Debate Central

This site hosts collections of articles, organized by topic and subtopic, dealing with controversial policy issues. The topic for 2003-2004 is ocean policy. There is also an e-mail address through which questions can be addressed to a panel of experts on the topic for the year. There is also a search engine for all web sites dealing with that topic. There are online discussion boards for the last several years' worth of topics. Addtionallly, there is a library of audio and video clips of debates. For educational role-playing, especially in environmental fields, it can be hard to include viewpoints that are important to the real-world issues that are being simulated in the classroom. Debate Central collects news articles, opinion pieces, and websites in order to give instructors as balanced a list as possible. The lists are actually dominated by poular scientific literature, as this material is very prominent on the Internet. Debate Central also includes sample affirmative and negative arguments for all topics, which reflect Libertarian or Republican viewpoints, emphasizing property rights. Older topics (i.e. 1997-1998: renewable energy) do not necessarily have the rich, varied list of annotated links that make the ocean-policy part of the site so helpful.

In their own words "The National Center of Policy Analysis (NCPA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, established in 1983. The NCPA's goal is to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control, solving problems by relying on the strength of the competitive, entrepreneurial private sector. Topics include reforms in health care, taxes, Social Security, welfare, criminal justice, education and environmental regulation."