Accelerating electric mobility: A distance-metric approach to policy assessment and reform

Integrating institutional and implementation issues into policy decisions - an introduction and overview, Derick W. Brinkerhoff. Part 1 Policy analysis and the new institutionalism analyzing policy reform and reforming policy analysis - an institutionalist approach, Ronald J. Oakerson and S. Tjip Walker the institutional analysis and development framework - application to irrigation policy in Nepal, Wai Fung Lam et al an institutional analysis of local-level common pool woodstock governance and management - implications for environmental policy, James T. Thomson analyzing bureaucracy and rural development policy implementation - the limits of hierarchy, Norman K. Nicholson. Part 2 Policy analysis and implementation frameworks: a comparative approach to the assessment of decentralization policy in Developing Countries, Richard Vengroff and Ogwo Jombo Umeh analyzing the role of the public sector in Africa - implications for civil service reform policies, Jerry M. Silverman sustainability assessment for agriculture policies - comparative cases from agricultural extension, Daniel J. Gustafson an analytic framework for policy implementation - assessing progress with Madagascar's national environmental action plan, Derick W. Brinkerhoff exporting policy paradigms - the case of Chinese forestry, Peter deLeon and Vicki L. Spencer. Part 3 Policy analysis and implementation tools: stakeholder analysis and political mapping - tools for successfully implementing policy reforms, Benjamin L. Crosby interactive policy analysis - process methods for policy reform, Louise G. White analytic approaches to reducing the costs of corruption - West African livestock marketing and trade policy, John S. Holtzman and Nicholas P. Kulibaba climbing the objective tree - policy analysis and reform in the Philippines, Alice L. Morton.

This book provides a wide-ranging assessment of laws and policies that impact HIV and AIDS. It shows how laws and regulations can either underpin or undermine good public health programs and responsible personal behaviors. Spanning 65 distinct legal topics, the authors demonstrate the scope and breadth of laws through a comparative law analysis. The book begins with a long section on public health laws, covering efforts to track the spread of the disease through testing and screening for HIV infections and AIDS; to deter transmission through prevention, prophylaxis, and partner notification; and to assist those infected through treatment. Next the authors address legal protection against discrimination across multiple areas of society including work, education, and health services. Subsequent chapters cover a variety of relevant topics including disclosure of HIV status, clinical research, access to information, and access to medicines. The legal issues facing several at-risk populations are specifically addressed in discrete chapters on women, children, men who have sex with men, sex workers, and injecting drug users. The Guide is intended to be of practical use for legal reform to support effective action against HIV/AIDS. We seek to alert those working on AIDS strategies and projects to opportunities for legal and policy reform and to provide them with tools to tackle the job effectively. To achieve this, we adopted the following format for each topic: first, we identify the specific issue or issues raised by the topic, and we follow that with a discussion of the pertinent legal and policy considerations. Then we give at least one good practice example (often providing actual statutory language), and follow that up with a list of key references.

Background: Health equity remains an enduring global challenge, with social determinants of health (SDOH)—such as income, education, housing, and employment—playing a pivotal role in shaping health outcomes. Despite advances in healthcare interventions, systemic inequities persist worldwide. Policy reforms targeting these determinants are increasingly recognized as critical to reducing disparities and achieving sustainable health improvements. Objective: This systematic review aimed to synthesize and critically evaluate global policy reforms addressing SDOH and promoting health equity across diverse populations. Methods: Adhering to PRISMA guidelines, a comprehensive search was conducted across five academic databases and relevant grey literature sources between January and March 2024. Out of 243 initially identified studies, 43 met the inclusion criteria following title/abstract screening and full-text review. Eligibility required: (i) national or subnational policy reforms targeting SDOH, (ii) explicit evaluation of health equity outcomes, and (iii) publication in English from 2010 to 2024. Key data on policy type, targeted determinants, equity outcomes, and evaluation methods were systematically extracted and thematically analyzed using established frameworks. Results: The included studies represented reforms from six global regions, with a majority based in high-income countries but notable examples from low- and middle-income settings. Successful policies shared common features: multisectoral collaboration, equity-centered design, community engagement, and robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks. Policy types encompassed universal healthcare, conditional cash transfers, education, and housing reforms. Common equity indicators included income, geographic location, race/ethnicity, and gender. Among the studies included, 70% reported quantifiable improvements in equity outcomes, while 30% lacked rigorous evaluation frameworks, limiting assessment of long-term impact. Conclusion: Policy reforms addressing upstream SDOH are essential for advancing health equity. Integrating equity considerations across all sectors, fostering intersectoral governance, and investing in robust monitoring systems offer promising pathways to reduce health disparities globally. However, persistent gaps in evaluation, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, highlight the need for sustained research and investment in comprehensive policy assessment.

Latecomer development in a “greening” world: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACTWe explore the experiences of school science teachers as they enact three linked national curriculum and assessment policy reforms in Sweden. Our goal is to understand teachers’ differing responses to these reforms. A sample of 13 teachers engaged in 2 interviews over a 6–9-month period. Interviews included exploration of professional background and school context, perceptions of the aims of the policy reforms and experiences of working with these reforms in the classroom. Analysis was guided by an individual-oriented sociocultural perspective on professional agency. Here teaching is conceptualised as an ongoing interplay between teachers’ knowledge, skills and personal goals, and the characteristics of the social, institutional and policy settings in which they work. Our analysis shows that navigating the ensuing continuities and contradictions results in many different expressions of teacher agency, e.g. loss of autonomy and trust, pushing back, subversion, transfer of authority, and creative tensions. Typically, an individual teacher’s enactment of these reforms involved several of these expressions of agency. We demonstrate that the sociocultural perspective provides insights into teachers’ responses to education policy reform likely to be missed by studies that focus largely on individual teacher knowledge/beliefs about reform or skills in ‘implementing’ reform practices.

Competency to stand trial (CST) is a contentious pretrial issue, confounded by ambiguous legal standards and inaccurate clinical tools. This article systematically explores both the controlling case law and the evolving assessment instruments, mindful of where and how they advance (or not) effective courtroom decision making. In the wake of our analysis, we propose a series of (criminal justice) policy reforms that address the problems posed by the CST legal doctrine and assessment technology. In brief, we call for changes with the competency evaluation procedures, the psychological instruments, and the legal remedies and/or strategies made available to the accused. We conclude by arguing that these revisions must be implemented if meaningful reform is to be effected for defendants whose competency is called into question prior to a criminal trial.

With India breaking out from the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ following the implementation of major policy reforms, the overall developmental outcome in Sri Lanka — the pioneer of policy liberalisation in South Asia — has been thrown into sharper relief. After a promising start, both in the immediate aftermath of the 1977 liberalisation and then again after the ‘second wave of liberalisation’ in 1991/92, economic performance in Sri Lanka has fallen well below expectations, though the economy has now become the most open in South Asia. There is a palpable sense of mass dissatisfaction and disillusionment with political leadership across the whole political spectrum, and the country veers from one major political and constitutional crisis to another. As Sri Lanka’s dream of emulating the East Asian tigers — the stated goal of successive post-1977 governments — has receded, concerns and questions about the efficacy and impact of policy reforms have re-emerged. In particular, the merits of trade liberalisation as a means of achieving industrial growth and employment generation are being called into question. The political climate has become more receptive to calls for more ‘nationalistic’ and protectionist policies with the growth of popular disenchantment with the mainstream political parties, both of which have (despite occasional backsliding) implemented progressive trade liberalisation. Though major domestic and international constraints make it unlikely that there will be a sharp reversal of policies to embrace more closed-door policies, a backlash against liberalisation can not only make further progress in this direction more problematic but, more importantly, lead to misleading policy prescriptions that can perpetuate and aggravate current problems. In this context, understanding the causes of Sri Lanka’s developmental failure, at least in terms of its inability to match expectations, through a systematic, in-depth assessment of past policies and strategies is certainly both necessary and welcome.

The continual use of suspension and expulsion remains an unsettling concern for many educational stakeholders. With some guidance from the federal government, states have begun to address the issue of discipline disproportionality through policy reform that restrict the use of suspension and expulsion for certain student groups (e.g., Pre-Kindergarten through 2nd grade) and particular behaviors (e.g., dress code, tardiness, willful disobedience). This study is novel as it extends the research base by providing a preliminary assessment of restrictive discipline policies, or non-suspension and non-expulsion policies. Findings from this study found that 0 states had non-in-school-suspension policies, 20 states had non-OSS policies, and 18 states had non-expulsion policies. Further, descriptive statistics demonstrated that White, Hispanic, and Black students saw increases in academic achievement after non-out-of-school-suspension and non-expulsion policies were implemented with Black students experiencing lower rates of OSS but higher expulsions and Hispanic students experiencing both higher rates of OSS and expulsions compared to White students. Implications for policy, research, and practice are discussed.

In this article, we draw upon notions of occupational professionalism and organizational professionalism to interrogate the complex, and sometimes contradictory, teacher learning practices that characterize educational policy enactment. We apply these understandings to the Growing Success assessment and evaluation policy in Ontario, Canada, and in relation to how five educators in varied positions in a regional school district made sense of this policy through professional learning. Our research considers how the interactions between professionalism and teacher learning can be deployed to better understand policy enactment as part of educators’ work and learning. The research reveals that organizational professionalism, characterized by hierarchical modes of decision-making, standardized work practices, external regulation and accountability processes, limited teachers’ learning. However, at the same time more occupational professionalism cultivated forms of professional learning necessary for productive enactment of educational policy. In relation to teacher learning for policy enactment, more occupational professionalism was characterized by, inter alia, commitment to student learning, the generation of dialogue about teachers’ assessment practices, coherence in relation to the whole reform agenda, a focus upon the immediacy of practice, and accountability to one another. The research indicates that even as more organizational professionalism is clearly evident in policy reform, the occupational cultures fostered by districts and schools can have significant beneficial effects for how teacher learning is expressed as a form of policy enactment.

Significant progress has taken place in the field of cancer immunotherapy in recent years. Cancer immunotherapy, particularly immune checkpoint inhibitors, have shown rather dramatic results and are believed to have completely transformed the field of oncology. However, these transformational therapies are more expensive than previous cancer therapies. As more cancer immunotherapy agents are being developed, with some already being marketed, it is important to consider how economic constraints will shape health policy and value assessment related to these agents. A number of strategies have been suggested to alleviate the price burden and the ensuing concerns about the sustainability of publicly funded healthcare systems. Among these strategies, value-based pricing (VBP) for innovative drugs dominates the headlines in the field of oncology. The specifics of how VBP may be implemented in the United States is still unclear. Nonetheless, policy reform and economic considerations will have to be incorporated into the planning of VBP. The objective of this paper is multifold: (i) to identify the factors affecting the impact of cancer immunotherapy on healthcare cost; (ii) to critically appraise current approaches used to assess the value of novel cancer therapies; (iii) to assess the methodological challenges associated with the economic evaluation of cancer immunotherapy. As the health care system in the U.S transitions toward a value-based model, the need for a formal value assessment framework is warranted in cancer immunotherapy.

This meta-analysis aims to evaluate the impact of U.S. education policy reforms on financial literacy outcomes through the implementation of financial education initiatives in schools. A comprehensive search was conducted across multiple databases, identifying relevant studies published between 2000 and 2023. After removing duplicates and screening based on pre-defined inclusion criteria, 35 studies were included in the final analysis. Data were extracted on key variables such as policy intervention types, student demographics, curriculum content, and assessment methods. The results were synthesized using random-effects meta-analysis, revealing significant improvements in financial literacy scores following policy reforms. However, variations in effectiveness were observed based on socioeconomic status and geographic regions. The findings highlight the critical role of well-structured education policies in enhancing financial literacy among students and offer recommendations for future policy directions to ensure equitable access and outcomes across diverse student populations. There was no financial support for this study.

Keywords: integrated assessment, environmental policy, agricultural policy, market liberalization, bio-economic model, farming systems, mathematical programming, maximum entropy estimation, data envelopment analysis, agricultural activity, land use, future studies. The main objective of this PhD thesis was to develop and evaluate a generic bio-economic farm model that can be used under different biophysical and socio-economic conditions for integrated assessment of a variety of agricultural and environmental policies. The functionality of the generic bio-economic farm model developed in this thesis was illustrated with an analysis of the impacts of the 2003 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy in the European Union for arable and livestock farms in a context of market liberalisation. In bio-economic studies, estimation of model parameters related to increasing costs because of limited machinery and managerial capacity, decreasing yields because of land heterogeneity and risk aversion is often not possible because of lack of data. Not including or misspecifying such parameters can have negative consequences on the forecasting performance of the model. In this thesis, methodologies based on Positive Mathematical Programming and Maximum Entropy estimation were proposed and implemented to recover unknown parameters underlying the actual decision making of farmers and to improve the forecasting performance of the model. The proposed methods relax a number of arbitrary assumptions of existing calibration methods and enhance representation of the actual decision making. The forecasting capacity of the models calibrated with the proposed methods was tested in ex-post experiments in which the models were calibrated with historical data of a particular base year and used to forecast policies and price changes of the following historical years. Results of these ex-post experiments showed that the proposed calibration methods improve the forecasting capacity of the model. For meaningful assessment of future policies using bio-economic models, a comprehensive set of alternative activities must be identified. Combinatorial procedures and filtering rules have been used in the literature to generate a set of activities that can be evaluated in bio-economic models. One very important limitation of combinatorial procedures is that the number of generated activities can easily explode. However, many of these activities are inferior with respect to their input-output relationships and they will never be part of the solution of the bio-economic farm model. In this thesis, a method based on Data Envelopment Analysis was proposed to identify and select alternative agricultural activities, representative for specific policy questions that can be used in bio-economic models. The Data Envelopment Analysis method reduced the number of alternative agricultural activities generated by existing combinatorial procedures by 95%, arriving at a number that can easily be applied in bio-economic farm models. The proposed method was applied to a problem of alternative nutrient management in Flevoland (the Netherlands).

This chapter presents a structured timeline of changes in curriculum and assessment policy in South Africa, demonstrating how these reforms have been short-lived and often abandoned before any sustainable improvement could materialize. Our analysis of key policy documents (1994–2019), analysis of curriculum and assessment reviews and informal email exchange with administrators in the Department for Basic Education indicates how a resistance to teacher accountability and change, political expediency for quick improvements, and the lack of collaborative capacity in the system, led to a trajectory of constant reform and overhaul of policy. Our reconstruction shows how the continuous contestation over curriculum and assessment policy offers little ground to negotiate differences and remedy potential technical faults in assessments, or to jointly develop the support for teachers and schools to use assessment outcomes for the benefit of teaching and learning. Only when these conditions are met can national assessments effectively inform the work of teachers and school principals and inform system-wide improvement, particularly where there is high inequality and large performance gaps between schools across the country, such as in South Africa.

Major reforms in assessment policy in Queensland secondary schools have occurred during the past 30 years. In each case, the reforms resulted from the adoption of recommendations, produced by a panel of experts, which constituted the design for a new system. Two features of the designs—their underlying philosophy and the status and technical adequacy of the recommendations—affected their prospects of success. Other influences were the experiences of teachers and public opinion as expressed and shaped through the media. Although substantial procedural changes were made to each assessment system during its operating life, these adjustments seemed incapable of warding off a crisis of professional and public confidence. In this article, crises in the reform cycles are analysed and interpreted in terms of legitimation theory.

No AccessEnvironment and Development1 Feb 2013Strategic Environmental Assessment in Policy and Sector ReformConceptual Model and Operational GuidanceAuthors/Editors: World Bank, The University of Gothenburg, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, The Netherlands Commission for Environmental AssessmentWorld Bank, The University of Gothenburg, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, The Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessmenthttps://doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-8559-3SectionsAboutPDF (1.8 MB)Other FormatsePUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract:This book presents the findings and recommendations of the evaluation of the World Bank's Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Pilot Program. It shows that SEA can contribute to improving development policy and sector reform by calling attention to environmental and social priorities, strengthening constituencies, enhancing policy capacities, and improving social accountability. It also provides guidance for undertaking SEA in policy and sector reform.Although it acknowledges the need for tailoring SEA to the context of specific sectors and countries, the book discusses in detail—and illustrates with examples—the analytical work and participatory processes required for effective SEA at the policy level. It suggests that the time is ripe for scaling up SEA in development policy and sector reform and recommends the establishment of a global alliance on environmental and climate change mainstreaming to support developing countries' efforts for achieving sustainable development. The book concludes by arguing that SEA applied to sector reform and development policy is a critical step for these efforts to be successful.This title responds to demand for SEA approaches at the policy level from policymakers, development and environmental specialists of bilateral and multilateral institutions, and environmental assessment specialists. This publication is the result of joint work by the Environment Department of the World Bank, the Environmental Economics Unit at the Department of Economics of the University of Gothenburg (EEU), the Swedish EIA Centre at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and the Netherlands Commission for Environmental Assessment (NCEA.) In line with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the book also contributes to harmonization of SEA approaches by the donor community that is led by the SEA Task Team of the OECD Development Assistance Committee. Previous bookNext book FiguresReferencesRecommendedDetailsCited ByFrom medicine to poison: how flexible strategic environmental assessment may be? Lessons from a non-regulated SEA systemImpact Assessment and Project Appraisal, Vol.37, No.57 February 2019Seeing power in international development cooperation: environmental policy integration and the World BankTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol.39, No.123 March 2013 View Published: November 2010ISBN: 978-0-8213-8559-3e-ISBN: 978-0-8213-8560-9 Copyright & Permissions Related TopicsEnvironmentGovernancePublic Sector Development KeywordsSTRATEGIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENTENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENTPOLICY SEAENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENTSECTOR REFORMENVIRONMENTAL MAINSTREAMINGSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WORLD BANKDEVELOPMENT POLICY PDF DownloadLoading ...