Drawing up policy options is a complex activity which involves defining and weighing the merits and risks of various alternatives. In its modern version, this usually involves formal policy analysis or “policy appraisal”; that is, policy work specifically undertaken to generate and evaluate...

John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) was articulated in order to better understand how issues entered into policy agendas, using the concept of a policy actors interacting in course of sequences of events occurring in what he referred to as the "problem", "policy" and "politics"...

The use of experimentation by practitioners and resource managers as a policy instrument for effective policy design under complex and dynamic conditions has been well-acknowledged both in theory and practice. For issues such as water resource management policy experimentation, especially pilot...

This paper proposes to integrate disparate notions of governance capacity by adopting a resource-based view of capacity. Governance capacity can be defined as the set of organizational and systemic resources necessary to make sound policy choices and implement them effectively. Adopting this...

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,...

Existing studies of policy mixes do not use consistent terminology and fail to carefully define the dependent variable of the inquiry. As a result theorization has lagged, the cumulative impact of empirical studies has not been great and understanding of the phenomena, despite many observations...

Public policies are the result of efforts made by governments to alter aspects of behaviour -- both that of their own agents and of society at large -- in order to carry out some end or purpose. They are comprised of complex arrangements of policy goals and policy means matched through some...

Policy failures are in a sense inevitable. That is, if a policy developed to deal with a specific problem or issue is left in place long enough it is highly likely that over time the environment or problem context will shift enough that the policy will become obsolete or irrelevant and like a...

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 established a clear global mandate for greater integrated policymaking. This concern for policy integration has forced practitioners and academics to rethink many underlying principles about this relatively old but poorly...

Lesson drawing, or learning from past policies or programs, can improve current or future policies or programs and, thereby, lead to policy success. This requires various types of evaluations that identify and highlight different causal relationships in the system. However, the literature on...