Toward More “Evidence‐Informed” Policy Making?

The quality of public decision making depends significantly on the quality of analysis and advice provided through public organizations. Champions of “evidence‐informed” policy making claim that rigorous evaluation practices can significantly improve attainment of cost‐effective outcomes. After decades of experience, performance information is more sophisticated, but evaluation practices and capabilities vary enormously. Public agencies gather and process vast amounts of information, but there has been little analysis of how this information is actually utilized for policy and program improvement. This article examines how government agencies use evidence about policy and program effectiveness, with attention to four themes: (1) the prospects for improving “evidence‐informed” policy making, (2) the diversity of practices concerning evidence utilization and evaluation across types of public agencies and policy arenas, (3) recent attempts to “institutionalize” evaluation as a core feature of policy development and budget approval, and (4) the relationships between public agencies and nongovernmental sources of expertise.     

Private authority and public policy interactions in global context: Governance spheres for problem solving

Private organizations play a growing role in governing global issues alongside traditional public actors such as states, international organizations, and subnational governments. What do we know about how private authority and public policy interact? What are the implications of answering this question for understanding support for, and effects of, policy development generally? The purpose of this article is to reflect on these questions by introducing, and reviewing, a special issue that challenges explicit claims, and implicit methodologies, that treat private and public governance realms as distinct and/or static. We do so by advancing a theoretical and conceptual framework with which to explore how the contributions to this special issue enhance an understanding about governance interactions across a range of empirical, sectoral, and regional domains. We specifically introduce the concept of governance spheres to capture the proliferation of issue domains denoted by highly fluid interactions across public and private governance boundaries.     

Localism in Practice: Investigating Citizen Participation and Good Governance in Local Government Standards of Conduct

This article examines how, against a background of localism endorsed by the 2010 coalition government in the United Kingdom, a key component of local integrity and governance was fundamentally altered. The Localism Act 2011 abolished the English local integrity framework, which relied on the participation of local citizens in the policy making and implementation of local government standards of conduct. The article utilizes Henrik Bang's concepts of “expert citizen” and “everyday maker” to explore citizen participation in local standards committees. Using a case study approach, the article demonstrates how standards committees shaped processes and practices in the local governance of integrity. The authors argue that standards committees were crucial in promoting local participation and enhancing good governance.     

A Norm of Evidence and Research in Decision‐making (NERD): Scale Development,Reliability, and Validity

Evidence‐based management is on the rise as a strategy to promote more rational decision‐making and effectiveness in governance and public service delivery. To understand how widespread the use of evidence is among managers in various settings, and why evidence is emphasized more in some settings than others, it is necessary to have a good measure of the use of research and evidence in management decision‐making. This article reports on the development and testing of a new multi‐item scale, Norm of Evidence and Research in Decision‐making (NERD), that can be used across organizational and functional settings to assess evidence‐based management practices within an agency. The results indicate that the scale is internally consistent (reliable) and that it correlates with criteria of the underlying construct (valid). The article concludes with a discussion of the potential utility of the scale for advancing research and understanding about the use of evidence by public and nonprofit managers.     

Biasing Politics? Interest Group Participation in EU Policy-Making

This article makes a contribution to research on soft or ‘new’ governance in EU policy making by examining the recent history of telecommunications policy as a case study, a sector hitherto not widely recognised for displaying this kind of governance. Training its focus on the process leading to the agreement of the latest iteration of the EU's Electronic Communications Regulatory Framework, the article finds strong evidence that soft governance has been used within hard governance legislative frameworks primarily as a tool of political compromise, in respect of the classic problem of securing a balance of regulatory power distribution between the national and EU level. Soft governance employed in this way casts doubt over its ability to achieve openness, common purpose, innovativeness and regulatory efficacy.     

Understanding What Shapes a Polycentric Governance System

Recent research has shown that communication networks involving governmental and nongovernmental actors self‐organize based on how risk is perceived. According to the “risk hypothesis,” actors embedded in governance systems in which there is widespread risk of defection tend to form bonding structures, whereas those in low‐risk systems form bridging structures. A parallel strand of research proposes to study complex governance systems composed of multiple actors and the decision‐making forums in which they interact. In this article, the authors couple these research threads and show how bonding and bridging structures form when stakeholders participate in three complex governance systems of varying institutional strength. Findings suggest that the prevalence of one type of structure over the other depends on contextual variables such as the stability of the institutions and the occurrence of environmental focusing events that demand quick policy responses.     

Governance Arrangements for Transboundary Issues: Lessons from the Food Waste Programs of Italian Regions

Focusing on transboundary issues contributes to highlighting how new governance modes can emerge from increasing interdependence and complexity in public policies. This article analyzes food waste as a transboundary issue that cuts across different policy subsystems (PSs), intersects multiple levels of government, and calls into question consolidated policy making for new modes of governance. The analytical framework provides a multidimensional approach and a new typology of governance arrangements to be used in empirical research. Evidence from an Italian case study and an empirical investigation of 20 regional food waste programs shows that regions can adopt different driving ideas and can activate a variety of governance arrangements and differentiated, as well as viable, modes of integration between consolidated PSs. The article argues that different tool mixes combined with different levels of governance complexity may lead to a variety of governance arrangements and a differentiated likelihood of policy integration.     

The twin faces of public sector design

Design thinking has become a popular approach for governments around the world seeking to address complex governance challenges. It offers novel techniques and speaks to broader questions of who governs, how they govern, and the limits of rational instrumentalism in policy making. Juxtaposing design thinking with an older tradition of policy design, this article offers the first critical analysis of the application of design thinking to policy making. It argues that design thinking does not sufficiently account for the political and organizational contexts of policy work. Design thinking also errs in universally privileging one particular policy style over others, and fails to account for the reality of policy mixes. Despite these deficiencies, it is argued that design thinking can inform and enrich governance by helping policy designers produce more adaptable designs, better appreciate the behavioral dynamics of public sector design, and leverage networked approaches to social problem solving.     

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.     

Designing stakeholder consultations: Reinforcing or alleviating bias in the European Union system of governance?

Consultations with stakeholders are a policy instrument widely used by policy makers to design policies and prepare legislative proposals across national and supranational systems of government. The European Union has recently reviewed its stakeholder consultation regime and asked for stakeholders’ policy input. This offers an opportunity to examine empirically stakeholders’ own evaluation of the regime and to ask a fundamental question about its democratic credentials: Do stakeholders recognise the EU consultation regime as reinforcing bias in interest representation by benefiting policy insiders, or conversely as an instrument that alleviates bias in supranational policy making? Building on rational choice institutionalism, this article outlines the potential distributional outcomes of the regime and argues that they are likely to vary along the lines of a classic divide in policy making that opposes policy insiders to outsiders. Two competing narratives are discussed in relation to the expected direction of this variation by focusing on insiders’ incentives to support or oppose the regime. The observable implications are tested empirically on an original dataset containing information about stakeholders’ positions on the evaluation of the regime status quo, its proposed further institutionalisation and their recommendations for change. The findings describe a consultation regime that seems to have created conditions alleviating bias in stakeholders’ participation in supranational policy making. This is evident in the lack of systematic, significant differences between insiders and outsiders in the evaluation of the consultation regime. Where differences do occur, they are consistent with the image of a consultation regime that has not reinforced bias in favour of policy insiders. These actors are found to be more critical of the regime status quo, its institutionalisation and more inclined to recommend policy improvements. This supports an optimistic view over the democratic credentials and legitimacy of the EU consultation regime and outlines an additional scenario under which policy actors that are traditionally associated with exerting more power and influence find themselves stripped of their privileged position in the context of European supranational governance.     

Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context

Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Inspired by Charles Tilly (1984), the authors compare patterns of agency governance in Hong Kong and Ireland, in particular, configurations of assigned decision‐making autonomies and control mechanisms. This comparison shows that in governing their agencies, the elected government of Ireland's parliamentary democracy pays more attention to input (i.e., democratic) legitimacy, while the executive government of Hong Kong's administrative state favors output (i.e., performance) legitimacy. These different forms of autonomy and control mechanism reflect different constitutional models of how political executives acquire and sustain their governing legitimacy.     

Advising Australian Federal Governments: Assessing the Evolving Capacity and Role of the Australian Public Service

Internationally, there have been persistent complaints that the policy capacity of governments has declined. This critique is widely accepted, including in Australia, but for the most part, such claims are assertions, made without reference to empirical evidence and data. This introduction to the Special Issue examining the Policy Advisory Capacity of the Australian Public Service considers these assertions and proposes an approach and methodology to test the discourse of declining policy capacity in Australian federal government. It introduces six case studies from across the spectrum of the Commonwealth government's responsibilities. The Special Issue concludes with an article by Evert Lindquist and Anne Tiernan assessing the ability of the APS to support decision‐making through its policy advising functions and its preparedness to meet the challenges of 21st century governance.     

Managing Incentive Dynamics for Collaborative Governance in Land and Ecological Conservation

Public governance often involves policy tools and stakeholders from multiple sectors. How different policy tools are used may affect the chances that the values and interests of diverse stakeholders can be aligned in mutually supportive ways. Drawing on insights from behavioral and cognitive economics, this article uses the case of land and ecological conservation in Twin Lake, Taiwan, to illustrate how various interactive dynamics—hierarchical exclusion and preemptive effects—may affect efforts in land and ecological conservation involving stakeholders from multiple sectors. Such illustrations may inform the choice and sequencing of policy tools for facilitating collaborative governance.     

Transaction Costs and the Perceived Effectiveness of Complex Institutional Systems

This article studies factors affecting how policy actors perceive the effectiveness of political institutions involved in complex water governance systems. The ecology of games framework argues that participants are more likely to perceive institutions as effective when the benefits of solving collective action problems outweigh the transaction costs of developing political contracts within these institutions. The authors hypothesize that transaction costs are a function of conflict, type of participation, political knowledge, scientific knowledge, and actor resources. Survey results suggest that the importance of these different sources of transaction costs varies across study sites in the Tampa Bay watershed in Florida, the Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta in California, and the Paraná River delta in Argentina. Based on the observed differences, some initial ideas are sketched about the evolution of complex governance systems from fairly simple and informal rules and networks to well‐established tapestries of many formal institutions.     

New Modes of Governance and the Participatory Myth

One of the most common arguments about ‘new governance’ is that it is characterised by heterarchy rather than by hierarchy, creating horizontal modes of governance among a multitude of actors – public and private – involving all relevant stakeholders. Often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, this argument is linked with a normative democratic claim that praises the particular participatory features of ‘new governance’ as compared to ‘old governance’. Using as a case study European occupational health and safety policy, characterised by a shift from ‘old’ to ‘new governance’ since the 1990s, this article warns us that one should be very reluctant in making normative claims on new governance. The analysis of new governance modes such as comitology, agency networking, and social dialogue in this field shows that more horizontal and heterarchical governance does not mean automatically more participatory governance in terms of involving civil society actors and all stakeholders.     

Standing apart and sitting together: Enforcing coalition agreements in multiparty systems

Abstract.  One of the most obvious questions to be asked about coalition governments is what these governments do, but this question has received little systematic attention from coalition researchers. A key element of coalition governance that may inform our empirical knowledge of the actions of government – their origin, organization and results – is coalition agreements. Party leaders negotiating a new government invest time in writing coalition agreements, and they do this because they expect beneficial effects: more efficiency in coalition policy making, and more peace in the government. Written coalition agreements are considered to reduce uncertainty and mistrust, and this is why they have become institutionalized in countries with coalition governments. This article presents an approach to the comparative study of coalition conflicts as they emerge during government formation, the management of this conflict through drafting coalition agreements and the effects of this during coalition life. The article sets out a number of expectations about the effects of types of deals that parties make; and asks what types of conflict management are most effective and what are the conditions for enforcement – structural and strategic? In recent comparative work, the features of coalition agreements and mechanisms of coalition governance in Western Europe have received attention. This article sets out, with empirical material, how further comparative research on coalition governance may be developed.     

Evidence in the Networked Governance of Regional Decarbonisation: A Critical Appraisal

This paper examines the use of evidence in collaborative policy making focusing on the challenges of implementing national decarbonisation policies in regional areas. Its case study of a staged policy intervention to promote the ‘transition to a low carbon economy’ in Victoria's coal‐dependent Latrobe Valley reveals the selective use of evidence to support policy directions that emerged from the interaction of policy knowledge and the political mood. The paper shows how local conditions can be manipulated to enable the production of evidence consistent with the policy objective, but also suggests that despite combining orchestrated evidence with customised forms of networked governance, it is not possible to suppress or deflect unresolved political disagreements.     

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.     

Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy Makers: A Case Study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative

Developing ways to bridge the long‐recognized gap between researchers and policy makers is increasingly important in this age of constrained public resources. As noted by recent scholarship, progress toward evidence‐informed policy making requires both improving the supply of research that is reliable, timely, and relevant to the policy process and promoting demand and support for this information among decision makers. This article presents a case study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative, which is working in a growing number of state and local governments to build systems that bring rigorous evidence on “what works” into their budget processes and to support its use in resource allocation decisions. The initiative's experience to date is promising, although creating lasting and dynamic evidence‐based policy‐making systems requires a long‐term commitment by both researchers and policy makers.