Policy Sciences最新文献

Emergency policies are among the most challenging policies that policy makers have to deal with, because of their extreme seriousness, the lack of time, and the high uncertainties that are involved. Policy analyses have demonstrated that good structural and organizational strategies are important, but not sufficient, to systematically guarantee a high level of resiliency in response processes. Some scholars have therefore suggested the need to verify whether individual cognitive and relational mechanisms can contribute to explaining the different levels of resiliency that emerge in emergency response processes. From such a perspective, this article presents the findings of a research that was aimed at testing whether emotional mechanisms matter. The affect infusion model was used to provide the analytical framework that was considered to identify the evidence necessary for the empirical research, and the 'most similar system design' was applied to select and compare two couples of emergency response processes with similar contextual, structural and organizational features, but different levels of resiliency. The empirical research was conducted from April 2020 to February 2021, through periods of job shadowing and semi-structured interviews with personnel from the public and private organizations involved in the response processes. The research has substantially corroborated the hypothesis and has highlighted that, despite very similar contextual, structural and organizational conditions, a negative emotional mechanism, triggered by fear and anxiety, was pervasive among managers involved in the two lower-resiliency emergency response processes, while a positive emotional mechanism, triggered by pride, was dominant among managers involved in the two lower-resiliency processes.

Policy change frameworks are commonly used to understand policy development processes. However, few studies have attempted to apply these frameworks to the recent popular fee-free policy education at the high school level in Sub-Saharan Africa. Investigating fee-free policy development through policy change frameworks can assist both in identifying the genesis of past policies, including who the important actors are, how issues are framed and problematised, and how specific solutions are designed, as well as how to interpret unfolding policies. In this article, we review three prominent policy change frameworks: Baumgartner and Jones' "punctuated equilibrium framework," Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith's "advocacy coalition framework," and Kingdon's "multiple streams framework." After reviewing the frameworks, we apply them to two fee-free policies in Ghana which are Progressive Free Senior High School and Free Senior High School policies to understand the drivers of fee-free policy change. From the socio-political background, three main concepts were derived from these policy change frameworks deducing from the basic assumptions of these theories. They are domestic politics, political and policy entrepreneurs, and socio-economic dynamics. The results show that fee-free policies are largely driven by domestic politics and political and policy entrepreneurs in political executive positions. Factors under socio-economic dynamics are only scope conditions that are not significant to trigger the adoption of a fee-free policy.