Policy Conflict Research Articles

Unpacking the intensity of policy conflict: a study of Colorado’s oil and gas subsystem

This article applies the Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) to describe and explain the characteristics of policy conflict within the oil and gas subsystem in Colorado. We use data from a survey of policy actors to assess three cognitive characteristics of policy conflict: divergence in policy positions, perceived threats from opponents’ positions, and an unwillingness to compromise. Aggregating these indicators across policy actors in the subsystem, we find a moderately high level of policy conflict intensity, but we also find substantial variation in the characteristics of policy conflict across policy actors. To help explain this variation, we examine how interpersonal and intrapersonal attributes of policy actors relate to the characteristics of policy conflict. In particular, we find that insular policy actor networks, interest group affiliations, and rigidity of risk and benefit perceptions associate more consistently with conflict characteristics than political views, education, or experience. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of this first application of the PCF and reiterate the need for theoretically and empirically rigorous measures of policy conflict.

Policy Conflict Framework

This essay introduces a Policy Conflict Framework to guide and organize theoretical, practical, and empirical research to fill the vacuum that surrounds policy conflicts. The framework centers on a conceptual definition of an episode of policy conflict that distinguishes between cognitive and behavioral characteristics. The cognitive characteristics of a policy conflict episode include divergence in policy positions among two or more actors, perceived threats from opponents’ policy positions, and unwillingness to compromise. These cognitive characteristics manifest in a range of behavioral characteristics (e.g., framing contests, lobbying, building networks). Episodes of policy conflicts are shaped by a policy setting, which consists of different levels of action where conflicts may emerge (political, policy subsystem and policy action situations), interpersonal and intrapersonal policy actor attributes, events, and the policy issue. In turn, the outputs and outcomes of policy conflicts produce feedback effects that shape the policy setting. This essay ends with an agenda for advancing studies of policy conflicts, both methodologically and theoretically.

Understanding rationales for collaboration in high-intensity policy conflicts

AbstractWhy people collaborate to achieve their political objectives is one enduring question in public policy. Although studies have explored this question in low-intensity policy conflicts, a few have examined collaboration in high-intensity policy conflicts. This study asks two questions: What are the rationales motivating policy actors to collaborate with each other in high-intensity policy conflicts? What policy actor attributes are associated with these rationales? This study uses questionnaire data collected in 2013 and 2014 of policy actors from New York, Colorado and Texas who are actively involved with hydraulic fracturing policy debates. The results show that professional competence is the most important rationale for collaborating, whereas shared beliefs are moderately important, and financial resources are not important. Policy actor attributes that are associated with different rationales include organisational affiliation and extreme policy positions. This article concludes with a discussion on advancing theoretical explanations of collaboration in high-intensity policy conflicts.

Application of the State aid rules to the creation of development banks: is there scope for simplification?

How the State aid rules are applied to the creation of new development institutions by Member States varies significantly depending on the exact structure that is adopted by the Member State for the creation of that institution. That results in differences in the legal powers and scope of these institutions that, while explicable from a legal perspective, can be difficult to rationalize in policy terms. The purpose of this article is to explore first of all the reasons for those differences in approach and then to consider whether there is, within the framework of the existing regime, scope for modification of the approach that is taken to the State aid analysis that would address or ameliorate some of the policy conflicts by using an approach more akin to that adopted when considering cases involving services of general economic interest.

Islam, Asymmetric Policy, and Social Conflict: The State's Role as a Root of Radicalism in the Philippines and Thailand

Radicalism has become a serious problem for many countries, including in Southeast Asia. One of its triggering factors is an extreme understanding of religion that leads to the assumption that people with different understandings are wrong and that violence is a legitimate way to change the situation. This often occurs because of a love of lineage or clan, as well as aggressive instincts. Such an extreme understanding results in the religious social conflicts, which in reality — particularly those involving Islam in Southeast Asia — are often influenced by regimes’ asymmetric policies. This study, therefore, explores the role of the State as a root of radicalism in the context of the dynamic relationship between Islam and asymmetric policies, with a focus on the southern Philippines and Thailand. Research findings show that the rise of radicalism in the Philippines was caused by social conflict resulting from government manipulation of referendum policy on special autonomy in predominant Muslim areas. Meanwhile, radicalism in Thailand was triggered by social conflict resulting from the cultural assimilation policy imposed upon the Muslim community by the government.

Elimination of policy conflict to improve the PDP evaluation performance

In the authorization access control model, the Policy Decision Point (PDP) may make an inappropriate authorization decision or the operating efficiency of the network and information system may be influenced, because there might be conflicts in the policies loaded on the PDP. As a result, the PDP's evaluation performance is affected when it evaluates access requests. In order to detect and eliminate conflicts in a policy and achieve the goal that the PDP can evaluate access requests with high efficiency, a form conflict detecting and eliminating engine is presented. This engine can not only detect and eliminate form conflicts in a policy, but also evaluate access requests. In the form conflict detecting and eliminating engine, a Resource Index Tree is constructed to convert the rules in a policy defined by the XACML to the node information in the Resource Index Tree. On the basis of the dependent relationship of resources, the overlapping relationship of conditions and effect information, form conflicts in a policy are detected and eliminated. Experiments make comparisons of the evaluation performance of the form conflict detecting and eliminating engine with that of the Sun PDP, as well as XEngine and SBA-XACML. Experimental results show that the evaluation performance of the PDP can be greatly improved by eliminating form conflicts in the policies.

PERKEMBANGAN TEKNOLOGI BATUBARA BERSIH BERWAWASAN LINGKUNGAN

Coal has a very important role to meet energy demand in Indonesia, however, it is also the dirtiest fuel among the fossil fuels. As coal utilization continues to increase, pollutants and greenhouse gases emissions from the coal utilization also increase, that would lead to environmental problems. Therefore, development of clean coal technologies for reducing those emissions from coal utilization needs to be considered. The technologies areintended to reduce the policy conflict between continuing coal utilization and protecting environment potential by improving the effectiveness of control technologies and reducing their costs. In addition, the technologies have higher efficiency that would impact on conserving fuels that lead to reducing costs and extension of coal reserve availability.

Transformation of Communication of Women’s Movement in the New Media: Seeking Gender Justice in Surakarta and Yogyakarta

Violence against women is still a thorny issue in Indonesia. Data of Lembar Fakta Catatan Tahunan (CATAHU) from National Commission for Women in 2015 reached to 16.217 cases. Discrimination of local regulations, religious intolerance, death penalty policy, evictions, and political conflicts are considered associated with it. Resistance to this issue has been conducted through social movements (women), but the results have not been succesful. The development of the women’s movement has shifted from the old social movements (physical) towards new social movements (digital). Advancement in technology of new media communication hasprovide a space for people to interact in a novel patterns. Internet is considered as a medium capable of facilitating the movement of women to communicate their aspirations, mobilizing the masses to make collective actions. This paper aims to describe the transformation of communication through new media in the women’s movement for gender justice with case studies in Surakarta and Yogyakarta. This study is conducted in several groups of the women’s movement which are based in community and NGO.

Is ‘Bio-Based’ Activity a Panacea for Sustainable Competitive Growth?

Taking a European Union focus, this paper explicitly models competing uses of biomass to quantify its contribution toward a sustainable low carbon model of economic growth. To this end, a state-of-the-art multisector multiregion modelling tool is combined with a specially developed bio-based variant of a well-known global database. Employing a decomposition method of the market drivers and classifying alternative future pathways, the aim is to understand how public policies can influence the apparent trade-off between the goals of lower carbon economic growth, environmental preservation and sustainable biomass usage. Results reveal that in targeting specific societal goals public policy can be effective, although this can lead to broader economic issues of resource inefficiency and even direct policy conflicts.

China’s Rare Earths Supply Forecast in 2025: A Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium Analysis

The supply of rare earths in China has been the focus of significant attention in recent years. Due to changes in regulatory policies and the development of strategic emerging industries, it is critical to investigate the scenario of rare earth supplies in 2025. To address this question, this paper constructed a dynamic computable equilibrium (DCGE) model to forecast the production, domestic supply, and export of China’s rare earths in 2025. Based on our analysis, production will increase by 10.8%–12.6% and achieve 116,335–118,260 tons of rare-earth oxide (REO) in 2025, based on recent extraction control during 2011–2016. Moreover, domestic supply and export will be 75,081–76,800 tons REO and 38,797–39,400 tons REO, respectively. The technological improvements on substitution and recycling will significantly decrease the supply and mining activities of rare earths. From a policy perspective, we found that the elimination of export regulations, including export quotas and export taxes, does have a negative impact on China’s future domestic supply of rare earths. The policy conflicts between the increase in investment in strategic emerging industries, and the increase in resource and environmental taxes on rare earths will also affect China’s rare earths supply in the future.

Packet: a privacy-aware access control policy composition method for services composition in cloud environments

Combining different independent cloud services must coordinate their access control policies. Otherwise unauthorized access to composite cloud service can occur when there's a conflict among different cloud service providers' access control policies, and then it will bring serious data security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose Packet, a novel access control policy composition method that can detect and resolve policy conflicts in cloud service composition, including those conflicts related to privacyaware purposes and conditions. The Packet method is divided into four steps. First, employing a unified description, heterogeneous policies are transformed into a unified attributebased format. Second, to improve the conflict detection efficiency, policy conflicts on the same resource can be eliminated by adopting cosine similarity-based algorithm. Third, exploiting a hierarchical structure approach, policy conflicts related to different resources or privacy-aware purposes and conditions can be detected. Fourth, different conflict resolution techniques are presented based on the corresponding conflict types. We have successfully implemented the Packet method in Openstack platform. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by the comparison with the existing XACML-based system at conflict detection and resolution performance.

The Law Systematic for Policy Conflict of Climate Change Disaster

The Law Systematic for Policy Conflict of Climate Change Disaster

Growing Financial Assets for Foster Youths: Expanded Child Welfare Responsibilities, Policy Conflict, and Caseworker Role Tension.

The study reported in this article explores the role child welfare workers play in elevating the financial capability (FC) of foster youths transitioning to adulthood. It draws on an examination of Opportunity Passport, a component of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, which operates across the United States. The authors held in-depth, structured interviews with eight staff and 38 current and former foster youths age 18 years and older in four sites across three states. Findings indicate that (a) program participants require professional financial assistance that is beyond the role of the traditional child welfare caseworker; (b) caseworkers who address FC in young adults face uncertainty in their roles; and (c) broader policies relevant to young adults transitioning to adulthood exhibit tension, if not conflict, regarding enhancing FC. The authors highlight the importance of expanding the role of caseworkers to incorporate elements of FC in serving the needs of foster youths.

Complex governance structures and incoherent policies: Implementing the EU water framework directive in Sweden

Contemporary processes of environmental policymaking in general span over several territorial tiers. This also holds for the EU Water Framework Directive system of environmental quality standards (EQS), which are part of a complex multi-level institutional landscape, embracing both EU, national and sub-national level. Recent evaluations show that many EU member states, including Sweden, have not reached the ecological goals for water in 2015. Departing from theories on policy coherence and multi-level governance, this paper therefore analyses Swedish water governance as a case to further our understanding of policy implementation in complex governance structures: how does policy coherence (or the lack thereof) affect policy implementation in complex governance structures? To answer this question, the paper maps out the formal structure of the water governance system, focusing on power directions within the system, analyses policy coherence in Swedish water governance through mapping out policy conflicts between the EQS for water and other goals/regulations and explore how they are handled by national and sub-national water bureaucrats. The study concludes that without clear central guidance, ‘good ecological status’ for Swedish water will be difficult to achieve since incoherent policies makes policy implementation inefficient due to constant power struggles between different authorities, and since environmental goals are often overridden by economic and other societal goals. Further research is needed in order to explore if similar policy conflicts between water quality and other objectives occur in other EU member states and how bureaucrats handle such conflicts in different institutional settings. This study of the Swedish case indicates that the role of the state as a navigator and rudder-holder is important in order to improve policy implementation in complex governance structures – otherwise; bureaucrats risk being lost in an incoherent archipelago of ecological, social and economic goals.

Policies in Conflict: Undermining Corporate Self-Policing,

This article addresses one of the foremost, yet mostly unrecognized barriers to the development of effective compliance and ethics programs in organizations: the existing legal system. While much has been made of government efforts to promote and recognize compliance and ethics programs, almost no attention has been given to an undercurrent in the legal system that has thwarted organizational self-policing, and that threatens to undermine the policy basis for promoting effective compliance and ethics programs. The article begins with a brief overview of the history of the field of compliance and ethics and the policy reasons for its development. It then reviews the policy conflicts between the existing legal system and the application of compliance and ethics. It surveys weaknesses in current approaches to implementing compliance and ethics programs that undercut the effectiveness of such programs. In the conclusion it discusses how to balance the conflicting policies, ending with proposed legislation to resolve the conflict.

Policy challenges and approaches for the conservation of mangrove forests in Southeast Asia.

Many drivers of mangrove forest loss operate over large scales and are most effectively addressed by policy interventions. However, conflicting or unclear policy objectives exist at multiple tiers of government, resulting in contradictory management decisions. To address this, we considered four approaches that are being used increasingly or could be deployed in Southeast Asia to ensure sustainable livelihoods and biodiversity conservation. First, a stronger incorporation of mangroves into marine protected areas (that currently focus largely on reefs and fisheries) could resolve some policy conflicts and ensure that mangroves do not fall through a policy gap. Second, examples of community and government comanagement exist, but achieving comanagement at scale will be important in reconciling stakeholders and addressing conflicting policy objectives. Third, private-sector initiatives could protect mangroves through existing and novel mechanisms in degraded areas and areas under future threat. Finally, payments for ecosystem services (PES) hold great promise for mangrove conservation, with carbon PES schemes (known as blue carbon) attracting attention. Although barriers remain to the implementation of PES, the potential to implement them at multiple scales exists. Closing the gap between mangrove conservation policies and action is crucial to the improved protection and management of this imperiled coastal ecosystem and to the livelihoods that depend on them.

Social Networks and Policy Entrepreneurship: How Relationships Shape Municipal Decision Making about High‐Volume Hydraulic Fracturing

Well‐resourced and well‐connected individuals, or “policy entrepreneurs,” often play an important role in advocating and securing the adoption of policies. There is a striking lack of inquiry into the ways that social networks shape the ability of these actors to achieve their aims, including the ways in which network ties may channel policy conflict. To address these gaps, we analyze data from an original survey and an original database of policies to assess the success of policy entrepreneurs (PEs) active in a highly contentious arena: municipal policymaking concerning high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) in New York. We use text‐mining to collect social network data from local newspaper archives, then use those data to construct municipal HVHF policy networks. Municipal anti‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they operate in less cohesive networks, act as bridges to relative newcomers to the governance network, and have a larger number of network connections. Pro‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they can forge high‐value connections to key decision makers. Policy entrepreneurs on both sides of the issue are more successful when they have a greater number of sympathetic coalition partners.

Security policy enforcement for networked smart objects

In the Internet of Things (IoT) heterogeneous technologies concur to the provisioning of customized services able to bridge the gap between the physical and digital realms. Security, privacy and data quality are acknowledged to represent key issues to be tackled in order to foster the large-scale adoption of IoT systems and technologies. One instrumental aspect concerns the ability of the system to preserve security in the presence of external attacks. In such a scenario, the integration of a flexible IoT middleware, able to handle a large number of data streams and of interconnected devices, with a flexible policy enforcement framework is needed and presented in this paper. The proposed solution aims to ease the management of interactions across different realms and policy conflicts. Its effectiveness is validated by means of a lightweight and cross-domain prototypical implementation.

Decentralization in educational governance and its challenges in Korea: Focused on policy conflicts between central and local government in education

Decentralization of educational governance is characterized by the recent education reform in Korea. With the election of progressive superintendents and local council members, educational policy conflicts have often occurred and deepened in the process of decision-making and implementation of policies such as School Violence Prevention, National Assessment of Education Achievement, Autonomous Private High School, and Teacher Appraisal for Professional Development. This paper examined what were key issues related to these conflicts, what caused these conflicts, and how they progressed by analyzing recent legal cases during the last 5 years (2010–2014) between central and local governments. Findings showed that three factors might be associated with policy conflicts in educational governance: Ambiguous authority and responsibility of educational administration, tensions of political and educational ideas and ideologies, and inadequacy of conflict prevention and coordination. Final findings of the study will provide valuable information to enhance cooperation between central and local educational governance.

Enhancing Environmental Quality and Sustainability through Negotiation and Conflict Management: Research into Systems, Dynamics, and Practices

AbstractIn a world of rapid population growth, urbanization, and climate change, sustainability and environmental integrity are increasingly central concerns. The frequent recurrence of conflict within these arenas, coupled to the difficulty in determining their impact on social–ecological systems, challenges governance at all levels of society. Negotiation‐based conflict management provides a promising response to these challenges. This guest editor's article examines: (a) the emergence and conduct of environmental and public policy (EPP) conflict management as a distinctive practice over the past 40 years; (b) the interplay between theories of environmental decision‐making and practices of EPP conflict management; (c) trends in research into EPP conflict management systems, the dynamics of interventions into these systems to resolve conflict, and the efficacy and impact of EPP conflict management practices; and (d) the contributions of the articles contained in this special issue to this literature and future directions in the field.