Research capacity building through twinning: experiences from a Danish–Malaysian twinning project

Twinning and its contribution to institutional capacity building in developing countries is the theme of an ongoing debate in Public Administration and Development. Unlike earlier contributions this article focuses on twinning in the context of research capacity enhancement. Using a 3 year Danish–Malaysian twinning research project as case our objective is to evaluate whether the general premises regarding a twinning project, as formulated by the Danish Development Cooperation Agency (Danida), appropriately support the twinning ambitions when the capacities in focus concern research. Besides institutional capacity building, twinning is expected to favour local ownership, involvement of the Danish resource base and continuing of cooperation after termination of funding. From 21 semi‐structured interviews with project participants it was found that although new research capacities had been gained, the prospects on continued cooperation are rather discouraging, both sides pointing to the lack of truly joint research experiences as the main reason. To care for this important incentive, the twinning premises are recommended to be modified to allow for the Northern resource base to advance its own research, and for Southern partner to demonstrate in‐house research capacities. Further, the North–South balance in project management needs to be more equal. This apart, the twinning premises appear sound. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modernising policy for public value: Learning lessons from the management of bushfires

This article highlights the need for an inclusive and integrated policy‐making model by drawing on the experiences of the bushfire fighting efforts of community, business and government bodies during the bushfires that ravaged North‐East Victoria during January and February of 2003 and the delivery of recovery assistance since the fires. These experiences revealed some shortfalls which militated against delivering public value for the communities affected during and after the fires. A policy framework has been developed in light of these shortfalls and is used here to reveal the ways in which bushfire management policy and practice needs to be ‘modernised’ if arrangements in the future are to deliver public value.¹     

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.     

Designing policy resilience: lessons from the Affordable Care Act

Policy Sciences - Public policies are the products of political conflict, constituted by mixes of diverse tools and instruments intended to achieve multiple goals that may change over time and not...     

Understanding policy change through bricolage: The case of Chile's renewable energy policy

Chile is a country where path dependency made energy policy change extremely difficult by international standards. However, the country has recently become a renewable energy poster child thanks to a gradual process of policy change. How was this possible? This article contributes to discussions about policy change driven by ideas and to explaining the puzzling case of Chilean energy policy change. It does so by discussing the mechanism of bricolage—the recombination of old and new ideas by policy entrepreneurs—and its capacity to produce policy change in contexts of high path dependency. The article develops the political manifestations and consequences of bricolage and problematizes how actors continue to contest and change ideas' meaning after they have been institutionalized, a key question when analyzing processes of bricolage. The analysis is based on an array of data sources including interviews with key actors, newspaper notes, and legislative proceedings.     

Winners and losers: Conflict management through strategic policy engagement

In high-conflict policy debates, individuals often make strategic decisions about the ways in which they engage in efforts to influence the direction of the debate. Some individuals act to expand the scope of the conflict, whereas others would prefer to contain the scope of the conflict and maintain status quo. This study empirically examines the relationship between activities of political engagement and goals of conflict expansion or containment in a particular setting in which there are clear “winners” and “losers.” This research first explores the tactics an individual undertakes as either conflict expansion or containment. The patterns uncovered are then tested against sectoral affiliation, to draw conclusions about key factors that explain some variation in policy engagement. Findings confirm that there are predictable patterns to engagement decisions, paving the way for future testing in different policy arrangements.     

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.     

Re-thinking urban citizenship for immigrants from a policy perspective: the case of Barcelona

This article proposes that the role of cities in immigrant integration be reconsidered through the prism of urban citizenship, looking at how local policies co-regulate immigrants’ status, rights and identity. It argues that urban citizenship connects two dominant understandings of citizenship, as city governments are under pressure to reconcile the normative perspective of formal membership of the state with the claims for rights expressed by excluded parts of the urban citizenry. A case study of an inclusive way of regulating citizenship in Barcelona illustrates how a citizenship perspective can cast light on the specific ways in which cities regulate immigrant citizenship in interaction with higher levels of government, and highlights some of the levers cities possess to modify the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion of immigrants locally.     

Technology and rural development strategies in a small farmer organization: lessons from Bolivia for rural policy and practice

At a time when public sector agricultural and rural development administration is changing quite profoundly, and when farmer organizations are being asked to assume more significant roles in rural and agricultural development, in-depth analysis of these organizations is an important input into policy and programmatic discussions. This article is an analysis of one type of small farmer organization, a regional economic organization called El Ceibo in Bolivia. It is one of the most successful cases of small farmer organization around technology generation and product transformation and marketing in the Andes. El Ceibo has been able to open new markets for its products, adapt product transformation techniques appropriate for these markets, and develop technology in support of its marketing strategy. Factors favouring Ceibo's success include long-term financial and technical support from external agencies, isolated location, and a cash/export crop specialization. The impacts of Ceibo are significant, although it is not clear how far Ceibo's activities foster a more broadly based regional development in the Alto Beni area. The article also compares the strategies and impacts of economically based organizations such as El Ceibo with those of more traditional, representative and politically oriented small farmer organizations.     

Fighting corruption in developing countries: Some aspects of policy from lessons from the field

Corruption persists in developing countries despite the proliferation of legal, institutional, and other measures that have been put in place to fight said corruption. The cancer of corruption has therefore spread exponentially in most developing countries with devastating socioeconomic and governance consequences. This practitioner perspective draws on the author's field experience and backed up by the research literature. It identifies, outlines, and discusses some aspects of policy in 3 areas—institution strengthening, the development and implementation of national anticorruption plans/strategies, and political will and leadership—and the conclusions that can be drawn from them for policy development and implementation in the ongoing quest to fight corruption in developing countries.     

Implementing transition management as policy reforms: a case study of the Dutch energy sector

Proposals to alter large-scale socio-technical systems through government actions in order to promote goals such as sustainability are highly uncertain policy projects. What is being proposed is the replacement of specific elements of existing policy ‘mixes’—the goals and means—by others, in the expectation of avoiding counterproductive or sub-optimal policy outcomes. While laudable, such efforts are fraught with risks; including the possibility of the creation of sub-optimal policy mixes or of failed reform efforts with resulting poor outcomes. This article develops a model and typology of policy regime change processes and outcomes following Thelen and others in arguing that complex policy mixes typically emerge through one or more of four processes, ‘drift’, ‘conversion’, ‘layering’ and ‘replacement’, and that the expected outcomes of these different processes in terms of their ability to meet initial expectations are linked to the manner in which policy goals and means are (or are not) combined in a consistent, coherent and congruent fashion. This propensity is illustrated through examination of the case of energy transition management as practiced in the Netherlands.     

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.     

History lessons for today's housing policy: the politics of low-income housing

History offers valuable lessons to housing policymakers. For those who would devise new low-income housing programs during today's trying economic circumstances, it is helpful to study the strategies that succeeded in achieving low-income housing programs in past difficult times. This article, History Lessons for Today's Housing Policy, examines the political processes that led to the adoption of new low-income housing policies during four political crises. The four crises were the Great Depression of the 1930s, the post-World War II housing shortage, the urban crisis of the 1960s, and the policy crisis of the 1970s. Among other history lessons, the article reveals that well-organized political support, especially from large institutions, is crucial to achieving distinctly different new programs; that decentralized programs are more politically resilient than centralized programs; that programs that appeal to the nation's broad middle-class are most popular; and that policy research is valuable but that politics trumps research.     

Narrative analysis for the policy analyst: A case study of the 1980–1982 medfly controversy in California

Narrative policy analysis provides a way of analyzing those highly uncertain and complex policy issues whose truth-value cannot be ascertained and about which the only thing practicing policy analysts know are the stories policymakers use in articulating these issues. One extremely well-documented controversy, the 1980-82 California Medfly Crisis, illustrates how a comparison and analysis of the structure of the dominant stories in that controversy reduces some of its underlying uncertainty. By focusing on the differential risk perceptions reflected in the stories, narrative policy analysis identifies an important area in which conventional policy analysis could have contributed to the controversy's resolution.     

Living in a warmer world: Challenges for policy analysis and management

Human activities are causing a steady increase in the concentration of infrared absorbing trace gases in the atmosphere. The buildup of these gases is causing a global warming that will dramatically alter regional climate patterns. Increases in sea level, changes in the patterns of winds and ocean currents, alterations in the magnitude and distribution of rainfall which occur as a result of global warming will have major economic and ecological consequencws. The timing and severity of these impacts will be determined in large measure by policy choices made in the near future and implemented over the next several decasdes.     

Expanding the scope and content of morality policy research: lessons from Moral Foundations Theory

Scholars have not precisely defined morality policy, and Smith (Policy Stud J 30(3):379–395, 2002) urged an empirical taxonomy be used to identify those policies. We argue that Moral Foundations Theory offers a methodology for empirically identifying issues with moral content. We inventory 15 issues in parliamentary studies of “conscience” voting, 14 morality policies in western democracies compiled by Studlar (in: Mooney (ed) The public clash of private values: the politics of morality policy, Chatham House Publishers, New York, 2001), and then survey MFT empirical studies to identify 22 issues with moral content. Based on this universe of 37 issues, three journals are content analyzed to determine the coverage given them and to outline productive lines for future research.     

Looking through a policy window with tinted glasses: Setting the agenda for U.S. AI policy

The policy agenda is currently being established for artificial intelligence (AI), a domain marked by complex and sweeping implications for economic transformation tempered by concerns about social and ethical risks. This article reviews the United States national AI policy strategy through extensive qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 63 strategic AI policy documents curated by the federal government between 2016 and 2020. Drawing on a prominent theory of agenda setting, the Multiple Streams Framework, and in light of competing paradigms of technology policy, this article reviews how the U.S. government understands the key policy problems, solutions, and issue frames associated with AI. Findings indicate minimal attention to focusing events or problem indicators emphasizing social and ethical concerns, as opposed to economic and geopolitical ones. Further, broad statements noting ethical dimensions of AI often fail to translate into specific policy solutions, which may be explained by a lack of technical feasibility or value acceptability of ethics-related policy solutions, along with institutional constraints for agencies in specific policy sectors. Finally, despite widespread calls for increased public participation, proposed solutions remain expert dominated. Overall, while the emerging U.S. AI policy agenda reflects a striking level of attention to ethics—a promising development for policy stakeholders invested in AI ethics and more socially oriented approaches to technology governance—this success is only partial and is ultimately layered into a traditional strategic approach to innovation policy.