ABSTRACT
Rural America, with its green pastures and hillside orchards, white farmhouses, and red barns has long represented contentment and stability in American life. The chapter explores the belief that the free-standing, micropolitan communities located outside standard metropolitan statistical areas are undergoing a socioeconomic transformation. Little attention has been given to how local officials of small towns and villages are formulating and implementing innovative policy making. Borrowing from several branches of the social science tree has engendered a variety of approaches for defining policy plan making. As an analytical tool, policy plan making is somewhat all encompassing, which allows its parameters as a distinct discipline to be quite fluid. Innovative public policy plan making involves an "anticipatory decisionmaking" strategy as a means for devising alternative solutions under conditions of political uncertainty. Understanding a community's political cultural subsystem is essential for defining the fundamental core values that operate within the community's system of governance.
