Social process in grizzly bear management: lessons for collaborative governance and natural resource policy

In this study, we analyze a case of governance in natural resource management. Building on the limited body of literature on termination and using methods of problem orientation and social process mapping, we examine a stakeholder engagement process designed to address conflicts in grizzly bear management in Banff National Park, Alberta. Terminated in 2009 after several years of collaboration, this stakeholder engagement process explicitly used the policy sciences framework to cultivate dialogue, improve participants?? decision-making skills, and make consensus-based recommendations for grizzly bear management. Our analysis demonstrates the utility of undertaking social process mapping and problem orientation in order to understand a natural resource policy problem. We include recommendations to foster a social process that allows for clarification and advancement of the common interest in stakeholder groups, insights into how social process can contribute to policy termination, and reflections on the practical, collaborative use of the policy sciences to solve problems of governance. This analysis complements other articles on this case that examine stakeholder perspectives, initial outcomes, and decision process, collectively providing a thorough policy analysis.     

Look to Sweden: The Making of a New Renewable Energy Support Scheme in Norway

Two renewable energy support schemes have spread across Europe: green certificate schemes (GCSs) and feed‐in tariffs (FITs). After a decade‐long policy‐making process, Norwegian decision makers decided in 2011 to adopt a GCS compatible with the already existing one in Sweden and thereby establish a joint Norwegian‐Swedish GCS. The article explores this process of policy transfer, and asks to what extent competition and policy learning contributed to Norway's choice of a GCS. It finds that competition was a barrier to a joint Norwegian‐Swedish GCS rather than (as predicted by some scholars) a driver of policy transfer. In terms of policy learning, it finds that Norwegian bureaucrats systematically were searching for information about renewable energy policy instruments in a process characterised by rational learning. However, this information was not taken into account by elected policy makers, whose learning was unsystematic and almost exclusively influenced by Sweden – making it a process of bounded learning. Finally, domestic factors that facilitated and constrained the policy transfer process are identified in the article. A reluctant bureaucracy defending the status quo policies constrained the policy transfer process. GCS as a market‐based instrument independent of yearly allocations over the annual national budgets facilitated the process by securing strong support in a broad coalition of stakeholder groups and thereby cross‐partisan support. The latter finding may contribute to the literature by underscoring the importance of domestic political factors.     

Exploring How Institutional Arrangements Shape Stakeholder Influence on Policy Decisions: A Comparative Analysis in the Energy Sector

In recent years, there has been an expansion of efforts to include stakeholders in administrative policy making. Despite significant potential to improve policy decisions, empirical evidence suggests that not all participatory processes provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholders to shape policy and may even give the most powerful stakeholder groups disproportionate influence over policy decisions. This article argues that the institutional arrangements for stakeholder engagement—the rules and norms that determine which stakeholders can participate and how—affect stakeholders’ influence on policy decisions. This article uses state energy efficiency policy making as a context in which to compare how different institutional arrangements shape the ways in which stakeholders engage in and influence the policy process across two states, Connecticut and Maryland. Findings highlight that institutional arrangements can be used to increase participation, mitigate undue influence of industrial stakeholders, and increase the influence of public interest stakeholder organizations.     

Making a difference: On the constraints of consensus building and the relevance of deliberation in stakeholder dialogues

This article illuminates the contribution of stakeholder dialogues to environmental policy making. It makes a distinction between stakeholder dialogues as consensus building and stakeholder dialogues as deliberation. Although consensus building seems to be the dominant approach in participatory environmental policy making, this article questions the merits of consensus building and it uses the experience of the Dutch stakeholder dialogue project Climate OptiOns for the Long term (COOL) to explore, in a deliberative design, the shortcomings of a consensus-building approach and how they are possibly dealt with. The article presents the results of two deliberative methods that have been used in the COOL project – the repertory grid analysis and the dialectical approach – to demonstrate how a deliberative design can help policy makers to critically assess arguments in favor of and against a broad range of policy options, and deal with stakeholder conflict in an early phase of the policy process.     

Federal and State Public Forest Administration in the New Millennium: Revisiting Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger

Herbert Kaufman's 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency's change over time, mirroring broad changes in federal public administration. But little is known about state forest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers in 48 state forest agencies, as well as state forest statute analysis. Results indicate systematic state–federal differences in legal constraints, citizen interactions, and the forest administrators themselves. Though these differences foster state administrator decision making based on professional expertise, they do not encourage the incorporation of stakeholder views into agency policy making, nor do they yield a bureaucracy that represents a diverse constituency. State forest administrators perceive substantial external challenges to their professional discretion, but it remains to be seen whether state forest agencies will change to more closely resemble their federal counterpart.     

政策利益相关者行为模式与规则的渐进调整——来自上海医疗卫生改革的经验

试图以上海医疗卫生改革政策制定和重构城市新型医疗服务体系为案例,对政策过程中利益相关者行为模式变化与政策规则调整的渐进主义特征做出解释.通过案例研究和制度分析的方法,本研究发现如何控制利益相关者的阻力行为以及强化决策者的预期信念,对于推动政策变迁的进程至关重要.上海市医疗卫生政策决策者是否能够进一步推进改革政策的进程在很大程度上不仅依赖于其对已有政策的效果(即相关者行为模式的变化与预期的方向相吻合或一致的限度),而且还取决于其对进一步改革政策下利益相关者行为模式变化的预期能力及其一致性的信念.     

Agriculture in Shifting Climates: The Configuration and Ripeness of Problem Understandings in Uganda and Senegal

The international community has advocated the adoption of climate‐smart agriculture (CSA) as lower‐income countries deal with the negative consequences of climate change. Scaling up such policies, practices, and programs successfully will require support from a variety of local stakeholders. Such support requires alignment between CSA solutions and the problem understandings of stakeholders. However, problem understandings can differ across individuals, stakeholder groups, and geographic areas. Consequently, we examine understandings of climate problems and socioeconomic and infrastructure problems related to agriculture among different stakeholder groups in Uganda and Senegal. We operationalized and measured these problem understandings following the detailed guidance of the political will and public will approach for analyzing social change. Semistructured interviews elicited stakeholder‐generated lists of problems for each group. Limited quantification of problem understandings and their relative importance or “ripeness” demonstrates how contexts might shape opportunities for CSA.     

Rent seeking and market competition

This paper emphasizes that political behavior of interest groups is a result of economic calculation, and therefore is affected by the market conditions under which they operate. We develop a two-stage game to link political and market decision-making. We find that if unproductive rent-seekingdirectly contributes to rent-seekers' market operations, then their lobbying efforts will be excessive if the number of outsiders is relatively large, restrained if it is relatively small. If rent-seekingdirectly impairs rent-seekers' market operations, the above described behavior will be reversed. The analysis also reveals that as wasteful rent-seeking may increase rent-seeker's production cost, market competition shifts production from now less efficient rent-seekers to their non-rent-seeking rivals. Welfare gains from this shift may overshadow the direct waste of influence activities.     

“My forest, my kingdom”—Self-referentiality as a strategy in the case of small forest owners coping with government regulations

Social research that informs the implementation of natural resource policies is frequently driven by the logic of the policy system itself. A prevailing concern with achieving policy outcomes can lead, however, to lack of attention to equally important aspects, for example the challenges the policy instruments present to those they are targeting and the consequences this might have for government–citizen relationships. To help guide research into these issues we have developed a situational–interactional approach to interpretive policy analysis that seeks to examine the processes involved when people collectively make sense of government instruments. The theoretical basis is provided to a large extent by Luhmann’s theory of self-referential social systems. In addition, we operationalise the concepts of interactional framing and resemiotisation to capture the active work of the citizens in sense-making processes. We then apply our situational–interactional analysis to small-scale forest ownership in Flanders. Analysis of data from focus groups with forest owners reveals how interactions build on each other in the co-development of particular strategies to cope with government intervention. Finally, we discuss two future directions for research. First, the forest owners find themselves in an inescapable relationship with the government, and feel their autonomy is threatened. Government intervention, therefore, will almost necessarily lead to resistance. Second, forest groups enhance compatibility between the government system and the forest owners, but rather than narrowing the gap between the two worlds they tend to emphasise it.     

From national identity to national security: China's changing responses toward India in 1962 and 1998

This article examines Russian Government policy towards Northeast Asia as an interplay between aspirations, which have been expressed by government leaders, parliamentary figures and prominent academics and journalists and actual results. The article uses three levels, global, regional and bilateral, as a basis for the analysis. In terms of global interests the Russian leadership has sought diplomatic balance against the US, in terms of regional interests the leadership has pursued the aim of economic and security integration while at the bilateral level Russian leadership has sought specific benefits from particular relations with China, Japan and South Korea. The article notes that Russia has obtained certain diplomatic benefits from the relationship with China which serve its interests at the global level. At the regional level policy aspirations have been frustrated by Russia's dire economic condition and the tendency to be treated as an ‘outsider’. Russia has benefited from an improvement of bilateral relations with China, Japan and South Korea but these gains do not translate into an improved position at the regional level yet. while the Russian leadership has been nurturing the development of bilateral relationships problems particular to those relationships hinder its wider regional acceptance.     

国家级新区的时空分布、战略定位与政策特征--基于新区总体方案的政策文本分析

国家级新区承载着服务国家战略、协调区域发展和政策先行先试的重要功能,其发展历程在某种程度上可以说是中国改革开放进程的缩影。对已有国家级新区总体方案文本进行解读、比较、分析和归纳,有利于全面理解国家级新区的战略定位与政策体系,审视其历程,预见其发展。国家级新区设立时间分布的层次性体现了改革从“摸着石头过河”走向全面深化,区域分布的战略性体现了国家区域发展从非均衡发展走向协调发展。国家级新区战略定位的核心要素总体概括为国家战略中心城市、开放型区域经济引擎、改革发展创新试点、高端产业基地、生态示范园区,但是部分新区核心功能定位缺失。国家级新区政策支持体系在很大程度上体现了与新区战略定位、区域分布、发展状况的匹配,但是仍然存在着政策支持与新区实际状况脱节的现象。应当从明晰新区战略定位与核心功能、增强新区政策支持与战略定位的匹配度、促进政策体系与经济社会发展以及国家改革进程动态适应、推动政策试验与学习机制调整转型等方面促进新区的健康、创新发展。     

Analysing Choice in Australian Individual Funding Disability Policies

The Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will allocate funding packages to people with disability who are assessed as needing paid support. The NDIS is an example of individual funding, which is currently not the dominant way of organising disability support in Australia. Individual funding aims to increase opportunities for personal choice. We present a framework for understanding current individual funding policies in each Australian jurisdiction according to two policy dimensions that potentially enable greater personal choice for people with disability: who holds their allocated funds and where support can be purchased. The findings show wide disparities in choice across the country, particularly due to constrained funds and the shortage of support to purchase in regional areas. The analysis demonstrates that NDIS implementation will need to consider that, while individual funding can be empowering for some people with disability, enabling choice can be challenging for administrators and service providers.     

Budget Process Reform: Waiting for Godot

The unraveling of the budget process described by Irene Rubin will have extraordinary consequences for the long-term budget outlook facing the nation. The retirement of the baby boom generation will prompt unprecedented and unsustainable structural fiscal imbalances for decades to come. Early policy action on the spending and revenue sides of the budget is critical to avert fiscal and economic crisis and to phase in changes in order to avoid precipitous and politically perilous actions in the future. Yet such actions constitute what amounts to a politically unnatural act, as one generation of political leaders is asked to make sacrifices in current policies benefiting future generations. Budget process reforms can serve to highlight the salience of these issues and help deal with the significant political hurdles faced by decision makers in making these intertemporal budgeting trade-offs. Ironically, the need for budget rules and processes has intensified as policy makers have become more vulnerable to polarized political parties, ever more watchful media, and mobilized interest groups. Budget rules and processes can help policy makers cope by protecting their ability to make the hard choices that will be necessary. The pressures for budget process reform will accelerate as the current financial crisis increases near-term budgetary pressures, promoting greater alignment between near-term and long-term fiscal problems.     

Corporate social responsibility commitment of small‐to‐medium enterprises and organizational competitive differentiation: Stakeholder pressure,market orientation,and socioeconomic context effects

This paper aims to examine the role of stakeholder pressure and market orientation in explaining the corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments and the organizational competitive differentiation of small and medium enterprises. The socioeconomic context, that is, favorable versus unfavorable, was used as a moderator in above links. The results verify the strong influence of stakeholder's pressure on CSR commitments and the influence of stakeholder pressure and market orientation on organizational competitive differentiation. The socioeconomic context confirms to have a significant moderating role in the hypothesized links. In a favorable context, stakeholder pressure turns out to be relevant in explaining CSR commitments and the organizational competitive differentiation, and CSR commitments itself also have a significantly positive effect on organizational competitive differentiation. In an unfavorable context, market orientation provides a significantly positive support to CSR commitments and organizational competitive differentiation.     

The policy implementation process

There is an implicit assumption in most policy studies that once a policy has been formulated the policy will be implemented. This assumption is invalid for policies formulated in many Third World nations and for types of policies in Western societies. Third World governments tend to formulate broad, sweeping policies, and governmental bureaucracies often lack the capacity for implementation. Interest groups, opposition parties, and affected individuals and groups often attempt to influence the implementation of policy rather than the formulation of policy.A model of the policy implementation process is presented. Policy implementation is seen as a tension generating force in society. Tensions are generated between and within four components of the implementing process: idealized policy, implementing organization, target group, and environmental factors. The tensions result in transaction patterns which may or may not match the expectations of outcome of the policy formulators. The transaction patterns may become crystallized into institutions. Both the transaction patterns and the institutions may generate tensions which, by feedback to the policymakers and implementors, may support or reject further implementation of the policy.By application of the model, policymakers can attempt to minimize disruptive tensions which can result in the failure of policy outcomes to match policy expectations.     

Gauging support for innovative farmland preservation techniques

Given growing concerns about the loss of farmland in the US, governmental and nonprofit groups are seeking innovative, cost-effective methods to preserve lands that will elicit additional landowner participation. This article describes four innovative farmland preservation techniques and derives implications for the policy process through interviews of key stakeholders: program administrators, lawmakers, and landowners. Experts on farmland preservation were also interviewed to ensure stakeholder perceptions substantively inform the policy process. Four techniques were selected for assessment from approximately 30 novel techniques. Reactions to these policy options reflect stakeholder perceptions of a baseline condition; the perceptions help evaluate which options are likely to survive the policy process and what attributes will lead to their acceptability because few of these techniques have yet become policy. Although the stakeholders may have more limited experience with the policy process, land preservation experts validated many of the results and the possibility of success in the “rough and tumble” of the policy process. Of the four investigated techniques rights of first refusal was the most favored, although respondents thought effective implementation would require careful targeting and a dedicated funding source. Experts agreed this technique was most likely to survive in the political arena. Agricultural conservation pension was also viewed favorably, though it was considered administratively difficult to implement. Several experts thought that, though inchoate, the pension plan could potentially be more cost effective than rights of first refusal. Land preservation tontines were perceived to be an interesting concept, but confusing, difficult to implement, and ill-defined. Term conservation easements were viewed unfavorably because they did not preserve land permanently.

Institutional features of congressional decisions: The fight to prohibit smoking on airlines

A pervasive theme of the congressional politics literature is that the committee system is fundamental in determining the policy status quo. Such an assertion hinges crucially upon committees controlling their jurisdictions; congressional delegation is undermined if a committee can assert authority over any issue domain at any time. Yet, representatives may possess an incentive to support a policy proposal that would change the status quo, even if it entails disregarding procedures. Indeed, standard conceptualizations of how members of Congress make their voting choices assume that only the benefits and costs associated with a policy matter, and they do not consider institutional factors such as whether a bill emerged from the correct committee.This analysis examines whether representatives will sacrifice policy interests to preserve institutional features of the legislature. The effort in 1987 to curb smoking on airplanes — which became embroiled in a difficult-to-resolve jurisdictional dispute — serves as a vehicle to analyze how sensitive members are to such features. The results demonstrate that a sizable number put aside their [generally moderate] policy preferences and voted against limits on smoking for institutional reasons. These findings have important implications both for specifying the determinants of policy change and for understanding institutional stability.     

Political instability in Africa: A rent-seeking approach

The foregoing analysis developed the paradigm of self-interest motivated revolutionary activities. In effect, the construct presented differs from the by-product theory developed by Tullock only in its specific modeling of government-created rents as the engine which drives the violent political behavior. The empirical test of the positive relationship between rent creation by the government and the amount of destabilizing political activity yields strong support for the structuring of politically destabilizing activities as rent-seeking in nature. It is the authors' hope that further empirical investigation and a more general and rigorous modeling of revolution as a rent-seeking activity will become an important part of the literature in public choice.Finally, some policy implications should be discussed. The policy emphasis for the governments of Africa countries should be on opening the economy to competition. Instituting programs to make the economic system more accessible to all segments of society would result in reduced opportunities for rent-seeking. Reducing rent-seeking should result in increased political stability. A reduction in government market intervention would also reduce the costs of government regulations on individual entrepreneurs inducing them to increase their participation in economically productive activities. Taken together the result would be increased political stability and higher rates of economic growth.     

Can markets be expected to prevent themselves from self‐destruction?

Even if competitive markets have shown themselves to be the most efficient organizational form for creating economic efficiency, the question of how they can avoid destructive influence from agents with opportunistic motives remains unresolved. Different institutional approaches have argued that to be efficient, markets need to be embedded in a set of formal and informal institutions. Because such institutions will in the long run make all market agents better off, they are labeled efficient institutions. Contrary to what is argued in neoclassical economics, it is unlikely that such institutions will be created endogenously by market agents because the institutions are to be understood as genuine public goods. Moreover, if such institutions have been established, we should expect market agents to face a collective action problem when sustaining them, leading to the destruction of the institutions. The conclusion is that if left to themselves, markets should be understood as inherently self‐destructive.     

Consultation, Constraints and Norms: The Case of Nuclear Waste

The objectives of public consultation can clash with other policy objectives, partly because the norms underpinning public consultation clash with other institutional norms within the policy process. This phenomenon is evident in the case of selecting a site for a low-level nuclear waste disposal facility in Australia. This case shows how the results of consultation processes are moulded by the process design, which in turn is constrained by a range of policy process norms to which governments adhere. The case confirms some recent critiques of participatory practices. It also suggests that reconciling potentially competing policy process norms will be an important exercise in institutional design if elected representatives wish to mitigate citizens' alienation from their governments.