Agenda Status Research Articles

Why has IPSAS been set as an agenda but not adopted in Myanmar?

IMPACT This article provides evidence regarding the efforts of the government of Myanmar to adopt the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), as well as analysing the interactions among the engaged stakeholders who have participated in Myanmar’s IPSAS agenda-setting and adoption process. The results, which are identified based on multiple streams theory, indicate that the issue of IPSAS adoption reached government agenda status only when all the problem, policy and politics streams were unified (i.e. full coupling). The results of this research explain why governmental inaction or non-decision with regard to public sector accounting reforms occurs and highlight the importance of the presence of a political support in the official adoption of IPSAS.

Comparing priority received by global health issues: a measurement framework applied to tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and dengue fever

IntroductionThe relative priority received by issues in global health agendas is subjected to impressionistic claims in the absence of objective methods of assessment of priority. To build an approach for...

Shifting patterns and competing explanations for infectious disease priority in global health agenda setting arenas.

The highly decentralized nature of global health governance presents significant challenges to conceptualizing and systematically measuring the agenda status of diseases, injuries, risks and other conditions contributing to the collective disease burden. An arenas model for global health agenda setting was recently proposed to help address these challenges. Further developing the model, this study aims to advance more robust inquiry into how and why priority levels may vary among the array of stakeholder arenas in which global health agenda setting occurs. We analyse order and the magnitude of changes in priority for eight infectious diseases in four arenas (international aid, scientific research, pharmaceutical industry and news media) over a period of more than two decades in relation to five propositions from scholarship. The diseases vary on burden and prominence in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 for health and well-being, including four with specific indicators for monitoring and evaluation (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis) and four without (dengue, diarrhoeal diseases, measles, meningitis). The order of priority did not consistently align with the disease burden or international development goals in any arena. Additionally, using new methods to measure the scale of annual change in resource allocations that are indicative of priority reveals volatility at the disease level in all arenas amidst broader patterns of stability. Insights around long-term patterns of priority within and among arenas are integral to strengthening analyses that aim to identify pivotal causal mechanisms, to clarify how arenas interact, and to measure the effects they produce.

Why Do Issues “Whose Time Has Come” Stick Around? Attention Durability and the Case of Gun Control

In any healthy democracy, myriad policy issues compete for the public’s attention. Most remain on the periphery of politics, either because they achieve salience only in narrow communities of interest or because they grab headlines only for brief periods of time. But sometimes issues become what we term “durable attention items”—they capture public attention and sustain it over many years. Why? We focus on one such newly durable issue—gun control in the United States. Using an original dataset of roughly 4,500 letters to the editor over a 40-year period, we demonstrate that this once-episodic issue, long dominated by a narrow constituency of pro-gun advocates, has become a mainstay of mass politics. We show that the gun issue’s growing agenda status is due entirely to pro-regulation people mobilized by a combination of contextual factors, namely regularized mass shootings and efforts to relax gun policy, working in tandem with partisan polarization. Besides offering novel evidence of a fundamental shift in American gun politics, the study contributes to our theoretical understanding of how episodic issues come to command consistent political engagement over the long term.

Agenda Setting and the Asbestos Issue

Research on agenda setting suggests awareness of issues, discussion of particular issue topics, and identification of issues of current concern all tend to follow treatment of those issues in the media. Such research also contends that media attention to problems rises and falls independent of the severity of the problem. This study of the asbestos issue examines both the association between media definition of an issue and appearance of the issue on the public policy agenda, and the correspondence between background conditions and media issue attention. Results suggest qualified support for an issue redefinition hypothesis: replacement of one issue definition with another definition by the media is related to changes in issue publicity and issue agenda status. A second, media independence hypothesis, that media attention is only loosely associated with prevailing background conditions, was supported during both the rise and fall of the asbestos issue.

DETERMINING KEY HUMAN CAPITAL COMPETENCIES FOR INDUSTRY 4.0: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

In the present times, the great industrialists are convinced that the world is at the verge of a new Industrial Revolution 4.0 to happen. Therefore, on the global, national and organizational level, the issue of Industry 4.0 has attained an agenda status among the policy makers. Since the evolution of organizations depends on the evolution of workforce, therefore, the competency development of human capital has become a primary concern for the technology champions around the world to stay relevant in the I.4.0 era. By determining the key competencies of human capital in the I.4.0 environment, organizations can be best facilitated to develop their human resource so that they can sustain and grow as per the standards of I.4.0. This study explores the literature to find out the key human capital competencies required in I.4.0, under the categories of personal, social and technical competencies. Consequently, all the competencies are well-integrated to develop a conceptual framework of competencies for Smart HR. 4.0. The findings of this study contribute well in better decision making for agenda setting and strategic plan formulation for competency development of human capital in the organizations. Keywords: Industrial Revolution 4.0, Industry 4.0, Smart HR 4.0, Impact of I.4.0 on Human Capital, Human Capital Competency for I.4.0.

Bridging the Gulf on Healthcare Policy Beyond the Affordable Care Act

This article presents a brief overview of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and changes ushered into the health care system by the Act. The overview is followed by arguments for and against the ACA, integrating and situating the divergent arguments within the context of both democratic and conservative standpoints on health care policy. Furthermore, the article explores the possibility of identifying factors responsible for the seeming difficulty in transiting policy from agenda status to adoption in a democratic system of governance. The article concludes with suggestions on ways and strategies that can help in bridging the ostensible gap between divergent positions, with the hope of charting the course to the desired destination of an equitable and sustainable health care policy for the United States.

The rise and fall of global health issues: an arenas model applied to the COVID-19 pandemic shock

BackgroundThe global health agenda is ill-defined as an analytical construct, complicating attempts by scholars and proponents to make claims about the agenda status of issues. We draw on Kingdon’s definition of the agenda and Hilgartner and Bosk’s public arenas model to conceptualize the global health agenda as those subjects or problems to which collectivities of actors operating nationally and globally are paying serious attention at any given time. We propose an arenas model for global health agenda setting and illustrate its potential utility by assessing priority indicators in five arenas, including international aid, pharmaceutical industry, scientific research, news media and civil society. We then apply the model to illustrate how the status of established (HIV/AIDS), emergent (diabetes) and rising (Alzheimer’s disease) issues might be measured, compared and change in light of a pandemic shock (COVID-19).ResultsCoronavirus priority indicators rose precipitously in all five arenas in 2020, reflecting the kind of punctuation often caused by focusing events. The magnitude of change varied somewhat by arena, with the most pronounced shift in the global news media arena. Priority indicators for the other issues showed decreases of up to 21% and increases of up to 41% between 2019 and 2020, with increases suggesting that the agenda for global health issues expanded in some arenas in 2020— COVID-19 did not consistently displace priority for HIV/AIDS, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease, though it might have for other issues.ConclusionsWe advance an arenas model as a novel means of addressing conceptual and measurement challenges that often undermine the validity of claims concerning the global health agenda status of problems and contributing causal factors. Our presentation of the model and illustrative analysis lays the groundwork for more systematic investigation of trends in global health agenda setting. Further specification of the model is needed to ensure accurate representation of vital national and transnational arenas and their interactions, applicability to a range of disease-specific, health systems, governance and policy issues, and sensitivity to subtler influences on global health agenda setting than pandemic shocks.

Analysing the global health agenda: A comparison of priority for diabetes and oral diseases

ABSTRACT Many claims are made concerning which issues are on the global health agenda and which are neglected. Scholarship is inconsistent and generally vague about how an issue’s status is (or should be) measured, however, leaving such claims open to questions about their validity. This inquiry explores a novel way of addressing the largely overlooked matter of how to comparatively assess the agenda status of health issues systematically, over time and in consideration of a global health context that lacks centralised authority. We draw upon a model from sociology which proposes that collective definitions of social problems and public attention evolve in multiple, interacting institutional arenas, each of which has the capacity to give robust attention to a limited number of issues. We systematically track status indicators for two significant global health issues, diabetes and oral diseases, in three arenas since 2000. Oral health’s status declined while diabetes rose in international representation, international organisation and scientific research arenas during the past decade. This article sets out some preliminary contours of an analytical approach that holds promise for enhancing understanding of causal mechanisms and outcomes across a wider set of global health issues and agenda setting arenas.

Aligning policy ideas and power: the roots of the competitiveness frame in European education policy

ABSTRACT How and why do some ideas attain agenda status while others do not? This paper seeks to explore these questions in the context of the policy changes observed in European education policy. By drawing from the literature on agenda-setting and employing process tracing, the paper develops a theoretical argument to investigate the causal mechanisms through which a new problem definition is set. The central argument is that three factors affect how a problem definition wins over another: (i) the presence of a policy entrepreneur; (ii) the ability to construct a convincing narrative to support a particular interpretation of a problem; and (iii) the specific zeitgeist of a given period, namely the social and political context within which ideas gain ground. The paper contributes to the literature on European education policy by examining how ideas about education emerged. It also contributes to the theoretical debate on agenda setting studies.

Agenda setting for maternal survival in Ghana and Tanzania against the backdrop of the MDGs

High-level political support for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) drew international attention to included causes at the turn of the century. Influences of this normative framework on national-level health agenda setting remain little investigated. This study investigates the agenda status of maternal survival against the backdrop of the MDGs in two countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Informed by replicative case studies conducted in Ghana and Tanzania, the study finds the MDGs played a significant role in the issue's increasing status in both countries by helping to align several factors that facilitate the agenda setting process, including: ideas concerning the severity of the problem and expectations for its redress; institutions that shape policies, programs and monitoring; and economic and political interests. The agenda setting process was similar in the countries but for two dynamics. HIV/AIDS dominated Tanzania's health policy agenda in the early 2000s, crowding out attention to maternal and other health issues. A network of concerned actors that expanded to form a broad political coalition later facilitated agenda setting in Tanzania, including securing some budgetary commitments. By contrast, Ghana's core maternal health network remained technically oriented and closed to broader political and civil society engagement, limiting its capacity to expand issue attention and budgetary commitments beyond the health sector.

Do Focusing Events and Narratives Drive Pharma Rent-seeking: Evidence from Disease Outbreaks

Kingdon argues that for an issue to gain agenda status, three “streams” have to come together. When these independent stream meet, a window of opportunity is created for a policy change to occur. Various factors can cause the window of opportunity to occur and one of them is a focusing event or in our case a disease outbreak (Kingdon, 1995). We hypothesize that when disease outbreaks occur pharmaceutical and related companies use this as an opportunity to seek rents. Congress passes funding when focusing events and narratives provide the opportunity to payback different pharmaceutical companies who have contributed to politicians. We use ProQuest News to track the media narratives during six different disease outbreaks and use Google Trends News to see how people interact with the narratives. We find that for five outbreaks there is support for our hypothesis, and the sixth outbreak provides a constraint on our hypothesis.

Health system strengthening: prospects and threats for its sustainability on the global health policy agenda

In 2013, Hafner and Shiffman applied Kingdon's public policy process model to explain the emergence of global attention to health system strengthening (HSS). They questioned, however, HSS's sustainability on the global health policy agenda, citing various concerns. Guided by the Grindle and Thomas interactive model of policy implementation, we advance and elaborate a proposition: a confluence of developments will contribute to maintaining HSS's prominent place on the agenda until at least 2030. Those developments include (1) technical, managerial, financial, and political responses to unpredictable public health crises that imperil the routine functioning of health systems, such as the 2014-2015 Ebola virus disease (Ebola) epidemic in West Africa; (2) similar responses to non-crisis situations requiring fully engaged, robust health systems, such as the pursuit of the new Sustainable Development Goal for health (SDG3); and (3) increased availability of new knowledge about system change at macro, meso, and micro levels and its effects on people's health and well-being. To gauge the accuracy of our proposition, we carried out a speculative assessment of credible threats to our premise by discussing all of the Hafner-Shiffman concerns. We conclude that (1) the components of our proposition and other forces that have the potential to promote continuing attention to HSS are of sufficient strength to counteract these concerns, and (2) prospective monitoring of HSS agenda status and further research on agenda sustainability can increase confidence in our threat assessment.

Getting to the Roots of Evaluation Capacity Building in the Global South: Multiple Streams Model to Frame the Agenda Status of Evaluation in Turkey

Abstract: A growing body of research is investigating the mechanisms to develop evaluation capacity in the Global South, but relatively little attention has been given to an equally important question: Under what conditions does the need to conduct and use evaluations for national decision making become a high priority on the governmental agenda? This article utilizes Kingdon's (2003) Multiple Streams Model to understand when and how evaluation is pushed higher on the public policy agenda in the Global South by using Turkey as a country case. This article argues that evaluation capacity building in the developing world may not be successful unless evaluation is indigenously elevated as a prominent item on the government's agenda. Turkey's case demonstrates evaluation's fleeting agenda status because evaluation as a policy solution has not yet become joined to a real problem despite the opening of a brief window of opportunity.

Getting to the Roots of Evaluation Capacity Building in the Global South: Multiple Streams Model to Frame the Agenda Status of Evaluation in Turkey

A growing body of research is investigating the mechanisms to develop evaluation capacity in the Global South, but relatively little attention has been given to an equally important question: Under what conditions does the need to conduct and use evaluations for national decision making become a high priority on the governmental agenda? This article utilizes Kingdon’s (2003) Multiple Streams Model to understand when and how evaluation is pushed higher on the public policy agenda in the Global South by using Turkey as a country case. This article argues that evaluation capacity building in the developing world may not be successful unless evaluation is indigenously elevated as a prominent item on the government’s agenda. Turkey’s case demonstrates evaluation’s fleeting agenda status because evaluation as a policy solution has not yet become joined to a real problem despite the opening of a brief window of opportunity.

Agenda setting for maternal survival: the power of global health networks and norms.

Nearly 300,000 women--almost all poor women in low-income countries--died from pregnancy-related complications in 2010. This represents a decline since the 1980s, when an estimated half million women died each year, but is still far higher than the aims set in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the turn of the century. The 1970s, 1980s and 1990 s witnessed a shift from near complete neglect of the issue to emergence of a network of individuals and organizations with a shared concern for reducing maternal deaths and growth in the number of organizations and governments with maternal health strategies and programmes. Maternal health experienced a marked change in agenda status in the 2000s, attracting significantly higher level attention (e.g. from world leaders) and greater resource commitments (e.g. as one issue addressed by US$40 billion in pledges to the 2010 Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health) than ever before. Several differences between network and actor features, issue characteristics and the policy environment pre- and post-2000 help to explain the change in agenda status for global maternal mortality reduction. Significantly, a strong poverty reduction norm emerged at the turn of the century; represented by the United Nations MDGs framework, the norm set unusually strong expectations for international development actors to advance included issues. As the norm grew, it drew policy attention to the maternal health goal (MDG 5). Seeking to advance the goals agenda, world leaders launched initiatives addressing maternal and child health. New network governance and framing strategies that closely linked maternal, newborn and child health shaped the initiatives. Diverse network composition--expanding beyond a relatively narrowly focused and technically oriented group to encompass allies and leaders that brought additional resources to bear on the problem--was crucial to maternal health's rise on the agenda in the 2000s.

The emergence, growth and decline of political priority for newborn survival in Bolivia

Bolivia is expected to achieve United Nations Millennium Development Goal Four, reducing under-five child mortality by two-thirds between 2021 and 2025. However, progress on child mortality reduction masks a disproportionately slow decline in newborn deaths during the 2000s. Bolivia's neonatal mortality problem emerged on the policy agenda in the mid-1990s and grew through 2004 in relationship to political commitments to international development goals and the support of a strong policy network. Network status declined later in the decade. This study draws upon a framework for analysing determinants of political priority for global health initiatives to understand the trajectory of newborn survival policy in Bolivia from the early 1990s. A process-tracing case study methodology is used, informed by interviews with 26 individuals with close knowledge of newborn survival policy in the country and extensive document analysis. The case of newborn survival in Bolivia highlights the significance of political commitments to international development goals, health policy network characteristics (cohesion, composition, status and key actor support) and political transitions and instability in shaping agenda status, especially decline-an understudied phenomenon considering the transitory nature of policy priorities. The study suggests that the sustainability of issue attention therefore become a focal point for health policy networks and analyses.

Policy Goals of European Integration and Competitiveness in Academic Collaborations: An Examination of Joint Master's and Erasmus Mundus Programmes

This study examines policy goals pertaining to joint Master's in Europe as presented in Bologna-related and Erasmus Mundus (EM) policy texts. The profile of joint programmes has risen in the aftermath of the Bologna Process (BP), together with the launch of the EU EM. Despite a European policy tradition of cooperation in higher education (HE), degree developments were usually left outside the scope of policy declarations and did not have an explicit ‘agenda status’. If so, what makes these degree developments ‘worthy’ of political attention in recent years? The paper shows that joint Master's developments have been represented as appropriate action for furthering integration and convergence, as well as for improving competitiveness. It examines the ways in which joint Master's developments have been framed within and by these policy goals. It finally questions drivers of competitiveness and considers their deeper implications for the aims of and practice in HE.

Reactive scheduling framework based on domain knowledge and constraint programming

Industrial environments frequently face disruptive events. This contribution presents a support framework, aimed at addressing the repair-based reactive scheduling problem. It is based on an explicit object-oriented domain representation and a constraint programming (CP) approach. When an unforeseen event occurs, the framework captures the in-progress agenda status, as well as the event effect on it. Based on this information, a rescheduling problem specification is developed. Tasks to be rearranged are recognized and the set of the most suitable rescheduling action types (e.g. shift-jump, reassign, freeze) is identified. Since a given specification may lead to several solutions, the second stage relies on a CP model to address the problem just defined. To create such model, action types are automatically transformed into constraints. Provided that good quality schedules can be reached in low CPU times, alternative solution scenarios focusing on stability and regular performance measures can be posed for each problem.

Policy Punctuations in Colorado Water Law: The Breakdown of a Monopoly

The actors, influences, and processes that combine forces to change policy subsystems are modeled in punctuated equilibrium theory wherein monopolistic policy subsystems are broken down through changes in policy images and venue shopping spurred by a critical mobilization of actors. Studying a case of policy change in Colorado water rights, this research examines multiple levels of policy change—local, state, and cross-case. This research finds that at the state level, punctuated equilibrium theory accurately explains the process by which policies changed to allow for recreational in-channel uses of water. At the local level, however, these processes are not clearly evident. Using media coverage as a proxy measure for agenda status also shows that policy image change and high public agenda status did not lead to these policy changes within Colorado communities. This article discusses whether we should therefore discount punctuated equilibrium as a model of policy change in this case.