Nominations are now being accepted for awards to be presented at the 2022 Annual Conference, to be held at the Hyatt Regency in Miami, Florida, on September 22-24, 2022.
Nominations for all awards are due by July 1, 2022, to the persons listed below for each award. To read the full call for nominations for any award, click on the award title. The names of past winners are available on our Awards page.
Aaron B. Wildavsky Award
This award is presented to honor the lifetime scholarly accomplishments of Aaron B. Wildavsky. The award is presented annually to a distinguished scholar in the field of public budgeting and financial management for lifetime achievement. The award recipient should be an outstanding scholar as judged by his or her record of publication and service to the field over a sustained period of time. Nominations should include a 1–2-page letter outlining the significant accomplishments of the nominee, the nominee’s vitae, and no more than two additional letters of recommendation. A committee will determine the award winner.
Nominations should be sent by July 1, 2022, to Bob Bland (bbland@unt.edu).
S. Kenneth Howard Award
This award is presented to honor the lifetime accomplishments of S. Kenneth Howard. The award is presented annually to a distinguished practitioner in the field of public budgeting and financial management for lifetime achievement. The award recipient should be an outstanding practitioner as judged by his or her record of service over a sustained period of time. Nominations should include a 1–2-page letter outlining the significant accomplishments of the nominee, the nominee’s vitae, and no more than two additional letters of recommendation. A committee will determine the award winner.
Nominations should be sent by July 1, 2022, to Jonathan Justice (justice@udel.edu).
Paul Posner Pracademic Award
The Paul Posner Pracademic Award honors lifetime achievement for significant contributions to the field of budgeting and financial management made as both a practitioner and an academic. This is not an annual award. It will be made only when an exemplary candidate is nominated and ultimately approved by the Paul Posner Pracademic Award Committee.
The award recipient should be an outstanding pracademic (practitioner and scholar) as judged by his or her record of service to and publication in the field over a sustained period of time. Nominations should include a 1-2 page letter outlining the significant accomplishments of the nominee, the nominee’s vitae, and no more than two additional letters of recommendation. A committee will determine the award winner.
Nominations should be sent by July 1, 2022, to Bob Bland (bbland@unt.edu).
Michael Curro Student Paper Award
Graduate students who have written outstanding papers in the field as part of a course, independent study, or other faculty supervised projects are eligible. The paper must be nominated by a faculty supervisor and must have been written between June 2021 and June 2022. The paper may not have been previously presented at a professional conference. Papers written by more than one student are not eligible. The papers can represent a variety of formats and topics within the broader interests of ABFM. In the past, papers have included traditional research efforts, critical literature comparisons, or analyses of financial documents. The topics have ranged across the discipline to include papers on federal budgeting, local government financing, state revenue sources, capital planning, trends in debt issuance, financial and accounting practices, and financing of specific policy functions.
Papers will be evaluated according to general criteria: contribution to the field, the appropriateness of the methodology, the quality of the research analysis, clarity of writing, logic of presentation, and originality and creativity. Faculty members responsible for nominating students should send a letter of nomination that includes the student’s name, the degree the student is pursuing, the school name, when the paper was written, and the thesis or purpose of the paper. If the paper was written for a class, please include the name of the course and when the course was offered. If the paper was part of the student’s extracurricular duties, please describe these duties. A financial award and commemorative plaque will be presented to the winner. Conference registration will also be waived for the winner.
Nomination letters and copies of student papers should be sent as e-mail (.doc file or PDF) attachments by July 1, 2022, to Michelle Lofton (mlofton@uga.edu).
Announcing Two New Awards
ABFM Best Book Award
The Association for Budgeting & Financial Management solicits nominations for the Best Book Award. The Best Book Award shall be awarded to the best submission for an outstanding public budgeting and finance book or edited volume with a copyright date within the past three years (2019 or more recently). Award eligibility is limited to books with association members in good standing. The book should be targeted to an academic research audience, and not be a textbook or a practitioner workbook. Preference will be given to books rather than edited volumes. Nominations (including self) should include a brief letter of introduction highlighting the scholarly contribution of the book for the ABFM audience.
Nominations are due to Justin Ross (justross@indiana.edu) by July 1, 2022. Physical or electronic copies will be requested for individual members of the Award committee to assist in evaluation.
Award for Scholarly Engagement in Public Budgeting and Finance
The Scholarly Engagement Award shall be awarded to the best submission for outstanding public budgeting and/or finance scholarly engagement in the previous calendar year (CY 21).1 This should entail an effort or product of scholarship whose primary purpose is public and/or community service and the audience is public servants and practitioners.
This award is open to all ABFM members in good standing at academic institutions including tenure or tenure track faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate students, and teaching and research faculty and staff. Only products where there is clear authorship are eligible. The products of scholarly engagement can represent a variety of work including, but not limited to, advising or consulting projects, courses/seminars/workshops, databases, webtools, books or published workbooks, and white papers or reports. Nominations should be made for a single scholar2 for a specific product of scholarly engagement whose intended audience was practitioners in the previous calendar year.
Scholarly engagement products will be evaluated using the following general criteria:
● contribution and impact of the product to practice,
● the connection between theory and practice
● the quality of work
● clarity of writing and presentation (when appropriate), and
● the originality of the work.
Any materials accompanying the nomination letter should assist the committee in evaluating the scholarly engagement product on those criteria. These may include white papers, course agendas and slides, letters from the practitioners involved, etc. The nomination letter should include information on the scholar being nominated, their organization and contact information, an abbreviated CV, and details of the scholarly engagement product (including the format, the timeline, the target audience, the deliverables, and information on the outcome and impact of the engagement).
If the committee selects a recipient, the winner of the Scholarly Engagement Award will be recognized at the awards luncheon at the 2022 ABFM conference and presented with a commemorative plaque. The committee need not make an award annually.
Nomination letters and associated materials should be sent as an attachment in an email (in a pdf file) by July 1, 2022, to committee chair Whitney Afonso (afonso@sog.unc.edu). Self-nominations are welcome.
1 Scholarly engagement or engaged scholarship can be defined as an intellectual endeavor with a commitment to improving or informing public practices. As Boyer (1996) notes using the resources of the academy for “the intellectual and civic progress” of society (p. 11) or what is sometimes called the application of knowledge.
2 However, for collaborative works, the committee encourages nominations of the individual members, but we may ultimately award the prize to multiple scholars for a single collaborative product.