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In this introduction to the special issue, we identify the key tensions underpinning the challenge of developing indicators of sustainable tourism, and use the papers submitted to the special issue to exemplify these tensions. The paper questions why it is that we need to measure sustainable tourism, the risk of becoming too focussed on measurement itself and losing sight of what is really important to sustainability. We consider who it is that should be undertaking the measurement of sustainable tourism and offer evidence of the way that societal power can be rebalanced by the kind of research inclusivity that controlling data collection brings. Determining the spatial boundaries has been a long-held tension between wanting data specificity and achieving wider comparability and engagement from policy makers and other stakeholders, while technological and methodological advances may allow for more progress to be made in addressing the weaknesses of measuring sustainable tourism. The paper questions whether indicators have led to any significant policy change, or whether the changes that have come are the result of indicators serving to create more sustainably literate stakeholders, more informed discussions and so a climate more receptive to taking decisions in support of a more sustainable tourism industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and defends the counter-hegemonic methods applied to the investigation of a high-profile national policy for Early Education and Care (ECCE) in Ireland. The policy, the Access and Inclusion Model (AIM) seeks to ensure the full inclusion and meaningful participation of children with disabilities in mainstream, state funded ECCE. It makes a significant contribution to data and debate on how research about inclusion can become inclusion in the context of policy evaluation. The design of the policy evaluation included surveys, in depth interviews and qualitative case studies of pre-schools and children supported by AIM which were deliberately designed to be counter-hegemonic through the recruitment of practitioners as co-researchers (as expert representatives within a feminised workforce), and the use of a participative method of elicitation that sough the perspectives and lived experiences of inclusion among fourteen children supported by AIM. This method was multi-modal mapping. With a focus on these counter-hegemonic elements, the paper poses questions about how the approach was counterhegemonic in terms of its theoretical underpinning, practical approach, and outcomes. Thematic analysis of the data collected by practitioner researchers for the child case studies showed that the approach did achieve counter-hegemony through the achievement of redistribution, representation, and recognition in both the enactment of the research, and in the reporting of children's lived experience in the study as a whole. However, the extent of counter-hegemony achieved was limited when practitioner researchers were unable to deploy the multi-modal mapping method because of limited time, or because the child was not a speaker of English or was as yet, non-speaking. In a context where policy makers have a preference for positivist and rationalist approaches to evaluating the impact of policies, we assert that research about policies for inclusion, should be enacted as inclusion and social justice through the deliberate deployment of participatory and counter-hegemonic methods. We also assert that multi-modal mapping holds particular promise for researching the lived experience of inclusion and participation from the perspective of children and argue that more work needs to be done on developing these methods so that they are effective with all children, including those who are non-speaking. Finally, we posit that Fraser's triune model of social justice can be applied as a benchmark for designing and evaluating counter-hegemonic modii and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politics & Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

China has long exercised environmental control through the imposition of sewage charges. The start of the environmental protection tax on January 1, 2018, means that China has entered a new phase of environmental control. Unlike many previous studies on the role of environmental taxes at the firm level, this paper examines whether environmental taxes affect pollution emissions by influencing the behavioral choices of micro-actors. This paper first reviews the Pyrrhic tax, the Porter hypothesis, and the "double dividend effect." We then construct provincial panel data for 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2019 as a sample, use the environmental protection tax as a natural experiment to evaluate the policy of this environmental protection tax using propensity score matching and difference-in-differences model, investigate the intermediate transmission mechanism of the policy implementation, and then analyze the differences in policy effects between provinces with different levels of economic development. The increased tax burden in 2018 led to a general reduction in provincial pollution emissions in which technological innovation by various groups, including firms and universities, had a mediating role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a systematic literature review of studies investigating the effect of an intervention on the efficiency of a decision‐making unit, when efficiency is computed using nonparametric frontier approaches. This paper offers a guide for future research by identifying patterns in (1) the fields of application, (2) applied efficiency models, and (3) analysis of efficiency determinants. Our findings indicate that, despite the prominent role of frontier techniques in the analysis of public sector performances and the importance of the effectiveness and the policy perspective, these two approaches have long been kept separate. Nevertheless, the combination of efficiency and effectiveness is fundamental to evaluate public interventions and to detect inefficiencies at the policy level, especially in key sectors such as education, health, and environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the performance of machine learning predictions for the counterfactual analysis of air transport. It is motivated by the dynamic and universally regulated international air transport market, where ex post policy evaluations usually lack counterfactual control scenarios. As an empirical example, this paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on airfares in 2020 as the difference between predicted and actual airfares. Airfares are important from a policy makers' perspective, as air transport is crucial for mobility. From a methodological point of view, airfares are also of particular interest given their dynamic character, which makes them challenging for prediction. This paper adopts a novel multi-step prediction technique with walk-forward validation to increase the transparency of the model's predictive quality. For the analysis, the universe of worldwide airline bookings is combined with detailed airline information. The results show that machine learning with walk-forward validation is powerful for the counterfactual analysis of airfares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marine economic development demonstration zone (MEDDZ) is the regional marine functional policy that assumes the significant tasks of innovation in the system and mechanism of the marine economy, optimization of the marine industrial structures, and the construction of marine ecological civilization. This paper constructs a panel database of 11 coastal provinces in China from 2006 to 2019, takes the Zhejiang Marine Economy Development Demonstration Zone Plan officially approved by the State Council of China in 2011 as a quasi-natural experiment, applies the synthetic control method (SCM) to evaluate the effect of implementation of the MEDDZ policy on marine industrial structure optimization in Zhejiang. The results show that: (1) The MEDDZ policy significantly promotes the structure optimization of the marine industry in Zhejiang and the existence of the policy lag phenomenon. (2) Based on the results of the robustness tests, we find that the fitted path of policy effects is better when the time of MEDDZ implementation is adjusted to 2012. (3) Government financial support and marine cargo capacity play a role in implementing the MEDDZ policy, positively affecting and optimizing the coastal marine industry's structure. Therefore, we make some suggestions from the perspectives of strengthening the policy implementation process, focusing on the policy lag phenomenon, and broadening funding sources, thus enriching theoretical research on policies in the field of the marine industry and providing practical references for the development of other coastal demonstration zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants can more efficiently achieve green technological change, industrial low-carbon transition, and high-quality economic and social development. As a typical environmental policy in China, the pilot carbon Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) has obvious advantages in achieving the collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants. Therefore, an evaluation of China's pilot carbon ETS from the perspective of collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants is performed in this paper. Compared with previous studies, first, this study innovatively uses the coupled coordination degree (CCD) model to measure the collaborative reduction level of carbon and air pollutants under different scenarios based on the panel data of China's 30 provincial-level regions during 2004–2018. Second, this study uses the DID method to evaluate the impact of China's pilot carbon ETS on the collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants and conducts some robustness checks and regional heterogeneity regressions. Third, this study uses the synthetic control method (SCM) further to examine the policy outcomes of the pilot carbon ETS. Scenario analysis shows that attaching importance to reducing air pollution will improve the collaborative reduction effect of carbon and air pollutants. Furthermore, the implementation of China's pilot carbon ETS exerts an effect of roughly 24.7% on reducing carbon, roughly 10.1% on reducing air pollutants, and roughly 22.0% on the collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants, ceteris paribus. Regional heterogeneity analysis shows that the impacts of the pilot carbon ETS are significant in all regions, except that the impact on reducing air pollutants in the central region is not significant. In addition, results from SCM indicate that the impacts of the pilot carbon ETS on the collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants are significantly efficient in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Hubei, and Chongqing, while not much efficient in Guangdong and Fujian. The main policy implications include strengthening the top-level design of the ETS in the collaborative reduction of carbon and air pollutants, attaching importance to the governance of air pollution, making the regional governance more targeted, and improving energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociology & Technoscience / Sociología y Tecnociencia is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Escuela Universitaria de Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Agricultural Resources & Environment / Nongye Ziyuan yu Huanjing Xuebao is the property of Journal of Agricultural Resources & Environment Editorial Board and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Most countries put significant amounts of time and effort in writing and issuing high-level policy documents. These are supposed to guide subsequent national defence efforts. But do they? And how do countries even try to ensure that they do? This paper reports on a benchmarking effort of how a few "best of breed" small- to medium-sized defence organisations (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) deal with these issues. We find that most countries fail to link goals to resources and pay limited attention to specific and rigorous ex-ante or post-hoc evaluation, even when compared to their own national government-wide provisions. We do, however, observe a (modest) trend towards putting more specific goals and metrics in these documents that can be - and in a few rare cases were - tracked. The paper identifies 42 concrete policy "nuggets" - both "do's and don'ts" - that should be of interest to most defence policy planning/analysis communities. It ends with two recommendations that are in line with recent broader (non-defence) scholarship on the policy formulation-policy implementation gap: to put more rigorous emphasis on implementation (especially on achieving desired policy effects), but to do so increasingly in more experiential ("design") ways, rather than in industrial-age bureaucratic ones ("PPBS"-systems). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent emphasis on carbon neutrality following COP27, many countries prioritise shifting to electric mobility as a crucial strategy to combat carbon emissions. A significant portion of this comes from transportation. Notably, countries such as Norway, China, and the United States have taken the lead in the electric vehicle (EV) industry, driven by their effective e-mobility policies. In contrast, the 10 member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are still in the early stages of adopting this emerging trend. This paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the current e-mobility policies within the ASEAN region, employing the STEELUP (Sociocultural and demographic, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Legislative, Urban design, and Political) framework to provide a holistic perspective on the e-mobility landscape in the ASEAN countries. By critically assessing the implementation of e-mobility policies in each country, this paper aims to identify key gaps and challenges that hinder the acceleration of EV adoption in the region. The findings from the STEELUP framework, coupled with a thorough analysis of the current conditions in ASEAN, provide crucial insights for governments and policymakers to act upon. Through evidence-based recommendations, this study concludes by suggesting effective strategies to expedite the uptake of EVs in the ASEAN region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter begins with an overview of recent developments that have encouraged and facilitated greater use of research syntheses, including Meta-Analysis, to guide public policy and practice in education, workforce development, and social services. It discusses the role of Meta-Analysis for improving knowledge of the effectiveness of programs, policies, and practices and the applicability and generalizability of that knowledge to conditions other than those represented by the study samples and settings. The chapter concludes with recommendations for improving the potential of Meta-Analysis to accelerate knowledge development through changing how we design, conduct, and report findings of individual studies to maximize their usefulness in Meta-Analysis as well as how we produce and report Meta-Analysis findings. The paper includes references to resources supporting the recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological civilization construction is an important dimension to achieve high-quality economic development. This paper evaluates the eco-efficiency improvement effect of China's ecological civilization pilot zone policy utilizing the synthetic control method (SCM) differences-in-differences method (DID) and examines the influence mechanism of ecological civilization pilot zones on eco-efficiency in the light of the environmental pollution penalty, green technological innovation, and environmental publicity and education. The study results indicate that the construction of the ecological civilization pilot zone policy has substantially boosted eco-efficiency in the pilot areas, with the strongest boosting effect on eco-efficiency in Fujian province, followed by Guizhou province, and not significantly on eco-efficiency in Jiangxi province. Further, this paper also reveals that the construction of ecological civilization pilot zones has effectively contributed to eco-efficiency through channels such as strengthening the environmental pollution penalty, stimulating green technological innovation, and broadening environmental publicity and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by all United Nations Member States, emphasize sustainable cities and communities, aiming to strengthen development planning and foster positive links between urban and rural areas by 2030. As the newly leading platform for urbanization development, characteristic towns ('Tese Xiaozhen' in Chinese) contribute to the target of sustainable urbanisation, wherein town policies are especially important for leading the sound development of characteristic towns. However, the effect of these characteristic towns policies remains uncertain. Additionally, most related studies have utilized qualitative methodologies in policy evaluation, which may be inadequate to guide actual practice. Thus, in order to accurately acknowledge the effect of characteristic towns policies, a policy evaluation framework is established in this paper, utilising the multiple streams theory, text mining and the Policy Modelling Consistency Index model (PMC-Index model). Then, taking 225 policy documents promulgated in China from 2015 to 2022 as the research objects, policy evaluation indicators were selected by combining the multiple streams theory to improve the PMC-Index model and a text mining method. Thereafter, an empirical analysis was conducted to evaluate the consistency of 10 characteristic towns policies chosen. The results indicate that the mean value of the PMC indexes of the 10 examined policies is 7.13 in the total of 9 points, which means that the general performance of the characteristic town policies is satisfactory, yet the low scores in terms of effectiveness, content, and guarantee. In the end, some recommendations and suggestions are proposed for clarifying administrative attributes, optimizing the integration of urban and rural resources, and adjusting the policy hierarchy to a bottom-up approach. This study not only provides a policy evaluation framework to comprehensively understand the consistency of global urbanization policies but also offers a beneficial reference for promote urban–rural sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have yet described concrete efforts by researchers in applied linguistics to systematically impact language policy. In linguistics, there is a general lack of published work on interactions between research and policy, and authors have decried a general dearth of policy literacy among applied linguists. The goal of the current paper is to describe how applied linguistics research can bring about policy impact by presenting a narrative account of one approach aimed at impacting university admission language policies. The first part of the paper presents research-based recommendations regarding language requirements for international students, the second focuses on mechanisms to communicate these recommendations to policy makers. The case study presented in this paper serves to argue that applied linguistic research and policy impact can go hand in hand, on the condition that policy recommendations are concrete, timely, seen as relevant, and researchers have a fundamental understanding of the policy-making context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a stochastic multi-period two-echelon dual sourcing inventory system where the buyer can source a product from two different suppliers: a regular and an expedited supplier. The regular supplier is a low-cost offshore supplier, whereas the expedited supplier is a responsive nearshore supplier. Such dual sourcing inventory systems have been well studied in the literature, mostly being solely evaluated from the buyer's perspective. Since the buyer's decisions have an impact on the supply chain profit, we adopt the perspective of the entire supply chain, i.e., by taking the suppliers explicitly into consideration. In addition, we study this system for general (nonconsecutive) lead times for which the optimal policy is unknown or very complex. We numerically compare the performance of two different policies in a two-echelon setting: the Dual-Index Policy (DIP) and the Tailored Base-Surge Policy (TBS). From earlier studies we know that when the lead time difference is one period, DIP is optimal from the buyer's perspective, but not necessarily from the supply chain perspective. On the other hand, when the lead time difference grows to infinity, TBS becomes optimal for the buyer. In this paper, we evaluate the policies numerically (under various conditions) and we show that from a supply chain perspective, TBS typically outperforms DIP at a limited lead time difference of a few time periods. Based on data collected from 51 manufacturing firms, the results of our paper imply for many supply chains with a dual sourcing setting that TBS quickly becomes a beneficial policy alternative, especially given its simple and appealing structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After nearly forty years of development, China's land consolidation policies (CLCP) have become an important tool for promoting rural revitalization and sustainable development. However, as a major land management policy, there is still a lack of quantitative evaluation research on its text. This paper establishes an evaluation system for CLCP using text analysis and the PMC-Index model. Based on a reasonable definition of the connotation of land consolidation, this paper collects 313 related policies issued by China's central government from 1982 to 2022, using text analysis to sort out the characteristics of issuance time, policy types, issuing institutions, and cooperation networks. By combining the outcomes of text mining with the previous research results to set evaluation indicators for the PMC-Index model, it distinguishes between comprehensive policies and specialized policies and separately evaluates them. Then, the PMC-Surface is established to clearly display the calculation results. The results show that the evaluation scores of comprehensive policies and specialized policies showed an upward trend over time. This indicates that the content of CLCP is constantly being enriched and expanded. The evaluation scores for different dimensions of comprehensive policies are relatively balanced, whereas there are significant differences in the evaluation scores of various dimensions of specialized policies. Both comprehensive policies and specialized policies have weaknesses in policy functions, incentives and constraints, and implementation guarantees, so improvements may be needed in these areas in the future. This study provides valuable insights into the advantages and disadvantages of a single land consolidation policy in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear regressions with period and group fixed effects are widely used to estimate policie's effects: 26 of the 100 most cited papers published by the American Economic Review from 2015 to 2019 estimate such regressions. It has recently been shown that those regressions may produce misleading estimates if the policy's effect is heterogeneous between groups or over time, as is often the case. This survey reviews a fast-growing literature that documents this issue and that proposes alternative estimators robust to heterogeneous effects. We use those alternative estimators to revisit Wolfers (2006a). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the special section on "Geographical Clustering and the Evaluation of Cluster Policies". We first provide a motivation of cluster policies and briefly review the state of the art in cluster evaluation research. We proceed with summaries of the papers comprising the special section, which take different perspectives and cover distinct facets of cluster policy evaluation. The papers identify challenges for evaluation by highlighting the variety of approaches towards cluster policies addressed at different policy levels. Additional challenges for an identification of policy impact result from the complexity as well as the timing of policy effects. Thus, proper evaluations should employ and combine a broad set of evaluation methods. Based on the main lessons learned, we finally propose several avenues for future research to cope with these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]