Voluntary Approaches to Environmental Problems: Exploring the Rise of Nontraditional Public Policy

Government reliance on voluntary programs represents a significant shift in public policy: moving from command and control regulations to market based mechanisms. This article explores the determinants of Voluntary Remediation Programs (VRPs) in the American States. During the 1980s and 1990s, 44 states adopted VRPs to facilitate remediation of existing hazardous waste sites. Relying on diffusion of innovation theory, I develop a model of state policy adoption that explores the influence of internal state political and economic factors, as well as testing the influence of regional and top‐down diffusion forces. I utilize a discrete‐time event history approach to test this model. The results indicate that state policymaking is responsive to interest group pressure and the pace of cleanup at hazardous waste sites. Additionally, state policymaking is consistently influenced by the actions of surrounding state governments; the probability of adopting a voluntary program increases if surrounding states have already developed these policies.     

The Determinants of Policy Introduction and Bill Adoption: Examining Minimum Wage Increases in the American States, 1997–2006

Faced with long intervals between federal minimum wage increases in recent years, state legislatures are increasingly likely to take action. Motivated by the relative dearth of empirical work on minimum wages in the American states, this article considered various explanations to determine which factors are associated with legislative efforts to pass wage increases. Taking seriously the view that disagreements over the effects of minimum wage increases enhances the influence of political factors, we drew on the policy adoption and diffusion literature to examine how internal determinants (political and economic variables) and regional diffusion pressures relate to both the introduction and adoption of minimum wage legislation in the American states in the years between the last two federal minimum wage increases (1997–2006). Employing negative binomial regression to analyze annual bill introductions, we found that a number of political variables are related to the consideration of minimum wage increases. However, using event history analysis to examine annual adoptions of minimum wage increases, we found few of the same variables matter. We concluded with a discussion of the empirical results within the context of the broader policy literature and cautioned future scholars to consider seriously whether political factors exert distinct influences at different stages of the policy process.     

The Influence Of States On Federal Policy Adoptions

This article examines whether stales, in the role of "laboratories of democracy," influence federal policy adoptions. Taking the recent past as the time frame, the article begins by examining major federal legislation to gauge the extern to which stale models were an influence. Following this, the focus shifts to important slate initiatives of the early 1980s, and their impact on subsequent federal legislation. The article concludes that the nature of the policy issue and the accompanying political dynamics are critical in determining whether states act as laboratories of democracy.     

Does Policy Diffusion Need Space? Spatializing the Dynamics of Policy Diffusion

For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism‐based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious‐based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory‐based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.     

Policy Diffusion and Strategies for Promoting Policy Change: Evidence From California Local Gun Control Ordinances

Recent research efforts on policy innovation and diffusion largely have focused upon policymaking at the state government level. In this article we seek to develop an understanding of the ways momentum for policy change can be generated among receptive local governments. We use gun control policymaking within California to illustrate how local government characteristics, the presence of regional associations, and the establishment of interest groups may lead to policy development and diffusion. We also identify linkages between interest groups, focusing events, and the successful use of a new image of gun violence as a public health problem, yielding insights into strategies that may be used successfully to promote policy change.     

Regional Innovation Policies in the Czech Republic and the Case of Prague: An Emerging Role of a Regional Level?

The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the development of Czech innovation policy which started to get its shape in the first years of the 21st century. The article traces its origins to a number of interlinked factors—the introduction of European regional policy in the Czech Republic, the increased inflow of foreign direct investment into R&D-intensive sectors and also the devolution of power to Czech regions that were established in 2001 and gave a new, regional dimension to research and innovation policy. It pays particular attention to the process through which the regionally-based innovation policy advocated by the European Union (EU) has been translated and adapted in the context of a new EU member state. As an illustration of the efforts at the regional level to make a better use of the potential of R&D and innovation in the regional development, a case study of a regional innovation strategy of the City of Prague is analysed. The City of Prague was selected for a critical analysis of an innovation system and innovation policy due to the fact that it is a region with significant but until now not fully exploited innovation potential and, in addition, its first innovation strategy has been recently adopted. The innovation strategy is closely scrutinized and the process of its elaboration is critically examined within the European and especially national context. The authors demonstrate that there is a lot of conceptual ambiguity and confusion associated with the process of transferring the experiences of Western European regions to the Czech Republic. The authors believe that at least some of their observations and analysis of weaknesses of the process through which the regional innovation strategy (RIS) has been carried out will have relevance for other Czech regions and even for other regions in the new EU member states.     

Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and the Diffusion of Innovations

This article builds on punctuated equilibrium theory to evaluate the diffusion of public policy innovations in the United States. The article argues that punctuated equilibrium theory provides a unifying framework for understating three mechanisms leading to the diffusion of innovations: gradual policy diffusion driven by incremental policy emulation, rapid state‐to‐state diffusion driven by policy imitation and mimicking, and nearly immediate policy diffusion driven by state‐level responses to a common exogenous shock. Drawing upon the Bass mixed influence diffusion model, this research generates measures of the coefficients of external and internal influences for diffusion for 81 public policy innovations that have spread across the United States. The article then evaluates how the policy image and direct participation of the federal government contribute to distinct patterns of diffusion over time.     

Who Are Your Neighbors? The Role of Ideology and Decline of Geographic Proximity in the Diffusion of Policy Innovations

States adopt policy innovations within the confines of a dynamic American federal system, but our study of policy diffusion tends to be fairly static. Single‐policy studies incorporate temporal variation, but for only one innovation. Macro‐level analyses examine broad patterns, but often by completely pooling across policy and time. This makes it difficult to identify how diffusion patterns change over time, though Walker's early work explicitly identified such temporal instability. This study specifically examines how neighbor and ideological cues change in importance over time using a dataset of 556 policies adopted from 1960 to 2014. While the findings demonstrate the generality of many key internal, external, and policy‐level determinants of adoption, there is variation in these effects across time. Most important is the relative stability of ideological similarity between adopters and declining influence of contiguous neighbors. Further, political polarization plays a role in conditioning neighbor and ideological cues.     

R&D Cooperation in Innovation Systems—Some Lessons from the European Regional Innovation Survey (ERIS)

Our paper summarizes some of the main results of the European Regional Innovation Survey (ERIS) as far as they are discussed in this special issue of European Planning Studies . The overall target of the ERIS project is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of determinants crucial for the innovation potential of any region, i.e. innovative and non-innovative manufacturing firms, business services and research institutions, as well as the innovative linkages and networks between these actors. Empirical research is based upon almost 8600 questionnaires collected in 11 European regions. Results confirm some of the common hypotheses on the relationship between space and innovation networks but others are contrary to existing scientific knowledge. Obviously the impact of national innovation systems on the innovation activities of manufacturing firms in a given European region is-at least-as strong as the impact of the respective regional innovation system. The spatial range of innovative linkages significantly depends on the size, the type of the cooperation partner, the R&D intensity and the industry of the analysed manufacturing firm. For example, the higher the technology intensity of the industry, the greater is the need of each firm to use intraregional knowledge via innovation linkages. It is therefore an important task in regional innovation policy to promote network-building among firms and other actors of a regional innovation system and to interlink these intraregional networks with national and international knowledge sources.     

Balancing Competitiveness and Cohesion in Regional Innovation Policy: The Case of Finland

This article sheds light on the relationship and tension between competitiveness and cohesion as undercurrents and continuous causes of controversies in the regional innovation policy. The in-built problems in regional innovation policy that emerge because this policy is essentially a synthesis of different policies with different rationales are contemplated. Empirically, this article outlines the main phases of evolution and drivers of development in the Finnish regional innovation policy. It also discusses the recent developments from the perspective of regional (and national) competitiveness and cohesion nexus. These empirical outlines are then used to feed the views back into the discussion on a more theoretical level.     

Sectoral Versus Territorial Regional Planning and Development in Norway

New regional policies in Norway and many other countries try to empower their regions through creating a balance between central governing with emphasis on redistribution of activities and resources, and local mobilization with emphasis on self reliance, innovation and learning by doing. In Norway municipalities and counties have for a long period had this double function, but we now see that the vertical policy of implementing national welfare policy has grown and become dominant. As a consequence, the horizontal policy of social mobilization has been neglected, and has to some extent been taken over by inter-municipal and interregional organizations. Normally, these organizations are in practice organized as regional development agencies. They seem to be vulnerable political institutions that seek legitimacy from--and need acceptance and support from--both territorial and sectoral governments. The regional planning process is regarded as an important tool in their political institution building process. In this paper I want to explain how regional planning and institution building in Norway in practice have moved towards a two-parallel system.     

SPID: A New Database for Inferring Public Policy Innovativeness and Diffusion Networks

Despite its rich tradition, there are key limitations to researchers' ability to make generalizable inferences about state policy innovation and diffusion. This paper introduces new data and methods to move from empirical analyses of single policies to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. We have gathered policy adoption data appropriate for estimating policy innovativeness and tracing diffusion ties in a targeted manner (e.g., by policy domain, time period, or policy type) and extended the development of methods necessary to accurately and efficiently infer those ties. Our state policy innovation and diffusion (SPID) database includes 728 different policies coded by topic area. We provide an overview of this new dataset and illustrate two key uses: (i) static and dynamic innovativeness measures and (ii) latent diffusion networks that capture common pathways of diffusion between states across policies. The scope of the data allows us to compare patterns in both across policy topic areas. We conclude that these new resources will enable researchers to empirically investigate classes of questions that were difficult or impossible to study previously, but whose roots go back to the origins of the political science policy innovation and diffusion literature.     

Shifting Winds: Explaining Variation in State Policies to Promote Small‐Scale Wind Energy

States have increasingly taken leading roles in U.S. environmental policymaking over the past two decades. As laboratories of democracy, states have developed different levels and mixes of policies to address climate change, nonpoint source pollution, alternative energy, and other challenging environmental issues. Policy scholars have sought to explain variation in state environmental policy through two primary theoretical lenses: internal determinants and regional diffusion. While our understanding of state environmental policy adoption has grown to identify which variables are most important, less is known about how these variables interact in particular states to influence policy adoption. This study examines the interactions of variables from both theories to explain how state policies for small‐scale wind energy promotion were adopted in three U.S. states. Our results highlight the nuanced role of citizen ideology, which may be important in contexts at either end of the ideological spectrum but less important in the middle—where economic development is more critical. Results also indicate that interstate competition may be over environmental as well as economic leadership. Interestingly, strength of the wind resource is not necessarily correlated with policy adoption for small‐scale wind energy promotion.     

Regional Innovation Systems and Economic Performance: Between Regions and Nations

This article aims at assessing the diversity of regional innovation systems and their economic performance in Europe. We propose to adapt the social systems of innovation and production (SSIP) framework at the regional level by identifying the specific arrangements of each part of the innovation and production system. Three key features of European regions are investigated using this framework: the diversity of regional SSIP, the interplay of regional and national determinants of such systems, and the impact of SSIP on regional performance. We identify a typology of regional configurations resulting from the combination of scientific, technological, educational and industrial indicators, using multivariate data analysis. A variance analysis approach is then developed in order to test the existence of specific regional growth regimes. The results highlight a persistently high level of diversity of regional configurations, notably among knowledge intensive regions, but also show that national institutional settings remain of fundamental importance in shaping a number of regional configurations. A final conclusion relates to the weak correlation observed between the structural characteristics of regions and their performance over the 2003–2007 period: regional performance remains primarily shaped by national trends. Overall, the paper questions the regional dimension of these “systems”.     

The Specialized Cities of the Gulf Cooperation Council: A Case Study of a Distinct Type of Policy Innovation and Diffusion

This article examines a new phenomenon in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) referred to as specialized cities (SC). These cities, in addition to being new towns, implement innovations in selected policy areas. This article goes beyond describing the spread of SC to answering a broader question: what motivates a GCC country to adopt such policy innovation? After a quantitative overview of the phenomenon, three cases have been selected to cover three main policy areas: energy, health care, and education, in Abu Dhabi Masdar City, Dubai Healthcare City, and Qatar Education City. A preliminary analysis of each of the cases is followed by a comparative approach that aims at discovering similarities and differences, as well as developing the basis for a preliminary analytical model that explains the driving factors behind these innovations. The country adoption of a policy innovation and its diffusion are mainly the results of geographical proximity and similarity, as these proximate countries tend to have similar economic aspects and common social problems that lead to similar policy action effects. Regional competition and positive reputational mechanisms are also particularly strong determinants for diffusion. The findings suggest that in the GCC region a diffusion of the phenomena is occurring, rather than that of a specific type of SC.     

Smart specialization as a strategy to develop early-stage regional innovation systems

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the role of smart specialization in catalyzing the development of early-stage regional innovation systems in less advanced regions, either by facilitating the emergence of some defining elements that were lacking or accelerating the development of others, such as: a regional knowledge base and a dynamic learning process, institutional structures, network integration mechanisms among key innovation actors, regional industrial specializations, and collective identities. The paper exemplifies this process with the case of Romania, a country where the research and innovation system is centralized at national level and regional innovation systems are in the early days. The transformations taking place in the Romanian regions within the process of implementing smart specialization, assisted by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in the project “Targeted Support to Smart Specialization in Romania”, suggest a dynamic coagulation of institutional, financial, policy, and human factors that catalyzed the development of regional innovation systems in the country and introduced a novel approach to innovation policy.     

Rescaling citizenship: gendering Canadian immigration policy

Tracing the impact of public consultation on policy development is vital to theories of the state. Without investigating how civic participation is transformed into policy outcomes researchers cannot adequately account for the interaction of state and civil society. In particular researchers need to refine their explanations of policy development by highlighting how identity and scale can alter both policy application and outcome. I develop this approach by tracing how the civic participation of immigrant women in Canada advanced the rights of women in the development of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which came into law in June 2002. By tracing the consultation process between Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and Sahara and NAC, two women’s advocacy groups, I reveal how public involvement and concern with gender equity transmitted into policy change. The outcomes of this interaction do, however, present some contradictions. In particular policy changes attempt to limit one source of inequality, but in the process enforce greater state control of mobility. Despite this paradox, I conclude that this political involvement represents a partial victory for immigrant women since it succeeded in promoting concerns with gender within the ‘formal’ arena of national policy development.     

The Role of Universities in Regional Development: Conceptual Models and Policy Institutions in the UK,Sweden and Austria

The literature on universities’ contributions to regional development is broad and diverse. A precise understanding of how regions may draw advantages from various university activities and the role of public policy institutions in promoting such activities is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for analysing universities’ contributions to regional economic and societal development in differing national contexts and the policy institutions that underpin them. To do this, we review four conceptual models: the entrepreneurial university model, the regional innovation system (RIS) model, the mode 2 university model and the engaged university model. The paper demonstrates that these four models emphasize very different activities and outputs by which universities are seen to benefit regional economy and society. It is also shown that these models differ markedly with respect to the policy implications and practice. Analysing some of the public policy imperatives and incentives in the UK, Austria and Sweden, the paper highlights that in the UK, policies encourage all four university models. In contrast, in Sweden and Austria, policy institutions tend to privilege the RIS university model, whilst at the same time, there is some evidence for increasing support of the entrepreneurial university model.     

Piloting Regional Innovation or Much Ado about Nothing?—Evaluating the R&D Policy Initiative of Nordland,Norway

This article evaluates the results of almost a decade of experience with regional R&D development and implementation for enhanced innovation in the county of Nordland, Norway. Following a 2002 national devolution initiative, the county of Nordland was the first among Norwegian counties to coin and implement a distinct R&D policy for business-related innovation and development. This was done by setting up a broad regional partnership, framing a regional strategy and by coordinating substantial budgetary resources to implement the strategy. The evaluation describes the results of this process as ambiguous. This article looks at the process from three perspectives. First, we look at the organizational side of how the policy formation and implementation processes have performed. Second, we evaluate the business community response to the policy initiative to see whether any signs of altered behaviour can be found. Third, we look at how the partnership dynamic can explain policy outcomes. Theoretically and policy-wise we then discuss how our findings contribute to new insights in the field of analysing and generating regional innovation policy.