From Commonwealth Responsibility to the National Interest: Australia and Post-war Decolonisation in South-East Asia

This article re-examines the drivers of post-war Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The central argument is that the motive of Commonwealth responsibility has not been given sufficient explanatory weight in interpreting Australia's post-war engagement with South-East Asia under both Australian Labor Party and Liberal-Country Party (Coalition) governments. The responsibility expressed by Australian policy-makers for the decolonisation of the Straits Settlements, Malayan Peninsula and British Borneo Territories cannot be adequately understood within a cold war ideological framework of anti-communism. Nor can it be explained by the instrumental logic of forward defence. The concept of responsibility is theorised as a motivation in foreign policy analysis and applied to Australian involvement with British decolonisation in South-East Asia between 1944 and 1971. The article finds that in its approach to decolonisation, Australia was driven as much by normative sentiments of responsibility to the Commonwealth as it was by instrumental calculations of cold war strategic interest. This diminished with the end of Indonesia's ‘Confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1966 and subsequent British commitment to withdraw from East of Suez. Australia's policy discourse becomes more narrowly interest-based after this, especially evident in Australia's negotiations with Malaysia and Singapore over the Five Power Defence Arrangements from 1968 to 1971.     

Private Citizens as Policy Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Autism Mandates and Parental Political Mobilization

Growing bodies of research in the social sciences point to politicians, bureaucratic officials, interest groups, and other actors who serve as policy entrepreneurs. In this paper, we argue that private citizens can also serve a primary role as policy entrepreneurs. To analyze this phenomenon, we investigate the behavior of private citizens and their role in changing state policies surrounding insurance mandates for autism coverage. Using a thematic analysis of focus groups and interviews conducted with individuals active in the push for autism policy change, we demonstrate that private citizens meet all of the requirements identified for policy entrepreneurs in the existing literature. We then investigate when, why, and how these private citizens step forward into the policy process as entrepreneurs. We show that entrepreneurship occurs when private citizens have needed resources, a sense of duty to fix a policy status quo they see as unjust, and a stake in policy change. We conclude by discussing the importance of our findings to the study of public policy and their generalizability beyond autism policy.     

Canada's Ocean Supercluster initiative: A national policy in regional clothing?

Since the late 1980s, there has been no explicit regional policy in Canada. Indirectly, though, equalization payments, industrial policies, as well as regional agencies encouraging the adoption of federal industrial and innovation policies, impact regional economies. In 2017, the federal government appeared to alter its approach: the Supercluster initiative was announced, drawing upon the idea that localized networks of interrelated firms can generate innovation and local development. In this paper, we discuss the mechanisms through which spatially focused industrial innovation policy can lead to regional development. We then focus on Canada's Ocean Supercluster initiative. The question we address is as follows: to what extent can this initiative (and, more widely, Canada's Supercluster policy) be understood as a regional development strategy driven by a coherent rationale for regional intervention? Apart from the fact that each Supercluster focuses on a pre-existing core of firms located within a region, there is little evidence that the Supercluster initiative has regional development objectives or impacts.     

The Green Energy Transition and Peripheral City Development in China: Towards a Local Eco-developmental State

The green energy transition is recognized for its inherent environmental contributions. This article illustrates how it can also reshape the economic landscape and create the conditions for a peripheral city to develop. Drawing on the politics of accelerating low-carbon transition and focusing on the role that local governments play in this process, the authors illustrate how the green energy transition has commercialized wind and solar resources and constructed a new resource control system in northwest China. The Gobi Desert has extensive wind and solar energy resources; having the authority to grant access to preferential sites to exploit these resources empowers local governments to combine their interests with those of other stakeholders to build local capacity and achieve developmental goals. Governments are also able to manipulate renewable energy curtailments to promote infrastructure investment, technological progress, and the grid-parity model. The green energy transition can therefore play a role in upgrading industrial structures, alleviating local poverty, narrowing regional development gaps, and contributing to national environmental improvement. This study provides a theoretical contribution to our understanding of how the local eco-developmental state configures new energy spaces and restructures local governance, and argues that green industrial policies are sometimes actively nurtured by local rather than central governments.     

Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance

High levels of conflict among coalitions in a policy process are often attributed to belief divergence and may lead to policy gridlock. Thus, reducing belief divergence may facilitate negotiation and open the door for policy change. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change, however, especially in high-conflict settings. Collaborative governance has been touted as one method for mitigating conflict to a level where negotiation is possible by means including but not limited to belief change. This study investigates the relationship between belief divergence as a driver of policy conflict and collaborative governance as a conflict mitigation tool by analyzing the beliefs of two opposing coalitions as they participate in a decade-long collaborative environmental governance process that ended in negotiated agreement. Using longitudinal survey and interview data, we find that coalitions' beliefs diverge more at a later point in the process, due primarily to the reinforcement and strengthening of one coalition's beliefs; however, we also identify aspects of the collaborative process that helped foster negotiated agreement amidst this growing belief divergence. These findings can inform scholarship on conflict mitigation in environmental governance as well as the design of more effective collaborative processes in high-conflict settings.     

Relational coupling of multiple streams: The case of COVID-19 infections in German abattoirs

After a series of COVID-19 outbreaks among employees in the German meat-processing industry, the Work Safety Control Act protecting these workers made it on the government's agenda in July 2020. From a Multiple Streams perspective, local corona hotspots may be understood as policy windows for introducing respective measures. However, this alone is not sufficient to explain agenda setting. This study investigates the coupling of streams within policy windows. Introducing the notion of relational coupling to the MSF research agenda, discourse network analysis provides a new methodology to reveal entrepreneurial activities. Studying the German mass media discourse on the issue identifies two stages: (1) An initial problem brokerage without coupling of core policies, followed by (2) a coupling across all streams based on a focusing event. We argue that relational coupling allows for an enhanced understanding of agenda setting.     

Applying Policy Termination Theory to the Abandonment of Climate Protection Initiatives by U.S. Local Governments

A considerable amount is known about the factors that influence policy adoption and implementation across different issue areas. Less is known, however, about the factors that influence governments to abandon programs or policies prior to reaching their stated objectives or originally specified end‐points. This article applies termination theory to local climate protection initiatives and examines cities’ withdrawal from the dominant sustainability organization facilitating these efforts. In the face of national government inaction, large numbers of U.S. municipalities voluntarily committed to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and joined the ICLEI's Climate Protection program. After steady membership increases for nearly a decade, ICLEI attained its largest size in 2010 with 565 city members. Over the next 2 years, this number plummeted by 20 percent. Positioned in the literature on policy change, we empirically test three hypotheses for why a substantial portion of cities ended their affiliation with this organization and terminated the explicit climate protection objectives associated with it: (1) political ideology and interest group pressure, (2) fiscal constraints, and (3) perceived program ineffectiveness. Analytical results support the first and third hypotheses. We identify factors that influence the termination of local GHG reduction initiatives and discuss theoretical implications of these findings.     

Institutions,Incentives, and Policy Entrepreneurship

Policy entrepreneurship is often used to explain agenda setting through reference to the behavior of individual “change agents.” But there are still gaps in our understanding of what motivates entrepreneurs. Rational choice theory emphasizes the importance of material and nonmaterial incentives; however, it remains unclear what role institutions play. This article aims to empirically examine the relationship between incentives and institutional encouragement of innovation. Using a case study of the federal government of Canada, I find evidence that incentives matter. Government agencies with many incentives are more likely to encourage innovation than agencies with few incentives. These results underscore the importance of institutions in determining the motivations of policy entrepreneurs, and suggest future research should focus on the interplay among individual, political, and institutional factors.     

The Impact of Temporary Immigrant Workforce Growth on Employee Verification Policies in the United States

The U.S. Department of Labor admits temporary immigrant workers to address labor shortages in local markets. Yet, do elected officials make it less difficult for some immigrants than others to secure employment in a state? Using U.S. temporary immigrant labor admissions data between 2006 and 2014, I examine the extent to which growth rates of main foreign‐born subgroups influence E‐Verify policies that require employers to authenticate the legal immigration status of employees. I find that state policymakers are less likely to enact E‐Verify policies in response to the growth of immigrants who work in specialty occupations (H‐1b visas). In contrast, the growth of immigrants working in nonspecialty occupations (H‐2a and H‐2b visas) increases the likelihood of enacting E‐Verify policies over time. The results suggest that policymakers release strict rules for employment only for highly educated immigrants who work in specialty occupations that offer higher paying salaries and career advancement opportunities. Disaggregating a monolithic foreign‐born population indicator into more specific class components provides an important contribution to public policy studies. Scholars will likely overlook the contrasting effects of specialty and nonspecialty immigrant workforce growth on policy decisions relating to immigrant employment.     

Emplacement and the politics of heritage in low-income neighbourhoods of Marseille

Recent scholarship addressing efforts to celebrate heritage in low-income neighbourhoods and housing estates has stressed the importance of attending to the continuity of place-based social relationships as a key factor in residents’ understandings of heritage, and, drawing on Smith’s conception of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, the ways these understandings differ from hegemonic and generalised expert discourse emphasising the deficiencies of the material environment. In this article, I examine a new object of state intervention in France, ‘the heritage of popular neighbourhoods’, and describe points of convergence and conflict between local heritage work in Marseille and the recent discursive framework established to employ heritage as a tool in reorganising French state policy towards urban peripheral neighbourhoods (the politique de la ville). Drawing on ethnographic research (2007–2014), this article identifies emplacement as a key feature in residents’ performances of neighbourhood heritage, a feature often absent or poorly elaborated in heritage work promoted by French urbanist policy in the past. I describe the ways emplacement has been expressed aesthetically in arts projects, trace the range of social networks and relationships enacted, and describe the political implications of these performances as a tool for promoting solidarity across time and space in Marseille.