Managerial Friction and Land-Use Policy Punctuations in the Fragmented Metropolis

Despite the portrayal of bureaucratic organizations as resistant to change, public managers have some ability to strategically move land-use processes out of incrementalism, even when bureaucratic lethargy acts as a drag. This article examines managerial influence in land-use policy by synthesizing theories of political markets and punctuated equilibrium. An information-processing logic is developed to explain why local government managers shift from “inward” to “outward” land-use management strategies in periods of environmental change. "Managerial friction” is defined as a strategic managerial adjustment producing punctuated land-use policy change in the face of environmental changing conditions. Hypotheses are tested using data on Florida local government comprehensive plan amendments and a Bayesian methodological approach. The evidence suggests managerial friction can be distinguished from the effects of environmental and political complexity as well as other forms of institutional friction, including management turnover, legislative institutions, and bureaucratic structure.     

Coalition Structures and Policy Change in a Consensus Democracy

This paper studies the relation between coalition structures in policy processes and policy change. While different factors such as policy images, learning processes, external events, or venue shopping are important to explain policy change, coalition structures within policy processes are often neglected. However, policy change happens as a result of negotiations and coordination among coalitions within policy processes. The paper analyzes how conflict, collaboration, and power relations among coalitions of actors influence policy change in an institutional context of a consensus democracy. Empirically, I rely on a Qualitative Comparative Analysis to conduct a cross‐sector comparison of the 11 most important policy processes in Switzerland between 2001 and 2006. Coalition structures with low conflict and strong collaboration among coalitions as well as structures with dominant coalitions and weak collaboration both facilitate major policy change. Competing coalitions that are separated by strong conflict but still collaborate strongly produce policy outputs that are close to the status quo.     

The Politics of Greek Environmental Policy

This article serves a dual purpose. Its substantive goal is to provide an account of Greek environmental policy formation and implementation over the last twenty years. Its theoretical goal is to examine the relative impacts of specific political factors, as contrasted with aggregate levels of socioeconomic and institutional development, in shaping environmental policy in an industrializing country. such as Greece. More specifically, it is argued that certain aspects of state-society relations and of the internal organization of the Greek state are frequently the major reasons behind the country's difficulties in formulating implementable preventive policy and in implementing adequately constructed policy.     

The Temporal Diffusion of Morality Policy: The Case of Death Penalty Legislation in the American States

The social learning theory of policy decisionmaking provides clear expectations for the temporal diffusion of policy through the American states (Gray, 1973; Rogers, 1995; Walker, 1969). But the diffusion of morality policy, with its technical simplicity, potential for high salience, and debate over basic moral values, may be driven by nonroutine decisionmaking. We hypothesize that morality policy will diffuse in patterns that depend on the purity of the morality debate surrounding it and the distribution of citizen values regarding it. We identify three distinctive temporal diffusion patterns for state death penalty policies that vary on these characteristics. We conclude that political decisionmaking driving some morality policy diffusion involves less policy learning, and more concern about majority public opinion, than does nonmorality policy.     

Policy Decisionmaking Models in Practice: A Case Study of the Western Australian "Sentencing Acts"

While there is an extensive body of literature on a range of policy decisionmaking models, there is a lack of supporting case studies about the lived experiences of policymakers and the usefulness of various decisionmaking models in practice. This article examines two traditional models of decisionmaking, namely crisis theory and the rational comprehensive model, to assess their strengths and limitations in explaining the introduction of the controversial Western Australian Crime (Serious and Repeat Offenders) Sentencing Act 1992 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1992 (the "Sentencing Acts"). We argue that the "Sentencing Acts" cannot easily be reduced to, or explained through, a single policy analysis model, as significant aspects of policy remain hidden. Finally, we contend that to understand the emergence of the Sentencing Acts requires an approach that can account for the interconnection between structural, agenda-setting, and decisionmaking levels of analysis.     

Political Commitment,Policy Ambiguity,and Corporate Environmental Practices

A lack of clear political commitment together with confusing rules and enforcement often characterize the institutional context of policy implementation and regulatory compliance in developing countries. By connecting such contextual features to existing models of policy implementation and regulatory compliance, we examine how regulatory factors are related to basic and proactive corporate environmental management practices in the Pearl River Delta region in China. Drawing on data derived from both a survey and in‐depth interviews, we show that a perception of clear political commitment to environmental protection across multiple government levels and units is positively associated with business efforts in basic environmental practices, regardless of the specific enforcement intensity. Nevertheless, a perception of clear political commitment is not related to proactive environmental practices. Conversely, a perception of policy ambiguity, in the form of confusing regulatory standards and enforcement, is negatively associated with corporate efforts in both basic and proactive environmental practices; yet, intensive inspections mitigate these negative associations with policy ambiguity.     

Policy Instrument Choices for Growth Management and Land Use Regulation

What factors account for local government land use practices and their choices among specific growth management policy instruments? We apply the political market framework to examine how land use policy choices in Florida are shaped by institutional features of county governments and the demands of organizations and interests in a community. Local policy decisions reflect a balance of the conflicting interests and responses to economic and political pressures. The results demonstrate that county government structure and election rules play critical roles in the adoption of urban service boundaries, incentive zoning, and transfer of development rights programs. We report evidence consistent with the argument that these “second‐generation” growth management policies are motivated by exclusionary goals.     

Trust and Understanding in Participatory Policy Analysis: The Case of the Vermont Forest Resources Advisory Council

Participatory policy analysis (PPA) has been recommended as a means for better informing the policy process and reinvigorating citizen participation in government decisionmaking. This study analyzes the Vermont Forest Resources Advisory Council (FRAC), a stakeholder form of PPA, to assess trust and understanding, which PPA proponents suggest is important for democratic governance. Findings indicate that process design and the roles of science and social values in decisionmaking affected trust and understanding among participants and in the FRAC process. This case highlights challenges in making PPA operational and in addressing positivist and postpositivist perspectives within PPA.     

Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change

This article reviews the concept of policy entrepreneurship and its use in explaining policy change. Although the activities of policy entrepreneurs have received close attention in several studies, the concept of policy entrepreneurship is yet to be broadly integrated within analyses of policy change. To facilitate more integration of the concept, we here show how policy entrepreneurship can be understood within more encompassing theorizations of policy change: incrementalism, policy streams, institutionalism, punctuated equilibrium, and advocacy coalitions. Recent applications of policy entrepreneurship as a key explanation of policy change are presented as models for future work. Room exists for further conceptual development and empirical testing concerning policy entrepreneurship. Such work could be undertaken in studies of contemporary and historical policy change.     

The Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

This paper uses a case study of wetland regulation in the United States to develop elements of a theory about institutional stability and change in policy processes involving large public organizations. This theoretical approach draws on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to understand events that are not well explained by other policy theories. Our approach accounts for the theoretically unexpected outcomes of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Rapanos v. United States, which stood to change the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulate the filling of wetlands. We propose a typology of institutional types that operate inside public organizations, and use process tracing to show how tacit institutions, those created informally within public organizations, can play key roles in determining the outcomes of policy processes. In the Rapanos case, informal coordination mechanisms enabled regulators and members of the regulated community to preserve substantially the pre‐ruling status quo. The key role of these microlevel interactions in shaping the macrolevel behaviors of public organizations underscores the importance of further research investigating how, in similar cases, different behavioral mechanisms interact in often complex and unexpected ways to determine the outcomes of policy processes.     

The Role of Pilot Projects in Urban Climate Change Policy Innovation

Cities are taking a leadership role in addressing global climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but policy innovations are needed to help cities move from goals to outcomes. Pilot projects are one means by which cities are experimenting with new ways of governing and financing climate change mitigation. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the role of pilot projects in urban policy innovation: their emergence and rationale, and the means by which they ultimately scale up and out to reduce GHG emissions. We use this framework to evaluate a pilot project for retrofitting social housing buildings in Toronto. We find the initial pilot project helped address the challenges of pursuing deep retrofits of social housing. Scaling these lessons up to the city level required overcoming challenges to financing and coordinating a larger project; scaling out to the provincial level revealed institutional and political obstacles to pursuing the co-benefits of deep building retrofits in social housing. Bridging agents play an important role in both scaling processes. The analysis reveals the additive nature of urban policy innovation and the dynamic interplay of change agents and institutional and political context in innovation processes.     

Strengthening the Role of Public Health in Environmental Policy

Over the past 25 years there has been a steady decline in the role of public health agencies in environmental protection. This paper examines the major factors that have contributed to that decline, including the impact of federal environmental laws, the disparity in funding between regulatory and public health activities in environmental protection, and the emergence of risk assessment as a basis for environmental decisions. The methods of risk assessment and traditional public health approaches are contrasted, and the advantages of the involvement of public health agencies are discussed. Recommendations are presented for strengthening the role of public health in environmental decisionmaking to address more effectively public concerns about environmental risks.     

Participation and Environmental Policy in Canada and the United States: Trends Over Time

This article explores trends in participation and environmental policy in Canada and the United States over three time periods: from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s; from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s; and, finally, over the past few years. The article examines possible interactions among the two variables within each country over these periods and searches out overall tendencies toward convergence or divergence. The article argues that there was divergence between the two countries in the first period, with the U.S. providing more participatory opportunities earlier than Canada and establishing a more developed regulatory framework. An overview of progress over the second period, showing some convergence among the two countries, is then provided. Canada seemed to be catching up to its southern counterpart in terms of both participatory opportunities—although they took a distinctively Canadian form—and policy decisions. More recently, however, the trend has been toward divergence. The article explains that, over the past few years, participatory opportunities in Canada have been diminished and the environmental regulatory framework has been scaled back. Although there have been some changes in the U.S. case, the scale of these changes has not been as extensive. The final section of the article then attempts to relate these broader trends in participation and policy decisions to the political context in each country. It is argued that institutional frameworks in the two countries have played a key role in the identified trends. In particular, Canada's institutional structure—specifically the concentration of power in the executive and its federal structure—has hastened these recent developments, while the U.S. institutional framework—with its multiple power centers—has acted as a brake on those who advocate significant change to the existing environmental policy regime.     

Policy Coherence and Policy Domains

Policy scholars generally agree that greater coherence of policies is desirable, but the concept is under-theorized and has received little empirical examination. This research examines the policy coherence of 18 policy domains and considers institutional factors that affect variation among them. There is considerable variation in coherence among substantive, regional, and identity-based policy domains. Greater degrees of policy coherence exist for policy domains that have dominant congressional committees or have more involvement of lead federal agencies. These findings extend what policy scholars know about policy subsystems in American policymaking to consideration of the coherence of policy domains.     

Environmental Values and Water Policy

The emergence of water markets has heralded the prospect of increased efficiency in the use of the resource for extractive purposes. However, water markets have not encompassed all elements of demand for the resource. Notably, demands for the environmental public goods provided by river flows have not been revealed in markets. State Governments have instituted regulations requiring ‘environmental flows’ to be quarantined from the market allocation process. This policy has triggered negative responses from irrigators and conservationists. Lobby groups have found that the process of determining environmental flows is a prospective site for rent seeking. To avoid policy being driven by rent seeking, information on the costs and benefits of environmental flows is useful. Whereas the costs of environmental flows are readily assessed through reference to market data on irrigators’ surpluses foregone, the benefits must be estimated through the use of non‐market, stated preference valuation techniques. These techniques — including contingent valuation and choice modelling — remain controversial. Some argue that they should not be used on ethical grounds. Others argue that they cannot be used on technical grounds. These arguments are discussed in this paper, using the context of the water policy debate. The evidence is that stated preference techniques are being used, and applications have been performed in Australia in the context of riverine health. However their use remains restricted relative to the scale of the Australian natural resource management task. Some possible explanations for this limited up‐take are provided along with some suggested ways forward.     

Policy of Delay: Evidence from a Bayesian Analysis of Metropolitan Land‐Use Choices

Do local policymakers strategically use delay in permitting development to forestall the growth machine? The mantras of smart growth and sustainable development assume local governments can balance the competing values of economic development, ecology, and equity interests in a community. We employ a political market framework to explain differences in local government land use decisions. This framework conceptualizes policy choices as resulting from the interplay between the aggregate policy demand by residents, developers, and environmental interests and the aggregate supply by government authorities. Delays can be imposed strategically through processes of development approval by city governments where industry strength and form of government vary within county‐level service‐delivery fragmentation. We utilize novel Bayesian multilevel modelling of data collected from 2007 and 2015 surveys of Florida city planners and find strong institutional effects and multilevel relationships.     

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience- complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley's salience-complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley's contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy's salience.     

Institutions,Markets and Economic Co‐ordination: Linking Development Policy to Theory and Praxis

This article explores policy applications of ‘new institutional economics’ theory in relation to markets and economic development. It argues for application of an analytical framework which instead of looking at institutions primarily in terms of their contributions to making competitive markets work better, sees such markets as one form of institution fulfilling exchange and co‐ordination functions in an economy. A key element in this is recognition of the importance of processes of change in non‐standard market arrangements in economic development, and there are strong theoretical, practical and historical grounds for more consistent policy in this area.     

Policy Design and the Acceptability of Environmental Risks: Nuclear Waste Disposal in Canada and the United States

This article examines the controversial process of developing high-level nuclear waste disposal policy in Canada, with some comparison to experience in the United States. It argues that a policy design perspective can assist in understanding the difficult social and political issues associated with waste disposal and the environmental and health risks that it poses. I examine several critical questions related to such an endeavor and link them to long-term goals of building a sustainable society. Success in formulating and implementing a nuclear waste policy in Canada will depend on the nation's capacity to create requisite processes of public participation. Particularly important are those actions that can help the public understand and assess environmental risks, including related ethical and social issues, and build public trust and confidence in the siting processes and the implementing agencies.