METHODS OF THE SECOND TYPE: COPING WITH THE WILDERNESS OF CONVENTIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS

Policy analysts, like allegorical homesteaders, face the seemingly unmanageable task of coping with the wilderness of ill-structured problems, while concurrently attending to well-structured problems, which can be addressed with conventional methods of policy analysis. What has appeared thus far as an unmanageable task may become manageable once analysts acknowledge the principle of methodological congruence: The appropriateness of a particular type of method is a function of its congruence with the type of problem under investigation.
To be sure, conventional methods of the first type are appropriate and useful for solving first-order problems, which are relatively well-structured. Contexts of practice, however, are pervaded by second-order problems which, variously described as squishy, messy, or ill-structured, are the class of all first-order problems. Just as methods of the first type are congruent with the simple analytic demands of first-order problems, so are methods of the second type congruent with the complex analytic demands of second-order problems. When policy analysts fail to observe this principle of methodological congruence they are likely to solve the wrong problem.
Methods of the second type are not limited to general heuristics, but include specific and readily comprehensible procedures for estimating the boundaries and structure of ill-structured problems. Since these estimation procedures appear to satisfy requirements of inductive estimates in general, policy analysts can assess their own performance in providing approximate answers to the right question, thus coping with the enemies who lurk in the wilderness of conventional policy analysis.     

Conservation and community-based development through ecotourism in the temperate rainforest of southern Chile

General assessments of ecotourism and community-led development offer conflicting views of these strategies’ potential. Appraisals of successful projects add to the available knowledge that policy makers can use to improve decision-making. The Mapu Lahual Network of Indigenous Parks (RML), an ecotourism development and conservation project in the 10th Region of southern Chile, covers 45,000 ha within the territories of eight indigenous communities, in a part of southern Chile that national and international conservation organizations consider a high priority for ecological conservation. Elected leaders of the indigenous communities established the RML in 2000 with technical assistance from public agencies and financial assistance from national and environmental organizations. The RML’s primary purpose is to increase and diversify per-capita incomes in a way that preserves the area’s environment and culture by establishing tourism based on a system of parks, trails, campgrounds, and local services. This paper appraises the RML with respect to the common interest of the relevant local, national, and international communities. The policy sciences provide a contextual basis for practical recommendations that will help participants build on the project’s strengths and correct its weaknesses. The RML initiative provides a model of a development process that has been constructively supported by members of public agencies and conservation organizations. The strategies employed in the RML could be diffused and adapted in other contexts.

Three ways to think about the ecological history of Monterey Bay∗

(W)ithout the recognition that the city is of and within the environment, the wilderness of the wolf and the moose, the nature that most of us think of as natural cannot survive, and our own survival on the planet will come into question.     

21st century American environmental ideologies: a re-evaluation

Around the turn of the century, myriad books and articles – from academics, journalists, organizational leaders and grassroots activists – explored the state of American environmentalism, outlining ideological antagonisms and tracing the contours of possible twenty-first century trajectories. In recent years, however, there have been few such analyses, and those that do exist continue to rely on the ideal types of the past. This article explores the shifting ideological contours of American environmentalism by (1) detailing how extant works categorize American environmental ideologies, and (2) employing discourse and content analysis of sixteen American environmental organizations to consider whether existing ideal-types capture the ideological variability driving contemporary environmental practice. It concludes by outlining six twenty-first century American environmental ideal-types: wilderness preservationism; liberal environmentalism; traditional environmental justice; techno-ecological optimism; socio-ecological progressivism; and socio-ecological radicalism. The article argues that the latter three ideological variants signal an ontological shift that cuts to the core of environmental practice.     

The market needs help: The disappointing record of home energy conservation

Energy conservation is widely considered to be the most promising solution to the nation's energy problems. The dominant public policy in this field has been to encourage conservation by decontrolling energy prices and relying on consumers to respond to price increases in ways that best meet their individual needs. This policy so far has led to only small reductions in energy use within the home, and even these reductions are only partly attributable to conservation behavior. Among the many obstacles to residential conservation that have come to light, a major one is the difficulty of predicting what savings will result from any specific investment in home energy efficiency. Ten years of experience after the 1973 oil crisis raises doubts about the feasibility of residential conservation as a short-term energy strategy, and suggests that new policies are needed to improve the operation of the market for conservation investment.     

ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE FOR SOIL CONSERVATION PRACTICES

When making its case to Congress and other audiences the Conservation Technical Assistance program of USDAIS Soil Conservation Service, which is the federal government's most extensive and expensive soil conservation program, based its argument on data about its clients. Missing have been comparisons between clients and nonclients that address the issue of whether clients might not have exhibited just as good conservation behavior without the program. Using multiple regression analysis that relates the diversity of conservation practices used to farm operators' receipt lnonreceipt of technical assistance, and controlling for relevant other variables, this study found statistically and substantively significant program effects in each of six diverse survey sites.     

Irresolvable cultural conflicts and conservation/development arguments: Analysis of Korea’s Saemangeum project

This paper examines, through argument analysis & grid-group model, how cultural bias, as the frame of reference of an advocacy coalition (AC), brings about irresolvable conflicts and produces divided arguments between coalitions for development and conservation in Koreas Saemangeum project. Based on different cultural biases, two ACs – the advocacy coalition for development (ACD) and the advocacy coalition for conservation (ACC) – interpreted the same facts differently in line with their cultural orientations and ways of life. The dynamic argument patterns reflected each coalitions cultural bias, which restricted the frame of reference of actors in each AC. After reviewing argument analysis as an analytic tool, we introduce cultural theoryin which ways of life, consisting of cultural biases and social relations, amplify the irresolvable conflicts between two ACs. Second, to show the culturally constructed nature of the conflicts, we analyze the contrasting arguments between the ACD (dominated by a hierarchy bias) and ACC (led by egalitarianism) in the Saemangeum project. Third, we discuss the implications of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavskys cultural theoryto advocacy coalition framework (ACF) as follows: 1) constraining effects on inter-coalitional learning by cultural biases, 2) coexistence of different solidarities under a coalition, and 3) asymmetric relationships between parties in a coalition.     

Interaction between States and Citizens in the Age of the Internet: "e-Government" in the United States, Britain, and the European Union

We examine the origins of the recent shift towards "e-government" in three cases: the United States, Britain, and the European Union. We set out three heuristic models of interaction between states and citizens that might underpin the practice of "e-government." Focusing on U.S., British, and European Union initiatives, we undertake a comparative analysis of the evolution of key policy statements on e-government reform in national (and supranational) government. We conclude that the democratic potential of the Internet has been marginalized as a result of the ways in which government use of such technology has been framed since the early 1990s. An executive-driven, "managerial" model of interaction has assumed dominance at the expense of "consultative" and "participatory" possibilities.     

WATERPOWER AND WILDERNESS: POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE ASPECTS OF THE LAKE PEDDER CONTROVERSY

Not that even the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories.     

Policy learning and policy change: learning from research citations

Although the seminal article by Bennett and Howlett (Policy Sciences 25: 275–294, 1992) on policy learning and change has been one of the top five most cited articles in Policy Sciences, no attempt has yet been made to provide a citation analysis showing how its impact has evolved over time. This paper reports the findings of a study that provides a systematic analysis of the citing articles published in academic journals during the period 1992–2017.     

党建引领社区公共价值生产的机制与路径:基于上海“红色物业”的实证研究

基于公共价值领导理论,对上海“红色物业”的创新过程和内在逻辑进行实证分析。研究发现,“红色物业”是政党基层组织在社区治理网络中的拓展和融入。在这个过程中,通过建立愿景塑造、共识形成、主体规范、协调沟通、行为监督五项机制,再造了物业管理相关方之间的连接和关系,形成了对于社区多元主体的公共价值领导,引导了价值共识的形成,维护并激活了导向公共价值的“治理网络”,最终创造了社区公共价值。     

B: THE NORMATIVE/IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF POLICY FORMATION FAMILY POLICY: HAS THE UNITED STATES LEARNED FROM EUROPE?

"Family Policy" is a term that is used increasingly in the U.S. to describe policies affecting children and their families. In this article, the authors focus on whether societal learning has occurred across the Atlantic with regard to family policy and what, if anything, the U.S. has learned or borrowed from Europe. The authors conclude that there has been some borrowing, albeit modest; currently, some of that learning is reflected in an expanding child policy debate.     

A more-than-human political moment (and other natural catastrophes)

Catastrophic events such as wildfires are predicted to increase and intensify because of climate change. This paper speculates on how politics may look within such a context by deploying Rancière's political theorisations. We examine how a posthumanist re-configuration of this humanist notion of politics contributes to thinking about, acting for, and living within a rapidly changing climate. Specifically, we make a case for “more-than-human” political moments using the illustration of wildness – in the form of a wildfire – breaking free of wilderness and burning the settled lands of human habitation. In doing so, we draw on a relational ontology that re-configures agency and speech as “more-than-human”.     

An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein

There has been a great deal of research in recent years concerning the use of substantive policy analysis in public policy-making. This paper seeks to integrate those findings - e.g., the enlightenment function of policy research - into a more general model of policy-making over periods of a decade or more. The conceptual framework focuses on the belief systems of advocacy coalitions within policy subsystems as the critical vehicle for understanding the role of policy analysis in policy-oriented learning and the effect, in turn, of such learning on changes in governmental programs.     

THE POLITICS OF MICROECONOMIC REFORM: STRUCTURING A GENERAL MODEL1

Abstract: This paper examines the current endeavours to render the Australian economy more economically efficient. While the case for microeconomic reform is clear in economic theory, Australian public policy analysts are less sanguine about the possibilities for its long-term success. This paper seeks to develop the parameters of a simple general model to explain both why microeconomic reform proposals are dominant today on the Australian policy agenda and, more importantly, what the conditions are for their success or failure. This general model provides a framework that will allow further elaboration in case studies of particular episodes of microeconomic reform.
The paper concludes pessimistically; micro-economic reform has been subsumed into the normal political agenda contests of Australian party politics. The pressures of such "politics" inclines Australian reforming towards incrementalism, rather than the Simon-style rationalism implicit from micro-economics. This mode of policy implementation will inhibit microeconomic reform in the longer term.     

Knowledge in the policy process: Incorporating new environmental information in natural resources policy making

Efforts by both natural and social scientists have brought significant new bodies of information to bear on natural resources policy making. Among these have been new insights in conservation biology and landscape ecology, new methods for valuing intangible resource benefits, and new frameworks for resource accounting. The use of these new sources of information is analyzed from a Lasswellian policy process perspective, with illustrations from recent experience with U.S. national forest planning. A distinction is made between the impact of new information on ordinary as contrasted to constitutive policy making. This experience suggests that these new sources of information may increase emphasis on sustainable, multiple benefit use of resources, but they can also shift power away from non-expert actors, undermine rights arguments, polarize debates over appropriate resource use, and delay timely decisionmaking.     

Public-Value Failure: When Efficient Markets May Not Do

The familiar market-failure model remains quite useful for issues of price efficiency and traditional utilitarianism, but it has many shortcomings as a standard for public-value aspects of public policy and management. In a public-value-failure model, I present criteria for diagnosing values problems that are not easily addressed by market-failure models. Public-value failure occurs when: (1) mechanisms for values articulation and aggregation have broken down; (2) "imperfect monopolies" occur; (3) benefit hoarding occurs; (4) there is a scarcity of providers of public value; (5) a short time horizon threatens public value; (6) a focus on substitutability of assets threatens conservation of public resources; and (7) market transactions threaten fundamental human subsistence. After providing examples for diagnosis of public-values failure, including an extended example concerning the market for human organs, I introduce a "public-failure grid" to facilitate values choices in policy and public management.