European Policy Analysis最新文献

This paper investigates whether the systematic application of open strategy can align goals in emerging public-private hybrid organizations, which face the challenge of integrating different identities, forms, and rationales from both public and private stakeholders. We develop an evaluative framework, addressing three crucial issues for a public-private hybrid's early development: What is the public-private hybrid's purpose? Who are the strategic actors involved? What knowledge and skills are needed? By applying the framework to a qualitative case study from the field of Swiss innovation policy, we learn that inclusiveness and transparency largely depend on the timeline of a hybrid's emergence. Public-private hybrids can either choose an inclusive, transparent but gradual, and slow strategy process or a speedy process characterized by the traditional ‘management at the top’ approach. This study offers both empirical and theoretical insights into strategy development in public-private hybrid organizations and its significance for public policy implementation.

The European Union (EU), especially in the context of Cohesion Policy (CP), has played a crucial role in developing and promoting policy evaluation practices across its Member States. Evaluation systems across the Member States have been established to assess CP investments. Remarkably, the use of evaluation research and its contribution to stimulating policy learning has remained a “black box.” To address this issue, this article aims to develop a novel framework centered around four conditions for evaluation-based policy learning, namely: (1) policy relevance, (2) resources and organizational settings, (3) quality of evaluation, and (4) evaluation culture. These conditions are retrieved from the existing literature on policy evaluation and applied to the six-country cases across the EU. The findings suggest how loosening the formal EU evaluation requirements could affect policy learning in the Member States.

Explanations for collective action focus on both institutions and narratives. On the one hand, institutional approaches emphasize the role of rules that guide human behavior. On the other hand, accounting for the narratives through which policy actors make sense of their actions helps in understanding strategic behavior. However, applying institutional and narrative perspectives together is daunting, in part because there has not been a common way to integrate the two approaches. In this article, we draw from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to elaborate a novel analytical approach that combines ANT with the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). We use IGT's and NPF's analytical categories in a processual perspective to examine how policy-makers strategically use institutions and narratives to create and stabilize a network of actors in innovation policy processes. We illustrate our approach through an in-depth analysis of the development of a smart city.

Disproportionate policy responses—policy over- and underreaction—are ubiquitous in policy affairs, yet detecting their full spectrum remains uncharted territory. To this end, I developed a descriptive-analytical framework centering on a novel conceptual tool, the Ladder of Disproportionate Policy, based on assessing the gap between the scope of the audience that the policy ostensibly serves and the degree of policy (mis)fit, that is, how the policy tools are set and adjusted to serve the actual audience. This scale assumes that policymakers can “game” these two policy dimensions before and during policy implementation. Political executives can climb up and down this conceptual Ladder and ascend or descend one dimension independently of the other in addition to moving from one side to the other. The case of the 2021 food voucher policy in Israel illustrates the feasibility of the Ladder.

Agricultural pesticide use is a wicked sustainability challenge: Trade-offs exist between health, environmental, agro-economic, and socio-political objectives. Various actors involved have diverse beliefs regarding these trade-offs and policies to address the challenge. But to what extent does the agreement or disagreement between actors reflect belief similarities or differences, and thus, the formation of advocacy coalitions? To answer this question, the study draws on the advocacy coalition framework and investigates data from 54 key actors in the case of Swiss pesticide policy. The study explores the relationship between the actors' (dis)agreement relations and their beliefs using Random Forests. Coalitions are identified through block modeling and beliefs based on multi-attribute value theory. The study shows that the two relations are a good proxy for identifying coalitions with conflict lines concerning beliefs and presents an approach to exploring ideological reasons behind (dis)agreement relations that supports identifying conflicting beliefs relevant to future policy solutions.

Policy capacity is vital for a nation's prosperity and sustainability, enabling governments to fulfill diverse responsibilities, such as security, economic growth, and accountable governance. This study evaluates policy capacity across countries from 2014 to 2020 using Sustainable Governance Indicators by the Bertelsmann Foundation. Focusing on executive capacity, which encompasses policy capacity's analytical, managerial, and political aspects, we gauge governments' ability to implement sustainable policies. Executive capacity is further classified into steering capability, policy implementation, and institutional learning. Findings show that policy capacity significantly influences policy effectiveness in all countries, with high-capacity countries demonstrating more impact. Enhancing policy capacity through efficient steering, implementation, and learning can improve policy effectiveness and foster responsive governance for sustainable development. This research provides valuable insights for policymakers seeking to bolster governance capacities and achieve positive policy outcomes.

Bureaucratic elites and national public administrations' experts play a key role in the preparation of supranational policies and in shaping global governance instruments. However, we know surprisingly little about what factors drive their preferences and support for supranational solutions. Drawing on the results of a vignette and conjoint experiment and the case of the European Commission's policy initiative to develop European Public Sector Accounting Standards, this study analyzes the effect of the communicative framing of a policy's objective and how experts' attitudes influence their preferences for policy outcomes. The study shows that the communicative framing of a policy's objective based on functional needs rather than on normative grounds increases support among national administrations' experts. Moreover, the study finds evidence that experts who internalized a public service motivation and those with a supranationalist collective identity are more willing to give up national sovereignty in favor of supranational policy solutions.

Through learning, policy actors can maintain, reinforce, or revise their beliefs and positions about the design and outcomes of policies. This paper critically analyzes factors influencing policy learning by comparing policy processes of two EU laws of the recent “Fit for 55” climate package: (i) revised provisions on increasing energy efficiency in companies included in the recast Energy Efficiency Directive and (ii) the new FuelEU Maritime regulation provided for decarbonizing maritime shipping. Learning across coalitions with competing beliefs was encountered in the first case but not in the other despite similar institutional settings. The difference is attributed to a more politicized debate on decarbonizing shipping, leading to consensus through bargaining instead of deliberation, and a circumscribed leader of one coalition, with a less flexible negotiation mandate. The paper adds to the theory on policy learning, suggesting that levels of politicization and polarization, as well as the mandates of the coalition leaders, influence cross-coalition learning.