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The Review of Policy Research recently published three special issues on policy process research in China, artificial intelligence, and climate policies. The current issue focuses on perception and performance in environmental policy, examining how policy actors and the public perceive policy making and the conditions for achieving environmental policy objectives. The articles cover various topics, including emotions in policy conflicts, coalition formation, public communication strategies, public support for climate change mitigation, energy efficiency, coordination of the energy transition, policy analytical capacity, performance measurement in water pollution remediation, and campaign-style enforcement in environmental governance. The research provides valuable insights into environmental policy and offers opportunities for interdisciplinary research. [Extracted from the article]

As climate change continues to increase both the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards and disasters, the need for a cohesive national mitigation policy grows. As the environmental federalism scholarship indicates, the inherent tension in federal, state, and local policy implementation highlights that despite a national need, environmental quality is a local public good. To complicate matters, there is disagreement about the optimal level of decision‐making regarding the adoption and implementation of environmental policy. This study addresses this gap by considering the role of policy ambiguity and conflict in policy implementation. The analysis relies on primary qualitative data collected from open‐ended interviews with 22 local government officials in 12 municipalities following Hurricane Harvey. Through the lens of policy ambiguity and conflict, we find confirmatory support for the idea that policies with less ambiguous goals are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, we find that policy conflict arises when local governments perceive there is little for the community to gain by implementing the federal program. Thus, the level of protection afforded to citizens varies greatly between communities and is influenced heavily by politics. This research supports the Ambiguity‐Conflict Model of policy implementation, an oft‐cited but rarely tested theoretical framework for assessing the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. It also demonstrates the barriers to local implementation of federal environmental policy in a nested system of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of unprecedented ecological crises, a consensus has been consolidated in the global community to fundamentally alter current modes of economic growth and patterns of resource allocation, in pursuit of a low‐carbon transition. Environmental governance plays an important instrumental role in this global agenda. The policy mix framework has emerged as a holistic approach to the design and analysis of environmental policies. A policy mix encompasses different dimensions, featuring not only the horizontality but also the verticality and temporality of interactions. Nevertheless, existing literature on environmental policy mixes focuses on the horizontal interactions, and very few studies have systematically explored the vertical and temporal interactions of policy mixes. Drawing upon the case of agricultural residue recycling in China, this study captures the evolution of both the narrative temporality and the verticality of environmental policy mixes. More importantly, the changing political narratives around residue recycling exert an intangible but significant influence on the vertical interactions between multilevel governments in both policy making and policy implementation, in which institutional and organizational arrangements constitute a key operational and mediating mechanism to manage vertical coordination. The study finally proposes three avenues for future research on environmental policy mixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is both the theoretical advancement and the application of policy process theories and public policy perspectives on science, technology, and environmental policy and related fields, such as health and agricultural policy. Moyson et al. (2022) cross-fertilize the ACF with the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to ascribe an advocacy coalition's successful translation of beliefs into policy to the use of an overly present and simple frame. The last two articles of this issue study the role of administration in environmental policy implementation, more specifically the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). [Extracted from the article]

With its traditionally strong focus on science and technology policies as well as environmental policies, the I RPR i aims to provide an interdisciplinary platform to explore these policy areas from a public policy perspective. The I RPR i is devoted to the publication of high-class research exploring the politics and policy of science and technology. In their analysis of media debates on fracking policies, Pattison et al. (2021) interlink these phenomena with the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and therewith contribute to both, the further development of the ACF and the NPF. [Extracted from the article]