Nabatchi named Strasser Endowed Professor in Public Administration
Tina Nabatchi, a leading scholar on citizen
participation, collaborative governance, and conflict resolution, and on challenges
in public administration, has been named the inaugural Joseph A. Strasser Endowed Professor in Public Administration
at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
The Strasser Professorship,
created earlier this year by a generous $3-million gift from alumnus Joseph
Strasser ’53 BA (History)/’58 MPA, is the first named and endowed professorship
specifically focused on public administration at the Maxwell School. It
reinforces Maxwell’s primacy in the field, across federal, state, and local
levels.
“I firmly believe that going into the public service
and working in the public interest is one of the most noble career choices a
person can make,” says Nabatchi, an associate professor of
public administration and international affairs. “Without government and public administrators, we do
not function as a society. Indeed, government only works when its public
administrators advance it through their everyday service.”
Nabatchi, who joined the Maxwell School
in 2007, has been involved with large-scale efforts to engage citizens in public
policy. She worked with the Obama White House to assist with the implementation
and evaluation of the public participation commitments in the Open Government
National Action Plans. She assisted the World Bank in the design and development
of a massive open online course (MOOC) about citizen engagement, which
has been delivered to tens of thousands of participants around the world.
She has extensive scholarly involvement in Participedia, an online repository of democratic participation
innovations around the world, and her federally funded research on deliberation
and patient engagement in health care settings won the 2016 Research Project of
the Year and the 2016 International Research Project of the Year Awards from
the International Association for Public Participation. She also serves as co-director
of the Collaborative Government Initiative at Maxwell’s Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration,
where she is a faculty research associate.
Before joining the Maxwell School, Tina was the
research coordinator for the Indiana Conflict Resolution Institute at Indiana
University-Bloomington, where she also received a PhD. In this capacity, she
provided consultations about, and evaluations of, alternative dispute
resolution in several U.S. federal agencies, including the Department of
Justice, the U.S. Postal Service, the National Institutes of Health, the
Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict
Resolution.
Nabatchi’s work is widely published and
frequently cited, and she is in demand as a speaker at conferences in the
United States and internationally. She has
written several award-winning articles, including “Addressing the Citizenship
and Democratic Deficits: Exploring the Potential of Deliberative Democracy for
Public Administration,” which won the 2010 Best Article Award from American
Review of Public Administration; “Evaluating the Productivity of
Collaborative Governance Regimes: A Performance Matrix,” which won the 2015
best article award from Public Performance and Management Review;
and “The New Governance: Practices and Processes for Stakeholder and Citizen
Participation in the Work of Government,” which was recognized as one of the 75
most influential articles in the history of Public Administration
Review.
She
is lead editor of “Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of
Deliberative Civic Engagement” (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-author of
Public Participation for 21st Century
Democracy with Matt Leighninger
(Jossey-Bass, 2015) and Collaborative Governance Regimes with
Kirk Emerson (Georgetown University Press, 2015), which won the
2017 Sharon M. Pickett Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution.
Nabatchi has been recognized for her exceptional work
in the classroom with the Maxwell School’s Daniel Patrick
Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research in 2013 and with the Birkhead-Burkhead
Teaching Excellence Award and Professorship in both 2012 and 2018. She was
also named as an inaugural Tenth Decade Scholar in 2015.
The creation of the Strasser
Professorship builds on a legacy
of support for the Maxwell School by Joseph Strasser, a life-long
public servant who served as budget officer for both Savannah, Georgia, and
later, Jacksonville, Florida. Strasser has donated more than $6-million to the
Maxwell School, previously funding upgrades and
renovations to Maxwell’s multi-use public events room, naming the school’s
central atrium, and establishing the Strasser Endowed Scholarship Fund that
supports top Maxwell graduate students.
“Tina Nabatchi is the ideal
inaugural recipient of the Strasser Professorship,” says Maxwell Dean David Van
Slyke. “As a top-ranked teacher and scholar, Tina exhibits boundless enthusiasm
for strong and effective public management, governance, and leadership. Her
role in preparing future executives in the field perfectly aligns with Joe
Strasser’s remarkable career as a public servant. We are delighted to honor
Joe’s legacy as a public manager and as a philanthropist with this important
appointment.”
“I am so honored to be the inaugural Strasser Professor of
Public Administration. Joe Strasser's dedication to public service is
inspiring, and I hope to uphold his legacy and ideals in my research,
teaching, and service efforts at the Maxwell School,” says Nabatchi. “Now more than
ever, we need a cadre of well-trained, dedicated, and engaged public servants
who can engage in higher-order reasoning and on-the-ground action to advance
democracy and governance in the United States and around the world.”
09/18/18