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The need for sustainability transitions is widely recognised, along with a concurrent need for the evolution of knowledge systems to inform more effective policy action. Although there are many new policy targets relating to net zero emissions and other sustainability challenges, cities, regional and national governments are struggling to rapidly develop transformational policies to achieve them. As academics and practitioners who work at the science-policy interface, we identify specific knowledge and competency needs for governing sustainability transitions related to the interlinked phases of envisioning, implementing and evaluating. In short, coordinated reforms of both policy and knowledge systems are urgently needed to address the speed and scale of sustainability challenges. These include embedding systems thinking literacy, mainstreaming participatory policy making, expanding the capacity to undertake transdisciplinary research, more adaptive governance and continuous organisational learning. These processes must guide further knowledge development, uptake and use as part of an iterative and holistic process. Such deep-seated change in policy-knowledge systems will be disruptive and presents challenges for traditional organisational models of knowledge delivery, but is essential for successful sustainability transformations.

To achieve its ambitious climate targets, the European Union (EU) must adopt new policies, increase the impact of existing policies and/or remove dysfunctional ones. The EU has developed an elaborate system to monitor national policy mixes in order to support these challenging requirements. Data that member states have reported to the EU over the last ten years reveal that the average expected per-policy-instrument emission reduction has declined, while national policy mixes have remained generally stable over time. This is strikingly discordant with the EU’s ambitious commitment to become carbon neutral by 2050 (‘net zero’).

This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers between 1787 and 2014. It is based on a compiled data set of 429 censuses and surveys, representing 101 countries and 46.9 million mothers, using the International and U.S. IPUMS, the North Atlantic Population Project, and the Demographic and Health Surveys. Using twin births (Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1980) and same gendered children (Angrist and Evans 1998) as instrumental variables, we show three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and often indistinguishable from zero at low levels of income and large and negative at higher levels of income; (2) these effects are remarkably consistent both across time looking at the historical time series of currently developed countries and at a contemporary cross section of developing countries; and (3) the results are robust to other instrument variation, different demographic and educational groups, rescaling to account for changes in the base level of labor force participation, and a variety of specification and data decisions. We show that the negative gradient in female labor supply is consistent with a standard labor-leisure model augmented to include a taste for children. In particular, our results appear to be driven by a declining substitution effect to increasing wages that arises from changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs into formal nonagricultural wage employment as countries develop.

The literature on policy dynamics has long argued for a better conceptualization and measurement of the dependent variable (“policy”), but this fundamental point has often been neglected in the policy feedback literature. In this paper, we explore how far disaggregating policy into different elements (policy instruments, objectives, and settings) addresses this gap. We do so by examining the world’s largest market-based climate policy instrument—emissions trading in the European Union—and reveal a number of valuable new insights. First, even if positive policy feedback locks in a policy instrument, actor contestation does not disappear, but narrows down to the more detailed level of policy settings. Second, feedback may operate differently at each policy level: the policy instrument and its settings may strengthen at the same time as support for broader objectives weakens. Finally, positive feedback may simultaneously strengthen opposing actors’ support for multiple policy elements, leading to a form of “policy stability by stalemate.” These findings highlight the need for a new, interdisciplinary phase of policy feedback research that more fully disaggregates the dependent variable across a wider range of policy areas and policy instrument types. Policy scientists are well equipped to contribute to and benefit from such a debate.

We examine 70,581 felony court cases filed in Chicago, IL during the period 1990-2007. We exploit case randomization to assess the impact of judge assignment and sentencing decisions on the arrival rates of new charges. Relative to prior research, we document an important source of heterogeneity in the impact of incarceration on recidivism. Incarceration creates lasting reductions in recidivism among first offenders but not repeat offenders. We present suggestive evidence that these reductions among first offenders primarily reflect outcomes for offenders who live in lower-crime areas of the city and are not involved in the drug trade. During our sample period, Illinois parole officers were able to issue arrest warrants for former inmates under their supervision. These powers place former inmates at significant risk of returning to prison as punishment for violations of technical conditions of their supervision. However, we find no evidence that these police powers increased the arrival rate of new charges against formerly incarcerated offenders. Incarceration does not reduce the arrival of new criminal charges among repeat offenders, and this outcome is not the result of parole officers over-policing repeat offenders.

This article engages a recent debate in contract theory concerning whether we should embrace a uniform contract law, or whether we should instead adopt different legal rules for different contracting relationships. A common assumption in the literature is that grounding contract in promissory morality would lead to the former. After all, the thinking goes, consumer purchases, parenting agreements, and commercial contracts all equally involve promises, and promissory morality requires one to do what one promised. But I argue that most contract-as-promise theorists have been operating with an overly abstract and individualistic conception of promissory morality that is too focused on the primary promissory obligation. This has obscured many important normative dimensions of promissory morality: How stringent is the promise? Under what conditions is a person obligated to perform? How is an agent entitled to respond to a breach? How should a promisee respond to a request for release? When should a promisee agree to renegotiate? Through a series of examples, I show how these features of promissory morality vary radically across different kinds of human relationships—e.g., marriage, friendship, parenting, and commercial bargains. I argue that this variance is best explained by conceiving of promissory morality as the morality of joint decision-making. The normativity of joint decision-making is dependent on the other joint projects that the parties have, such as maintaining a friendship, forging a life together as a married couple, or raising children. This is an important result for contract theory: if promissory morality doesn’t justify the application of general contract principles across different contracting relationships, then likely nothing does. So, for the law to have a coherent grounding, it ought to resist the urge to apply uniform contract principles across diverse human relationships, even if promissory morality plays a central justificatory role in contracts.

Following the landmark Paris agreement, policy makers are under pressure to adopt policies that rapidly deliver deep, society-wide decarbonisation. Deep decarbonisation requires more durable policies, but not enough is known about if and how they actually emerge. This book provides the first systematic analysis of the determinants of policy durability in three high-profile areas: biofuel production, car transport, and industrial emissions. It breaks new ground by exploring how key European Union climate policies have shaped their own durability and their ability to stimulate supportive political dynamics in society. It combines state-of-the-art policy theories with empirical accounts of landmark political events such as 'Dieselgate' and the campaign against 'dirty' biofuels, to offer a fresh understanding of how and why policy makers set about packaging together different elements of policy. By shining new light on an important area of contemporary policy making, it reveals a rich agenda for academic researchers and policy makers.

In this essay, I argue that the role for exclusionary reasons in a sound account of practical rationality is, at most, much more circumscribed than proponents of exclusionary reasons might suppose. Specifically, I argue that an attractive account of moral motivation is in tension with the idea that moral reasons can be excluded. Limiting ourselves to the tools of first order moral reasons—including such relations as outweighing, and disabling—allows us to preserve a more attractive account of the relationship between what there is strongest reason to do, what one is motivated to do, and that for which one is praiseworthy or blameworthy. In closing, I argue that we can capture the normativity associated with legal decision-making using only the resources of the first-order model.

We defend a fitting-attitude (FA) theory of the funny against a set of potential objections. Ultimately, we endorse a version of FA theory that treats reasons for amusement as non-compelling, metaphysically non-conditional, and alterable by social features of the joke telling context. We find that this version of FA theory is well-suited to accommodate our ordinary practices of telling and being amused by jokes, and helpfully bears on the related faultless disagreement dispute.

This editorial highlights the diversity in studies of experimentation that aims for solutions to climate change and wider sustainability challenges. The diversity is reflected in the theoretical underpinnings, the agency behind experiments, the niches in which experimentation occurs, in the governance of the experiments and in experiments with governance, in the way experiments contribute to learning and sharing of knowledge across levels and scales. This implies that experimentation and experiments can contribute to transitions in very different ways and that experimentation also runs the risks of merely becoming a distraction that maintains status quo instead of contributing to transformative change. In moving forward research should explore the diversity even more, and critically evaluate and discuss the possible contributions to policy and polycentric governance.

This chapter seeks to clarify how the notion of institution extends beyond organizational form, rules and relationships into more fundamental social and political factors that determine how people think, behave and devise rules through which they expect everyone else to play. For sociologists, the study of institutions is central to understanding the organization and functioning of all societies. Indeed, within the functionalist paradigm, sociology is ‘the science of institutions’ and other ‘social facts’. The study of institutions is undoubtedly experiencing a renaissance throughout the social sciences. In economics, politics, public choice, sociology and organizational analysis the study of institutions has emerged as a ‘new’ focus for analysis. According to Jordan and, Smith one of the most important institutions within which policy making and implementation takes place is the policy network or community.

The European Union (EU) has had a profound effect upon its members’ environmental policy. Even in the United Kingdom (UK), the EU’s most recalcitrant member state (historically labeled the ‘Dirty man of Europe’), environmental policy has been Europeanised. As the UK moves to the EU’s exit door it is timely to assess the utility of Europeanisation for understanding policy dynamics in the UK. Drawing upon interviews and extensive engagement with stakeholders, this article analyses the potential impact of Brexit upon environmental policy and politics. The analytical toolkit offered by de-Europeanisation is developed to identify the factors that drive and inhibit de-Europeanisation processes, thereby providing insights that may be applicable in other settings. Disengagement and policy stagnation are presented as more likely environmental outcomes of Brexit, with capacity emerging as a central explanatory variable.

Policy monitoring is often seen as a crucial ingredient of policy evaluation, but theoretically informed empirical analyses of real-world policy monitoring practices are still rare. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on climate policy monitoring in the European Union, which has a relatively stringent system of greenhouse gas monitoring but a much less demanding approach to monitoring policies. It explores how institutional settings, policy implementation, and the quality of information may impact the practices and politics of policy monitoring. Drawing on quantitative regression models and qualitative interviews, it demonstrates that policy monitoring has evolved over time and is itself subject to implementation pressures, but also exhibits learning effects that improve its quality. In further developing both everyday policy monitoring practices and academic understanding of them, there is a need to pay attention to their design—specifically, the impact of any overarching rules, the institutional support for implementation, and the criteria governing the quality of the information they deliver. In short, policy monitoring should be treated as a governance activity in its own right, raising many different design challenges.

Background and Objectives Quality control (QC) data collected by blood services are used to monitor production and to ensure compliance with regulatory standards. We demonstrate how analysis of quality control data can be used to highlight the sources of variability within red cell concentrates (RCCs). Materials and Methods We merged Canadian Blood Services QC data with manufacturing and donor records for 28 227 RCC between June 2011 and October 2014. Units were categorized based on processing method, bag manufacturer, donor age and donor sex, then assessed based on product characteristics: haemolysis and haemoglobin levels, unit volume, leucocyte count and haematocrit. Results Buffy-coat method (top/bottom)-processed units exhibited lower haemolysis than units processed using the whole-blood filtration method (top/top). Units from female donors exhibited lower haemolysis than male donations. Processing method influenced unit volume and the ratio of additive solution to residual plasma. Conclusions Stored red blood cell characteristics are influenced by prestorage processing and donor factors. Understanding the relationship between processing, donors and RCC quality will help blood services to ensure the safety of transfused products.

Most constitutional theorizing aims to specify the meaning or content of the Constitution. Constitutional content, in turn, is assumed to have implications for sound constitutional decisionmaking. In this Article, I argue that the search for a general theory of constitutional content rests on a mistake. Sound constitutional decisionmaking, I argue, does not rest on a prior account of constitutional content. In defending this conclusion, I argue that sound constitutional decisionmaking is pluralistic, open-ended, and context-dependent. Those features of sound constitutional decisionmaking are at odds with any attempt to specify a general theory of constitutionality that could guide constitutional decisionmakers. On the positive view defended here, constitutional decisions are constitutional not because they arise out of some independent source that makes things constitutional, be it text, structure, precedent, or some other thing. They are constitutional because they involve practical reasons that arise within the social practice of American constitutional law.

Policy networks can help to coordinate different objectives. The vast literature on network governance often implies that the mere existence of networks will automatically lead to improved coordination. However, much empirical analysis so far has focused on networks within particular policy sectors, which may actually inhibit horizontal coordination across policy sectors. This focus has led to ambiguities regarding the use of networks in practice — which this article seeks to help address. By analysing the role of networks in the coordination of the EU’s economic and environmental objectives in the development of its mercury policy, the article demonstrates that policy networks need to span several policy sectors if they are to help reconcile competing policy objectives. Furthermore, certain characteristics of the policy area which contributed to the formation of an inter-sector network in this case are discussed.

This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers between 1787 and 2014. It is based on a compiled data set of 429 censuses and surveys, representing 101 countries and 46.9 million mothers, using the International and U.S. IPUMS, the North Atlantic Population Project, and the Demographic and Health Surveys. Using twin births (Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1980) and same gendered children (Angrist and Evans 1998) as instrumental variables, we show three main findings: (1) the effect of fertility on labor supply is small and often indistinguishable from zero at low levels of income and large and negative at higher levels of income; (2) these effects are remarkably consistent both across time looking at the historical time series of currently developed countries and at a contemporary cross section of developing countries; and (3) the results are robust to other instrument variation, different demographic and educational groups, rescaling to account for changes in the base level of labor force participation, and a variety of specification and data decisions. We show that the negative gradient in female labor supply is consistent with a standard labor-leisure model augmented to include a taste for children. In particular, our results appear to be driven by a declining substitution effect to increasing wages that arises from changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs into formal nonagricultural wage employment as countries develop.

Although manifestly not a state, the European Union (EU) has evolved from its origins as a trade-based economic organization to become a supra-national political body that regulates across multiple policy sectors in a state-like manner. Nowhere is this regulatory influence more pronounced than in relation to the environment, where the EU now effectively determines the national policy of its member states in areas as diverse as air quality, water pollution, habitat protection, and genetically modified organisms. Countries outside of the EU are also increasingly influenced by its policy norms. Indeed, the EU is widely recognized as an international environmental policy entrepreneur, particularly in relation to climate policy. What is even more remarkable is that this broad environmental acquis communautaire, or corpus of policy and law, has been assembled in the space of just four decades. Up until the early 1970s, environmental concerns were primarily governed at the national and/or sub-national levels in Europe. Environmental measures that were adopted by the European Economic Commission (EEC) were overtly aimed at trade harmonization within a common market. As new, and more costly, regulatory measures were adopted, conflicts erupted with member states. These battles continued into the 1990s, with member states invoking the principle of subsidiarity to slow down the pace of integration. By the 2000s, EU policy had reached a state of maturity. Despite attempts by more economically liberal governments and industrial actors to roll back policy expansion, the EU sought to shift the emphasis of policymaking toward more holistic responses to sustainable development issues. Economic austerity has, to an extent, slowed the pace of policy expansion but the future of the sector is likely to witness greater experimentation with novel policy instruments and a gradual merging of environmental, climate and energy policy objectives. In this respect, EU environmental policy remains a work in progress. A growing literature on these topics has emerged since the late 20th century. Firstly, several key texts have been published to provide an overview of the sector. Secondly, the literature has also focused more specifically on political decision-making, including the institutional aspects of policymaking. Thirdly, scholars have researched individual policies or policy subsectors, often using them to understand integration through time. Fourthly, empirical work has formed the basis of theory testing or theory building, using perspectives imported from comparative (national) politics and European integration. Finally, research has engaged with the process of environmental governing across multiple institutional levels, including understanding the implementation of measures and how member states are being Europeanized. This overview of the published literature is structured according to these strands.

Federal theories are once again enjoying renewed interest within European Union studies, where they potentially have multiple uses, including shedding more light on the enduringly puzzling issue of task allocation. Yet their overtly rationalist nature means that they may underestimate the contingent and socially constructed nature of integration principles and norms. One recent theory that tries to adopt a more socially nuanced explanation of task allocation is cryptofederalism. This article further develops its central arguments by adding insights drawn from social constructivism, then applying them to the animal welfare sector – a deeply controversial policy area where task allocation has always proven difficult to explain. It reveals that, once ‘retooled’, cryptofederalism adds a new but incomplete dimension to federal accounts of task allocation. Several scenarios of the potential future relationship between federalism and constructivism are then explored with respect to the changing ‘mosaic’ of European integration theory.

Policy coherence for development (PCD) — the integration of the needs of developing countries into all policy areas — is now an EU policy goal. This article focuses on how far this ambitious goal has been addressed in a policy procedure — impact assessment (IA) — established to support such cross-cutting goals. Drawing on an analysis of the 2006 and 2013 reforms of the EU’s sugar policy, it finds that while IA offered a new venue in which to debate PCD, in practice it reproduced the same disagreements that previously frustrated agricultural reform. The article shows how IA was shaped during its implementation, so instead of functioning as a bureaucratic procedure to pursue policy coherence, it simply buttressed the power of dominant groups. Advocates of policy coherence in general and PCD in particular should therefore be mindful that the toolbox of implementing instruments in the EU may be more limited than sometimes assumed.

States have been widely criticized for failing to advance the international climate regime. Many observers now believe that a "new" climate governance is emerging through transnational and/or local forms of action that will eventually plug the resulting governance gaps. Yet states, which remain oddly absent from most discussions of the "new" governance, will remain key players as governance becomes more polycentric. This paper introduces a special issue that explores the ability of states to rise to these interconnected challenges through the analytical prism of policy innovation. It reveals that policy innovation is much more multi-dimensional than is often thought; it encompasses three vital activities: invention (centering on the 'source' of new policy elements), diffusion (that produces different 'patterns' of policy adoption), and the evaluation of the 'effects' that such innovations create in reality. The papers, which range from qualitative case studies to large 'n' quantitative studies, offer new insights into the varied roles that states play in relation to all three.They show, for instance that: the policy activity of states has risen dramatically in the past decade; that state innovation is affected to similar degrees by internal and external factors; and that policies that offer flexibility to target groups on how to meet policy goals are most effective but that voluntary reporting requirements are ineffective. This paper draws upon these and many other insights to offer a much more nuanced reflection on the future of climate governance; one that deservedly puts states at the front and center of analysis. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

A key dimension of the debate about policy innovation is the extent to which new policies achieve significant and lasting effects on the problems they purport to address. However, little is known about such effects. We break new ground by investigating how far current evaluation practices in a policy system with relatively ambitious climate policies – the European Union – identify the most effective (carbon-reducing) policies. We find that a small number of policy instruments are projected to deliver the lion’s share of emission reductions. Setting aside the special case of emissions trading, these instruments are not particularly innovative. If significant practical and political obstacles can be addressed, more (detailed) evaluations could enhance the evidence base and also the political prospects for delivering deeper emissions cuts through to 2050. An evaluation perspective could also offer a very different way to consider policy innovation dynamics.

In a series of papers, Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star defend the following general account of reasons: R: Necessarily, a fact F is a reason for an agent A to Φ iff F is evidence that an agent ought to Φ.

It is a truism that environmental management has experienced a significant change in the locus of governing, in which centralised forms of steering have been gradually replaced by more collaborative management approaches organised at the ecosystem scale. Whereas much research capital has been expended on informing their design and promoting their uptake, surprisingly little systematic comparative empirical research exists on the precise nature and extent of what is often described as a ‘paradigm shift’ in governing. We address this gap by examining how one issue often deemed to require deeper ‘collaboration’, namely, catchment management, has been addressed in three comparable federal political systems: the European Union; the USA; and Australia. On the basis of a fresh and more comparable account of the forms and modalities of collaboration, we reveal that, although collaboration has undoubtedly grown in recent decades, its depth and extent remains highly variable both across and within the three cases. We also examine what these subtly different geographical ‘contours of collaboration’ imply for future research and practice.

Some particularists have argued that even virtue properties can exhibit a form of holism or context variance, e.g. sometimes an act is worse for being kind, say. But, on a common conception of virtuous acts, one derived from Aristotle, claims of virtue holism will be shown to be false. I argue, perhaps surprisingly, that on this conception the virtuousness of an act is not a reason to do it, and hence this conception of virtuous acts presents no challenge to particularist claims about the context variance of reasons. Still, I argue that the virtues nevertheless have important implications for our understanding of the particularism debate. Specifically, we can accept the particularist claim that reasons do not need to be principled in order to have the normative status that they do have, while still maintaining that sound moral thought and judgement has a principled structure understood in terms of the virtues.

The European Union's (EU) claims to be a leader in international climate policy are well known. Since the early 1990s, a rich and vibrant academic literature has analyzed the internal sources and international consequences of its leadership aspirations, especially in relation to the challenges of mitigation. More recently, attention has turned to adaptation policy. The literature highlights how policy actors have successfully exploited many of the opportunities afforded by the EU's ‘polycentric’ form, while minimizing its downsides, but that acute challenges lie ahead, particularly if a strong global-level framework remains elusive. It has continually underlined the fact that the EU's climate policy activities have enormous relevance well beyond European borders. Both in terms of its role as a driver of international policy and a source of transferable policy lessons on how to govern in ‘polycentric’ settings, appreciating the EU's experience is vital for those seeking to understand the governance of climate change, both within and between states. WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:75–90. doi: 10.1002/wcc.205 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

The European Union (EU) has long claimed, with some justification, to be a leader in international climate policy. Its policy activities in this area, dating from the early 1990s, have had enormous influence within and beyond Europe. The period since ca. 2000 in particular has witnessed the repeated emergence of policies and targets that are increasingly distinct from national ones and sometimes globally innovative. They encompass a wide array of instruments (e.g., market-based, informational, voluntary, as well as regulatory). Policy development has been motivated by a mixture of concerns: to avoid national differences in policy causing distortions of the EU’s internal market; to enhance the domestic legitimacy of the wider project of European integration; to improve energy security; and to increase economic competitiveness through “ecological modernization.” Climate policy has also offered a means to enhance the standing of the EU as a global actor. The EU has, in general, been influential in international negotiations, for example, in its promotion of the 2°C warming limit and advocacy of emission reduction “targets and timetables.” In turn, its own policy has been shaped by developments at global level, as with the surprisingly enthusiastic adoption of the “flexible mechanism” of emissions trading. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that acute challenges to policy coherence and effectiveness—applying to emerging policy on adaptation, as well as mitigation—lie ahead in a Europe that is more polarized between its more environmentally conscious Member States and those in central and eastern Europe who have extracted significant concessions to protect their fossil fuel–intensive sectors. Although the Paris Agreement of 2015 offers an important opportunity to “ratchet up” the ambition of EU policy, it is proving to be a difficult one to seize.

The financial crisis has triggered demands to halt and even reverse the expansion of European Union (EU) policies. But have these and previous demands actually resulted in policy dismantling? The existing literature has charted the rise of dismantling discourses such as subsidiarity and better regulation, but has not examined the net effect on the acquis. For the first time, this contribution addresses this gap in the literature through an empirical study of policy change between 1992 and 2014. It is guided by a coding framework which captures the direction of policy change. It reveals that, despite its disposition towards consensualism, the EU has become a new locus of policy dismantling. However, not all policies targeted have been cut; many have stayed the same and some have even expanded. It concludes by identifying new directions for research on a topic that has continually fallen into the analytical blind spot of EU scholars.

Over nearly thirty years Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy (EPC) has been publishing agenda-defining papers on a number of topics related to government and policy in the broad sense. We examine what has been published, assess the impact it has made, and identify who the main audiences have been. The analysis reveals that EPC has made significant improvements in the diversity of the geographical origin of its submissions and publications, and in terms of impact, but that there is still room for improvement in both respects. We find that the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of EPC is one of its main strengths but possibly also one of its weaknesses. We conclude that it should remain a research-driven journal which seeks to advance both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary debates on a wide range of pressing contemporary policy issues arising from the governance of the economy, society, and the environment.

In a series of important papers, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson argue that all extant neo-sentimentalists are guilty of a conflation error that they call the moralistic fallacy. One commits the moralistic fallacy when one infers from the fact that it would be morally wrong to experience an affective attitude—e.g., it would be wrong to be amused—that the attitude does not fit its object—e.g., that it is not funny. Such inferences, they argue, conflate the appropriateness conditions of attitudinal responses with the fittingness conditions of the associated evaluative properties. Further, they argue that moral considerations are irrelevant for determining if amusement fits its object. We agree that a strong moralizing of humor is wrongheaded and that jokes can be quite funny even in cases where we have a compelling moral reason to not be amused. However, we argue that pace D’Arms and Jacobson moral considerations can be relevant for property ascription. On our view, in order for a joke to be funny, a properly sensitive agent must take herself to have a contributory reason to be amused, and in some cases that she lacks such a reason is best explained by appeal to moral considerations. We use this constraint as the basis of what we call our modest proposal for a modest sentimentalism.

More and more scholars are revisiting federal theories in an attempt to explain the functioning of the EU. Yet in‐depth empirical testing of their claims remains surprisingly limited. Cooperative federalism represents one particularly promising variant of federal theory in this respect. This article extends and refines existing claims about its utility to show how EU policy‐making can be fruitfully conceived of as a multi‐level ‘cooperative game’ played out between different actor coalitions. It then uses these arguments to analyse task allocation — a critical indicator of the European integration process — within the environmental sector. Drawing on fresh empirical evidence, it demonstrates how differential patterns of task allocation have emerged from a series of interlinked ‘cooperative’ dynamics, which were in turn shaped by broader federal structures. Although greater testing and development is needed, it concludes that there are good reasons to add cooperative federalism to the evolving ‘to...

Climate policy is a relatively young and dynamic area of public policy making. However, its development has attracted far more attention than the results it delivers in practice, which of course are the concern of policy evaluators. This article attempts to provide the first systematic cataloging of the emerging patterns of policy evaluation undertaken in different parts of the European Union. Theories of policy evaluation suggest that these evaluation practices should acknowledge the inherent complexity of climate policy making, be reflexive by questioning official policy goals, and be participatory. A meta-analysis of 259 climate policy evaluations suggests that current practice engages with some but not all of these issues. This article concludes by analyzing the implications of this finding for those in the academic and practitioner community who are keen to understand the extent to which climate policy evaluation is delivering on its promises. © The Author(s).2011.

European Union (EU) environmental policy is a key driver of national policy making in Western Europe and significantly shapes international environmental politics. The adoption of a new EU Treaty t...

The principle of environmental policy integration (EPI) attracts great scholarly interest as well as widespread political backing. Political support is particularly strong in the European Union, where it enjoys a prominent quasi-constitutional status. However, the practical fulfilment of EPI appears to lag well behind these aspirations, although the evidence base of this widely held view remains rather fragmented. This article aims to review the ‘state of the art’ in EPI research and practice from the perspective of its conceptual meaning, processes of implementation and outcomes ‘on the ground’. It finds that the political commitment to EPI is indeed widespread, especially in industrialized states, but that deep disagreement surrounds its actual application. In terms of everyday practices, ‘policy integration’ is complex and contingent, and there are few ‘best practices’ that can be easily shared between jurisdictions. Finally, knowledge about policy outcomes is very sparse indeed, and policy-making systems seem very ill prepared to address this lacuna. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The literature is now exploring the wider implications of the governance ‘turn’ in the European Union. This article develops this work by looking at the administrative demands associated with the use of ‘new’ (and principally network-based) instruments of governance. In the past, the main instrument used to integrate environmental concerns into other sectors was regulation. But in the 1990s, the Cardiff Process was established at EU level to promote a newer and more network-based approach to delivering this objective. Drawing upon an analysis of how well national administrative systems have responded to the demands associated with networks, it argues that both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ instruments of governance are reliant on the presence of sufficient administrative capacities. It concludes that decision-makers in the EU have traded the ‘old’ governance of regulation for the ‘new’ governance of networks without sufficiently diagnosing the administrative demands associated with either.

When my co-Managing Editor Andres Rodr|guez-Pose and I originally launched this particular feature of the journal in 2008 (Jordan and Rodr|guez-Pose, 2008), little did we know that I would be writing the second of these retrospective analyses of `the most downloaded papers'. Clearly, my 2008 paper on the governance of sustainable development (Jordan, 2008) has struck a chord with a large number of readers, which of course is a source of great pleasure for me but also, I think, bodes well for the journal's efforts to be recognised as an influential disseminator of popular contemporary environmental social science analysis. It is both an honour and a privilege to have this opportunity to reflect on my original reasons for writing that paper, to summarise the reactions it has generated, and to explain how my own work has evolved since I finished writing it in December 2007.

The increasing complexity of policy problems, coupled with the political desire to base new policies on the foundation of firm evidence, has accelerated the development of policy assessment tools. These range from complex computer models and cost benefit analysis through simple checklists and decision trees. In the last decade, many governments have established formal policy assessment systems to harness these tools in order to facilitate more evidence-based policy making. These tools are potentially widely available, but to what extent are they used by policy makers and what becomes of the evidence that they generate? This paper addresses these questions by studying the empirical patterns of tool use across 37 cases in three European countries and the European Commission. It uses a simple classification of tools into advanced, formal and simple types. It finds that even when tools are embedded in policy assessment systems, their use is differentiated and on the whole very limited, in particular when it comes to more advanced tools. It then explores these patterns from contrasting theoretical perspectives to shed light on why, when and how different policy assessment tools are used in the policy process.

Widely advocated as a means to make policy making more integrated, policy assessment remains weakly integrated in practice. But explanations for this shortfall, such as lack of staff training and resources, ignore more fundamental institutional factors. This paper identifies institutional capacities supporting and constraining attempts to make policy assessment more integrated. A comparative empirical analysis of functionally equivalent assessment systems in four European jurisdictions finds that there are wide-ranging institutional constraints upon integration. These include international policy commitments, the perception that assessment should support rather than determine policy, organisational traditions, and the sectorisation of policy making. This paper concludes by exploring the potential for altering these institutions to make policy assessment more integrated.

The existing literature has started to analyse why the policy co-ordination ambitions that permeated the 2001 White Paper on governance have not been realized. However, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to exploring the administrative demands that these ambitions impose on different policy actors. This article opens up this research area by focusing on more ambitious policy objectives and their associated network-based modes of governance. The empirical part examines three public administration systems in the EU to assess how well they have responded to these demands. Although often downplayed by those advocating network-based modes of governance, this paper reveals that the administrative demands they pose are much greater than is commonly supposed. Some actors (e.g. the Commission and the UK) have upgraded their administrative co-ordinating capacities, whereas others (e.g. the Netherlands) have moved in a perverse direction. It is concluded that the EU needs to take administrative capacity ...

After a long period in the doldrums, in recent years the use of federalism to understand the European Union (EU) has undergone something of a renaissance. However, some of its core claims remain ambiguous and many have not been tested empirically. This paper argues that amongst a number of truth claims made by federal theorists, potentially the most illuminating is that relating to the allocation of decision-making powers (or tasks) across different levels of governance. In testing the value of what appears to be an increasingly distinct ‘turn’ in EU scholarship, it subjects this particular claim to empirical testing within the area of environmental governance – a policy area which is especially well suited to federal theory. Drawing on three relevant federal theories, this paper concludes that each one sheds new light on task allocation, but all have their blind spots, suggesting the need for further refinement, empirical testing and possibly synthesis with other theoretical approaches.

Politicians and policy analysts are equally guilty of focusing more of their attention on the making of policy rather than the manner and ultimate extent to which it is actually implemented. This much is certainly true of the many international agreements which now form part of a wider body of international (including European Union) environmental law. This article attempts to redress this imbalance by comparing and contrasting the more recent attempts made by three North European states to implement the terms of the Convention on climate change within their own domestic territories. To date, the pathways through which each state has chosen to implement the Convention have been shaped both by more ‘stable’ cultural, economic and historical factors, as well as more ‘sporadic’ reactions to unforseen contingencies. On a broader plane, the three case studies give examples of the kinds of interesting and highly disparate dilemmas which now increasingly confront national governments as they seek to reconcile their international environmental obligations with domestic political imperatives.

The UK is reportedly an international leader in the application of environmental policy appraisal (EPA). From the late 1980s until 2004, UK central government sought to produce ex ante assessments of the potential environmental impacts of different policy options. Critics maintain that EPA had a very limited impact on policy-making activities in Whitehall departments. However, the empirical basis for these claims is surprisingly thin. This paper seeks to better understand what facilitated or retarded EPA by looking at its use in Whitehall, with the aim being to draw lessons for the UK's new and more integrated appraisal regime, as well as similar systems in the European Union. The paper finds that the implementation of EPA was both weak and highly sectorised, and that there is an underlying resistance to policy appraisal per se in Whitehall. These weaknesses urgently need to be addressed otherwise new systems of integrated appraisal will not deliver what is expected of them.

Sustainable development is a cross-cutting issue par excellence that necessitates a very high degree of policy coordination. This is especially true considering that the European Union's 2001 Sustainable Development Strategy demands that all European Union (EU) policies actively support the sustainable development of other countries, particularly those in the developing world. In order to fulfil this ambitious obligation, the EU has pledged to consider the impacts that all new policies have within and outside the EU as part of a new impact assessment (IA) regime. This paper aims to evaluate how well the new IA regime has helped address the ‘external’ dimensions of sustainability through the analysis of potential effects of EU policies on non-EU countries. It finds that the IA procedure does not currently function as an effective instrument for the implementation of the Union's commitment to promoting sustainability in the developing world. Other coordination mechanisms need to be considered, given the horizontal and vertical complexity of this challenge. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Policy convergence is an established theme in comparative political analysis. Policy convergence research certainly has the potential to add a fresh perspective to a surprisingly large number of active debates within European Union (EU) studies, such as those concerning Europeanization, globalization, policy transfer and ‘new’ modes of co-ordination. However, it remains a very heterogeneous research field, dominated by American comparativists. With some exceptions, the term does not (at least yet) excite as much interest among scholars of the EU as perhaps it could. This commentary seeks to assess the extent to which the papers in this special issue succeed in fashioning the broad issue of policy convergence into a cumulative and enduring body of work within EU scholarship. It finds that they do a great deal to define key terms and explanatory variables. However, the contributors concede the need to do much more to address the vexed question of causality and to feed their work into the mainstream...

Governance is a term in good currency, but there are still too few detailed empirical analyses of the precise extent to which it has or has not eclipsed government. This article explores the temporal and spatial characteristics of the governance transition by charting the deployment of new policy instruments in eight industrialised states and the European Union. The adoption and implementation of (‘old’ and ‘new’) policy instruments offer a useful analytical touchstone because governance theory argues that regulation is the quintessence of government. Although there are many ‘new’ environmental policy instruments in these nine jurisdictions, this article finds that the change from government to governance is highly differentiated across political jurisdictions, policy sectors and even the main instrument types. Crucially, many of the new policy instruments used require some state involvement (that is, ‘government’), and very few are entirely devoid of state involvement (that is, pure ‘governance’). Far from eclipsing government, governance therefore often complements and, on some occasions, even competes with it, although there are some cases of fusion. Future research should thus explore the many complex and varied ways in which government and governance interact in public policy-making.

Now it is widely accepted that the European Union (EU) constitutes a system of governance, analysts need actively to explore precisely how it may affect the continuing struggle better to coordinate national and European administrations. In its 2001 White Paper on governance, the European Commission interpreted governance to mean less central control and more network-led steering. Its interpretation of such networks is that they are self-organizing. Drawing upon an empirical study of environmental policy integration (EPI) in the EU, this article shows that this vision may not adequately fit the multi-actor, multi-level coordination challenges associated with some EU problems. By studying the administrative capacities that the European Commission and three member states have created to achieve better environmental coordination, this article shows significant administrative weaknesses. It concludes that the coordination challenges now troubling the EU require a more thoughtful discussion of network management than the White Paper suggests.