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Coastal and ocean management in the United States is a complex issue requiring an equally complex management policy. Federal policy has historically been carried out in a siloed (sector-by-sector) fashion causing inefficient and bureaucratic management by federal agencies. The Obama administration took a novel approach to coastal and ocean management by signing an executive order that brought together federal agencies and empowered regional stakeholders, creating a first of its kind comprehensive National Ocean Policy. In 2018, former President Donald Trump rescinded the Obama-era policy and enacted his own version of National Ocean Policy that shifted authority to the states and focused on the economic potential of American waters. This research addresses a significant challenge in federal management of a complex natural resource. Here we identify common management strategies between different administrations to provide insights for future attempts at National Ocean Policy. We collect policy documents, press releases, and congressional testimony from high-level stakeholders and identified the most common themes over a 12-year period from 2009-2021. We find three common themes between the administrations even though their policies varied in strategy and scope: 1) the importance of a strong and enduring marine economy, 2) creating a strategic and efficient ocean policy, and 3) devolving authority from the federal government to state and regional decision-makers. We argue that coastal and ocean management via executive order is too easily rescinded to have a lasting impact. These novel findings highlight potential strategies for bipartisan cooperation in future attempts at National Ocean Policy.

An environmental dispute arose in the Cayman Islands where politicians and multinational cruise companies sought an infrastructure upgrade that would destroy 15 acres of coral reef habitat. A competing coalition emerged to contest this project resulting in important policy change: the first ever people’s-initiated referendum. Our research uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to study how policy change is enacted in a biodiversity conservation policy system. We find differences between two coalitions in members, policy beliefs, resources, and strategy. Policy beliefs of both coalitions reveal two competing realities, especially on the subject of science needed to inform a sustainable tourism economy, with scientific misinformation becoming increasingly impactful in policy making. Second, we find that one coalition leveraged the interests of powerful politicians and international corporations to advocate for the infrastructure project, even though the destruction of coral reefs was in defiance of laws. To contest this, the second coalition leveraged volunteers and small donations to enact policy change, successfully triggering the referendum. Our research is significant because in places where volunteering and small donations are less possible, such as in emerging market economies, it is easy to see how well-resourced interests could degrade biodiversity even with domestic laws protecting species and habitats.

Quick-response research during a time of crisis is important because time-sensitive findings can inform urgent decision-making, even with limited research budgets. This research, a National Science Foundation-funded Rapid Response Research (RAPID), explores the United States (U.S.) government's messaging on science in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how this messaging informed policy. Using rapidly emerging secondary data (e.g., policy documents taken from government websites and others), much of which has since been removed or changed, we examined the interactions between governing bodies, non-governmental organizations, and civilian populations in the Southeastern U.S. during the first 2 years of the pandemic. This research helps to better understand how decision-makers at the federal, state, and local levels responded to the pandemic in three states with the lowest vaccine rates and highest levels of poverty, income inequality, and disproportionate impacts borne by people of color in the nation: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This study incorporates the Policy Regime Framework to discuss how two foundational concepts (ideas and institutions) helped govern policy implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research fills a significant information gap by providing a better understanding of how policy regimes emerge across multiple levels of government and impact vulnerable populations during times of a public health crisis. We use automated text analysis to make sense of a large quantity of textual data from policy-making agencies. Our case study is the first to use the Policy Regime Framework in conjunction with empirical data, as it emerged, from federal, state, and local governments to analyze the U.S. policy response to COVID-19. We found the U.S. policy response included two distinct messaging periods in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic: pre and post-vaccine. Many messaging data sources (agency websites, public service announcements, etc). have since been changed since we collected them, thus our real-time RAPID research enabled an accurate snapshot of a policy response in a crisis. We also found that there were significant differences in the ways that federal, state, and local governments approached communicating complex ideas to the public in each period. Thus, our RAPID research demonstrates how significant policy regimes are enacted and how messaging from these regimes can impact vulnerable populations.

Crop foraging by African savannah elephants Loxodonta africana negatively affects farmer livelihoods and support for conservation, yet affordable, sustainable and practical solutions remain elusive. To inform conservation priorities, our goal was to assess the hitherto little explored relationships between farmers’ views on agricultural damage and the socio-economic factors limiting their use of elephant deterrents. We tested our hypotheses associated with the demographic categories of age, education level, years spent farming, gender, exposure to information on deterrent methods, farm size, village and relevant combinations of these factors by surveying 206 respondents across six villages in rural Kenya and analysing the resulting data using an information theoretic approach. Respondents were almost four times more likely to use deterrents if exposed to the relevant information, and almost five times more likely to do so if they had secondary education as opposed to none. Farmers with a higher level of education were five times more likely to have received information on deterrents compared to those with no formal education. Participants who had not received information on deterrents were almost three times more likely to believe that they could implement deterrent methods. Respondents who stated that they could not implement deterrents overwhelmingly cited a lack of financial resources as the reason. Overall, we found that crucial information on reducing elephant crop foraging is not reaching the relevant stakeholders, and socio-economic factors such as education and exposure to information appear to limit uptake of protective measures. These insights are important for developing mitigation strategies and supporting the livelihoods of people affected by negative human–elephant interactions, and thus for effective elephant conservation. Our findings also have broader applications for practitioners seeking to understand barriers stakeholders face in their efforts to mitigate negative interactions with wildlife.