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30 Pol'y Stud. J. 6 (2002)

handle is hein.journals/plyssjnl30 and id is 1 raw text is: Policy Studies Journal, 30:1 From the Editors We were very privileged to have benefited from the tireless efforts of Stuart Nagel. A picture of Stuart appears at the front of this issue. A future symposium is planned that will attempt to do justice to his many contributions to the field of policy studies. A brief assessment of Stuart Nagel's role in policy studies is provided at the Policy Studies Organization Website: http://www.ipsonet.org In This Issue The individually contributed articles in this issue address the issues related to health policy, regarding the disease of leprosy, also known as Hansen's Disease, in the United States and Japan. Janet E. Frantz, in Political Resources for Policy Terminators, focuses on the difficulties associated with closing down public programs and their related facilities. She analyzes the politics of policy termination from the perspective of Deborah Stone's conceptualization of politics in the policy arena through examination of a case study of the U.S. government's decision in the 1950s to end its policy of providing lifelong residential care to victims of (leprosy). She concludes that government officials were able to terminate the policy and overcome the well-conceived opposition from patients, staff, and the community elements only when the decisionmakers were able to employ their available political resources skillfully. Hajime Sato, in Abolition of Leprosy Isolation Policy in Japan: Policy Termination through Leadership, examines the same policy termination issues through a very different set of lenses. His emphasis is on policy termination as a means for correcting existing policies and allocating resources more efficiently, based on scientific advances that make the status quo obsolete and unsustainable. He argues that delay in terminating a flawed policy may result in increased harm that can be avoided by overcoming institutional inertia and related obstacles to policy innovation. The policy inertia induced by Japan's longstanding isolation of leprosy patients, which persisted after it had been proven scientifically not to be necessary, was overcome only after decades of political struggle. The set of obstacles in the way of this policy change included intellectual reluctance, opposition by vested interests, and biased expert opinion. Existing policy practices were adapted slowly through loose administration of the isolation policy. The leadership of a skillful policy terminator and consensus among key actors were required to bring the issue to the forefront of the policy agenda. A commentary on both articles is provided by Peter deLeon. He argues for the continued study of policy termination and comparative policy analysis, and sees further research on comparative policy termination as a viable way to overcome the limitations of the existing policy termination literature based on case studies and relatively restricted theories. The symposium in this issue, on the impact of immigration policy on communities, is edited by Clifford P. McCue and Dorothy Norris-Tirrell. Articles in the symposium include an introduction by McCue and Norris-Tirrell, the implications for policymakers of immigrant needs and local government services (by Norris-Tirrell), the dynamics of immigration and local governance 6