This study examines the role of research in agricultural policy making in Malawi at a time when the Africa Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development have been seeking to promote greater evidenced-based decision making in agriculture. Drawing on both theory and actual past...

In this paper, we document an approach to capacity strengthening of parliamentarians in Ghana and attempt to gauge to what extent and under what conditions such investments could lead to better debates and informed policymaking to promote growth and poverty reduction. We traced a group of...

Despite recent advances in the Evolutionary and Systems Perspectives to Economic Change (SI), confusion still exists about how to apply it to the design and implementation of Innovation & Technology Policy (ITP) in concrete settings. Since the `Normative' aspects of SI are framed in terms so...

The current emphasis in the development community on demonstrating policy impact requires a better understanding of national policymaking processes to recognize opportunities for, and limits to, generating policy change. Consequently, this paper introduces an applied framework, named the...

The executive - legislative relations in the Philippines have been described in two contrasting stories, namely the "strong president" story, and the "strong congress" story. This paper tries to consolidate the existing arguments and propose a new perspective focusing on the "compromise...

This introductory essay for the journal Symposium presents an overview of issues related to ‘Q-Squared in Policy: the use of qualitative and quantitative methods of poverty analysis in decision-making’. We focus on issues raised on the supply side of data use, relating, inter alia to the...

Purpose – The Orphan Drug Act has provided the pharmaceutical industry with incentives to research and develop drugs for orphan diseases: rare diseases with little profit potential. It is considered very successful legislation by legal scholars, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how different actors interacted to influence local labour legislation in the case of the collective bargaining regulations in Guangdong Province, China, using long-term observation and in-depth interviews. Design/methodology/approach This paper...

Purpose – Organizational life and policy making is increasingly conceived in terms of a “three sector” model – public, private and “third”. The purpose of this research paper is to examine a little‐studied phenomenon that increasingly characterises societies in both the...

This paper processes responses from households in 66 countries to address differences in the extent to which bribes and gifts are considered acceptable. Levels of acceptance differ substantially from one country to another, but they do not conform to popular expectations: Respondents in rich,...