beneficial. The lived experience of people in rural communities tells a different story. Despite its theoretical appeal, federalism has too often underdelivered on its promise for those farthest from the centers of power. This policy brief uses examples from interjurisdictional competition that disregards place attachment, political representation that amplifies formal power without meaningful voice, and redistribution programs that fail to overcome local capacity constraints to demonstrate these gaps.