Elite and Participatory Policymaking: Finding Balance in a Case of National Forest Planning

In recent years many theorists and practitioners have called for more public involvement in policymaking and for greater citizen input in decisions. The move toward participatory and community-based approaches in policymaking can be seen as a backlash against more elitist technocratic, top-down models of decisionmaking. Using a case study of a successful National Forest planning exercise, this research investigated whether a participatory or elite model characterized the decisionmaking process. The findings indicated that neither an elite nor participatory model of decisionmaking dominated in the planning process; rather, both forms of aecisionmaking contributed to important elements in formulating this successful National Forest plan.     

George Bush and Executive Branch Domestic Policymaking Competence

This article critiques the George Bush domestic policymaking process and argues that Bush had the second-lowest level of policy competence among postwar presidents, ranking above only Ronald Reagan. Although not overtly antianalytic like Reagan, Bush gave little thought and effort to restoring the badly damaged executive branch domestic policymaking process. The article closes with suggestions about the steps needed for, and the difficulties in establishing, a strong White House policymaking process that generates fruitful interaction among key policy advocates over time and that establishes sufficient Executive Office of the President (EOP) capacity to monitor the implementation and management of presidential policies.     

The Dynamics and Interactions Between the President's and the Public's Civil Rights Agendas: A Study in Presidential Leadership and Representation

Past research views presidents as reactive and minor actors in the civilrights policy process. However, that research has focused solely on the latter stages of the policy process. This report views the president's role from an agendasetting perspective. A content analysis reveals that presidents lead public opinion on civil rights, but that the public has little impact on the president's civil rights agenda. The distinction between discretionary and required agenda items explains this asymmetry between the president and the public in civil rights policymaking. A fuller notion of policymaking that includes all stages of the process, from agendasetting to implementation and evaluation, is required to understand the role of the president in civil rights policymaking and leads us to revise the perception that presidents play reactive and minor roles in civil rights policy.     

Policy Influence and Policy Responsiveness in State Pollution Control

This article develops an integrated theory of state policy influence and responsiveness, then operationalizes this theory to account for variations in the strength and scope of state water pollution control and hazardous waste management programs. The analysis finds that economic, ideological, interest group, and political system characteristics act in concert to affect state policymaking, and that the influences behind policymaking vary systematically and predictably across policy areas within environmental protection.     

The Seattle Commons

This study looks in depth at the politics, planning, and policymaking involved in the attempt to create a new “urban village” close to downtown Seattle. Beginning in 1991 with a small group of citizens who shared a vision of a major in-city park, the Seattle Commons project gradually became transformed, as result of different interests and political agendas, into an urban village with a major park at its core. This study analyzes these competing interests, the public private leadership roles, the process of organization-building, and the marshaling of opposition that characterized the Commons planning effort during its initial years.     

Communities in Catchments: Implications for Natural Resource Management

Economic and social considerations in natural resource management include the need for community participation and a greater appreciation of social and economic processes in understanding environmental problems. It is anticipated that new frameworks will guide these inclusions and redirect planning and management activities to achieve environmental sustainability. This paper examines issues of participation and the nature of ‘community’ through an analysis of relevant natural resource management policy documents and a case study of a public drinking water supply catchment in Western Australia. The findings indicate that if NRM strategies are to be successful, then a much wider and more inclusive view of community is needed, one that fully captures the different stakeholder groups beyond farmers, such as town residents, indigenous people, and those involved in other land uses. We need strategies that can accommodate differences within and between communities.     

We Finished the Plan,So Now What? Impacts of Collaborative Stakeholder Participation on Land Use Policy

There is a growing movement toward collaborative stakeholder participation in environmental policy. Rather than calling for a reliance on government officials to solve environmental problems, this approach calls for empowering a community of stakeholders to contribute meaningfully. Scholars examining citizen participation have investigated the performance of such efforts. This study examines one important aspect of performance, the impact of stakeholder participation on policymaking at the local level. A multiple‐case analysis of county‐level, community‐based task forces working on farmland preservation planning in Ohio, U.S., reveals patterns of policymaking processes and the near‐term impacts of collaborative planning. These patterns are linked to scholarship using prior empirical studies as well as the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, which integrates physical, social, and institutional variables to examine collective decision‐making related to natural resources. Results indicate that the degree of policy change is associated closely with local contextual factors, rather than internal group factors often emphasized in studies of citizen advisory committees and collaborative groups.     

Bureaucratic Leverage over Policy Choice: Explaining the Dynamics of State-Level Reforms in Telecommunications Regulation

While state governments have enjoyed greater control over regulating local telephone service providers since 1984, movement toward efficiency-based policy reform (e.g., adoption of competitive markets) has proceeded slowly. We investigate this pattern by addressing how the degree of policy discretion held by state public utility commissions (PUCs) affects reform of local telephone exchange regulation. Using precise measures of both PUC discretion and state policy changes over time, we find that states with "stronger" PUCs (more policymaking authority) are significantly more likely to move toward efficiency-based policy regimes and away from traditional rate-of-return regimes. Greater PUC discretion systematically related to state adoption of efficiency-based reforms over time suggests that regulators are using updated information about policy impacts to inform their policymaking activities. Our findings contradict a common presumption that regulatory bureaucracies are simply motivated by a desire to increase their control over policymaking. Instead, state PUCs are a key source of telecommunications policy reform in the states.     

Comparing Climate Change Policy Adoption and Its Extension across Areas of City Policymaking

Public policies increasingly address complex problems such as climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation that require forging connections across existing areas of policy activity. Despite the emerging prominence of these types of policymaking challenges, more research is needed to understand policy responses to them. In this paper, I use survey responses from 287 cities and a hurdle model to comparatively examine the factors that underlie the adoption of climate change mitigation and adaptation as issues influencing city policymaking and their extension across areas of city policymaking. I find evidence that while social change, crisis, and conditions supporting nascent coalitions were associated with adoption, extension across areas of policymaking was associated with the city?s prevailing political economy as well as the resources for expanding communities of interest. In the process, I offer empirical evidence for existing similarities and differences in cities? considerations about climate change mitigation and adaptation; particularly that the number of policymaking areas influenced by mitigation was associated with financial factors while the number influenced by adaptation was associated with socioeconomic ones.     

Participation in Policy Streams: Testing the Separation of Problems and Solutions in Subnational Policy Systems

The multiple streams theory of national policymaking has been influential in the study of public administration and public policy—if not without a fair bit of controversy. While some laud the model for its openness to the important role of policy entrepreneurs and the irrationalities of the decision‐making processes, others criticize the model for its lack of readily testable propositions. This article identifies a series of testable propositions in the multiple streams model (particularly that discussed by Kingdon). We assess whether participation in local policymaking (focusing on school district policymaking related to violence prevention) is characterized by “separate streams” of participants or is dominated by organized participants like interest groups or policy specialists. We found evidence of unity (rather than separation) in the policymaking process and scant evidence of elite, organized interests dominating the policymaking process. The results call into question a key assumption of the multiple streams model.     

Strategic Participatory Planning in Archaeological Management in Greece: The Philippi Management Plan for Nomination to UNESCO’s World Heritage List

Abstract

This paper examines appropriate conditions for effective strategic participatory planning in archaeological heritage management. It is suggested that heritage literature often considers the tangible outcome of strategic participatory planning, the management plan, as an end of the planning process in itself. Drawing from experience in drafting a management plan for the archaeological site of Philippi in Greece, conventional archaeological management in the country is discussed followed by the identi?cation of constraints on and bene?ts from strategic participatory planning. This paper argues that more critical approaches to the actual planning process are necessary for strategic participatory planning to continuously improve as an approach in Greece and elsewhere.     

The Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Policy Process Analysis: The Case of Smoking Control in Japan

This study examined the process of smoking control policymaking in Japan, employing the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and the Policy Process Analysis (PPA). In the view of the ACF, changes in policies and policymaking are explained as resulting from the emergence of, and the competition among, two advocacy coalitions, either protobacco or antitobacco. On the other hand, the PPA conceives of the process of policy change as a set of processes and gives a closer look into the important aspects of policymaking that the ACF does not well examine.     

江苏省旅游客源市场结构与开发对策研究

客源市场的研究是旅游开发的基础,为旅游资源开发与规划和旅游管理活动提供了科学依据。具有极为重要的理论意义与实践意义。本文根据客源市场结构的有关理论,结合相关旅游统计资料,探讨了江苏客源市场的结构特征,分析了空间结构、时间结构与旅游者类型结构。在此基础上对江苏省国内外客源市场的目标层次进行了划分,并提出了旅游市场的开发对策。     

Confidence Building in Local Planning and Development. Some Experience from Norway

Can local confidence building and cooperation strengthen local communities and have a positive influence on local development? This is the main question in this article. In the first part of the article the conditions for confidence building, mobilization, self-development and self-confidence in local planning are presented. A planning process called strategic and mobilizing planning which is built on these conditions is described. This planning or development process is drawn as an infinite spiral with an increasing 'radius'. As examples of such local confidence building and mobilization processes the cases of 'Nordvest Forum' and 'Cooperation in Haram commune' are presented and discussed. Nordvest Forum is a collaborative activity owned by competing companies in the region, which have recognized that they have a common problem related to recruitment and training of leaders. This has lead to new activities and new cooperation especially related to management training and cooperation. The collaboration between private and public institutions in Haram is an example where common challenges for companies and community were recognized. This process started as a concrete activity regarding recruitment of skilled workers with participation from a few but nevertheless important persons in the private and public sectors. The learning and confidence developed as a result of this cooperation lead to new and broader activities concerning the future of the community with many more participants. In the conclusion some practical advice is given for community planning and confidence building, informed by the theoretical discussion and the empirical examples in the article.     

Bureaucratic Competition in the Policy Process

Recent scholarship has emphasized the important role that strategic bureaucratic actors play in the formulation of public policy. This study builds on that research by exploring the ways in which agencies strategically compete with one another over the content and character of public policy. Using insights from the literature that explicitly models bureaucratic competition, the study adapts an existing model of policymaking in subsystems to generate expectations about the causes and consequences of bureaucratic competition in the policy process. Finally, the article explores the utility of these propositions through a case study of a protracted policy battle over the management of natural resources in the western United States.     

Problem Definition, Agenda Access, and Policy Choice

Problem definition is fundamental to public policy making, intertwined as it is with the political process throughout the activities of issue initiation, program design, and legislative enactment. Yet problem definition remains in immature analytic construct, productive of only a modest amount of scholarship that is lacking a coherent shared framework. Seeking to address this deficiency, this article systematically examines the origins, elements, and consequences of problem definition, relating this discussion to previous literature in the area, current policymaking developments, and future research needs.     

Strategic Environmental Planning and Uncertainty: A Cross-National Comparison of Green Plans in Industrialized Countries

Uncertainty is a distinct feature of environmental policy and environmental issues. This article explores the potential of strategic and comprehensive environmental planning for dealing with these uncertainties. First, four types of uncertainty and their specific impacts on environmental policy are distinguished. Strategic environmental planning could be a promising approach for dealing with these uncertainties. Based on an empirical analysis of national environmental policy plans and sustainability strategies in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, this article comes to the conclusion that although only few of the existing green plans fully explore the theoretical potential of this new approach to environmental policymaking, it has proven an effective mechanism to deal with and reduce at least some of the uncertainties with which environmental policymakers are confronted. The greatest potential of strategic planning lies in increasing the political system's capacity to deal with those problems of long-term environmental degradation, which in spite of the past successes of environmental protection remain largely unsolved.     

Modeling Issue Definitions Using Quantitative Text Analysis

Issue definitions, the way policy issues are understood, are an important component for understanding the policymaking process. Research on issue definitions has been divided between a macro level that examines collective issue definitions and a micro level focusing on the ways in which policy actors frame policy issues. This article develops a model of issue definitions that assumes issues are multidimensional, competition exists among policy actors in defining issues, and that collective issue definitions can be understood as the aggregation of individual issue definitions. This model is then estimated using quantitative text analysis. While various approaches to text analysis and categorization have been used by scholars, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a specific type of topic modeling, is used to estimate issue definitions. Using LDA, witness testimony taken from Congressional hearings that occurred from 1975 to 2012 about the issue of used nuclear fuel (UNF) is examined and seven distinct dimensions of the UNF debate are estimated. The construct validity of these dimensions is checked by testing them against two major policy changes that occurred in the UNF domain. I conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weakness of topic modeling, and how this approach could be used to test hypotheses drawn from several of the major policymaking theories.     

UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lenggong Valley,Malaysia: A Review of its Contemporary Heritage Management

This article reviews contemporary heritage management through a systematically coded content analysis at one of Malaysia’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Archaeological Heritage of the Lenggong Valley (AHLV). It evaluates the competency of the preliminary Conservation Management Plan (CMP) of AHLV by looking at the accuracy of five distinctive dimensions of the CMP in conveying the information about the sites and management objectives: the legislation related to the heritage conservation and management; the action and implementation of the management strategies; the level of stakeholder’s participation; and, finally, how the CMP integrates local values and ideas into management planning. The results show that contemporary heritage management planning at Lenggong Valley tends to prioritize the conservation of the archaeological values of the sites over other values (i.e. social, historical, and aesthetic values), and that planning has largely been in the hands of governmental agencies with limited involvement from local communities in the decision-making process.