| Chapter 1: | Governors and the National Governors Association (NGA) |
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The NGA as a Policy Resource for the Governors
and the States
The second way the NGA assists governors is through its Center for Best Practices. This arm of the NGA is “[t]he nation’s only dedicated consulting firm for governors and their key policy staff” (NGA Brochure 2006). In a sense, the Center for Best Practices serves as one conduit through which policy innovations can diffuse across states because the organization provides guidance and documentation of successful policies implemented by states and governments after experimenting with various policies. This branch of the NGA spends considerable time producing documents for governors and their states.3
Throughout its history, the NGA has maintained a policy research office where it shares information with governors. Since the late 1970s, the NGA has transformed itself into an organization that, in its own words, “is the collective voice of the nation’s governors and one of Washington, D.C.’s, most respected public policy organizations” (NGA Brochure 2006)—this this is because the NGA is a collection of offices which represents a very powerful elective office and because of the NGA’s history of working closely with the federal government. The fact that President Theodore Roosevelt was active in organizing the governors’ conference is indicative of the prominence the organization held very early in its existence. Moreover, many prominent executive and legislative branch officials once occupied the governor’s office.4
The NGA has authored many publications for the nation’s governors. A majority of these publications were composed in the late 1970s, in the 1980s, and in the early 1990s, and these deal with such prominent issues as the quality of rural life (Dewitt, Batie, and Norris 1988), emergency preparedness (National Governors Association 1979), education (National Governors