No Home for Housing: The Situation of the Commonwealth's Housing Policy Advisory Function

The Commonwealth's policy capacity with regard to housing policy and provision has been erratic and patchy. Partly this is because housing was not traditionally a formal Commonwealth responsibility but something in which Commonwealth governments episodically intervened, and partly it was because Commonwealth ministers often did not exercise demand for policy advice in this area. When policy capacity was exercised it tended to define housing narrowly as a welfare initiative, thereby limiting its conception and excluding other important questions and problems involved with housing as a policy domain. This trajectory meant that the advisory deficiencies of the Commonwealth were often exposed at exactly those times when they were most needed. It also meant that the Commonwealth lacked the detailed knowledge and understanding of housing issues when it was called upon to deliver various programs. The article argues that the Commonwealth needs to adopt a more strategic housing policy that addresses longer term needs as well as the economic, social and environmental consequences of its housing policy.     

The politics of policy diffusion

This article discusses the recent literature on policy diffusion and puts forward a new articulation of its political dimensions. Policy diffusion means that policies in one unit (country, state, city, etc.) are influenced by the policies of other units. The diffusion literature conceptualises these interdependencies with four mechanisms: learning, competition, coercion and emulation. The article identifies a model of diffusion that is dominant in the diffusion literature. According to this model, policies spread because decision makers evaluate the policy implications of the actions of other units. It is argued that the role of politics remains in the background in this model, and the article shows how going beyond a narrow focus on policy adoptions helps us to consider the politics of policy diffusion more explicitly.     

Rural and Regional Policy: A Case of Punctuated Incrementalism?

The rural policy environment has many of the conditions that might suggest a tendency towards punctuated equilibrium. The Commonwealth has little direct power over rural space and industries, there has been a long tradition of state support for agriculture and decision‐making has generally been kept within a tight policy community, dominated by rural interests. In our review of the PAP data and policy history, we find instead an underlying movement across time and governments towards an expectation of self‐reliance for rural businesses and communities. On top of the long‐term incremental movement towards this expectation, issue attention has shifted according to political, climatological and market conditions, rather than necessarily in line with changes in policy content.     

Implementation: Making Hard Work of Something Simple

Early in 2012 the Rural Property Addressing Project in South Australia announced that it had substantially met its outcomes, and that the whole of the project was soon to be completed. In 2003, one of the recommendations to cabinet from the South Australian Premier's Bushfire Summit was to endorse the development of a standard property addressing system for rural properties across the state. This was formally endorsed by cabinet, and was a direct response to the fact that essential services such as ambulance, medical and social care were hindered in providing services to the residents of Eyre Peninsula during and after the bushfires. Overall, this was not a controversial decision, nor was it a huge implementation challenge, yet it took nine years to come into effect. This is a classic case of the tyranny of small decisions. This article outlines some of the implementation challenges faced by this apparently simple project, and provides some thoughts for implementation challenges of the future. The take‐away message is that if something so comparatively simple was made so complex, how can we adapt our public services to the cross‐cutting challenges of the future?     

The Australian Public Service and Policy Advising: Meeting the Challenges of 21st Century Governance

This concluding article summarises the case study findings comprising the Special Issue on ‘Advising Australian Federal Governments: Assessing the Evolving Capacity and Role of the Australian Public Service’, identifies and discusses cross‐cutting issues, and considers strategic implications for future practice and research. It reviews key findings from six case studies – Treasury, Prime Minister and Cabinet, Intergovernmental Relations, Housing, the BER Stimulus program, and Defence – and assesses the policy advising capacity of the Australian Public Service, with a focus on the policy‐political interface between governments and officials. Putting recent experience in historical context, it considers the performance of the Commonwealth's policy advisory system, the impact of prime ministers and centralisation, the link between advising and analytic capacities, the system's resilience and readiness, whether recent dissatisfaction over APS advising reflect lack of capacity or a culture clash, and the responsibility for ensuring high‐quality policy advice. It recommends developing a more systematic approach to assessing policy advising capability, building on recent APS reforms.     

Thinking Strategically in Federal Policy: Defining the Attributes of High‐level Policies

Governments frequently develop policies that are strategic in nature. Strategic issues at the national level are those requiring long timeframes for impact, coordinated approaches across multiple tiers of government, are cross‐sectoral, and require systemic approaches to design and implementation. Yet the process of how national strategic polices are developed and implemented in Australia is unclear, and largely unattended in the literature. This paper provides a foundation to understanding the characteristics of strategic polices and approaches to their development. Five national policies are compared (National Competition Policy, National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development, the Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure, Australia in the Asian Century, and the National Food Plan) and discussed. An analytical framework is constructed and key attributes of strategic policy identified.     

试论政策评估的焦点及其标准

政策评估应该聚焦于什么内容与政策评估有哪些标准，这是政策评估中两个最为重要的问题。政策评估不是“数豆子的游戏”，它针对的是政策影响而非政策输出。政策评估关注的是政策结果带来的影响。政策评估标准基于多维理性，这些标准主要包括政策效益、政策效率、充分性、公平性、回应性和适当性。政策评估的公平性标准更是涉及个人福利最大化、保障最低福利、净福利最大化、再分配福利最大化的公平思路，阿罗悖论、阿马蒂亚·森选择模式、帕累托标准、卡尔多-希克斯标准、罗尔斯的差别原则等为政策评估的公平性标准提供了有益借鉴。     

Policy Entrepreneurs,Issue Experts,and Water Rights Policy Change in Colorado

Policy entrepreneurs can influence policy changes and decisions. These people invest their time, knowledge, and skills into promoting policies with which they agree. This paper investigates the influence that entrepreneurs had in the case of recreational water rights policy in Colorado to build a model of policy entrepreneurship. Almost 20 Colorado communities have constructed white‐water kayak courses to boost their local economies. In twelve of these communities, construction was followed by community pursuit of a new form of water right—the recreational in‐channel diversion. This case study is relevant to many areas of environmental policy and management where policies are transitioning from traditional consumptive uses of the resource to nonconsumptive uses. This policy change was not a given in Colorado communities, with recreational water rights requiring significant investments of community resources. These research findings conclude that policy entrepreneurs were influential to policy change, but the most important actors were expert entrepreneurs who hold expertise in water resource matters.     

政策的终结与“终结的政策”

政策终结实质上是决策者的再决策行为。政策终结有利于节省政策资源、提高政策效率和优化政策系统。但是,当前我国政策终结失范影响了政策终结工作的推进,从而影响了改革的进程。因此,尽快建立与健全“政策终结的政策”是推进政策终结顺利进行的根本。     

Learning about Learning: Discovering the Work of Policy

The development of policy rests on skilled practice by knowledgeable practitioners – ‘policy work’ – and it is important to know what skills and knowledge this work calls upon, and where these are learned. Although there is substantial academic knowledge and courses in this field, many practitioners will argue that policy work is ‘as much an art as a science’ and is something that ‘you learn as you go’. This article reports on an exploratory study of policy practitioners’ accounts of their practice, what counts as knowledge, and in what contexts it is ‘useful’. We examine the discourses through which policy work is accomplished, the way in which people learn to do it, and the place of academic work in the constitution of these discourses. Drawing on our respondents understanding of policy practice, we discuss what more might be done to facilitate learning about the work of policy.     

试论公安政策制定的法治化

公安政策作为调整社会公共安全关系的手段,其背后蕴藏的是社会公安价值的分配,继而意味着对社会组织及公民的安全利益分配。其制定过程必然要求多方参与、科学民主。而要保障其政策目的的实现就必须借助法的手段,实现公安政策制定的法治化。     

Success and Failure in Environment Policy: The Role of Policy Officials

This paper reports on interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 with senior officials involved in Australian federal environmental policies over the past 30 years. It examines whether they have a prior sense of whether an environment policy is likely to succeed and their experience of the key factors driving environment policy success. Most interviewees claimed a strong prior sense of policy outcomes, but their expression of the key factors indicating success (consultation, clear objectives, a clear mandate, and a strong evidence base) varies from the usual emphases found in the public policy literature. The research illuminates the ways in which the policy officials at times exert a greater role than that suggested by the Westminster conventions or the policy theory literature. Not emphasised in the literature, yet pivotal for success in the vexed space of environmental policy, was the self‐directed yet at times skilful policy ‘agency’ exhibited by officials.     

Conventional Politics for Unconventional Drilling? Lessons from Pennsylvania's Early Move into Fracking Policy Development

The emergence of hydraulic fracturing techniques is generating a dramatic expansion of the development of domestic natural gas resources in the United States and abroad. Fracking also poses a series of environmental protection challenges that cut across traditional medium and program boundaries. Formal constraints on federal government engagement thus far devolve considerable latitude to individual states for policy development. This provides an important test of whether recent scholarly emphasis on highly innovative state environmental and energy policies can be extended to this burgeoning area. Pennsylvania has moved to the epicenter of the fracking revolution, reflecting its vast Marcellus Shale resource and far‐reaching 2012 legislation. This article examines the Pennsylvania case and notes that the state's emerging policy appears designed to maximize resource extraction while downplaying environmental considerations. The case analysis generates questions as to whether this experience constitutes an influential state early mover that is likely to diffuse widely or is instead an aberration in a rapidly diversifying state policy development process.     

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.     

Austerity or welfare state transformation? Examining the impact of economic crises on social regulation in Europe

This article provides an encompassing analysis of how economic crises affect social regulation. The analysis is based on an innovative dataset that covers policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013) in the areas of pensions, unemployment, and child benefits. By performing a negative binomial regression analysis, we show that economic crises do matter for social policymaking. Our main empirical finding is that crises impinge on social regulation by opening a window of opportunity that facilitates the dismantling of social policy standards. Yet crisis‐induced policy dismantling is restricted to adjustments based on existing policy instruments. We do not find significant variation in policymaking patterns across different macroeconomic conditions for the more structural elements of social policy portfolios, such as the envisaged social policy targets or the policy instruments applied. This suggests that economic crises do not lead to a profound transformation of the welfare state but to austerity.     

政策分析与政策分析人员

政策分析与政策分析人员是政策分析领域两个最为重要的概念。本围绕这两个概念，解释了政策分析的概念起源、学科特征、基本类型和研究途径，并阐述了政策分析人员的工作性质、机构背景、关注焦点和分析方法。     

The Politics of Climate Policy: Strategic Options for National Governments

This article summarises the results so far of an international investigation aimed at identifying political strategies that make it easier for national governments to take more effective action against climate change while avoiding significant political damage. The numerous strategic options identified included strategies involving unilateral action by governments, strategies of persuasion, damage limitation strategies, strategies that can be used in political exchange with other political actors, and strategies designed to improve the bargaining position of governments by altering the terms of political exchange. The article concludes with a shortlist of especially promising strategies.     

Assessing Material and Symbolic Variations in Punctuated Equilibrium and Public Policy Output Patterns

Numerous researchers have confirmed sharp and punctuated policy change. Newer findings in U.S. forest policy in the Pacific Northwest and U.S. state tobacco policy have found largely nonpunctuated changes. What are the implications for punctuated equilibrium theory? U.S. state tobacco policy‐making from 1990 to 2006 indicates a wide variety of nonpunctuated policy output patterns including: linear and constant, gently oscillating and increasing, linear and increasing, and linear and constant and then nonexponentially increasing. All nonpunctuated policies resulted in symbolic policy output change except state tobacco licensing, higher tobacco taxes, and enactment of clean indoor air legislation, which resulted in partially material and partially symbolic policy output change. Emerging from this research is a new public policy model based on social policy realism. Public policy output change can be quite complex, sometimes punctuated and sometimes not, reflecting the balance of power between sometimes competing and cooperating interest groups.     

Fiscal Policy Learning from Crisis: Comparative Analysis of the Baltic Countries

The experience of a major crisis is often expected to lead to policy learning but the empirical evidence about this is limited. The goal of the paper is to explore comparatively whether the crisis of 2008–2010 has led to fiscal policy learning by civil servants in the three Baltic countries. Despite some differences in the crisis experience, the finance ministry officials in all three countries have identified the same lesson from the crisis: fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical and help to stabilize the economy. The paper also discusses how various factors have influenced policy learning, including the acknowledgment of failure, blame shifting, and analytical tractability.     

The opinion-policy nexus in Europe and the role of political institutions

A strong link between citizen preferences and public policy is one of the key goals and criteria of democratic governance. Yet, our knowledge about the extent to which public policies on specific issues are in line with citizen preferences in Europe is limited. This article reports on the first study of the link between public opinion and public policy that covers a large and diverse sample of concrete public policy issues in 31 European democracies. The findings demonstrate a strong positive relationship and a substantial degree of congruence between public opinion and the state of public policy. Also examined is whether political institutions, including electoral systems and the horizontal and vertical division of powers, influence the opinion-policy link. The evidence for such effects is very limited, which suggests that the same institutions might affect policy representation in countervailing ways through different mechanisms.