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In the policy world, the idea of ideational robustness deals with why and how policy elements can be maintained over time and the implications this has for government strategy and activity. Past approaches to ideas and their influence on public policy stressed the disparate roles of multiple policy mechanisms such as path dependency or the nature of policy networks in either driving policy change forward or ensuring persistence of a policy. Ideational robustness on the other hand allows for the possibility of some changes occurring in policy environments and components while motivating cognitive and normative policy ideas are adapted and retained. While ideational persistence has often been identified as a source of policy stability, the possibility that some ideas allow lesser or greater levels of change in policy components while basic policy content remains more or less intact (ideational robustness) is much less well understood. The article reviews the literature on policy change and stability which highlights the influence of different policy processes on overall policy dynamics and the role played by policy learning in promoting ideational robustness. Using evidence from military doctrines and procurement in Canada and Australia, the study finds that the two countries drew different defence policy lessons from the end of the Cold War which contributed heavily to the extent of robustness of their defence policy ideas. The case studies show that ideational robustness is important but also that its study must be combined with that of other policy mechanisms and processes in order to explain overall policy change patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government information activities are often thought to be motivated by a classic calculus of blame minimization and credit maximization. However, the precise interactions of "blame" and "credit" communication activities in government are not well understood, and questions abound about how they are deployed in practice. This paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) machine-learning sentiment analysis of a unique dataset composed of several thousand tweets of high-level political leaders in four OECD countries--namely the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Canada--during 2020-2022 to examine the relationships existing between "blame" and "credit" communication strategies and their relation to the changing severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in an objective and subjective sense. In general, the study suggests that during this high-impact, long-lasting, and waxing and waning crisis, political leaders acted in accordance with theoretical expectations when it came to communicating credit seeking messages during the periods when the COVID situation was thought to be improving, but they did not exclusively rely upon communicating blame or scapegoating when the situation was considered to be deteriorating. The consequences of this finding for blame and credit-based theories of government communication are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy advice has been the subject of ongoing research in the policy sciences as it raises fundamental issues about what constitutes policy knowledge, expertise, and their effects on policymaking. This introduction reviews the existing literature on the subject and introduces the themes motivating the articles in the issue. It highlights the need to consider several key subjects in the topic in the contemporary era: namely the challenge of legitimacy, that of values, and the challenge of politics. The papers in the issue shed light on the ongoing delegitimization of conventional knowledge providers, the problem of the normative basis of experts' advice, the increasing politicization of expertise in policymaking, and the relevance of political context in influencing not only the role of experts but also whether or not their advice is accepted and implemented. It is argued that these modern challenges, when not addressed, reinforce trends toward the inclusion of antidemocratic values and uninformed ideas in contemporary policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale military platform procurement is an essential but understudied component of the policy studies of megaprojects. Procurement decisions in this area, from ships to aircraft, are examples of a specific type of often very expensive purchases which feature complex multi-actor and multiyear processes characterized by high degrees of conflict between actors over purchases and planning horizons. This study of military procurement efforts of this type demonstrates the importance of maintaining policy 'alignment' between governments and service providers for successful megaproject procurement to occur and suggests several strategies for accomplishing this that can be applied to similar large-scale but nondefense-related projects, ranging from hydroelectric dams to high-speed railway development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article joins with others in this special issue to examine the evolution of our understanding of how the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic impacted policy ideas and routines across a wide variety of sectors of government activity. Did policy ideas and routines transform as a result of the pandemic or were they merely a continuation of the status quo ante? If they did transform, are the transformations temporary in nature or likely to lead to significant, deep and permanent reform to existing policy paths and trajectories? As this article sets out, the literature on policy punctuations has evolved and helps us understand the impact of COVID-19 on policy-making but tends to conflate several distinct aspects of path trajectories and deviations under the general concept of "critical junctures" which muddy reflections and findings. Once the different possible types of punctuations have been clarified, however, the result is a set of concepts related to path creation and disruption--especially that of "path clearing"--which are better able to provide an explanation of the kinds of policy change to be expected to result from the impact of events such as the 2019 coronavirus pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the theoretical and empirical challenges the coronavirus pandemic poses for theories of policy change. Critical events like coronavirus disease are potentially powerful destabilizers that can trigger discontinuity in policy trajectories and thus are an opportunity for accentuating path shifts. In this paper, we argue that three dynamic pathways of change are possible and must be considered when analysing post-COVID policymaking: normalization, adaptation, and acceleration. These different pathways need to be explored in order to understand the mid- and longterm policy effects of the pandemic. This introduction contextualizes the articles in this special issue, situating them broadly within two broad categories: (a) assessment of how the coronavirus disease pandemic should be understood as a crisis event, and its role in relationship to mechanisms of policy change; and (b) mapping the future contours of the pandemic's impact on substantive policy areas, including education, health care, public finance, social protection, population ageing, the future of work, and violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy tools are a critical part of policy-making, providing the 'means' by which policy 'ends' are achieved. Knowledge of their different origin, nature and capabilities is vital for understanding policy formulation and decision-making, and they have been the subject of inquiry in many policy-related disciplines and sector-specific studies. Yet many crucial aspects of policy tools remain unexplored. Existing studies on policy tools used in policy formulation tend to focus on 'substantive' tools – those used to directly affect policy outcomes such as regulation or subsidies – and largely neglect 'procedural' tools used to indirectly but significantly affect policy processes and outcomes. A key aim of this special issue is to fill this knowledge gap in the field. This article introduces the issue by establishing that procedural tools play a more determining role in public policy-making than is generally acknowledged and deserve a more systematic inquiry into their workings, their impact on the policy process and the organization and delivery of public and private goods and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this collection of essays is to gain insights into the different national-level state responses to COVID-19 around the world and the conditions that shaped them. The pandemic offers a natural experiment wherein the policy problem governments faced was the same but the responses they made were different, creating opportunities for comparison of both the kinds of policy tools being used and the factors that accounted for their choice. Accordingly, after surveying on-line databases of policy tools used in the pandemic and subjecting these to topic modelling to reveal the characteristics of a 'standard' national pandemic response, we discuss the similarities and differences found in specific responses. This is done with reference to the nature and level of policy capacity of respective governments, highlighting the critical roles played by (in)adequate preparation and lesson-drawing from past experiences with similar outbreaks or crises. Taken together the articles show how the national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were shaped by the opportunity and capacity each government had to learn from previous pandemics and their capacity to operationalize and build political support for the standard portfolio of policy measures deployed to deal with the crisis. However, they also show how other factors such as the nature of national leadership, the organization of government and civil society, and blindspots towards the vulnerabilities of certain population segments also helped to shape policy responses to the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How best to deal with uncertainty and surprise in policy-making is an issue which has troubled policy studies for some time. Studies of policy uncertainty and policy failure have emphasized the need to create policies able to be improvised upon in the face of an uncertain future, meaning there is a need to design and adopt policies featuring agility, and flexibility in their components and processes. Such policies require redundant resources and capabilities and this need is in strong opposition to ideas about design which equate better designs with efficiency, implying the allocation of only the minimum amount of resources possible, and which also often emphasize routinization and the replication of standard operating procedures and programme elements in order to ensure consistency in programme delivery. While these latter designs may be appropriate in stable circumstances or where competition can provide a degree of system-level resilience, this is not true for many public sector activities where government is the sole provider of particular goods and where services and future scenarios are unknown, contested or unpredictable. As studies of crisis management and other similar situations have emphasized, in these instances robustness is needed and can be planned for. This article examines the concepts of surprise, agility and improvisation and their linkages to robustness in order to both clarify terminology and outline the organizational and managerial features of policies and policy-making which prevent, and facilitate, flexible adaptation in both policy content and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-production has become a buzzword for both scholars and practitioners in the past decade. This introduction to the thematic issue ‘Co-production: Implementation problems, new technologies and new designs’ unpacks the concept of co-production and illustrates how it has been operationalized on the ground in diverse country-specific contexts. To facilitate the analysis, we make a distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ forms of co-production, even though the practice has not really been around long enough to have established a tradition in the true sense of the word. However, these two distinct forms of co-production are highly useful conceptual lenses through which to view the finer details and nuances, to identify the enabling conditions and to foreshadow the governance challenges, but also to highlight the innovating role co-production plays in forging public services and public policies. Thanks to the rich and varied ways in which the contributors have approached this central topic; the thematic issue enables the research and practice to more fully appreciate the ins and outs of co-production and suggests the most promising directions for future study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, policy-making has been envisioned as a process in which subsets of policy actors engage in specific types of interactions involved in the definition of policy problems, the articulation of solutions and their matching or enactment. This activity involves the definition of policy goals (both broad and specific), the creation or identification of the means and mechanisms that need to be implemented to realize these goals, and the set of bureaucratic, partisan, electoral and other political struggles involved in their acceptance and transformation into action. While past research on policy subsystems has often assumed or implied that these tasks could be undertaken by any actor, more recent research argues that distinct sets of actors are involved in these three tasks: epistemic communities that are engaged in discussions about policy dilemmas and problems; instrument constituencies that define and promote policy instruments and alternatives; and advocacy coalitions which compete to have their choice of policy alternative and problem frames adopted. Two of these three sets of actors are quite well known and, indeed, have their own literature about what it takes to be a member of an epistemic community or advocacy coalition, although interactions between the two are rarely discussed. The third subset, the instrument constituency, is much less known but has from the outset been considered in relation to these other policy actors. The articles in this special issue focus on better understanding the nature of actor interactions undertaken by instrument constituencies and how these relate to the other kinds of actors involved in policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how learning has been treated, generally, in policy network theories and what questions have been posed, and answered, about this phenomenon to date. We examine to what extent network characteristics and especially the presence of various types of brokers impede or facilitate policy learning. Next, a case study of the policy network surrounding the sustainability of palm oil biodiesel in Indonesia over the past two decades is presented using social network analysis. This case study focuses on sustainability-oriented policy learning in the Indonesian biodiesel governance network and illustrates how network features and especially forms of brokerage influence learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy design, or the deliberate governmental effort to attain desired policy objectives, is an integral part of micro and macro-level fiscal and financial regulation. This paper seeks to address the role of regime coherence and policy capacity in contributing to effective financial policy design. Drawing on the cases of the Global Financial Crisis and Asian Financial Crisis and focusing on Asian states, we assess regime capacity at both international and domestic levels. We argue that it is the integration of analytical, operational and political capacities that have contributed to the overall ability of a government regime to address and respond to crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "policy advisory systems" was introduced by Halligan in 1995 as a way to characterize and analyze the multiple sources of policy advice utilized by governments in policy-making processes. The concept has proved useful and has influenced thinking about both the nature of policy work in different advisory venues, as well as how these systems work and change over time. This article sets out existing models of policy advisory systems based on Halligan's original thinking on the subject which emphasize the significance of location or proximity to authoritative decision-makers as a key facet of advisory system influence. It assesses how advisory systems have changed as a result of the dual effects of the increased use of external consultants and others sources of advice - 'externalization' - and the increased use of partisan-political advice inside government itself- 'politicization'. It is argued that these twin dynamics have blurred traditionally sharp distinctions between both the content of inside and outside sources of advice and between the technical and political dimensions of policy formulation, ultimately affecting where influence in advisory systems lies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incrementalism enjoyed an almost uninterrupted 40 year run as the dominant model of policy change from the publication of Lindblom and Dahl's first mention of the subject in 1953. In the mid-1990s, however, the elements of a new orthodoxy of policy dynamics began to appear in the form of various models of 'punctuated equilibrium', most notably in the works of Peter Hall, Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones. It is important to note, that the new orthodoxy did not replace the old, but rather supplemented it through the addition of notions of 'atypical' or 'paradigmatic' change to the pattern of marginal or incremental change put forward by Lindblom and his colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s. Contemporary models thus owe a great debt to incrementalism, attempting to incorporate its strengths while overcoming its weaknesses. This article discusses this evolution in theories of policy dynamics and the research agenda currently found in this area of policy studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most cases, policy scholars interested in the role of policy analysts in promoting and practicing evidence-based policy-making rely on very partial survey results, or on anecdotal case studies and interview research. Despite the existence of a large body of literature on policy analysis, large-scale empirical studies of the work of policy analysts are rare, and in the case of analysts working at the sub-national level, virtually non-existent. There has been very little research on this level of policy workers despite the significant powers they exercise in prominent federal systems such as the USA, Germany, Australia, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Malaysia and Canada. This paper reports on the first comprehensive survey of the work of policy analysts at the provincial and territorial levels conducted in Canada in 2008-2009. It examines the background and training of provincial and territorial policy analysts, the types of techniques they employ in their jobs, and what they do in their work on a day-by-day basis. The resulting profile of sub-national policy analysts presented here reveals several substantial differences between analysts working for national governments and their sub-national counterparts, with important implications for policy training and practice, and for the ability of nations to improve their policy advice systems in order to better accomplish their long-term policy goals through the practice of evidence-based policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government communication is now a large growth industry in many countries. Exactly what is meant by the term, however, varies from author to author. In this paper government communication is conceived as a policy tool or instrument, that is, as a means to give effect to policy goals. Key policy-relevant aspects of the term are examined including differences between the role of government communications in the 'front-end' of the public policy and production processes related to agenda-setting, policy formulation and producer activities as opposed to the 'back-end' of policy implementation, policy evaluation, consumption and distribution. TWo case studies of political and policy-related information campaigns in Canada, one dealing with Elections Canada at the federal level and the second with provincial health policy-making in British Columbia, are examined in order to discern patterns in the use of government communication tools useful as a basis for comparative inquiry into Democratic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important part of the study of the policy response of government in the area of a novel technology, such as genomics, lies in identifying the technological trajectory followed in the sector and how it intersects or impacts upon existing policy, regulatory and innovation regimes. Part of the challenge in studying the impacts and outcomes of such trajectories, therefore, is their multilayered nature. This has led to the proliferation of different models or frameworks for the analysis of many sectors, each one tackling a specific level and obscuring the linkages between levels and units of analysis. Research into innovations, however, benefits from an understanding of the overall policy and regulatory regimes present in a sector while an understanding of regulatory behaviour is in turn linked to the overall policy framework set up to govern a sector. As such, analyses of both regulation and innovation in a sector such as genomics can profit from an integrated, multi-level approach grounded in the overall nature of the policy regime present in the sphere of activity under examination. We offer such an approach by synthesizing four existing models of policy, regulatory and innovation behaviour that fit the three levels of analysis -- the policy regime, regulatory regime and the innovation regime -- in the sphere of biotechnology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful policy integration poses significant challenges to policymakers. The provincial cases studies of Integrated Land Management described in this volume suggest three main lessons. First, integration is often a response to a long period of policy layering or drift that has resulted in a highly disorganized policy regime, with potential for generalized incoherence within and between policy goals and policy means. Second, policy integration will often pose formidable difficulties of multi-level governance. Third, the multiplication of new actors often outstrips the ability of governance mechanisms to cope. Responsive policy-making for large-scale complex policy issues such as ILM requires both sophisticated policy analysis as well as an institutional structure which allows problems to be addressed on a multilevel and multi-sectoral basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention in recent years has been focused on the idea of replacing patchworks of public policies in specific issue areas with more coordinated or 'integrated' policy strategies (IS). Such strategies are expected to display a match of coherent policy goals and consistent policy means which can produce policy outcomes optimally matched to specific large-scale problem contexts. Work on such strategies in areas such as Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), National Forest Policies (NFPs), European transportation and energy planning, Mediterranean desertification and others, however, has shown a remarkable resilience of preexisting policy elements, leading to policy failures and other sub-optimal outcomes. On the basis of a review of this literature, this article argues that the development of IS typically follows one or more of the processes Thelen et al. have characterized as 'displacement, conversion, layering, drift and exhaustion". Studies of IS must take this evolutionary perspective into account in developing a better understanding of issues surrounding appropriate IS design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents tools to undertake and evaluates the problem of identifying the policy instrument mixes of New Governance Arrangements (NGAs), and assess their likelihood to produce best results. NGAs are modern-day examples of complex policy designs which require analysis to understand their development and likelihood of success, and are often suggested as solutions to complex policy problems like environmental or health protection.

The article discusses the aquaculture in Canada as a resource sector caught in staples vise. Aquaculture in Canada is an archetypal case of new post-staples resource industry but it also perpetuates many of the same social and economic problems. New post-staples resource industry combines high capital intensity and sophisticated technology to produce a new, post-staples version of staple resource.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Elizabeth Moore on Canadian agricultural sector and another by Michael Howlett and Jeremy Rayner on fin and shellfish aquaculture.

This article examines the process of constitutional change surrounding the enactment of the natural-resource amendment (Section 92A) to the Canadian Constitution Act (1982). It traces the motivations behind the adoption of the clause to a combination of long-term exogenous factors originating in the OPEC-inspired price rises of the 1970s, and short-term endogenous factors particular to Canada's political and institutional arrangements, including unpredictable patterns of judicial arbitration of constitutional issues. The presence of endogenous and exogenous "shocks" to long-established constitutional modus vivendi allows some predictions to be made about the general nature and direction of future constitutional change. However, the workings of short-term political and institutional variables make it impossible to predict the exact content of the constitutional response to such influences. This finding supports Ban- ting and Simeon's hypothesis that constitutional change is political process subject to political forces in society and that constitutional change, like constitution-making, remains an art and not a science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advertising has associated products with nature throughout the 20th century, contrary to the claim that business has only recently changed its ads in response to consumer demands for environmentally friendly products; what is new is corporate advertising that portrays companies as "nature's caretakers.