Policy Sciences

Decision models which aspire to generality are weak since they must be divorced from any societal environment, or assume universality for one form of society. The former is the case with normative rational models, the latter with descriptive ones such as incrementalism. To assume that decision modes vary in response to environmental factors might be a more fruitful basis for analysis. This is the point of departure for the present paper, which offers a conceptual framework independent ofa priori assumptions about the decisionmaker's environment. Among hypotheses which are presented on the relationships between environmental and decision variables, is the suggestion that an important factor affecting the style of decisionmakers is their perception of change. An environment perceived as relatively stable or gradually changing will elicit incremental decision processes, while decisionmakers finding themselves subjected to rapid change in a turbulent environment may adopt a decision mode called entrepreneurial. This is distinguished from the incremental mode by, among other characteristics, its greater propensity for risk.

A decision seminar is concerned with knowledge of the policy process and with the evaluation of knowledge for policy. The critical requirement is a nucleus of persons who are determined to work together over a number of years. Among the criteria to be considered in selecting a topic are the needs of the civic and public order. Those who are in the civic order (universities, etc.) may plan “counterpart seminars” to parallel structures of government, selected functions, or problems. The agenda of a seminar calls for the consideration of any particular pattern in relation to its context in social process and evolves a distinctive audio-visual environment for the purpose. Successive attention is given to the clarification of goals, the description of trends, the analysis of conditions, the projection of developments, and the invention, evaluation and selection of alternatives. Continuity permits learning from self-corrective appraisal of past statements and roles. The technique can be diffused to official agencies.

Previous scholarship has focused primarily on how citizens’ form policy preferences and how those preferences are taken into account in democratic decision-making. However, the temporal aspect of policy preferences has received little attention, although many significant societal problems have consequences that extend far into the future. To fill the gap, we examine to what extent citizens are willing to support policies, when rewards can only be expected after several electoral cycles. Using a conjoint survey experiment, we demonstrate that while a slight tendency towards more immediate policy rewards is discernible, citizens are not as impatient as has been widely assumed. In contrast with previous research, political trust does not affect the impact of the time horizon of policy choice. Instead, we find that people with higher education are more likely to choose policies the benefits of which materialize in the distant future. These findings add to the growing evidence which suggests that citizens’ short-sightedness is not a very strong driver of democratic myopia.

This study evaluates whether the education, environmental expertise, and nationality of firms' chief executive officers (CEOs) are associated with greater participation and environmental performance in a voluntary environmental program implemented in a developing nation. Specifically, we collected data from the Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST) program, a voluntary initiative aimed at promoting beyond-compliance environmental performance by hotels operating in Costa Rica. Our findings suggest that CEOs' level of formal education and environmental expertise appear to be significantly associated with higher corporate participation in voluntary programs and also with higher beyond-compliance environmental performance ratings. Contrary to conventional expectations, CEOs from industrialized countries (as opposed to developing countries) do not appear to show a statistically significant association with participation in the CST program and with higher beyond-compliance environmental performance.

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) has developed into a comprehensive theoretical approach to the policymaking process. Empirical findings have however posed challenges in understanding important questions about the identification of advocacy coalitions, explanations for possibilities and sources of shifting coalitions, and the role of exploitive coalitions in policy change. We argue that the integration of relevant aspects of cultural theory (CT) into the ACF provides answers to these open questions. First, the theoretical synthesis of both perspectives suggests an exhaustive typology of four distinct sets of policy actors’ cultural biases. In environmental and natural resource policy, they are mainly expressed by myths about physical nature that can be understood as deep core beliefs that entail, guide, and constrain policy core beliefs in the policy subsystem. Second, linking ACF and CT allows for the conceptualization of cognitive mechanisms for strategic cross-cultural alliances between different advocacy coalitions, which are enabled through specific shared or complementary core beliefs. Third, the synthesis provides an explanation for exploitive coalitions who take advantage of issues triggered by external and internal disruptive events through strategic issue (re-)framing and shifting coalitions that, together with ideological congruence related to veto and institutional players, make major policy change possible. To illustrate our theoretical arguments, we present a long-term analysis of policy change through forest sector reforms and forest certification in Germany and Bulgaria. We conclude by underlining the promising explanatory power of combining ACF and CT as a basis for developing a more comprehensive cognitive theory of policymaking in the context of environmental and natural resource management.