Policy Subsystem Research Articles

Neoliberalism at the borders of transnational policy: political exclusion in Australia’s Reconceptualization of trans-Tasman traditions

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the influence of political traditions on policymaking at the interface of national and transnational governance. It uncovers various dimensions of influence on boundary-setting through policy change, derived from a case study examining how Australia reconceptualised longstanding freedom of residential movement and equal treatment for citizens across the Tasman. These policymaking activities spanned boundaries across policy subsystems at the interface of both domestic and transnational arenas, in response to perceived dilemmas. This paper focuses on the enabling role of neoliberal ideations to effect an agenda driven by more covert motives. In context of bilateral economic integration, conflicting traditions created a dilemma for Australia, which sought to maintain the advantages of the free labour-market whilst minimizing the problem of granting access to social security and citizenship to those perceived to be unsuitable. I find that Australia, in resolving this dilemma, allowed neoliberal conceptions of labour as a commodity, thereby enabling traditions of exclusion and border control, to override longstanding trans-Tasman traditions.

Strategic policy narratives: A narrative policy study of the Columbia River Crossing

This study examines how coalitions in local policy contexts implore policy narratives to expand or contain the scope of policy issues. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), a maturing theory of the policy process, is utilized in this study to conduct content analysis on 370 public documents from competing coalitions in relation to the Columbia River Crossing project; a “wicked” policy issue in the Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA region of the Pacific Northwest. From this case selection, it is hypothesized that competing coalitions will use narrative strategies of containment and expansion to achieve their desired policy outcomes. It is also theorized that shocks to a policy subsystem may result in a shift to coalitional narrative strategies. This research will shed light on how coalitions strategically implore policy narratives in cohesive and less cohesive ways to influence policy outcomes.

Paradigmatic policy change or unintended subordination of rural autonomy: the case of source water protection in Ontario, Canada

In May 2000, E. coli originating from nearby agricultural lands contaminated the municipal water supply of Walkerton, Ontario. As a result, over two thousand people became seriously ill and seven people lost their lives. In response to this crisis, source water protection emerged as part of a multi-barrier approach for the provision of safe drinking water. Intervention at the source provides an early opportunity to contain a range of potential risks, many of them tied to land-use. However, source water protection involved a fundamental shift in Ontario’s policy approach to the provision of safe drinking water. In doing so, it mobilized powerful actors to defend their interests against this change. This study traces how the problem was defined in Ontario, and by whom, establishing a continuum of actor–institution interactions that spans the development and implementation stages of the Clean Water Act (2006), and shows how different preferences were carried forward through the devolution of decision making to the watershed level. By disaggregating the policy change into its constituent parts, and accounting for actor effects at the implementation stage, we observe that decentralization in the context of sustained political pressure led to an effective concentration of decision-making power, thereby actually eroding local control. Caution is thus warranted when considering the devolution of decision making to inclusive social processes, as this may link policy subsystems and thereby create the institutional channels through which special interests can dominate decision making.

Probing Narrative Cognition Theory: A Semantic Analysis of Multi-level Hydraulic Fracturing Policy Narratives in Arkansas

Contentious policy debates over the use of hydraulic fracturing technologies in the U.S. have produced inconsistent policies (John Kester and Moyer 2015; Zirogiannis et al. 2016). These debates hold serious implications across a variety of policy domains including energy, environment, economy, and national security. Competing policy narratives often oversimplify the issue by positioning hydraulic fracturing as either a threat to the environment or as an opportunity to realize an economic gain, leaving the issue vulnerable to disinformation campaigns (Old Tactics, New Tools: A Review of Russia’s Soft Cyber Influence Operations. 2017; U.S. House of Representatives 2018) which continue to be employed by outside interests in efforts to destabilize the U.S. energy market (U.S. House of Representatives 2018). According to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), meso-level narratives are utilized by competing advocacy coalitions within an adversarial policy subsystem (McBeth et al. 2007; Shanahan, Jones, and McBeth 2011). Meso-level policy narratives are strategically employed to persuade others to adopt one policy perspective over another. In Colorado, for instance, narratives on hydraulic fracturing emphasized either the associated economic benefits or the potential risks posed to human health and the environment (Heikkila et al. 2014). This divergence of narrative surely fails to support compromise and holds the potential to sustain related policy conflict (Weible and Heikkila 2017). The different views advanced by such narratives are likely to be evaluated, processed, and consumed by diverse individual policy actors, particularly those who are interested in the issue and willing to engage in the debate. While the NPF identifies narrative cognition as the process of extracting meaningful elements from the narrative to think about the policy issue at the micro-level, this concept has rarely been investigated in a systemic manner (but see Jones and Song 2014; Jorgensen, Song, and Jones 2018; Zanocco, Song, and Jones 2018). The controversial nature of the hydraulic fracturing policy debate provides a unique opportunity to further examine this concept of narrative cognition. As such, this chapter probes narrative cognition theory within the context of the hydraulic fracturing (HF) debate in Arkansas by comparing meso-level HF narratives to micro-level communications and examining what factors influence the process. While meso-level HF narratives are certainly accessible to both elite policy actors and the general public, this study narrows its focus to local policy elites residing in the state.

A política nas políticas de acesso à informação brasileiras: trajetória e coalizões

Resumo Como as diversas iniciativas legislativas sobre acesso à informação no Brasil culminaram na aprovação da Lei n. 12.527 (Lei de Acesso à Informação [LAI], 2011)? A partir da abordagem de coalizões de defesa (advocacy coalitions framework - ACF), este artigo analisa a formação de agenda e a atuação de diferentes coalizões, por meio da análise de amplo clipping de notícias, entrevistas, leis e documentos publicados entre 2001 e 2012. Foram identificadas duas coalizões: a) uma a favor de mudanças na legislação, composta por setores do Poder Executivo, do Poder Legislativo, da mídia e da sociedade civil; e b) outra a favor da manutenção de regras restritivas de acesso à informação, composta por Forças Armadas, Itamaraty e Comissão de Relações Exteriores e Defesa Nacional (CRE) do Senado. Identificou-se, também, a superposição de dois subsistemas de políticas públicas: a) o de transparência; e b) o de reconciliação. Este último monopolizou o debate público sobre o tema, contribuindo para a morosidade na aprovação da LAI (2011). O Itamaraty também emerge como autor de forte lobby contra modificações nas regras de classificação de documentos, por motivos ainda a explorar em profundidade.

Functional interaction of crime policy subsystems

Functional interaction of crime policy subsystems

Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis‐remote policy subsystems and make policy punctuations in these areas less likely. However, if such punctuations do occur, they tend to be particularly extreme. Second, we argue that the empirical implications of PET are best tested by separately analyzing variance as an indicator for incrementalism and degrees of freedom as an indicator for punctuations. The empirical analysis builds on two data sets capturing policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013).

Governance Arrangements for Transboundary Issues: Lessons from the Food Waste Programs of Italian Regions

AbstractFocusing on transboundary issues contributes to highlighting how new governance modes can emerge from increasing interdependence and complexity in public policies. This article analyzes food waste as a transboundary issue that cuts across different policy subsystems (PSs), intersects multiple levels of government, and calls into question consolidated policy making for new modes of governance. The analytical framework provides a multidimensional approach and a new typology of governance arrangements to be used in empirical research. Evidence from an Italian case study and an empirical investigation of 20 regional food waste programs shows that regions can adopt different driving ideas and can activate a variety of governance arrangements and differentiated, as well as viable, modes of integration between consolidated PSs. The article argues that different tool mixes combined with different levels of governance complexity may lead to a variety of governance arrangements and a differentiated likelihood of policy integration.

Theoretical framework and formation mechanism of the green development system model in China

Green development (GD) is a complex adaptive system (CAS) closely related to the social, economic, and natural environment. Facing environmental degradation due to the rapid economic and social development, the Chinese government has made important strategic decisions about GD. This study thus proposes a theoretical framework to explain the GD system (GDS) in China and its formation mechanism. First, it identified the components of the Chinese GDS in the literature. Second, using a mathematical model, the theoretical framework of the GDS model in China was constructed based on CAS and knowledge element (KE) theory and tested using 1999–2017 panel survey data. Finally, based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs (MHN), the formation mechanism of the GDS was explained. The results are as follows. The presence of GDS in China has a significant positive correlation with mountains (M), water (W), forests (Fo), farmland (Fa), lakes (L), grassland (G), human (H), production subsystems (PS), living subsystems (LS), and legal institutions and policy subsystem (LIPS). The more important the GD concept, the higher the level of GDS in China. The proposed theoretical framework is congruent with China's contextual background and explains the approach to the environment based on China's development strategy. The study's conclusions are as follows. (1) The GDS model in China is a knowledge-complex massive dynamic system with the characteristics of people-oriented and harmonious coexistence of M-W-Fo-Fa-L-G. GD concepts are included in the model in terms of PS, LS, and LIPS. (2) Human beings drive, maintain, and operate GDS throughout China. (3) Chinese GDS began with the need for black development (BD) and progressed due to BD's negative consequences. Further, the need for GD emerged, promoting the formation of Chinese GDS through the growth of green behaviour.

China’s Policy Processes and the Advocacy Coalition Framework

This review of 81 applications of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in China between 2006 and 2017 finds that the ACF's hypotheses about the existence and stability of competing advocacy coalitions in policy subsystems, the occurrence of change across its three‐tiered belief system, and the credence of its four pathways to policy change, which have been developed and mostly tested in Western democratic contexts, can be confirmed in China's authoritarian political system and transitional context. This review also finds some unexpected results, which have implications for studying China's policy processes and for future applications of the ACF. Adopting common vocabulary and theoretical foci, ACF applications have captured some of the complexity and evolving features of policy processes in China. Applications of the ACF to China have also enriched the discussions about how authoritarian governments, through interacting with other policy actors, adapt to external changes in transitional context.

The ever-changing narrative: Supervised injection site policy making in Ontario, Canada

BackgroundWe analyze the ongoing debate surrounding supervised injection sites in Ontario, Canada and changing policies that impact host communities. Despite a plethora of evidence proving the effectiveness of supervised injection sites on harm reduction strategy, the topic remains highly controversial with constantly changing rhetoric in the Ontario drug policy landscape. MethodsWe reviewed government reports, policies, and media sources spanning from prior to the establishment of the first Canadian supervised injection site in 2000 to early 2019, adopting an advocacy coalition framework approach to this policy analysis. Various advocacy coalitions emerge from this analysis, including all three levels of government, law enforcement, health practitioners, and community groups. We describe the narratives constructed by these coalitions, analyzing the supervised injection site model as a harm reduction strategy within a continually shifting socio-political landscape. ResultsEmerging from the analysis are competing narratives put forward by various stakeholders within the policy subsystem. We find policy-makers tend to leverage scientific uncertainty as a tool to defend the interests of the most powerful actor in the subsystem. Despite an increase in the number of deaths due to the opioid crisis and evidence highlighting the efficacy of supervised injection sites as a harm reduction tool, various stakeholders are locked in a battle of claims and counter-claims about the appropriate policy response to opioids. ConclusionsThese findings have broad implications for drug policy in other contexts. Our case study demonstrates the strength of stopgap measures, like supervised injection, to reduce harm from controlled substances.

Horizontal Collaboration in Crisis Management: An Experimental Study of the Duty Officer Function in Three Public Agencies

Lately, scholars have been engaging in studies on the crossroads between collaborative public management and crisis management, but our knowledge on how organizations work together with interorganizational goals in times of crisis or in relation to the threat that crises pose, is still limited. This study aims to illuminate how interagency horizontal collaboration plays out in practice. An interview study with twenty‐three Swedish duty officers in three organizations with critical tasks in the institutional crisis management system is carried out to unearth impediments to interagency collaboration that emerge when organizations from different policy subsystems engage in crisis collaboration. Empirically, the study contributes with new knowledge on how a crucial function in crisis management carries out work and deals with challenges. Theoretically, it contributes to the literature on crisis management collaboration by shedding light on processes of horizontal collaboration in the area of crisis management.

Lobbying and policy conflict: explaining interest groups’ promiscuous relationships to political parties

Do interest groups prefer to interact with party political supporters or opponents, and why do they do so? Recent research has provided different explanations and mixed findings for this question, highlighting the role of institutional contexts and differences between interests. Here, we focus on the effects of issue-level factors instead. We hypothesize that higher levels of conflict lead interest groups to lobby both supporters and opponents. Our argument emphasizes that the reason to do so lies in interest groups’ desire to gain or maintain prominence within a policy subsystem, rather than in persuasion attempts. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on the lobbying targets for 80 Dutch interest groups on more than 300 issues, we find support for our theoretical claims. When the level of conflict is high, prominence often trumps persuasion. These findings suggest that interest groups, by contacting many different parties, can contribute to policy making in positive ways.

Analyzing climate and energy policy integration: the case of the Mexican energy transition

ABSTRACT One of the main challenges faced by climate policy makers today is to design and implement policies capable of transferring climate policy goals into sectoral actions towards transformational pathways. Hence, climate policies need to be of cross-cutting character, lead to coherence with sectoral goals and reconcile diverging sectoral interests. Against this background, Mexico has undertaken significant efforts to reform its energy sector, including goals for clean energy and energy efficiency, and the adoption of implementation mechanisms via the Law for Energy Transition of 2015. Furthermore, Mexico has introduced a complex climate governance system, including ambitious mitigation goals. In this paper, we applied concepts of climate policy integration to analyse whether integration between the policy subsystems of energy and climate change occurred in Mexico in terms of political discourse and negotiation, policy goals and instruments, and implementation; as well as the factors at work that lead to climate policy integration. We find that on the level of political discourse and negotiation, an integration process between the energy and climate subsystems occurred, influenced by the availability and market maturity of clean energy, mitigation scenarios and external events, such as the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference. However, a combination of decisions on integrated climate-energy policy outputs, and preparing the public administration system for the implementation of integrated policies, is needed to enable appropriate institutional mandates, budgets and instruments and avoid institutional fragmentation. Omitting to take these decisions was identified as a major shortcoming in the political-administrative system, preventing higher levels of climate policy integration. Key policy insights The Mexican Energy Transition Law shows that policy windows can be used by policy makers to attain integrated energy-climate policy outputs and to advance national mitigation and energy sector goals. In order to make full use of integrated policy decisions, the administrative system has to follow suit by also introducing mandates, budgets and policy instruments of an integrative character. Climate policy integration in practice implies identifying and using the full potential of policy windows in order to ensure the raising of ambition under the Paris Agreement as well as achievement of sectoral policy objectives.

The Political Economy of Collective Action and Radical Reform: A Proposed Conceptual Framework

Radical reform displaces social equilibria. It reorients key institutions and underlying mechanisms of coordination and enforcement. This paper presents a broad framework for analyzing radical reform in terms of a large set of collective-action problems faced by potential reformers. It merges concepts that often appear separately in the literature, including social preferences, power relationships, policy subsystems, institutional stability, types of institutional change, and types of agents. Relatively simple game-theoretic models offer a platform for depicting key interactions. Over time, these interactions follow a punctuated-equilibrium dynamic, within which incremental reforms sometimes sow the seeds for punctuation via radical reform. Punctuation unfolds as an information cascade of rapidly shifting perceptions and activity within a social network. Ultimately, this paper offers conceptual foundations for examining how activists occasionally succeed in instigating or facilitating radical reform — and why they so often fail. This framework can then spawn a host of more targeted models and multiple empirical hypotheses.

Collective Action, Civil Society, and Public Policy in Turkey

Understanding policy change mechanisms has been a key question for scholars of public policy and collective action. However, policy scholarship mostly ignores civil society-based explanations of policy processes. In order to address this gap, this study combines the Advocacy Coalition Framework with networked collective action perspectives and analyzes a successful case of mobilization of women’s rights organizations in Turkey to reverse a bill on child marriage. Study findings suggest that advocacy coalitions are not static entities. When different issues in a policy subsystem are invoked, the structure of inter-coalition networks can change substantially and these variations in inter-coalition interactions may have consequences for influencing policy change. Moreover, this paper argues that extensive street protests and online campaigns by civil society organizations have the capacity to boost the bargaining power of minority coalitions, especially in contexts that lack multiple formal venues for making policy claims.

Advocacy Coalition Framework and Policy Changes in a Third‐World Country

This work concerns health sector reform in Nigeria between 2003 and 2014. Using qualitative content analysis, I investigate the factors that led to the reform, the reform process, and its outcome. The objective is to assess the conformity of the policy reform to Sabatier and Weible's Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in order to ascertain the applicability, or otherwise, of the ACF in policy analysis in stable democratic African states. In the article, external shock, policy subsystem, stable parameter, technical experts, advocacy coalitions, the “devil shift,” and policy core beliefs—which are basic components of ACF—were all identified in the policy reform process. I conclude that the ACF can be applied in policy reform in democratic African states, so long as there is the rule of law, a separation of powers, freedom of speech and association, a fairly stable political environment, and the presence of policy participants with expert knowledge of the policy issues.Related ArticlesMorris, Mary Hallock. 2007. “The Political Strategies of Winning and Losing Coalitions: Agricultural and Environmental Groups in the Debate over Hypoxia.” Politics & Policy 35 (4): 836‐871. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2007.00086.xSwigger, Alexandra, and Bruce Timothy Heinmiller. 2014. “Advocacy Coalitions and Mental Health Policy: The Adoption of Community Treatment Orders in Ontario.” Politics & Policy 42 (2): 246‐270. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12066Udjo, Eric O., and Barney Erasmus. 2014. “Impact of Retirement Age Policy on the Workforce of a Higher Education Institution in South Africa.” Politics & Policy 42 (5): 744‐768. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12092 Related Media CNBC Africa. 2017. “How Can Nigeria Improve Its Healthcare System?” https://www.cnbcafrica.com/videos/2017/09/14/how-can-nigeria-improve-its-healthcare-system/Opeyemi, Agbaje. 2012. “Health Sector Reforms in Nigeria 1.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YvV_xj0meU

Trade and nutrition policy coherence: a framing analysis and Australian case study.

Maximising synergies and minimising conflicts (i.e. building policy coherence) between trade and nutrition policy is an important objective. One understudied driver of policy coherence is the alignment in the frames, discourses and values of actors involved in the respective sectors. In the present analysis, we aim to understand how such actors interpret (i.e. 'frame') nutrition and the implications for building trade-nutrition policy coherence. We adopted a qualitative single case study design, drawing on key informant interviews with those involved in trade policy. We focused on the Australian trade policy sub-system, which has historically emphasised achieving market growth and export opportunities for Australian food producers. Nineteen key informants involved in trade policy spanning the government, civil society, business and academic sectors. Nutrition had low 'salience' in Australian trade policy for several reasons. First, it was not a domestic political priority in Australia nor among its trading partners; few advocacy groups were advocating for nutrition in trade policy. Second, a 'productivist' policy paradigm in the food and trade policy sectors strongly emphasised market growth, export opportunities and deregulation over nutrition and other social objectives. Third, few opportunities existed for health advocates to influence trade policy, largely because of limited consultation processes. Fourth, the complexity of nutrition and its inter-linkages with trade presented difficulties for developing a 'broader discourse' for engaging the public and political leaders on the topic. Overcoming these 'ideational challenges' is likely to be important to building greater coherence between trade and nutrition policy going forward.

A Bridge in Flux: Narratives and the Policy Process in the Pacific Northwest

AbstractPolicy narratives play an important role in the policy process. Often policy narratives originate from advocacy coalitions seeking increased support from the public for their policy stance. Although most Narrative Policy Framework studies have focused on national policy issues, this study examines a state and local economic development project by exploring the policy narratives from competing coalitions in favor and opposed to the project. Specifically, in the Portland–Vancouver area of Oregon and Washington, local policy discussions have been dominated by a proposal for a new mega bridge on Interstate‐5 connecting the two cities across the Columbia River. A new government agency (CRC—Columbia River Crossing) was formed for the implementation of this project. Upon approval of a proposal, CRC experienced heavy backlash from citizens, local businesses, community leaders, and other stakeholders leading to the formation of two competing coalitions in opposition and support of the bridge. This study, using content analysis of 370 public documents, finds that competing coalitions utilize policy narratives in strategic ways to characterize the opposing coalition, themselves, and other actors in the policy subsystem. This study also suggests that the strength and cohesion of a coalition's narrative contributes to its policy success and the winning/losing status of a coalition potentially determines the types of strategies they will use. Last, this study introduces and tests a new narrative strategy called the impotent shift testing a coalition's strategic use of the victim character.

Reconceptualizing the Policy Subsystem: Integration with Complexity Theory and Social Network Analysis

The concept of the policy subsystem is an essential building block for several of the basic frameworks of policy process studies. Over time issues have become more complex, crossing subsystem boundaries, and so subsystems have escalated in their complexity as well. It is increasingly insufficient to study just one policy subsystem and so scholars have turned to studying boundary‐spanning regimes or policy networks. In this essay, we review the major contributions to developing the concept of a policy subsystem and trace its evolution into broader conceptualizations like issue and policy networks. We argue that the future for theories of the policy process is in more explicit integration of complexity theory and more effective modeling of subsystems with the utilization of social network analysis. In closing, we discuss the enduring nature of the concept of policy subsystems and highlight studies that continue using it in innovative ways.