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Marine ecosystem governance is an important component of the goal of developing a strong maritime nation, as well as an urgent need to ensure national maritime security. The "Bay Chief System"(BCS) is a novel policy concept with Chinese roots that seeks to improve the marine ecological environment. In this paper, we take the coastal cities in China as an example and use the panel data of prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2022 to analyse the impact of the Bay Chief System on the regional marine ecological environment by using a differences in-differences model. The baseline regression results reveal that the implementation of the Bay Chief System leads to a 0.122 percentage point improvement in marine ecosystems but it has yet to be linked to the River Chief System(RCS) to establish a systematic synergistic mechanism. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the implementation of the Bay Chief System is more effective in coastal cities with smaller populations, a heavier proportion of secondary industries, and a geographic location closer to the South. The analysis of the impact mechanism indicates that the Bay Chief System mitigates the adverse effects of near-shore resource development on the marine ecological environment by regulating the intensity of fishery and coastal tourism development. Additionally, it optimizes water quality by substantially reducing pollutants like chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (AN) in seawater, ultimately contributing to the protection of the marine ecological environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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.)

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]

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]

In this paper, we propose a modified synthetic control causal analysis for time series data with volatility in terms of absolute value of return outcomes taken into account in constructing the prediction of potential outcomes for time series causal analysis. The consistency property of the synthetic weight parameter estimators is developed theoretically under a time series data-generating process framework. The application to evaluate the UK's mini-budget policy, announced by the then Chancellor on 23 September 2022, which had significant implications for the stock market, is examined and analysed. Comparisons with traditional synthetic control and synthetic difference in difference (DID) methods for evaluation of the effect of the mini-budget policy on the UK's stock market are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Situated within the growing literature on green alternatives to research and innovation-led green transition approaches, this paper sketches the contours of an emerging transition policy evaluation matrix aiming at going beyond contemporary (new) materialist concerns. To do so, I introduce a vitalist focus on life and establishing all connectedness as a long-term normative goal of just and deep global development policy. For this purpose, I draw from key insights from the recent interim evaluation of the European Framework program 'Horizon Europe', as well as non-Western and indigenous and feminist approaches to environmental justice to argue for overcoming an exclusive materialist and individualist preoccupation with green transition as it has been characteristic hitherto. Building on the requirement of a theory of change for encompassing well-being that includes a shifted yet assessable notion of being, I describe the non-linear sequence of green transition phases transcending materialist approaches to shifted energy supply and large-scale decarbonization to include an imaginary of a connected biocentric humanity with a just vitalist concern for life and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

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.)

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]

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]