Internationalized Policy Environments and Policy Network Analysis

The importance of horizontal coordinating governance arrangements in the internationalized policy domains that occur more frequently in the present globalizing era justifies building further on middle-level theories that draw on the policy community/policy network concepts. This reconceptualization, however, requires an explicit integration of policy paradigms and political ideas into policy community theory and careful attention to the differential impact of varying governance patterns in internationalized policy domains. This article pursues these objectives beginning with a review of existing literature on policy communities and policy networks. Next, drawing on recent research on policy paradigms and political ideas, it suggests how policy community concepts might be adapted for the study of policy change. Four types of internationalized policy environments are then identified and their implications for policy communities and policy networks are assessed. The article concludes by introducing the concept of policy community mediators and discussing how they might shape the relationships among multiple policy communities.     

Can Transparency Foster More Understanding and Compliant Citizens?

Voluntary policy compliance is an important yet rarely studied topic in public administration. To address the paucity of research, this article proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework that ties policy transparency and policy understanding to voluntary policy compliance intentions. The reasoning is that the extent to which citizens understand a policy contributes to their intentions to comply with that policy. Further, the authors argue that policy transparency indirectly influences voluntary policy compliance intentions through a positive effect on citizens’ levels of policy understanding. To enhance the validity of the findings, the authors assess these relationships across two policy domains. The findings reflect an indirect positive effect of transparency on voluntary compliance occurring through policy understanding. However, this emerged only for one policy domain. These results suggest that the effects of policy transparency on policy understanding and voluntary policy compliance intentions may depend on the policy domain.     

Policy Transfer as a Form of Prospective Policy Evaluation: Challenges and Recommendations

This article focuses on policy transfer as a form of prospective policy analysis, which we define as policy makers' attempts to assess the effect of a policy or program before it is put in place. Despite a burgeoning literature on cross-national policy transfer, there has been little systematic comparison of cases to identify either common problems or potential strategies in the practice of policy transfer. This article sets forth a rational model of policy transfer and examines, in light of that model, case studies of cross-national policy transfer spanning different policy domains. Taking into account the constraints faced by policy makers, we relax standard rational decision-making criteria and make recommendations for improving the process of policy transfer as a form of prospective policy evaluation.     

The power of process: State capacity and climate policy

State capacity is central to the provision of public goods, including environmental protection. Drawing on climate policy making, this article argues that the division of labor between the bureaucracy and legislature in policy formulation is a critical source of state capacity. In cases of bureaucratic policy design, the legislature sets policy goals and delegates policy design to bureaucracies. This division of labor shifts distributional conflict to autonomous bureaucracies, allowing for effective policy design. California followed this path in climate policy making, setting it on track to meet climate goals. In cases of legislative policy design, bureaucracies set goals and legislatures design policy measures. Since legislators have incentives to respond to vested interests, legislative policy design is vulnerable to regulatory capture. In Germany, legislative policy design in climate policy making is preventing attainment of emissions reduction goals, as industry interests succeeded in blocking key policy measures. Our findings highlight procedural sources of state capacity.     

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。     

Policy Failure and Policy Learning: Examining the Conditions of Learning after Disaster

The policy learning literature indicates that governments can and do learn after a policy failure but not always. The purpose of this study is to examine the conditions under which policy failure leads to policy learning. It asks two questions. First, is policy failure associated with policy learning? Second, if policy is associated with policy learning, does the failure initiate different types of learning? Using the policy failure and learning literatures as an organizing framework, this paper analyzes three comparative cases of policy failure revealed by tornados in Greensburg, Kansas (2007); Joplin, Missouri (2011); and Moore, Oklahoma (2013). It finds that failure of the policy process in agenda setting is associated with instrumental policy learning. It also finds that there are two types of failure of decision making: failure to make a timely decision and failure to make any decision. The two types of decision‐making failure are associated with different types of policy learning. In addition, the contextual factors underpinning the link between policy failure and learning are prior experience with the policy problem and capacity to learn.     

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.     

Policy Conflict Framework

This essay introduces a Policy Conflict Framework to guide and organize theoretical, practical, and empirical research to fill the vacuum that surrounds policy conflicts. The framework centers on a conceptual definition of an episode of policy conflict that distinguishes between cognitive and behavioral characteristics. The cognitive characteristics of a policy conflict episode include divergence in policy positions among two or more actors, perceived threats from opponents’ policy positions, and unwillingness to compromise. These cognitive characteristics manifest in a range of behavioral characteristics (e.g., framing contests, lobbying, building networks). Episodes of policy conflicts are shaped by a policy setting, which consists of different levels of action where conflicts may emerge (political, policy subsystem and policy action situations), interpersonal and intrapersonal policy actor attributes, events, and the policy issue. In turn, the outputs and outcomes of policy conflicts produce feedback effects that shape the policy setting. This essay ends with an agenda for advancing studies of policy conflicts, both methodologically and theoretically.     

Policy Change,Policy Feedback,and Interest Mobilization: The Politics of Nuclear Waste Management

Many of the leading theories of the policy process are aimed at providing insights into the factors that make policy change more (or less) likely. In general, policy change is seen as a result of shifting dynamics within policy subsystems. However, building on theories of policy feedback and interest mobilization, this article examines whether policy change, apart from being an effect of subsystem dynamics, can be a cause of shifting dynamics as latent actors are motivated to participate in the subsystem as a result of policy change. Two hypotheses regarding post‐policy change mobilization are developed and tested using data on participation in congressional hearings concerning the management of nuclear waste. The findings suggest that policy change can activate latent policy actors, specifically those actors that view themselves as “losing” as a result of the policy change. These results point to the need for scholars to examine the potential impacts of post‐policy change dynamics on policy development.     

Nonpunctuated and Sweeping Policy Change: Bhutan Tobacco Policy Making from 1991 to 2009

This paper examines policy outputs associated with the 2004 Bhutan antitobacco law, including 2009 amendments, to determine if the law is congruent with punctuated equilibrium or social policy realism theories of policy change. There was no direct and sudden tobacco policy output change in Bhutan due to a shock to the policy system contrary to what punctuated equilibrium theory would predict. Rather, policy change was sweeping but nonpunctuated. This paper reconfirms prior findings of social policy realism theory that various and complex policy output patterns occur due to a mixture of contingent and complex factors. Under social policy realism, a complex interplay of factors drive policy with the state, corporate actors, and interest groups, and the market often playing a primary role. These complex policy outputs have a direct impact on society and the natural environment reflected in government policy output actions or inactions.     

Setting Agendas and Designing Alternatives: Policymaking and the Strategic Role of Meetings1

This paper investigates the role of strategic forums—such as special commissions, task forces, roundtables, working groups, summits—in the policy process. Reviewing prominent theories about policymaking, the author suggests ways in which strategic forums might fit within these frameworks as an analytically distinct policy lever. The paper examines existing literature on such forums, and identifies characteristics of “meetings that matter”—those gatherings that appear to have achieved some policy traction in a given domain. Finally, the paper investigates a particular field, cultural policy, to evaluate the extent to which meetings are serving policy purposes. The author concludes that meetings can serve an important role in the policy process by framing public problems and highlighting policy alternatives; creating and sustaining policy communities; fostering policy transfer and knowledge uptake; and developing networks among policy entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, with regard to cultural policy, the author argues that, compared to other policy domains, strategic policy-focused convenings are not a regular part of the arts and culture landscape and remain underused policy tools.     

打破政策“黑箱”的制度设计——基于广州政策兑现实践的研究

如何打破政策“黑箱”是学界和社会关注的重要议题。以广州市政策兑现改革实践为例,探讨如何从制度设计层面来打开公共政策过程中的政策“黑箱”。研究发现,虽然公共政策过程是一个动态且复杂的过程,但是通过统筹政策制定和政策落地两端、主观要素客观化、模糊标准明确化、重塑政府流程等,能够形成确定的决策环境,控制非理性因素,约束自由裁量权,并压缩权力寻租空间,从而可以从源头消除政策“黑箱”的形成土壤。广州市政府政策兑现改革过程中,通过“输入—转化—输出”的制度框架设计,形成了从政策制定到政策执行再到政策结果与评估的政策闭环,并对政策兑现的相关责任单位、流程和时限都进行了严格把控,进而实现对政策“黑箱”内部决策要素的控制。从政策“黑箱”本身入手,破解政策“黑箱”难题,实现政策的阳光承诺和给付,最终形成极具特色和借鉴意义的广州模式。     

Blurring or Shifting of Policy Frames?: Institutionalization of the Economic-Environmental Policy Linkage in the European Community

This article investigates how "policy frames" have shaped the way European Community actors perceive the policy linkage between market integration and environmental policy. The article contends that there are three Community policy frames: conditional, classic, and sustainability. They form alternative "packages" of policy ideas defining the relationship between economic and environmental policy. The article provides an analysis of how actors embed these frames in the Community's institutional framework.To illustrate the general impact of policy frames on the environmental arena, the article explores two cases: waste management policy, and the integration of environmental concerns into the Community's agricultural policy. The article concludes by highlighting the different factors that promote and undermine the formation of "thick" institutional structures likely to integrate environmental and economic policy objectives.     

Agenda dynamics and the multi-level governance of intractable policy controversies: the case of migrant integration policies in the Netherlands

This article focuses on the relation between agenda dynamics and multi-level governance for a specific type of policy problems: intractable policy controversies. It discusses migrant integration policies in the Netherlands as a case-study, analysing problem, political and policy agendas in the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and on the national level, as well as the relation and interaction between these policy levels. The article shows that in a contested policy area like migrant integration, patterns of agenda setting often have a strongly level-specific character, leading to different policy frames and thus complicating modes of governance in multi-level setting. Precisely when the framing of policy problems itself is at stake, level-specific agenda dynamics will produce different policy frames also in multi-level policy settings. This makes multi-level governance in terms of effectively coordinating relations between policy levels to create congruence of policies between different levels a particular challenge when faced with this type of policy problems.     

Experiment-based policy making or conscious policy design? The case of urban housing reform in China

The public policy literature has long debated whether policy change results from conscious policy design or is contingent upon a political process involving both state and non-state actors. An experiment-based policy-making model based on China’s experience attempts to reconcile such debate by arguing that policy makers can consciously make policies without deliberately designing them. That is, policy makers can encourage or initiate multiple small-scale experiments that will cumulatively translate into incremental policy changes. Through a case study of urban housing policy changes in China, this paper investigates the underlying logic of incremental policy changes, specifically the role of policy makers in successive policy experimentation. Our case study illustrates that the role of local policy experimentation has been overestimated because the central government controls the experimental variables, judges what constitutes the success of the experiment, and chooses which experiments are replicated at the national level.     

Policy Transfer and Policy Learning: A Study of the 1991 NewZealand Health Services Taskforce

Research into policy transfer and lesson drawing has been criticized asfew authors have convincingly shown how cross-national policy learning actually influences policy formation in a particular jurisdiction. This article addresses this gap by presenting a study of the development of the 1991 health policy in New Zealand. By studying the process of policy development, rather than just a policy document, it was possible to disaggregate different aspects of the policy and to identify sources and influences. This article finds that the 'conspiracy' model of policy formation does not fit this case as it presents an overly simplistic view, which allows little space for policy learning. This case illustrates the subtle and multifaceted influence of different jurisdictions, different institutions, and different individuals on a given policy.     

公共政策工具研究的意义、基础与层面

在经济社会转型、推进经济社会进步的过程中,政府的主要手段之一就是公共政策。而所采取的公共政策的实践效果如何本身就反映出政府的执政能力。从当前各国公共政策的实践和理论来看,关于政策工具的研究已经成为有关公共政策研究的一种发展的潮流。在这方面的理论和实践上的不足,向人们提出了严峻的挑战。论证了在公共政策过程中,关于政策工具的选择、比较以及关于不同政策工具之间存在差异性、互动性的了解,对于取得公共政策的成效来说,有着极为重要的意义;概述了近年来推动公共政策工具研究的学科基础(如经济学、法学和公共管理学等)以及社会实践基础;阐述了值得开展政策工具研究的一些主要的视角和方面,这些方面的研究无论是就理论还是就实践来说均有着重要的价值。     

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.