Orchestrating sustainability: The case of European Union biofuel governance

This article provides an empirical analysis of orchestration – that is, the initiation, support, and embracement of private governance arrangements through public regulators – in the field of European Union biofuel governance. It examines the emerging sustainability regime and shows that orchestration has been extensively practiced. Regulators in the European Union have used a range of directive and facilitative measures to initiate and support private biofuel certification schemes and to incorporate them in their regulatory frameworks. This has given rise to a hybrid regime in which public and private approaches are closely intertwined. Discussing the benefits and complications of engaging with private biofuel sustainability governance, the article's findings point to a partial failure of orchestration in this policy area.     

Three Decades of Policy Layering and Politically Sustainable Reform in the European Union's Agricultural Policy

The study of policy reform has tended to focus on single‐stage reforms taking place over a relatively short period. Recent research has drawn attention to gradual policy changes unfolding over extended periods. One strategy of gradual change is layering, in which new policy dimensions are introduced by adding new policy instruments or by redesigning existing ones to address new concerns. The limited research on single‐stage policy reforms highlights that these may not endure in the postenactment phase when circumstances change. We argue that gradual policy layering may create sustainability dynamics that can result in lasting reform trajectories. The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has changed substantially over the last three decades in response to emerging policy concerns by adding new layers. This succession of reforms proved durable and resilient to reversal in the lead‐up to the 2013 CAP reform when institutional and political circumstances changed.     

Valence,Policy Ideas,and the Rise of Sustainability

This article introduces to policy studies the concept of valence, which we define as the emotional quality of an idea that makes it more or less attractive. We argue that valence explains why some ideas are more successful than others, sometimes gaining paradigmatic status. A policy idea is attractive when its valence matches the mood of a target population. Skilled policy entrepreneurs use ideas with high valence to frame policy issues and generate support for their policy proposals. The usefulness of the concept of valence is illustrated with the case of sustainability, an idea that has expanded from the realm of environmental policy to dominate discussions in such diverse policy areas as pension reform, public finance, labor markets, and energy security. As the valence of sustainability has increased, policy entrepreneurs have used the idea to reframe problems in these various policy areas and promote reforms.     

Australia's Indicator-Based Sustainability Assessments and Public Policy

Operationalising sustainability has proven difficult because the concept is ambiguous and fraught with contradictions. In response, sustainability indicator systems to characterise and measure sustainable development have been developed globally. The focus of this article is on how indicators function as an instrument of policy to enhance achievement of environmental and sustainability policy in Australia at national scale. In theory, by integrating information from the environmental, social and economic domains and then feeding knowledge to a wide range of policy sectors, sustainability indicator systems may facilitate cross-agency and -portfolio connectivity. Key characteristics of the various sustainability indicator systems developed to inform policy at the national level are described, noting the diverse approaches to indicator development in Australia. The structural relevance of indicator systems to the mechanisms of policy and institutions in Australia is discussed, and corresponding issues of institutional fit are analysed .     

The Third Sector and Residential Care for the Elderly in China's Transitional Welfare Economy

This article examines third‐sector welfare homes for Chinese elderly and argues that four factors affect their survival and development prospects: the extent care establishments meet the needs of their users; how successfully they manage their human resources; whether they ensure their financial sustainability; and whether they satisfy the expectations of their investors. The data reveal that while care homes generally serve their customers well and maintain staff satisfaction, they encounter difficulties in financing and service operation that pose grave challenges to their investors. The resulting problems cast a shadow over the future prospects of old‐age care homes and raise questions concerning the state's non‐profit policy.     

New Governance,Green Planning and Sustainability: Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together1

Bridgman and Davis (2000:91) have argued that ‘ideally government will have a well developed and widely distributed policy framework, setting out economic, social and environmental objectives’. This article compares and evaluates two such frameworks or plans, Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together, in terms of their potential to promote sustainability. It argues that they are very different exercises in new governance, aimed at reconnecting with community priorities and at redirecting macro‐policy setting away from a preoccupation with economic priorities, respectively. Nevertheless, both plans have the capacity to ‘green’ state planning, in Tasmania in terms of more purposeful benchmarks, and in Victoria in terms of enhanced sustainability emphasis in the macro‐policy setting. The article encounters tensions in its review of the plans between deliberation and planning, policy empowerment and policy progress, and policy institutionalisation and politicisation as means of achieving policy change. It finds that whilst Tasmania and Victoria are re‐engaged states that are reinventing state policy, as yet they are failing to meet the governance challenges of sustainability.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

The Power of Money: Global Capital and Policy Choices in Developing Countries

Extant studies of the impact that international phenomena have on policy choices, and those focused on the political economy of exchange-rate regimes in particular, are incomplete because they do not consider the effect that reliance on global capital has on the policy preferences of domestic groups. Consequently, they cannot explain why some newly emerging market countries pursue fixed exchange regimes under political and economic conditions—such as recently completed elections, uncompetitive export sectors, and poor national economic performance—in which others have altered their policies. I argue that reliance on different types of foreign capital generates distinct capital-specific policy preferences. Furthermore, rather than simply mimicking the preferences of foreign investors, domestic groups are likely to promote policies that reduce their capital-specific risks and vulnerabilities. Panel logit models of exchange-rate regimes in emerging market countries from 1973 through 2000 demonstrate that higher levels of democracy bolster these effects .     

Community in Public Policy: Fad or Foundation?

Both internationally and within Australia public policy is experiencing a rush back to the idea of community. After 15 years of discourse about the new public management and economic rationalism a much older discourse is slipping back into public policy. It is a normative discourse about changing relations between state democracy, market capitalism and civil society in which the idea of community is a central ‘new’ relation used to manage both state and market failures. Already new policy tools emerging from this discourse can be seen with innovations based on concepts such as partnerships, place management, and a raft of community consultation mechanisms. Much of the rhetoric about community as a new foundation for public policy, however, remains confused. The result is a muddle of ideas in which this potentially useful concept is in danger of becoming just another public policy reform fad. This article looks at what policy makers are saying about community, identifies problems in this current usage and offers ways of thinking about community with a view to establishing its policy utility.     

Experimentation in policy design: insights from the building sector

The current article questions how experimentation in policy design plays out in practice. In particular, it is interested in understanding how the content and process of policy-design experiments affect their outcomes. The article does so by building on an original study into 31 real-world examples of experimentation in policy design in the building sector in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. All examples aim to improve the environmental sustainability of the building sector. The article finds that these 31 examples have attracted moderate to substantial numbers of participants (policy outcome HO.i), but have not achieved substantial numbers of buildings built or retrofitted with high levels of sustainability (policy outcome HO.ii). By carefully unpacking these policy designs into a number of key characteristics, it finds that this mismatch between the two outcomes may partly be explained by flawed policy-design processes. The article concludes with the main lessons learnt and provides some suggestions on how to improve experimentation in policy design.     

AGENDA-SETTING BY STATE LEGISLATIVE BLACK CAUCUSES: POLICY PRIORITIES AND FACTORS OF SUCCESS

As their representation in legislative chambers has increased, black state legislators have organized into caucuses to maximize their policy influence. These caucuses act as policy entrepreneurs in initiating and advancing minority policy goals. The North Carolina Legislative Black Caucus is il- lustrative of an emerging force in half the states in moving minority policy issues from the systemic to the formal legislative agenda. Using the 1987 North Carolina Legislative Black Caucus as the research setting, supple- mented with selective data on other state caucuses, this article offers insights into the types of policy initiatives state legislative black caucuses advance. Also, situational and political factors that may foster successful agenda-setting are explored.     

What future for the policy sciences?

The term “policy sciences” refers both to a distinctive tradition within the policy movement and to the broader policy movement itself. While the generic use of this term is sure to persist, the community of policy scientists trained in the tradition founded by Harold Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal faces challenges to its sustainability as a distinctive tradition of the policy movement. To motivate open discussion and debate, this essay follows the logic of a problem-oriented analysis, and also includes personal reflections and anecdote, with the following objectives: It suggests that the policy sciences tradition faces challenges to its sustainability because of the simple arithmetic of generational turnover in university faculty. It explores six factors internal and external to the policy sciences community militating against sustainability. The essay then critiques three different roles the policy scientist might play in contemporary academia, and concludes with a discussion of alternatives that might enhance the sustainability of the policy sciences tradition, should sustainability indeed be a desired outcome.     

UNEMPLOYMENT POLICY: A CASE STUDY IN AGENDA MANAGEMENT

Abstract: Agenda management is a process in which governments attempt to prevent policy issues from emerging, to influence the public perception of issues and to shape or delete issues on the current agenda of policy making. Numerous techniques are available and governments may often resort to them for political purposes. Unemployment policy from 1976–82 provides a case study for assessing the significance of agenda management in the policy process. The many initiatives and announcements of the government and their presentation in the media are described. It is concluded that the government often appeared to employ agenda management techniques such as tokenism, symbolic reassurance, postponement and the selective presentation of social indicators. It is noted that the government's handling of the issue followed an annual cycle, superimposed on which was an electoral cycle. Its attempts to influence public perceptions of the issue had direct links with the nature of policy outputs.     

Emerging donors and new contests over aid policy in Pacific Asia

Abstract

The rise of emerging donors has unleashed new political contests over aid policy, some of which have occurred at the domestic level. This article locates the special edition's analysis of these contests within the existing literature on emerging donors, draws out the key findings of included papers, and considers their implications for policy. It argues that domestic contests have had significant influence over aid policy in both emerging and established donors, the agendas at work have varied from case to case reflecting countries' different political economies, and aid policies represent a ‘work-in-progress’ rather than an expression of immutable models.     

Regions with regionalism? The rescaling of interest groups in six European states

In many European countries a regional or meso level of government has emerged, with significant policy responsibilities. It has been suggested that the representation of social and economic interests has not followed, so that policy communities remain state‐wide, giving ‘regions without regionalism’. This study of interest groups in six European states examines their adaptation to devolution, focusing on organisation, cognitive change and relationships. It finds there has been a regionalisation of interest representation, but it is uneven, depending on the strength of regional government, territorial identities and the interests of social actors. Business, trades unions, farmer organisations and environmental groups are all cross‐pressured on the regional question. The region is emerging in some cases as a site of interest intermediation. Territorial policy communities are emerging in some regions, but in most cases these supplement, rather than replace, state‐wide policy communities.     

Myth and American politics

Accumulating tensions call into question the sustainability of the American political system, which ultimately depends on public faith in the justifying myth. This article takes sustainability as a policy problem, and attempts to reconstruct the significance of recent, scattered events in American politics from the standpoint of central theory in the policy sciences. The resulting construct emphasizes the significance of intellectuals in the decision processes of modern society and the continuing task of the policy sciences.     

Negotiating a Place for ‘Sustainability’ Policies in Municipal Planning and Governance: The Role of Scalar Discourses and Practices

The widespread adoption of sustainability agendas in urban contexts has opened a now well-recognised ‘policy space’ linking sustainability principles with urban development and local politics. Central to these enquiries is a focus on the need to spatialise debates on sustainable urban development by examining the scales at which locally grounded tensions are resolved. Using a case study set in the City of Vancouver, Canada, this article shows how the adoption of one specific sustainability policy—food policy—was enabled by specific reframings of the scale at which it was assumed to be most appropriately situated, and shows how new strategies for co-ordinating governance at and between scales were deployed.     

Sustainability Reporting by Australian Universities

There is continuing debate about the consequences of climate change and an increasing emphasis placed on the disclosure of social and environmental indicators by organisations. Universities have been traditionally known as places where intellectual inquiry and advances in knowledge are paramount. Therefore, there is an expectation that universities would place much emphasis on sustainability reporting to fulfil the needs of a range of stakeholders. The objective of this study is to investigate the nature and extent of sustainability disclosures reported by Australian universities in stand‐alone sustainability reports. The findings suggest significant differences in the nature and extent of sustainability disclosures. This study has implications for policy‐makers and university administrators and is a call to senior university leaders to take up the challenge and contribute to the global conversation with regard to sustainability reporting.     

Between Two Worlds: Indigenous Leaders Exercising Influence and Working across Boundaries

Although there has been considerable commentary and debate relating to Indigenous political leadership, less attention has been given to the emergence of Indigenous leaders working to improve Indigenous prospects from within the worlds of community development, management, and administration. Based on in‐depth interviews with a cohort of emerging Indigenous leaders in these situations, we found that these leaders are producing their own style of leadership, drawing on their Indigenous identity as a resource, while negotiating the policy and other demands of white Australia. The style of leadership that is emerging has its own distinctive attributes, being more relationally based than is the norm. We suggest that these differences have an important cultural dimension, but also relate to the strategic and tactical challenges of managing ‘two‐ways’. We conclude that these characteristics may be difficult to recognise and reward in organisations where leadership is conceptualised in more instrumental terms.