Search

Local governments have led the way on climate action in the United States. While the federal government has largely stood to the side, local governments have made great efforts to adopt policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A large and robust literature in urban politics has explored the variables that influence local government action on climate change in the United States. Issue severity and resident ideological preferences have been identified as two of the most important factors in local climate action. Governments that are more likely to face major impacts from climate, such as coastal communities, and governments serving more liberal residents have both been found to pursue climate policy at higher rates. In this paper we suggest that these relationships are better understood as conditional. We argue that the effect of issue severity will be moderated by ideology. When residents are liberal, issue severity will matter. When residents are conservative, the impact will be muted. We find strong evidence for this hypothesis. Coastal governments and governments that have experienced drought adopt more climate policies, but this is conditional on the ideology of residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines policy outputs associated with the 2004 Bhutan antitobacco law, including 2009 amendments, to determine if the law is congruent with punctuated equilibrium or social policy realism theories of policy change. There was no direct and sudden tobacco policy output change in Bhutan due to a shock to the policy system contrary to what punctuated equilibrium theory would predict. Rather, policy change was sweeping but nonpunctuated. This paper reconfirms prior findings of social policy realism theory that various and complex policy output patterns occur due to a mixture of contingent and complex factors. Under social policy realism, a complex interplay of factors drive policy with the state, corporate actors, and interest groups, and the market often playing a primary role. These complex policy outputs have a direct impact on society and the natural environment reflected in government policy output actions or inactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While a majority of scholarship on the study of transnational advocacy networks ( TANs) has focused on the role of value-and-belief-sharing as these networks link activists across nations together, less has been written concerning the role of knowledge exchange among environmental nongovernmental organizations ( ENGOs) in helping effect policy change. This article examines how transnational coalitions of ENGOs in North America have helped shape environmental policy across the Canada- U.S.- Mexico borders. In the paper, I explore two cases of nonstate actor mobilization: the North American Pollutant Release, and Transfer Registry Project and the Citizen Submission on Enforcement Matters. In this article, I bridge notions of 'soft power' with scholarship on knowledge sharing, thereby showing that nonstate actors use it as a model to build stronger transnational coalitions, effecting pressure on industry and intergovernmental actors, and provide policy input in environmental decision making across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, the Ontario government passed the Places to Grow Act and the Greenbelt Act, both major changes in land use policy designed to preserve greenspaces and combat urban sprawl in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Canada's largest conurbation. This article examines the actors, actor beliefs, and inter-actor alliances in the southern Ontario land use policy subsystem from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). Specifically, this paper undertakes an empirical examination of the ACF's Belief Homophily Hypothesis, which holds that inter-actor alliances form on the basis of shared policy-relevant beliefs, creating advocacy coalitions. The analysis finds strong evidence of three advocacy coalitions in the policy subsystem-an agricultural coalition, an environmentalist coalition, and a developers' coalition-as predicted by the hypothesis. However, it also finds equally strong evidence of a cross-coalition coordination network of peak organizations, something not predicted by the Belief Homophily Hypothesis, and in need of explanation within the ACF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilateral governance of transboundary water resources between the United States and Mexico is in flux today. Historically, the International Boundary and Water Commission ( IBWC), the joint commission by which the two countries jointly manage shared rivers, has dominated decision making and policy in the border region by defining problems and framing knowledge. However, over the past two decades, a transnational network has been emerging to restore the Colorado River Delta. In this paper, we explore how a transnational network has been operating collaboratively to shift transboundary water governance in the Colorado River Delta region toward greater participatory, science-based governance. We explore the IBWC in this context of governance change to reveal the adoption of institutional and policy reforms, along with some resistance to this change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a multistakeholder engagement process conducted in an Australian policy setting that led to a new community engagement framework: Science and Technology Engagement Pathways ( STEP). I describe the process in the context of a lack of awareness, experience, and culture of deliberative public engagement in Australia, particularly in relation to decision making concerning science, technology, and innovation. Increasing cautiousness in government and industry approaches to nanotechnology development, in Australia and elsewhere, creates an imperative and an opening for improved stakeholder and community engagement to improve the legitimacy and sustainability of decisions. In this context, STEP may stimulate movement toward deliberative engagement by raising awareness and commitment from diverse stakeholders and providing a structure for developments in engagement and public dialog. STEP potentially provides 'rules of engagement' and 'intervention pathways' for ongoing public engagement with science and technology developments and for critical 'science in society' perspectives to inform policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kramarz and Park (2016) claim that global environmental governance's increased accountability mechanisms are not matched with environmental gains. I assert that this 'accountability paradox' develops for environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) due to a convergence of trends: ENGOs' increased governance roles coupled with competition for funding and agenda space produces a field riddled with opposing or diverging views. These organizations cannot fully satisfy other actors' demands and achieve 'balanced accountability' because of their differentiated and conflicting approaches to environmental problem-solving. Instead, ENGOs face an accountability dilemma: let the various demands of accountability interfere with their ability to achieve mission or let their missions interfere with their efforts to be accountable. This constrained choice is delineated by Koppell's multiple accountabilities disorder and the new concept 'single accountability disorder.' The qualitative case of the International Marinelife Alliance demonstrates how an ENGO moves through the multiple accountability states that constitute this paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Review of Policy Research is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How are nonstate actors within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held to account? In this article, we introduce the concept of 'institutional accountability' to complement the wider literature(s) on accountability in climate governance. Within institutional frameworks, actors employ rules, norms, and procedures to demand justifications from one another. In light of those justifications, actors then use 'exit, voice, or loyalty' to positively or negatively sanction each other. To depict the dynamics of institutional accountability, we analyze the role of nonstate actors in the nine constituency groups of the UNFCCC. We outline the constituency structure and the population of observer organizations. We then identify examples where nonstate actors employed institutional rules in tandem with exit, voice, or loyalty to foster accountability. In making this analysis we draw upon three years of on-site participation at UNFCCC meetings, document analysis, and more than 40 semi-structured interviews with state and nonstate actors. We conclude by discussing the scope and conditions under which institutional accountability may occur in other issue areas of global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing global trend of judicializing environmental policy has been received with optimism, and in the context of democracies in transition, many have found in an active Supreme Court a potential solution to political impasses. However, as the judiciary is the least democratic of the three branches of government, what impact does judicialization have on democratic accountability? We claim that judicialization generates accountability losses in two ways. First, theoretically, when the Court takes on managerial functions that extend beyond its adjudicative role, it distorts its horizontal accountability functions. Second, empirically, when the Court becomes involved in policy formulation, effectiveness is not guaranteed yet there are no vertical accountability sanctions the polity can impose on judges. We illustrate this argument with an emblematic and instructive case of judicialization of environmental policy in Argentina. We conclude that judicialization to remedy policy failures undermines democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supporters of open data believe that free and complete access to research data is beneficial for science, public policy, and society. In environmental science and policy, open data systems can enable relevant research and inform evidence-based governmental decisions. This article examines the unlikely case of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research's transition toward an open data model. Considering Brazil's young democracy, incipient practice of government transparency and accountability, and lacking a tradition of science-policy dialogue, this case is a striking example of how open data can support public debate by making information about forest cover widely available. The case shows the benefits and challenges of developing such open data systems, and highlights the various forms of accessibility involved in making data available to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lot of scholarly attention has focused on why groups choose to pursue their policy goals in one venue over another. This manuscript adds to the literature by testing a new theory of venue shopping, the Adaptive Venue Shopping Framework. This manuscript finds empirical support that groups choose venues by strategically assessing the institutional context which involves three primary elements: the group's mix of resources, their opponent's resource strengths, and the degree of venue accessibility, which is a combination of opponents' degree of control over a venue and a venue's image amiability or receptivity. In addition to confirming these findings, this case study links the literature on venue shopping with recent scholarship about 'vested interests' by demonstrating how a powerful agricultural group came to dominate in a legislative venue, how it protected its policy victories from reversal, and how it kept policy making from shifting into alternative venues, thus leading to long-term policy stability. Furthermore, it demonstrates how newly emerged groups can achieve policy success against stronger opponents by threatening to seek their policy goals in alternative institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department of Energy (DOE) administers the national low-income Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP). Under this program, DOE provides grants to states (grantees), which then provide grants to local weatherization agencies (subgrantees), to weatherize income-eligible homes for free. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 allocated $5 billion in funding to WAP, a very significant increase from an annual appropriation that ranged in the $200-250 million range for many years. As part of a major evaluation of WAP, states and local weatherization agencies were surveyed, in part, to assess their experiences during the ARRA period. The substantial funding increase created a number of issues for the national weatherization network: the political visibility of their programs increased significantly, organizational responsibilities were shifted, new laws and regulations were passed that impacted their programs, media attention of their programs increased, federal oversight of their programs increased; and programmatic costs increased because of the increased oversight and because ARRA required WAP to operate under the provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931. There was some concern within the national weatherization network that the influx of ARRA funds would permanently damage nonfederal funding leveraging relationships. However, two-thirds of grantees and over 40% of subgrantees stated that they believe that the long-term impacts of ARRA on leveraging relationships will be positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long-dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community-based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California-based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state- or industry-led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transboundary water resources are very challenging to manage, generating numerous unresolved management issues. North America possesses two different spatial contexts in which transboundary water resource management issues exist, the arid U. S.- Mexico border region and the humid U. S.- Canada border region. Past work on the U. S.- Mexico border has explored a range of institutional arrangements by which resources are managed, with a special focus on both existing and new institutions and how the locus of policy formulation may vary across scale. In this article, I explore water resource issues in the U. S.- Canadian transboundary context through a comparative examination of management frameworks in the westernmost section on the U. S.- Canada border. Specifically, I examine the Cascadia Corridor region within which the Salish Sea and smaller nested watersheds lie, exploring how concepts of devolution, regionalization, subnational participation, and spatial scale have unfolded in transboundary management efforts in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing importance of public engagement in science policy making and declining levels of public trust in food production, the European Food Safety Authority ( EFSA) has attempted to embed 'good governance' approaches to strengthen scientific independence and open up risk decision making, which include the use of public consultations. However, 'opening up' of risk assessment policies reveals some tensions; namely, balancing the goals of scientific excellence and transparency, protecting science from interests, addressing value judgments, and limited opportunities to debate ethical and social issues. EFSA's development of risk assessment policy for genetically modified animals is used as a case study to analyze these tensions. This analysis suggests that in order to fulfill good governance commitments and maintain trust in risk governance, closer cooperation between EFSA and the European Commission is required to provide 'space' for debating the broader risk management issues. This publically accessible space may be needed alongside rather than instead of EFSA's consultation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-1960s through 1980, major policy changes were adopted as a result of federal and state public lands protection statutes. This article analyzes the impact these policy changes have had upon the economies of gateway communities, a subject of limited discussion in the scholarly literature. One conclusion is that gateway community economies have become less dependent on resources extraction. This analysis finds that several factors––beyond policy change––have influenced the shift away from resources extraction. Likewise, there is the question over what economic mainstays have stepped in to fill the resources extraction void? For many gateway communities, it appears that the answer has been recreational tourism. The implications of this economic shift within gateway communities are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the United Nations Environment Program, UN Conference on Environment and Development, and other international organizations have acknowledged the importance of civil society for engaging stakeholders in environmental change—especially at the local community level—and in promoting democracy. 1 In Russia, efforts by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to promote reform since 1991 have aimed at achieving both objectives and face numerous political, legal, and attitudinal hurdles. This article examines these hurdles and the factors that facilitate development of an environmentally conscious civil society in Russia through analysis of the views of 100 representatives of environmental NGOs, news media, scientific community, corporations, and public agencies. We also investigate three abbreviated but illustrative vignettes that illuminate civil society impediments. Our thesis is that successful efforts to ensure adequate protection of Russia's environment require a strengthening of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the United Nations-brokered World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in light of nongovernmental organization participation as a full partner in consultations and decisions. Combining participation-observation fieldwork, interviews, and eye-witness accounts with a selective content analysis of key WSIS documentation, official and dissenting, the article presents the occupational hazards of this sort of encounter between civil society participants, government, and business sectors as global information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media agenda-setting partners. It focuses on the hazards of key word strategies in what are now irrevocably computer-embedded domains for action and access. Hyperlinked textual production and related key word search functionalities are now, I argue, integral to global agenda-setting in the intertwined areas of ICT, media, and sociocultural policy. This formal encounter between multilateral institutions and social justice and ICT advocacy, online and on the ground, raises new questions for policy research in these domains, questions that require fresh approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The now much debated role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the ongoing democratization of Mexico involves global issues such as trust, social capital, and volunteerism. How applicable the work of Robert Putnam on civil society is to Latin America, and how central associationalism will be to Mexico's future are a focus of this study of the policies that may promote democratic consolidation and ameliorate Mexico's“civic deficit” in a time when the place of the state in Mexican society is being reexamined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]