William Leach

Biography

Bill Leach is a teaching Professor in the Price School’s Department of Public Policy and Management with courses serving the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degree programs in policy, planning, and public administration. He is a member of the inaugural class of Faculty Fellows at USC’s Leadership Institute in the Center for Excellence in Teaching, as well as USC’s Faculty Teaching Institute on Artificial Intelligence in Education.

His highly-cited research investigates collaborative, consensus-seeking approaches to governance and policy implementation, and appears in the leading peer-reviewed journals in public administration, political science, and environmental policy.

Dr. Leach graduated magna cum laude from UC Berkeley’s bachelor of science program in Conservation and Resource Studies, earned a master’s degree in natural resource management from the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, and a PhD in environmental policy from the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California, Davis.

Courses taught

PPD 225 – Solving Public Problems
PPD 499 – Collaborative Environmental Management and Conflict Resolution
PPD 504 – Essential Statistics for Public Management
PPD 540 – Fundamentals of Public Administration
PPD 542 – Policy and Program Evaluation
PPD 546 – Professional Practice of Public Administration
PPD 628 – Urban Planning and Social Policy
PPD 672 – Collaborative Governance
PLUS 652 – Place, Institutions, and Governance

Selected Publications

• Leach, W. D., An, B. Y., & Tang, S.-Y. (2021). Evaluating California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: The First Five Years of Governance and Planning. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 57(6), 972-989.
• An, B. Y., Tang, S.-Y., & Leach, W. D. (2021). Managing environmental change through inter-agency collaboration: Protective governance in mandated sustainability planning. Environmental Science & Policy, 125, 146-156.
• Siddiki, S., Kim, J., & Leach, W. D. (2017). Diversity, Trust, and Social Learning in Collaborative Governance. Public Administration Review, 77(6), 863-874.