The Multiple Streams Framework and the problem broker

John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) constitutes a powerful tool for understanding the policy process, and more specifically, agenda‐setting, through three separate streams: problems, policies and politics. This article argues that the MSF would benefit from further development of the problem stream. It introduces a clearer conception of agency into the problem stream by suggesting the inclusion of the problem broker. The problem broker is a role in which actors frame conditions as public problems and work to make policy makers accept these frames. The problem broker makes use of knowledge, values and emotions in the framing of problems. The use of these three elements is seen as a prerequisite for successful problem brokering – that is, for establishing a frame in the policy sphere. Other important factors are: persistence, access to policy makers, credibility and willingness. Problem brokers also need to know who to talk to, how and when in order to make an impact. The context, in terms of, for example, audience and national mood, is also crucial. The inclusion of the problem broker into the MSF strengthens the analytical separation between streams. According to Kingdon, policies can be developed independently from problems. The MSF, therefore, enables a study of policy generation. The inclusion of the problem broker, in the same sense, makes it possible to investigate problem framing as a separate process and enables a study of actors that frame problems without making policy suggestions. The MSF is, in its current form, not able to capture what these actors do. The main argument of this article is that it is crucial to study these actors as problem framing affects the work of policy entrepreneurs and, thereby, agenda‐setting and decision making.     

Cultures of Public Policy Problems

This article is an essay about the construction of a culturalist theory of problem definition in the public domain. Using grid-group Cultural Theory and a typology of the structures of policy problems, questions are posed such as the following: Why do some policymakers prefer to define problems as overstructured and not understructured? May one predict that policymakers who adhere to different ways of life will prove to be more adept in solving some problem types rather than others? Renowned policy science research work suggests how each way of life corresponds to a particular problem definition strategy. Hierarchists will impose a clear structure on any problem, no matter what the cost. Isolates see social reality as an unstable casino in which any privileged problem structure jeopardizes chances for survival. Enclavists (or egalitarians) will define any policy problem as an issue of fairness and distributive justice. Individualists will exploit any bit of usable knowledge to improve a problematic situation. These four focal strategies are part of repertoires of problem definition strategies, where each cultural solidarity type disposes of a differentially composed set of secondary strategies. Finally, it is suggested that the links between group-grid Cultural Theory and policy problem types may serve the practitioner as analytic tool for active and (self-) critical problem structuring and (re)framing.     

Federalism and U.S. Water Policy: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century

This article traces five historical streams of water policyin the United States, revealing the strain and stresses of intergovernmentalrelations pertaining to water resource management. It findsthat water policy is increasingly characterized by pragmaticfederalism emphasizing collaborative partnerships, adaptablemanagement strategies, and problem and process orientation.The evolving nature of federal-state relations, characterizedby expanding federal authorities and increased state capacity,coupled with a rise of local watershed groups and greater ecologicalconcern, calls for improved coordination. Yet challenges resultingfrom policy fragmentation and ecosystem complexity remain. Continuedcalls for greater integration will likely be heard as federal-staterelations continue to evolve.     

《校车安全条例(草案)》的政策议程分析——基于多源流模型的视角

校车安全问题何以进入决策者的视野是理解《校车安全条例(草案征求意见稿)》得以快速发布的关键。采用案例分析法,从多源流理论视角对校车安全的源流发展、焦点事件和政策行动者等方面进行整体分析,研究表明:校车安全政策议程是政策企业家在政策窗口开启之时推动问题、政策和政治三大源流汇合的结果。相比垃圾桶模型、触发机制模型和议程设置理论,多源流模型在本案例中更具解释力。同时,多源流模型面临中国情境,源流之间存在相关性,而非完全独立。拥有双重身份的政策企业家具有从政府机构中打开"政治窗口"的可能性,这为多源流模型的本土化应用与后续研究提供了一个可供考察的角度。最后,指出阻碍校车安全政策议程设置的主要因素包括,制度性利益表达通道不通畅、政府部门对焦点事件处理能力和水平不高、管理权限划分模糊。为此,应创建有效的制度性利益表达通道、积极关注媒体舆情,扩大问题来源、科学合理划分管理权限。这些问题及对策对于其他政策领域也具备一定的借鉴意义,这也是本研究对政策制定者的启迪所在。     

The Development of Renewable Electricity Policy in the Province of Ontario: The Influence of Ideas and Timing

This article examines the development of policy to promote renewable electricity in the province of Ontario (Canada) between 1995 and 2006. Drawing upon both the role of ideas in policy development and a “multiple streams approach,” it is argued that changes in the problem, policy, and politics streams—and their coupling by key political entrepreneurs—account for two significant shifts in Ontario's efforts to promote the increased use of renewable electricity. The first shift occurred on July 3, 2003 when the Ontario Commissioner of Alternative Energy, Steve Gilchrist, announced that sole dependence upon free markets to support renewable electricity was being displaced by a new commitment to a renewable portfolio standard. The second shift occurred on March 21, 2006 when the Ontario Premier, Dalton McGuinty, announced that dependence upon a bidding system to promote renewable electricity was being supplemented by a commitment to feed‐in tariffs. A focus upon the evolution of ideas, combined with an appreciation for timing, continues to provide the explanation for the development of renewable electricity policy in Ontario.     

Clarifying the Status of Policy

This essay examines ‘What is a policy?’ from the viewpoint of a public servant trying to make sense of the maze of official statements, procedures, guidelines and various other expressions of intra‐governmental opinion that might bear upon a discretionary decision. It seeks to clarify the meaning and status of policy, to explain how to determine cases which are not covered by explicit statements of policy, and to decide how much relative weight to accord to various policy documents and circumstances. Although it does not set out to rehash the old debate about the distinction between politics and administration (often misunderstood as a distinction between policy and administration), it finds Woodrow Wilson's 1886 aphorism on this subject a good place to start.     

公共政策问题建构过程中的公共性研究

公共政策具有公共性,亦即处理大多数民众的问题。政策具有问题性,也就是政策以民众问题为导向,大多数民众有相同问题,政府机关将问题纳入政府议程,提出解决策略。倘若忽视公共性,公共政策就有可能变为某些个人、团体、阶层谋取私立的工具。这就要求我们在公共政策的制定和实施的过程中,必须时时关注公共性,亦即要做到在政策问题取向上的公共性。故而,首先探究公共政策问题与其公共性之意涵;其次,析探问题建构中公共性之哲学基础;最后,藉由现今流行于公共政策学界,用以展现问题建构过程中公共性的审议式民主,以及审议式民主在台湾之应用-公民会议的召开,来加以进一步说明。     

The New Policy World of Cybersecurity

As government agencies, private sector corporations, the military, and even retail shoppers shift their activities to the Internet, cybersecurity becomes increasingly important. Past presidential administrations recognized that cybersecurity necessitates a comprehensive national policy to protect electronically transmitted and stored information from intrusion. But so far, development of a coherent cybersecurity policy has proven to be a daunting task. A feasible policy framework that systematically arrays the issues and specifies parameters of constraints is lacking, and articulated policies and strategies are narrowly focused and implemented incrementally. The authors argue that recent government documents related to cyberspace form a positive foundation on which to build a comprehensive policy. Despite the incremental nature of cybersecurity progress, these key documents represent a cumulative process on which to build future policy.     

Moving Policy Theory Forward: Connecting Multiple Stream and Advocacy Coalition Frameworks to Policy Cycle Models of Analysis

The stages/policy cycle, multiple streams, and Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) approaches to understanding policy processes, all have analytical value although also attracting substantive criticism. An obvious direction for research is to determine whether the multiple streams framework and the ACF can be refined and applied to other dimensions of policy‐making set out in the policy cycle model. This article argues that extending and modifying Kingdon's framework beyond the agenda‐setting stage is best suited to this endeavour. Doing so makes it possible to bring these three approaches into alignment and enhances our understanding, although retaining the core insights of each.     

Policy Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change: Multilevel Governance of Central Banking Reform

Recent studies on institutional theory and the public policy field called for efforts to pry open the black box of institutional and policy change. This article offers a response to this call. It demonstrates that historical and discursive institutionalist approaches are complementary to explain how and why institutional change occurs. In addition, it shows how these approaches can add value to and benefit from the public policy and administration fields that seek to explain policy change and success. In particular, it emphasizes the interactions between structure and agency that contribute to the change. The empirical finding is based on qualitative analysis of central banking reform in Turkey. It suggests that institutional and policy change is more likely to occur when policy entrepreneurs, with joint membership in domestic and transnational policy communities, mediate various ideas and discourse within and among these communities in a punctuated institutional equilibrium.     

The Empires Strike Back: Is the Internet Corporatizing Rather than Democratizing Policy Processes?

For at least a decade, scholars have sought ways to remedy citizen dissatisfaction with representative democracy. Recently, the development and deployment of the Internet has been heralded as a technical solution to this problem. Observers often base their optimism on analysis of the Internet's impact on elections and public comment processes. Yet elections do not generate the policies that people resent—policy processes do. So far, we know little about the Internet's role in this critical social activity. This article provides a framework for locating the Internet's impact on policy processes and presents findings from two case studies on "Internet-enabled" policy making. The cases suggest that the Internet will not fix what ails representative democracy. Indeed, the Internet may only reinforce the much-resented organizational dominance of politics. Reconnecting politics with society is still primarily the work of organizational and institutional reformers, not hardware and software engineers.
Liberal representative democracy models appear to have a built-in bias against citizens in disorganized or informal sectors that are not highly focused, in contrast to those driven by single issues. Powerful lobby groups are able to mobilize resources and influence government agendas for their own causes, while groups without resources or a single focus have no mechanism for influencing government policies and processes. The imbalance created by lobbying is probably one of the most serious issues confronting current liberal representative democracy models.— Kakabadse, Kakabadse, and Kouzmin (2003, 48)     

Policy and Blame Attribution: Citizens’ Preferences,Policy Reputations,and Policy Surprises

Negativity bias suggests that the attribution of blame to governments, for alleged or actual policy failures, is disproportionately pertinent for their popularity. However, when citizens attribute blame for adverse consequences of a policy, does it make a difference which policy was it, and who was the political agent that adopted the policy? We posit that the level of blame citizens attribute to political agents for policy failures depends on three policy-oriented considerations: (1) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s established policy position; (2) the distance between a citizen’s ideal policy and the agent’s concrete policy choice; and (3) the distance between the agent’s established policy position and her concrete policy choice. The inherent relationship between these three policy-oriented considerations renders their integration in one model a theoretical and methodological imperative. The model provides novel observable predictions regarding the conditions under which each of the three policy-oriented factors will produce either pronounced or subtle observable effects on blame attribution. We test the model’s predictions in two survey experiments, in Israel and in Germany. The results of both experiments are highly consistent with the model’s predictions. These finding offer an important contribution by specifying the ways in which individual-level preferences interact with politicians’ policy reputations and policy choices to shape blame attribution. Our model entails unintuitive revisions to several strands of the literature, and in the “Discussion” section we provide tentative support for the applicability of this model to other political judgments beyond blame attribution.

     

Explaining the formation of business-environmentalist collaborations: Collaborative windows and the Paper Task Force

Building on the agenda setting theory of Kingdon (1984), this paper develops a collaboration forming model to explain the creation of multi-party initiatives as an addition to Gray's (1985 and 1989) explanation for collaborations as a response to environmental turbulence, crisis, or complexity. It tests this model by examining the Paper Task Force, a collaboration of five multi-national companies, an environmental group, and a university intended to determine environmentally sound guidelines for paper procurement. The study finds that multi-stakeholder collaborations can require collaborative windows for their formation. These windows occur when four process streams – problem, policy, organizational, and social/political/economic – converge. In the case of the Paper Task Force, the problem stream was an increasing recognition of the environmental burdens throughout the lifecycle of paper production. The policy stream included new governmental initiatives to make paper-making processes cleaner and use paper with more recycled content. The organizational stream consisted of an increasing willingness among corporations to improve their environmental performance combined with their development of paper making technology with lower environmental impacts. The social/political/economic stream included strong public support for the environment in the United States and demand for chlorine free paper in Europe. A collaborative entrepreneur, the Environmental Defense Fund, working with the other Task Force members, was able to join solutions to problems. Implications for other collaborative ventures are developed.     

Straightening the three streams: Theorising extensions of the multiple streams framework

This article suggests theoretical refinements to the multiple streams framework (MSF) that make it applicable to parliamentary systems and the decision‐making stage of the policy process. Regarding the former, the important role of political parties in parliamentary democracies is highlighted. Party policy experts are expected to be members of the policy communities in the policy stream and to promote viable policy alternatives in their respective parties, while the party leadership is concerned with adopting policies in the political stream. With regard to the latter, the introduction of a second coupling process to analyse decision making more rigorously is suggested. Moreover, the article provides operational definitions of the framework's key concepts when applied to parliamentary systems and derives a systematic set of falsifiable hypotheses for agenda‐setting and decision making in these systems, thus addressing one of the main critiques against the MSF – namely that no hypotheses can be derived from it.     

Enactment and Implementation of the National Security Personnel System: Policy Made and Policy Unmade

This case study reviews the enactment and implementation of the National Security Personnel System (NSPS) in the U.S. Department of Defense. Proponents of reform seized the opportunity to enact reform in the aftermath of 9/11, basing their arguments on national security concerns. However, the policy‐making process did not produce a consensus for reform among key stakeholders in the personnel management policy community. Instead, the NSPS angered and alienated the Office of Personnel Management, the public employee unions, and a number of congressional Democrats. Implementation of the NSPS became problematic as Defense Department officials attempted to move quickly and independently to get the new system online, eventually forcing the department to put the system on hold. In the end, Congress imposed limits on its implementation, advocates for the system disappeared, and a new president supported the repeal of NSPS. This case provides useful insights into the formulation of future strategies for personnel management reform.     

Policy Expansion in Local Government Environmental Policy Making

Relatively little is known about when, why, and how some jurisdictions “double down” on policy priorities, rapidly adopting multiple measures tackling the same issue. Rapid policy expansion can emerge in fast‐evolving, uncertain, and contested policy arenas in which pressures for policy making are not satisfied, and even may be strengthened, by initial policy innovation. This article analyzes local government policy making on high‐volume hydraulic fracturing by New York State municipalities from 2008 to 2012. Policy path dependence, peer influence, and policy design appear to play a critical role in determining whether public officials respond to these pressures with policy expansion. Initial policy innovations can open windows for policy participants to secure additional measures that strengthen or enlarge the scope of action. Public officials and stakeholders seeking particular policy outcomes should take a long view of the policy process while simultaneously remaining alert for opportunities afforded by pressurized policy dilemmas.     

Industrial Policy and the States

The emergence of industrial policy proposals on the nationalscene raises the prospect of a greater role for the states inAmerican economic policy. Four types of industrial policy proposalsare described, each representing a distinctive strategic orientation.After describing the implied role of states in each type, weargue that state involvement is politically necessary if anyproposal is to succeed in the national policymaking arena. Weassess the four strategic proposals in light of that contentionand conclude that two of the approaches—infrastructureinvestment and subnational jurisdiction proposals—havean advantage over the better known trade policy and sectoraltargeting strategies.     

Policy science: A conceptual and methodological analysis

In the first section policy science is differentiated from policy analysis, the notion of policy is defined, and an analysis of the concept of policy science is offered which gives emphasis to what is unique in this intellectual endeavor when it is conceived as a general method of problem solving. Section II provides a discussion of the criteria of rationality for the conduct of policy science. Attention is focused upon the methodological differences between science and policy science and upon certain methodological difficulties which are peculiar to policy science. The third section gives consideration to one important relationship between facts and values in the policy science process. While it is generally well recognized that values enter into policy science in a way they do not enter into science, it is also widely held that they do not operate in such a way as to frustrate the central objective of the policy scientist (i.e., the solution or alleviation of a policy problem). It is argued that the relation between values and facts in policy science is frequently such as to have this undesired frustrative effect.     

Designing Policy Pilots under Climate Uncertainty: A Conceptual Framework for Comparative Analysis

Abstract

An ongoing challenge while designing policies pertains to their proportionality with the change that is likely or expected in a future policy context. This article conceptualizes proportionality as a feature of policy design to compare different policy strategies launched in response to current and expected changes in the policy context and contributes to comparative policy theory and practice. The conceptual framework is operationalized with climate change as a complex policy problem that challenges policymakers in designing proportionate strategies to enable adaptation to change in the climate and associated impacts. Under conditions of uncertainty, policy piloting provides an opportunity to experiment and test the design features of alternatives to status quo policies to function in a changed policy context. The theoretical discussion is supplemented with examples of policy pilots launched as a form of policy experimentation to address climatic risks to agriculture in rainfed zones of India. Policy design features in four settings of change in policy context, ranging from small-scale incremental to highly flexible adaptive responses, are compared using the framework of proportionality.     

Making the Harder Yards: Environmental Policy Integration in Australia

Solutions to environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land and water resource degradation require long term integration of economic, social and environmental policies. This poses challenges to specialised, hierarchical public administration systems. The study reported here examined strategies, structures and processes to enable environmental policy integration in six Australian states and territories, and some federal arrangements. The study found that the most prominent success factors, barriers and gaps that affect environmental policy integration relate to leadership, long term embedding of environmental policy integration and implementation capacity. Factors deserving further research and policy attention include leadership, cultural change and capacity building; embedding sustainability in structures and processes; development of a long term evidence based approach; strengthening decentralised implementation arrangements; and evaluation of policy integration initiatives.