Policy Sciences

Guidelines for spending federal grants to the states for social services changed repeatedly between 1962 and 1975. The process of preparing guidelines changed, and so did their content. These changes are described and explained. Guidelines at all stages failed to provide intelligible and useful instructions to federal and state administrators. In part this was because the contextual supports that normally help to give effect to grant-in-aid guidelines—explicit antecedents in the law, and implicit understandings among administrators at different levels of the federal system—were lacking or seriously defective. Beyond that, in each of their different phases the guidelines proved untenable because of dysfunctions that may have been peculiar to the respective processes by which they were prepared.

Several shortcomings in a major study of the world's energy system are described. The study, entitled Energy in a Finite World, resulted in widely publicized conclusions and urgent policy recommendations that were derived from detailed projections of the global energy future. A set of computer models was used to produce these projections, which are analyzed here in two ways. First, treating the models as a black box, it is shown that several principal results are effectively prescribed informally in input data that pass through the models unchanged. Second, despite claims of robustness, detailed sensitivity analysis shows that the energy supply projections are highly sensitive to perturbations in various input data. Early work that revealed this problem is not cited, and standard sensitivity tests are not provided in the study. Thus, despite the appearance of analytical rigor, the study's conclusions are evidently based on opinions rather than objective robust analysis.

This paper examines some of the secondary or indirect consequences of multistakeholder collaborative processes in the environmental arena. Its thesis is that such collaborative processes constitute fertile ground for participating actors to experience change in their subjective understandings of and relationships to each other, themselves, and environmental action. This exposition draws upon ethnographic research performed with a U.S.-based multistakeholder environmental partnership over a two year period in 1997–1998 as well as a theoretical perspective conceptualizing these personal transformations in terms of social learning, cultural production, and identity formation. Three main findings are explored that support the proposed thesis. The first concerns contributions toward personal transformation made by typical partnership structures and operations. The second pertains to the existence of a commonly shared belief among partnership participants demonstrating an expectation for such changes. The third involves evidence that such transformations actually do take place. Examples from the case study include changes to participants’ understandings of other environmental stakeholders, the development of new relationships among participating actors, the adoption of new ways of approaching environmental problem solving and decision making, and the formation of altered identities. The paper explores some of the implications, both positive and negative, that this transformative quality of multistakeholder environmental partnerships has for both environmental problem solving and some of the enduring conflicts that have impeded satisfying environmental action in the past. Finally, recommendations are made for how practitioners may organize, manage, and evaluate multistakeholder partnerships to promote such changes.

A number of factors cause individuals to use diverse strategies to solve problems. This paper presents a methodology for examining these differences in strategy. Verbal protocols are elicited to collect data on the cognitive processes occurring during problem solving. These data, codified into propositional representations, and non-parametric statistical comparisons are then used to evaluate the significance of strategy differences. These strategies are then mapped with dynamical graphs, with which we examine the task-independent and the task-specific cognitive representations the participants used. As an illustrative example we apply this methodology to study the influence of two contributing factors, professional training and national culture, on the strategies adopted by professionals to solve a complex and ill-structured problem (hunger in a country). The problem-solving strategies of professionals from different countries and trained in architecture, engineering, law or medicine are analyzed to show some intriguing differences in the general strategies adopted by individuals belonging to different professions, and the outcomes from using these strategies.

New kinds of policy analysts and policy scientists are being trained in university graduate programs but the outlines of this new profession remain fuzzy. A comparative analysis of other professionals in government advisory roles may provide touchstones by which to develop the new profession. The article reports interviews with urban planners, lawyers, economists and political scientists about their experience in government. Propositions are developed about characteristic modes of thought and problem-solving styles of each profession and conclusions drawn about the relative “effectiveness” of each set of professional skills in a policymaking process. It is then suggested that the new policy scientist profession should develop some of the positive skills of the other fields in order to enhance effectiveness.

The disillusion with social science evaluation can be partly attributed to an overly narrow view of the function of evaluation. In the accepted model, evaluation functions to provide information needed by rational decision-makers for discrete decisions. But evaluations often cannot perform this function. However, evaluation often does serve other functions. In one such function, it acts as a means for managing conflict and promoting social change. It often also stimulates program staff to critically examine their assumptions and behavior. Consideration of these additional functions leads to suggestions for changes in recruitment of evaluators and in the definition of the evaluators' role. Finally, one can view evaluation as a societal ritual whose function is to calm the citizenry and to perpetuate an image of government rationality.

This study assesses the faculty research productivity of 23 graduate public policy programs, and is based upon data from the Social Sciences Citations Index. The results clearly show that a handful of policy programs have outstanding research records: UC Berkeley, Princeton, Michigan, Chicago, Duke, Carnegie-Mellon, Rand, Syracuse, and, of course, Harvard. Most of the rest also have quite commendable records by this criterion.