Beyond (and Within) City Limits: Climate Policy in an Intergovernmental System

This analysis explores the role of city‐level and state‐level variables to explain why some cities make more progress on climate‐related policy implementation than others. Using multilevel modeling, we find little support for the influence of state factors on local government leadership among the 812 cities in the dataset, but local government institutional and community variables are strongly associated with climate policy initiatives. We argue for a rethinking of the notion of the limited and constrained city and suggest that, in the realm of climate protection and environmental policy, cities are leading a bottom‐up federalism. Moreover, where some political analysts and scholars have argued that climate protection and environmental policies may not be economically rational for cities to pursue, we theorize that cities are acting locally to further their self‐interest in an increasingly global economy.     

Who teaches and who learns? Policy learning through the C40 cities climate network

This study examines the network structure of policy learning in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, which is a network of the world??s largest cities committed to tackling climate change issues. Among forty members and nineteen affiliate members, we ask the question with whom do cities learn and why? How are policy-learning relationships associated with cities?? multi-stakeholder governing body, policy performance, and cultural similarities? While studies on learning have analyzed conditions facilitating learning, quantitative studies of local government learning in global networks are rare. To facilitate the investigation into learning, we conceptualize learning as a process comprising information seeking, adoption and policy change, and focus on information seeking as the foundation step in the learning process. This social network analysis using the exponential random graph model reveals the cities that seek information and those that are information sources are different subgroups. Furthermore, analysis of nodal attributes suggests that transmunicipal learning in the C40 network is facilitated by the presence of a multi-stakeholder governing body; homophily of culture (language and regional proximity); and higher level of climate change policy performance. Creating a multi-stakeholder governing body could ensure participatory representativeness from citizens and relevant stakeholders to enhance climate change policy engagement and decision making as well as policy learning.     

An Examination of Local Climate Change Policies in the Great Plains

As the United States struggles with national solutions to address climate change, state and local governments have become leaders in both mitigation and adaptation policy. Although a significant and growing body of research targets these policies, most studies have assumed common factors motivating both adaptation and mitigation policy adoption. There remains a need for more research on cities of all sizes, their adoption of specific local policies, the factors motivating those choices, and whether the influences for mitigation differ from those that motivate adaptation. The paper uses data from a new survey of over 200 local governments in eleven states of the Great Plains region, including measures distinguishing between mitigation and adaptation policies. These data are employed to test the relative influence of factors from three areas: the policy environment, the attitudes of governmental actors, and community atmosphere, in explaining observed variation in the adoption of climate change policies.     

Innovative Leadership and Policy Change: Lessons From Thatcher

This article employs the concept of Innovative Leadership to challenge the literature on policy change, particularly its skepticism about executive-led policy innovation. It examines evidence of innovative leadership under the Thatcher governments in the face of the social, governmental, and economic and secular factors normally believed to structure policy choice in democracies. On the basis of this it considers the opportunities/resources available to executives wishing to pursue innovative leadership. The conclusions are qualified by reference to system-specific and environmental factors which may circumscribe Innovative Leadership.     

Water quality modeling for environmental management: Lessons from the policy sciences

Models are used in many policy arenas to predict the future consequences of current decisions. A model is typically viewed as a rational, objective means of processing complex information to predict future conditions. With respect to socioeconomic modeling, policy scientists have found that models frequently do not live up to these promises – they often incorporate the modelers' biases, are difficult for decision makers to use, and do a poor job of point predictions. While awareness of these characteristics of socioeconomic models has increased, less attention has been paid to such factors in environmental modeling. This paper explores the implications of policy scientists' observations about socioeconomic models for the use of water quality models environmental decision making. For example, the relatively simple task of modeling for an estuarine waste load allocation decision incorporates judgment in model choice, calibration, and use. More complex watershed models involve even more choices that have implications for decision making. Thus, environmental models are not strictly technical inputs to the policy process. Model users, regulators, and the public should be aware of the judgments and uncertainties involved in surface water quality modeling so that model results are used appropriately in the decision-making process.     

Regional Governance and Institutional Collective Action for Environmental Sustainability

This research investigates why various mechanisms of cooperation among local authorities are chosen using the theoretical lens of institutional collective action (ICA). The article analyzes 564 local collaboration agreements drawn from four urban regions of China to explain the choices of environmental collaboration agreements among cities. Examples of three forms of interlocal agreements—informal, formal, and imposed agreements—are analyzed. Ordinal logistic regressions are estimated to test which factors predicted by the ICA framework influence the form of collaboration selected. The results indicate that the involvement of national or provincial government, the number of policy actors involved, heterogeneity of economic conditions, and differences in administrative level among the actors involved influence how collaboration agreements are structured. Examining the choice of agreement type contributes to the understanding of interlocal collaboration and provides practical insights for public managers to structure interlocal collaboration.     

Command without control: The case of China's environmental target system

In the existing literature there is general agreement that the effectiveness and efficiency of command and control instruments versus market‐based instruments is highly context specific. A country's particular regulatory environment and state capacity, as well as the features of given environmental problems, play an important role in ascertaining what the “right” set of policy instruments for environmental management might be. This article examines how command and control instruments are used as an environmental enforcement mechanism in China's authoritarian state. Based on extensive fieldwork, this paper shows that the reliance on binding environmental targets as the main domestic policy instrument in China has generated numerous undesirable consequences. While China's target‐based approach to implementation has incentivized local officials to strictly enforce environmental mandates, there are numerous shortcomings in the system. In particular, target rigidity, cyclical behaviour, poor data quality, and the absence of an independent monitoring agency have generated adverse effects and contribute to a yawning gap between regulatory goals and outcomes. The paper concludes that binding environmental targets as the main command–control instrument in China can be more accurately described as “command without control” as the target‐setting central government does not exercise a high degree of control over implementation and monitoring processes. But command and control instruments can be suited for managing “first‐generation” environmental problems and addressing environmental issues that have easily identifiable pollution sources and which are easy to verify.     

Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Challenging the Property Rights Paradigm in Botswana

Recent work in international studies and comparative politics scrutinizes the relative importance of ideas, interests, and institutions as sources of policy change. A growing body of scholarship identifies ideas as the main causal factors, influencing perceived interests as well as perceived policy options. Others contend that policies can best be understood as products of institutions. Neither explanation can account for both policy choice by politicians and the implementation strategies of administrators. In Botswana, the use of professional criteria for hiring and advancement encourages adherence to international professional norms within the bureaucracy, but electoral competition gives politicians more reason to be attentive to local political concerns. The institutions that define relations of authority among actors with different motivations shape the outcomes of policy choice and implementation. Institutions influence the attentiveness of policy-makers to ideas when making decisions, the degree of attention particular policy-makers give to ideas from particular sources, and the degree of acceptance that ideas must achieve to affect policy. Better evaluations of political development can be achieved through attentiveness to the mix of actors involved in policy decisions, the diversity of institutions and ideas that affect their policy preferences, and the relations of authority that shape their relative influence over policy choice and implementation.     

Water Pollution Control In Democratic Societies: A Cross-National Analysis Of Sources Of Public Beliefs In In Japan And The United States

Postindustrial society seems to bring with it an inevitable heightening of official and public concern with environmental pollution. In light of this fact it becomes important to understand the dynamics by which public opinion is formulated in this area of public policy. What factors are associated with citizens placing concern for environmental pollution above other public policy concerns? What individual characteristics are associ- ated with the development of the view that government ought to take direct action to prevent or deal with environmental pollution? Are such factors common to postindustrial democratic societies generally? The study reported here identifies the similarities and differences in the patterns and correlates of pollution relevant beliefs and behavior in Japan (in the cities of Llishima, Fuji and Numazu in Shizuoka Prefecture] and the United States (Spokane City and County, Washington State). A comparative study of pollution policy can be especially instructive inasmuch as unique cultural, economic, historical and social patterns may generate distinctive citizen conceptions of desired policy outcomes and means to achieve them.     

The birth,life, and death of policy instruments: 35 years of EU gender equality policy programmes

Policy instruments research is an essential part of studying European Union governance. A growing interest in processes of (de-)legalisation and patterns of instrument choice requires a more process- and context-oriented analysis of the EU’s instrument selection. Using a political sociology approach, the article analyses patterns of instrument choice in soft law policy programmes, by examining the life cycle of EU gender equality policy programmes from 1982 to the present day. Gender equality policy programmes offer an in-depth understanding of how the Commission upgrades and downgrades policy instruments. The analysis indicates that patterns of policy instrument choice are not necessarily inflexible once a policy instrument is selected. Instead, patterns vary while the instrument is (de-)legalised. Investigating gender equality policy programmes provides explanations for the shifts in the use of legislative instruments and their limitations.     

Punctuating Which Equilibrium? Understanding Thermostatic Policy Dynamics in Pacific Northwest Forestry

A key theme among seminal contributions to policy studies, including Baumgartner and Jones (1993; 2002) , Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) , and Hall (1989; 1993) , is that "external perturbations" outside of the policy subsystem, characterized by some type of societal upheaval, are critical for explaining the development of profound and durable policy changes which are otherwise prevented by institutional stability. We argue that these assumptions, while useful for assessing many cases of policy change, do not adequately capture historical patterns of forest policy development in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Differences in policy development concerning state and federal regulation of private and public forest lands governing the same problem, region, and population challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy on policy dynamics. To address this puzzle, we revisit and expand existing taxonomies identifying the levels and processes of change that policies undergo. This exercise reveals the existence of a "thermostatic" institutional setting governing policy development on federal lands that was absent in the institutions governing private lands. This thermostatic institutional arrangement contained durable policy objectives that required policy settings to undergo major change in order to maintain the institution's defining characteristics. Policy scientists need to distinguish such "hard institutions" that necessitate paradigmatic changes in policy settings from those that do not permit them.     

Analytics and Beliefs: Competing Explanations for Defining Problems and Choosing Allies and Opponents in Collaborative Environmental Management

The rationale for collaborative environmental management often hinges on two factors: first, specialized training creates biased analytics that require multidisciplinary approaches to solve policy problems; second, normative beliefs among competing actors must be included in policy making to give the process legitimacy and to decide trans‐scientific problems. These two factors are tested as drivers of conflict in an analysis of 76 watershed partnerships. The authors find that analytical bias is a secondary factor to normative beliefs; that depicting the primary driver of conflict in collaborative environmental management as between experts and nonexperts is inaccurate; that compared to the “life” and “physical” sciences, the social sciences and liberal arts have a stronger impact on beliefs and choice of allies and opponents; and that multiple measures are needed to capture the effect of analytical biases. The essay offers lessons for public administrators and highlights the limitations and generalizations of other governing approaches.     

Covenant of Mayors: Reasons for Being an Environmentally and Energy Friendly Municipality

The Covenant of Mayors (CM) is the mainstream European movement involving local authorities who voluntarily commit to increase energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources within their territories with the aim of reducing CO₂ emissions and meet the European Union objectives by 2020. One country that has a greater number of signatories of this agreement is Spain. This article analyzes which factors influence the decision of Spanish local authorities to join the ever‐growing movement. An empirical model is formulated to describe the behavior of Spanish local governments, this being a binary choice model which is a function of various political, economic, and technical factors. Among the prominent factors that influence this decision are population, availability of renewable energy, fiscal and environmental stress, citizens’ political preference, the contagion effect of neighboring municipalities, the existence of covenant coordinators, and finally, economic motivations.     

Performance targets,path dependence,and policy adoption: evidence from the adoption of pollutant emission control policies in Chinese provinces

Abstract

Although performance targets imposed by high levels of governments are an important vertical result-oriented influence on local governments’ policy adoption, no studies have examined the impacts of performance targets on policy processes. Using the adoption of atmospheric pollutant emission standards by Chinese provinces in the 2000 to 2015 period, this study runs spatial autoregression models to investigate the effects of mandatory performance targets on environmental policy adoption processes in China. The results show that top-down performance targets can drive the adoption of atmospheric pollutant emission standards in Chinese provinces. Furthermore, the influence of vertical environmental performance targets on the adoption of local atmospheric pollutant emission standards is stronger in Chinese provinces that have adopted more similar standards in the previous period. The results show that top-down performance management shapes the policy adoption processes and policy adoption of Chinese provinces under vertical result-oriented performance target pressure is path-dependent.     

The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance on Public Policy

What are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making? This study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice. Previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts. The findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems. Objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts; thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem. The result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions.     

Governance modes,policy regimes and operational plans: A multi-level nested model of policy instrument choice and policy design

Policy goals and means exist at different levels of abstraction and application and policies can be seen to be comprised of a number of components or elements, not all of which are as amenable to (re)design as others. Defining and thinking about polices and policy-making in this way is very useful because it highlights how policy design is all about the effort to match goals and instruments both within and across categories. That is, successful policy design requires (1) that policy aims, objectives, and targets be coherent; (2) that implementation preferences, policy tools and tool calibrations should also be consistent; and (3) that policy aims and implementation preferences; policy objectives, and policy tools; and policy targets and tool calibrations, should also be congruent and convergent. Policy instrument choices can thus be seen to result from a nested or embedded relationship within a larger framework of established governance modes and policy regime logics. In this contextual model, the range of choices left at the level of concrete targeted policy instrument calibrations—the typical subject of policy tool analysis—is restricted by the kinds of decisions made about policy objectives and the appropriate tools to attain them, and both of these, in turn, by the kind of choices made at the highest level setting out general policy aims and implementation preferences.

Using Local Government Corporate Plans in Victoria

The Victorian state government has required local governments to publish their corporate plans and this paper explores the information provided by their corporate plans. These plans demonstrate diversity in the form and content, but several themes emerge. First, despite the purpose of corporate plans being to demonstrate accountability to the local community, the lack of performance targets reduces the usefulness of these plans for accountability purposes. It also explores objectives which are of major importance to the sector, such as local economic development, which is an issue difficult to control in the local area, being largely determined by federal and state policy. Other important objectives include financial and asset management together with emphases on the local community and accountability, issues which were the drivers of the state government's reform agenda. This article assists those who want to enhance the practice of corporate (strategic) planning in local government.     

Introduction: Understanding Public Policy through Its Instruments—From the Nature of Instruments to the Sociology of Public Policy Instrumentation

Public policy instrumentation and its choice of tools and modes of operation are treated either as a kind of evidence (governing means making regulations, taxing, entering into contracts, communicating, etc.) or as if the questions it raises (the properties of instruments, justifications for choosing them, their applicability, etc.) are part of a rationality of methods without any autonomous meaning. This paper aims to explain the significance of a political sociology approach to public policy instruments in accounting for processes of public policy change: (1) public policy instrumentation is a major issue in public policy, since it reveals a (fairly explicit) theorization of the relationship between the governing and the governed: every instrument constitutes a condensed form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it; and (2) instruments at work are not neutral devices: they produce specific effects, independently of the objective pursued (the aims ascribed to them), which structure public policy according to their own logic.     

Globalization and the Choice of Governing Instruments: The Direct,Indirect, and Opportunity Effects of Internationalization

We propose to shed light on the effect of globalization on the choice of policy tools. Contrary to what is commonly believed, we find that the source of many of the changes in the patterns of instrument choice found in contemporary society lies in the domestic rather than the international arena. To the extent that global factors have had an effect, it is through what we term indirect and opportunity effects rather than direct ones. Further, we argue that traditional command and control instruments are not antithetical to globalization as is evident in their continued, and at times even increasing, use in a variety of settings. We conclude that what is important for policymakers is to ensure that their choice of instruments is consistent with traditional sectoral and national policy styles, with or without globalization.