Coherent Policy Agenda Research Articles

Advocacy coalitions and the transfer of nutrition policy to Zambia.

Stunted growth in children and multisectoral action to address it are dominant ideas in the international nutrition community today, and this study finds that these ideas are increasingly evident over time in nutrition policy in Zambia, with stunting largely displacing other framings of nutrition. This study is based on key informant interviews (70 interviews with 61 interviewees), policy document review, and social network mapping, with iterative data collection and analysis taking place over 6 years (2011–2016). Analysis was based on two established political science theories: policy transfer theory and the Advocacy Coalition Framework. Policy changes in Zambia are shown to result from the international community’s nutrition agenda, transferred to national policy through the normative promotion of certain ways of understanding the issue of malnutrition, largely propagated through advocacy, technical assistance and funding. With its focus on multisectoral action to reduce stunting, the recent nutrition policy narrative impinges directly on an existing food security narrative as it attempts to alter agriculture policy away from maize reliance. The nutrition policy sub-system in Zambia is therefore split between an international coalition promoting action on child stunting, and a national coalition focused on food security and hunger, with implications for both sides on progressing a coherent policy agenda. This study finds that it is possible to understand policy processes for nutrition more fully than has so far been achieved in much nutrition literature through the application of multiple political science theories. These theories allow the generalization of findings from this case study to assess their relevance in other contexts: the study ultimately is about the transfer of policy being explained by the presence of advocacy coalitions and their different beliefs, resources and power, and these concepts can be investigated wherever the nutrition system reaches down from international to national level.

A critical review of the technology-inequality debate

In the last decades of the 20th Century, a large consensus emerged over the effect of technological change on wage distribution. The core of this theory becomes the backbone of a scientific paradigm that attempts to give an explanation for most of the open issues in currently developed economies, from rising of inequality in the USA to European unemployment, and from the different patterns of productivity to the institutional change. The dawn of this wisdom is reviewed, as well as the research program that consolidated it, with particular focus on the elements of internal coherence. The debate raised by this perspective is discussed and an explanation is presented on how the mainstream analysis was able to resist the critiques and translate itself into a coherent policy agenda. The alternatives approaches are reviewed, showing the lack of coherent framework. The article offers a epistemological point of view, since it shows that the reasons for the success are mainly rooted in the domain of competing scientific approaches.

Managing for local resilience: towards a strategic approach

The term resilience is increasingly being used to capture the challenges involved in managing in ‘hard times’. This article aims to provide one of the first empirical studies of the term’s application to local authority interventions around emergency planning and climate change: two areas in which resilience has been particularly emphasised in local policy making. Drawing upon research undertaken in the north east of England, the article considers how local managers have understood and applied the term, the extent to which it has been developed as a coherent policy agenda, and its strategic significance. In reframing the debate on resilience in terms of discourses of ‘recovery’ and ‘transformation’, the article examines how, in addition to informing policy realities on the ground, resilience is also a normative, politically laden term, within which conservative narratives of uncertainty, vulnerability and anxiety compete with a more radical focus on hope, adaptation and transformation. The study reveals concerns over the term’s longevity, tensions between the different interpretations of resilience, and the lack of a coherent strategic framework within which the different discourses on resilience could be considered and reconciled. However, the article also captures the growing importance of a resilience narrative that is seen to add value in a period of austerity, integrate key features of climate change adaptation and emergency planning, and act as a ‘strategic lynchpin’ in relation to other policy areas, such as economic resilience.

Youths in the interface of development and security

This article interrogates the link between youth, security and development in Africa and argues that the central determinant in the link is ‘governance’, especially as this implies the ability of the state to harness the productive potential of youths and to meet their demands on a number of issues. The article also asserts that the reality of a youth bulge in many African countries presents challenges (as opposed to crises), as much as opportunities for national socio-economic transformation. Besides, youths in many developing countries have been the victims of developmental experiments often tele-guided by international financial and development agencies. In its conclusion, the articles argues that efforts to address the challenges posed by youths must move from platitudinous wish-list into formulation of coherent policy agenda that is consistent with the socio-economic and political realities of individual countries; in which youths themselves active agents; and one which must be incorporated into the wider governance framework of nation-states. The issue of youth and violent conflict concerns more than youth, it is a reflection of society in crisis and hence of development itself. If a society's values, norms, customs, practices, structures and institutions are under threat and such changes in turn threaten the development of its children into youth and then adults, then that society cannot sustain itself.1 The state … the economy… are predicated on notions of adulthood; they all require the participation of adults in order to function. If youth are unable to fully make this transition to the minimal conditions of adulthood, then such structures are unsustainable and will either fracture or mutate in unforeseen ways. An understanding of the intersections between youth, violent conflict and society is a way of re-examining development and developing societies. Youth, those who engage in violence and especially those who do not, are located at the junctures between development, security, peace and conflict.2

Medicare funding for nursing education: Proposal for a coherent policy agenda

Medicare Graduate Medical Education (GME) funding for nursing education, established in 1965, no longer represents a coherent policy agenda, which must support educating the nursing workforce from classroom to practice. Three key concepts must be addressed: nursing education costs for both service and educational institutions, defining nursing education in federal rules and regulations, and the community's role in supporting nursing education. Responsibility for educating a nursing workforce must be shared by the community of academic, health care, professional, and government institutions and organizations, a policy supported by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). Knowledge about costs, funding streams, and policies for nursing education is essential for nursing educators to advocate for funding of nursing education and practice. Nursing programs and academic institutions need to initiate discussions with policy makers and potential community partners about service/education partnerships. Finally, community investment in nursing education pays dividends by providing essential health services of a highly skilled professional workforce.

South African Trade Unions in a Time of Adjustment

DURING THE LATE apartheid era, the South African economy was both weakened by sanctions and disinvestment, and sheltered by the then government's protection ist policies. Democratization has brought with it both the lifting of embargos, and the phasing out of tariff barriers and decentralization incentives, which offered substantial state subsidies for industries located near the former bantustans. This has posed certain challenges for organized labour. On the one hand, the South African trade union movement retains a significant following and organizational vitality in a decade associated with union decline, and enjoys an unprecedented degree of political influence on account of its alliance with the mling African National Congress (ANC). On the other hand, it has had to contend with a dimin ishing pool of potential recruits as a result of widespread retrenchments and restructuring, particularly in core areas ofthe economy such as the metal and mining industries. Moreover, the unions face all the difficulties of attempting to develop a coherent policy agenda that not only ameliorates, but also presents genuinely viable alternatives to, the process of adjustment. In other words, the challenge is to retain the integrity of a union voice whilst continuing to compromise where necessary with both state and capital.