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The past decade has seen a rapid rise in the number of policy innovation labs (PILs). PILs that are found both inside and outside of government address a wide range of social issues. Many PILs shar...

Originating in neoliberal democracies, the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is a common policy tool allowing governments to provide public service through collaboration. In some non-liberal societi...

HIGHLIGHTSForestry and Related Natural Resources (FRNR) students from 51 countries report that enjoyment of nature was the most important factor driving their decision to enroll.Decision factors that caused hesitation included earning potential, availability of funding, and political issues.Importance factors differed significantly between genders, race/ethnicity, academic standing, world region, and social background (i.e. urban vs rural).Women and people of color from multiple world regions had a greater hesitancy to enroll in an FRNR programme than their white male counterparts.Implications for recruitment and retention include the need for continual diversity and inclusion efforts and a balance between personal preferences and employability.SUMMARYA survey of 396 undergraduate and graduate students from 51 countries on 5 continents currently enrolled in Forestry or Related Natural Resource (FRNR) degree programmes was conducted of attendees to the International Union of Forest Research Organizations' (IUFRO) conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, 2014. These perspectives come from some of the most active students in their respective fields. We explored the motivating reasons for enrolling in their current FRNR programme, and conversely why they may have been hesitant to do so. Results indicate that enjoyment of nature was the most important factor on average driving the decision to enroll, closely followed by job satisfaction, concern for the environment, enjoyment of outdoor recreation, being outdoors, and an interest in subject material. Hesitancy factors included earning potential, availability of funding/scholarships, and politically contentious issues. A number of significant differences were found across demographic categories. Of particular note was the greater hesitancy on the part of women and people of color to enroll in FRNR degree programmes compared to their white male counterparts. We discuss the limitations of our study arising from its international scope and imbalance of responses among countries and regions.

Throughout the developing world, payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are popular policy instruments that allow those who rely on such amenities as drinking water and clean air to pay the landowners who, in turn, provide and care for those services so the resources are protected and sustainably available in the future. Despite the popularity of PES programs as policy instruments, they have been proven largely ineffective in achieving their long-term goals. Specifically, they have failed to conserve the targeted ecosystem services. We examine Mexican instrument constituencies that have promoted use of a PES program, the payments for hydrological services (PHS) program. Instrument constituencies are groups of policy actors who are bound by an interest in a particular policy instrument or solution. Although the PHS program has been in existence for nearly 20 years, the evidence points to policy drift and overall policy failure. The path-dependent nature of the instrument constituency and resulting feedbacks have crowded out any chance of more effective forest or water conservation programs from being established. A case-based counterfactual analysis is employed to consider alternative program choices that could exist in the absence of a PHS instrument constituency.

Medical tourism occupies different spaces within national policy frameworks depending on which side of the transnational paradigm countries belong to, and how they seek to leverage it towards their developmental goals. This article draws attention to this policy divide in transnational healthcare through a comparative bibliometric review of policy research on medical tourism in select source (Canada, United States and United Kingdom) and destination countries (Mexico, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore), using a systematic search of the Web of Science (WoS) database and review of grey literature. We assess cross-national differences in policy and policy research on medical tourism against contextual policy landscapes and challenges, and examine the convergence between research and policy. Our findings indicate major disparities in development agendas and national policy concerns, both between and among source and destination countries. Further, we find that research on medical tourism does not always address prevailing policy challenges, just as the policy discourse oftentimes neglects relevant policy research on the subject. Based on our review, we highlight the limited application of theoretical policy paradigms in current medical tourism research and make the case for a comparative policy research agenda for the field.

For several decades, stakeholder engagement in climate change decision-making has been well chronicled. Recently there have been renewed calls for governments to be agents of climate change policy innovation. However, an overlooked actor is the bureaucracy, particularly the degree of autonomy in relation to elected politicians. This paper argues that successful climate change policy will depend on finding the right balance of stakeholder engagement and bureaucratic autonomy, which we label the ‘sweet spot.’ To make this claim, we introduce and discuss recent advances in three areas in the public management literature. First, we discuss how a public value perspective provides a valuable lens to understand why the sweet spot matters. Second, we develop a framework for identifying the sweet spot by building on recent stakeholder and bureaucratic autonomy literature. Third, the role of procedural policy instruments that could potentially facilitate the sweet spot is discussed.

Both policy entrepreneur and policy implementer play critical roles in the policy process. Little attention has been devoted to how the identity overlap may influence policy change. This paper addr...

There are numerous strategies to lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or to mitigate global climate change. One of them is to promote polices for developing renewable energy sources. There has been a growth in such policies but not enough is known about their effectiveness. We use a revised version of Schaffrin et al.’s (2015) Index of Policy Activity (IPA) 1 to examine the historical development (1998–2015) of federal and state/provincial renewable energy policies across five federal countries in the Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the United States. Here the focus is on “policy output,” which is defined as a function of policy density and intensity. Policy density is measured by counting the number of policies in each country relating to a particular goal during our time frame, while policy intensity, or the strength the policy has toward meeting specific goals, is measured by summing scores for six indicators: objective, scope, integration, budget, implementation and monitoring. The higher the policy score for a country, the more likely the country will be able to meet its intended goals. Our results show that the U.S. has the densest renewable energy policy output followed by Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and finally Argentina has the least-dense policy output. Overall, Brazil and Canada’s renewable energy policies were the most intense, followed by Argentina’s and the U.S.’s, with Mexico’s policies receiving the lowest intensity scores. These countries differ in how long they have supported renewable energy policies and the levels of government that implement them. These findings show that countries may be spending resources on producing myriad renewable energy policies, but without coordination between different levels of government or a concerted effort to ensure that the policy instruments are effective, those resources may be wasted while GHGs continue to rise. This research contributes to the understanding of how individual federal and state/provincial government make efforts toward implementing or enforcing energy policies to influence long-term policy change.

The idea of “think tanks” is one of the oldest in the policy sciences. While the topic has been studied for decades, however, recent work dealing with advocacy groups, policy and Behavioural Insight labs, and into the activities of think tanks themselves have led to discontent with the definitions used in the field, and especially with the way the term may obfuscate rather than clarify important distinctions between different kinds of knowledge-based policy influence organizations (KBPIO). In this paper, we examine the traditional and current definitions of think tanks utilized in the discipline and point out their weaknesses. We then develop a new framework to better capture the variation in such organizations which operate in many sectors.

In a crisis, almost-instant choices about who to trust or distrust could make a difference between life and death. Trust is necessary for cooperation, coordination, social order, and to reduce the need for coercive state imposition. During a pandemic, people need to trust experts to help them understand and respond to the problem, governments to coordinate policy instruments and make choices about levels of coercion, and citizens as they cooperate to minimize infection. We compare these general requirements with specific developments in the UK and US, identifying: the variable reliance by elected politicians on scientific experts, worrying levels of distrust in elected leaders, and a shift from a trust-based to more impositional forms of government action (with more variation in responses in the US). While trust is difficult to define and measure, these examples show that people miss it when it is gone.

In recent years, governments worldwide have been embracing new and innovative ways to develop public policies and design public services using a variety of methods including crowdsourcing, human-centered design thinking, and economic behavioral nudging. This trend in government innovation has led to the rise of the Policy Innovation Lab (PIL): individual units, both inside and outside of government, that apply the traditional principles of scientific laboratories — experimentation, testing, and measurement — to a host of emergent issues including the rise disruptive technologies, social problems, and environmental concerns. PILs are an increasingly important development in public policymaking, with a variety of methods and approaches to building relationships between governments, organizations, and citizens, and generating ideas and designing policy. However, these labs are under-researched: Many are established without a full understanding of their role and value to the policy community. We aim to address this knowledge gap and create opportunities where policy innovators can make connections with their peers and learn about the current practices and applications of policy innovation from one another. In 2018, the Centre for Policy Innovation and Public Engagement (CPIPE) at Ryerson University published The rise of policy innovation labs: A catalog of policy innovation labs across Canada. This effort led by Dr. Bryan Evans identified policy innovation labs (PILs) across Canada. We replicate CPIPE’s methods and format in order to identify operating in the United States. This report is part of a larger NSF sponsored project examining PILs in the United States. This report identifies the innovation labs in the United States, profiling their methodologies, projects, and partners, mapping the policy innovation landscape across the country. Each one-page summary provides a profile for each lab and highlights the existing innovation practices and networks in the public, academic, non-profit, and private sectors, and identifies methodological and ideological trends across the different labs and networks. In this highly dynamic space, new labs are emerging and disappearing all the time. The purpose of this report is to put a spotlight on policy innovations and their successes and to build and strengthen connections between researchers, policymakers, and policy innovators. Through a strengthened and sustained community of practice, we hope to see governments continue to embrace new approaches for effective policymaking.

We comment on the recent comprehensive review “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management” by Williamson and Nelson (2017, Can. J. For. Res. 47: 1567–1576, doi: 10.1139/cjfr-2017-0252 ). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous barriers facing Canadian forest managers. The underlying functionalist assumptions of such an approach are highly problematic from both a scholarly and a practical policy perspective. We argue that social scientists engaged in climate change research who want to influence policy-making should understand and then empirically apply causal mechanisms. Methods such as process tracing and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) are promising tools that can be employed in national- or local-level assessments.

Scientists often worry that their evidence is not used properly in the policy-making process. Their main response is to change the supply of evidence to reduce policymaker uncertainty. They should focus more on ambiguity, combining evidence and persuasion to help policymakers define the policy problem. To do so, they need to understand the policy process in which they engage. They cannot do so alone. Policy scholars can help, by articulating the practical value of policy theories. To help most effectively, they need to state clearly the “causal mechanisms” of the policy process. For example, what causes policymakers to pay attention to an issue informed partly by evidence, or what rules guide their behavior most strongly when weighing up evidence with other factors? In this paper, we show that policy theories have informed this debate, but often without making explicit statements of causality. We draw on the social science causal mechanisms field to improve such analysis and suggest use qualitative methods to clarify and measure causal mechanisms to benefit policy scholars and the wider policy analysis community. A focus on mechanisms can inform policy scholarship, science community engagement and on-the-ground policy work.

The problem that climate change poses globally is being addressed locally through the use of diverse policy responses in many countries. Following its five-decade history of environmental policy making in the USA, the country has employed a particular mix of different renewable energy policy instruments, or tools, in order to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and replace fossil fuels with renewably sourced energy. We analyze and compare renewable energy policies and policy instruments from 2000 to 2016 for Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico with the USA, to determine what makes the USA unique in its robust approach to climate policy and reflect on the time periods when policy making has been the most active. We found that the most often used regulatory instruments in the USA to achieve its climate policy goals have been Renewable Portfolio Standard requirements implemented at the state level, with federal climate mitigation policy being contested.

Between 2006 and 2011, the Canadian Conservative government advocated the concept of ‘open federalism’ which sought to minimize the role of the federal government in areas falling under provincial ...

In the United States, 29 states, Washington, D.C. and three territories have adopted a mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) for their electric power systems, while eight states and one territory have set renewable energy goals. Many foreign nations have adopted an RPS as well. Thus far, almost all RPSs across the United States have met their interim goals with targets and timetables that vary widely. Hawaii’s RPS is the most ambitious, with a 100% target set for 2045 (though Vermont set a 75% target for 2032). This paper provides a case study of the Hawai’i RPS. The paper focuses on geographical issues and perspectives that may tease out the course of the states’ electricity future: sensitivity to climate change, population distribution, interisland rivalries, as well as the need for greater energy storage and complementary policies. An important complexity is the challenge of meeting electricity demand on six separate Hawaiian Islands (because of the lack of an interisland transmission cable), although all of them have substantial renewable energy resources.

Paul Sabatier’s 1988 Policy Sciences paper, “An advocacy coalition framework of policy change and the role of policy-oriented learning therein” (21:129–168), introduced the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) to the policy discipline. Over the past 30 years, the ACF has become a generalizable theory of policy change. Another feature is the ongoing critical self-assessment and revisions of the framework’s theoretical and empirical assumptions. As a result, there have been many reviews of the ACF. However, the popularity of Sabatier’s contribution and the most cited article in this journal is its wider significance beyond the ACF. A bibliometric analysis of 737 peer-reviewed publications citing this paper is undertaken. This is followed by a summary chronicling ACF reviews and scholarship comparing the ACF with other policy process theories and frameworks.

The nature of policy work in nongovernment organizations (NGOs) is important consideration when understanding policy co-construction. Based on the results from a Canadian web-based survey of policy workers across five fields across three provinces, a multi-regression structural equation model suggests how NGO policy work can contribute to a greater collaboration on key policy issues and greater policy interaction between societal organizations and government agencies. The frequency of formal and informal invitations by governments played an important role in terms of the overall levels of interaction and stakeholder input. Networking activity was found to be important when addressing consultative-related issues, but only with NGO networks or their clients. Involvement in the early stages of policy development by the NGO policy workers did not lead to greater engagement with government officials, which may be a potential problem when their advice is sought after.

Background It is imperative that researchers studying medical tourism connect their work with policy, so that its real-world challenges can be better understood, and more effectively addressed. This article gauges the scope and evolution of policy thinking in medical tourism research through a bibliometric review of published academic literature, to establish the extent to which researchers apply public policy theories and frameworks in their investigation of medical tourism, or consider the policy imperatives of their work. Methods A Boolean search of the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection was performed to identify policy-related publications on medical tourism. We analyzed the results using bibliometrics and a data visualization software called VOSviewer to identify patterns in knowledge production and underlying network linkages in policy research on the subject. Results Our findings suggest that only a small proportion of medical tourism research explicitly addresses policy issues or applies policy paradigms in their study approach. Field-specialized journals serving practitioners publish less research as compared to interdisciplinary social and health policy journals. Moreover, there are significant geographical and disciplinary disparities in the policy-orientation of research, and a predilection towards select policy areas such as reproductive and transplant tourism to the neglect of more holistic governance and health system considerations. Conclusion This article is a call to action for greater engagement by policy scholars on medical tourism, and for health researchers to more explicitly consider how their research might contribute to the understanding and resolution of contemporary policy challenges of medical tourism. Failure to clearly and consistently make the policy connection is a lost opportunity for researchers to frame the public debate, and influence policy thinking on medical tourism.

In policymaking, evidence-based or evidence-informed policymaking are thought to be essential methods for influencing policies and decisions by telling decision-makers “what works, when and why” (Head, 2008). Different types and sources of evidence exist, however, as do the means by which policy-relevant information is communicated to policy-makers. One way for resource project decision-makers to incorporate knowledge into policies is through public comment. But the kinds of knowledge which policy-makers consider to be valuable evidence is not clear a priori, and little is known about whether and how public comment processes collect, weigh, and assess data and opinions of experts and members of the public (Rifkin, 1994). This paper examines the results of a multi-year, multi-agency decision and comment process in the proposed PolyMet NorthMet mine project in northeastern Minnesota to reveal how government agencies involved in the mine approval process analyzed and valued knowledge gained from a very large and extensive public comment process. It finds, among other things, that the agencies involved in this project approval process consistently weighted comments from experts more heavily than those from ordinary lay members of the public and valued comments opposed to the project more highly than those of supporters.

The weight of much expert forest management opinion is that issues such as climate change can be effectively addressed only if forest policy-making moves from a purely sectoral focus and undergoes a shift to a more integrated multi-issue, multi-sector policy-making process. This is because credible adaptation policies in the sector require greatly enhanced multi-sectoral policy integration if they are to succeed. But this requirement may be beyond the capacity of many countries to deliver. This article explores the integration challenges faced by forest policy-making in Canada and the United States and uses the case of assisted tree migration to probe the reasons for the failure of institutions in both countries to develop and manage better vertical and horizontal integration in a climate change-related forest policy area. The article emphasizes the importance of previous rounds of policy-making or “policy legacies”, which serve to constrain contemporary policy options. It argues that due to the p...

Most efforts to develop a comprehensive, science-based approach to climate change adaptation have been written by natural scientists and resource managers and have adopted an underlying conception of policy-making as a functional process of mutual adjustment between elements of tightly linked natural and social systems. The influence of this framing is especially clear in the popularity of key metaphors such as ‘stress,’ ‘barriers,’ ‘vulnerability,’ and ‘resilience.’ There are obvious advantages to this way of proceeding, not least the possibility of using the systems concept as an overarching framework to integrate the multidisciplinary teams of researchers commonly employed in large-scale assessments of climate change impacts. Nonetheless, this underlying conception of linked natural and social systems presents significant challenges when it comes to moving the ideas found in these strategic documents forward into the world of policy and practice. As the case studies of North American, Australia...

As the Canadian oil sands development matures, an increasingly important policy activity is reclamation. Reclamation has received limited attention compared with the broader discussion of oil sands expansion, however, and its past direction and future trajectory are unclear. Recent moves to reform the policy in Alberta have been interpreted simultaneously as a major change and a marginal adaptation to the existing framework. This article employs a historical-institutional perspective to help reconcile this debate and further understanding of changes to Alberta's oil sands reclamation policies over the past half century. It traces the factors and outlines the processes which have driven its evolution since 1963 with special attention paid to the 2011 Oil Sands Progressive Reclamation Strategy, the most recent attempt to reform oil sands reclamation policy. The article reveals a complex long-term pattern of policy development in which processes of ‘tense layering’ of new initiatives on top of old elements r...

This paper examines the intersection between changing goals, actors and institutions in designing Wisconsin's woody biopower policy mix. Using a historical institutionalist analysis over three decades (1990–2020) of Wisconsin energy and forest products policy development, changes in the capacity of the mix to encourage the production of forest biopower are examined. The study reveals the state experienced early periods of policy congruency via policy layering as efforts to promote the use of forest waste as biofuel emerged as an important part of the state's overall energy mix. However, more recent calls for cost effective and affordable energy has resulted in “policy dilution” in this sector, a form of policy dismantling largely ignored in the literature on the subject. This story is one like policy ‘stretching’ in which a policy mix develops through patches and layering until such time as its internal contradictions drive processes of more substantive reform. Although the policy change literature tends to focus on cases in which reforms are added to mixes in order to strengthen a stretched regime, as this case study shows, this process can also work in reverse, with additions paradoxically leading to the dismantling of important aspects of an existing policy arrangement.

There is well established literature that focuses on measuring the public (social) value of ecosystem services, alongside traditional economic valuations, with the aim of better informing natural resource management decision-making. However, few studies have considered the role of ecosystem service values directly in the context of the general public's support for specific natural resource management decisions and practices. This leaves open the possibility that policy makers and resource managers may be relying on criteria that have negligible influence on public preferences. In this paper, we consider this gap, by testing hypotheses concerning the public's willingness to support forest harvesting for biomass material that will facilitate electricity generation based on a survey of households in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, U.S. An ecosystem service valuation model was developed and subjected to multivariate statistical analyses (factor analysis and OLS linear regression). The findings show that respondents in biomass producing communities may be more supportive of biomass sources such as forestry residues and forest thinnings than dedicated energy wood harvesting operations. In addition, the findings indicate that using an ecosystem service approach can help explain differences in support between these respondents and provide insight into socially acceptable forms of biomass harvesting operations.

This chapter contributes to the understanding of analytical practices and tools employed by policy analysts involved in policy formulation and appraisal by examining data drawn from 15 surveys of federal, provincial and territorial government policy analysts in Canada conducted in 2009-2010, two surveys of NGO analysts conducted in 2010-2011 and two surveys of external policy consultants conducted in 2012-2013. Data from these surveys allows the exploration of several facets of the use of analytical tools, ranging from more precise description of the frequency of use of specific kinds of tools and techniques in government to their distribution between permanent government officials and external policy analysts. As the chapter shows, the frequency of use of major types of analytical techniques used in policy formulation is not the same between the three types of actors and also varies within government by Department and issue type. Nevertheless some general patterns in the use of policy appraisal tools in government can be discerned, with all groups employing process- related tools more frequently than ‘substantive’ tools related to the technical analysis of policy proposals.

Despite heavy reliance on fossil fuels, Michigan's electorate soundly defeated a Renewable Energy Amendment in 2012 (Proposal 3). The proposal would have mandated that 25% of its electricity come from renewable energy resources by 2025. Prior to the election the State had legislated a 10% goal of adopting more renewable energy into its electricity system through a renewable portfolio standard. Was the defeat a policy failure? This paper employs concepts from the policy failure literature to answer the question. We argue that a traditional policy evaluation such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA) needs to be considered along with broader “political” evaluations. CBA results are complemented with political analysis, which reveal the complexity of evaluating key energy strategies. Keywords: Cost-benefit analysis, Michigan, Policy failure, Renewable energy, Renewable portfolio standard

This paper synthesizes and builds on recent critiques of the resilience literature; namely that the field has largely been unsuccessful in capturing the complexity of governance processes, in particular cause–effects relationships. We demonstrate that absence of a causal model is reflected in the black-boxing of governance processes which is problematic for resilience studies with explanatory ambitions. We introduce mechanism-based thinking as alternative research perspective that offers more analytical rigour and elaborate the key principles of this approach. Mechanism-based approaches are aligned to the ways of thinking in systems theory and complexity sciences and can be used to advance scientific inquiry and policy practice to govern complex sustainability issues.

For nearly 20 years, the four edited volumes of Theories of the Policy Process (TPP) have reviewed and chronicled the key frameworks and theories of the policy process. With the growing sophistication and the ever increasing number of empirical applications of each approach, the volume’s editors have called for policy process scholars to take causality seriously. We argue that the growing interest in causal mechanisms in other areas of political sciences and in social sciences generally may contribute to the next generation of policy process research. A textual analysis of TPP’s 4th edition reveals a ‘lumpiness’ in the use of causality and mechanisms across seven popular approaches: the Multiple Streams Approach, the Advocacy Coalition Framework, Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, Institutional Analysis and Design, Policy Diffusion, Policy Feedback Theory, and Narrative Framework Theory.

With growing attention on formulating the “right” policies and programs to address climate change, the contribution that policy work will make in fostering adaptive capacity needs to be examined. Policy capacity is crucial to policy formulation and should be at the heart of climate mainstreaming. There are six hypotheses about the nature of climate-based policy work based on a survey conducted of Canadian federal and provincial government employees in the forestry, finance, infrastructure, and transportation sectors. To measure the simultaneous effects on perceived policy capacity, an Ordinary Least Squares regression was conducted. Among the key findings was that the increased demand for climate change science within an organization resulted in a decreased perception of policy capacity. Policy work was largely focused on procedure activities rather than on evaluation. The model found that networking was critically important for perceived policy capacity. Effective policy formulation will involve the part...