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Frameworks for Policy Analysis argues that, in order to bring relevance back to policy analysis, we need to approach policy situations as complex phenomena and employ multiple ways of looking at things in order to understand the essential elements of each policy case. The book is an exploration of distinct, sometimes radically different, models for analysis, but it is also a reference for these multiple methodologies that all come under the term ""analysis."" Along with classic and recent models, the book introduces some new concepts that serve to deepen our analysis and aspire to what G.

AbstractPolicy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working and reworking of relationships among policy actors. We define relationality and develop its use in policy research. While the relational can be depicted as an alternative model for policy (e.g., Confucian versus Weberian), it is more accurate to understand it as a system that complements conventional policy regimes. To illustrate the concept, we examine examples from policymaking in China. We end with a discussion of how relationality should be a general condition that should be applicable to many, if not all, policy situations.

GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has captured planning practice to an unprecedented degree, and this article on how it reconfigures and is configured by institutional context. The author inquires into GIS as a technology for incorporating knowledge into institutional use and includes five propositions: (1) GIS's efficiencies in data processing allows it unprecedented facility and scope of analysis, (2) its use increases alienation, (3) its mimetic language furthers its role in planning, (4) its logic appears rational—purposive, but it conceals an underlying normative logic, and (5) its most profound effect is on the mapper, and the alienating and normative character of GIS necessitate new modes of "social ground-truthing." The author studies the southeast Los Angeles (SELA) initiatives to demonstrate these propositions. This article compares two studies: one GIS-based, and the other based on participatory action research and discusses how GIS might be recontextualized into a technology for liberating democratizing processes.

In a reversal of the historical role of territory in intergroup conflict, the article focuses on an emergent notion of territory as an instrument for peace. In this article, the author begins to theorize about the mechanisms by which so-called peace parks might act in resolving conflict and ushering in regional stability. Two models are utilized that differ in their portrayal of how these parks might work. The first model, built on a game-theoretic foundation, provides insight into incentive mechanisms by which parties might agree to a border park. Furthermore, the model sheds light on whether these parks might serve as vacant buffer zones or, alternatively, active zones of cooperation. However, the game-theoretic model should be complemented by another, qualitative model that focuses primarily on how these interactions are embedded in history, culture, tradition, and group identity. To this end, the author develops a second model, which portrays institutions as structures of care. In the model of care, relationships are constitutive of identity, and institutions and practices (including war and peace) evolve in coherence with the web of relationships. It is the employment of mutually complementing analytics that might afford a deeper understanding of how these peace parks might actually serve as effective bridges for peace.

A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collective action. Part of this impasse stems from a gap between the multidimensional nature of contemporary global crises and unidimensional modes of understanding and managing them. In this article, we describe an integrative approach rooted in the paradigm of social ecology that might enable us to tackle these challenges more comprehensively. We discuss, for example, how a social ecological perspective focuses attention not only on the carbon footprint of society but also on the social footprint of carbon. We review the tenets of social ecology and reflect on its promise for spurring new modes of collaborative research and collective action, including more effective strategies for planetary governance. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 50 is July 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The policy literature has long recognized the inherent need for a program to fit the unique conditions found in a certain context. We present a theory of institutional contextualism that focuses on the mechanisms by which actors adapt a policy design to fit a situation. We conceptualize institutions as phenomena that are constituted by a constant dialectic between text (the general blueprint) and context (the particular setting). The first half of this dialectic, which is the diffusion of the constitutive text or norm onto the institutional setting, has been discussed in the literature. Our research focuses on the second half, and we delineate, in concept, mechanisms for fitting the program to the local context. We then use a case study of improvised microfinance programs in Tamil Nadu, India, to illustrate how this occurs in reality. The research underscores the unexamined link between effective governance and contextual fit and offers a typology of mechanisms for fit that should inform future research. Adapted from the source document.

Policy design is an area of study in the field of public policy with a curious intellectual history. It engendered a large literature in the 1980s and 1990s oriented to understanding design as both a process and an outcome with prominent figures in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia such as Lester Salamon, Patricia Ingraham, Malcolm Goggin, John Dryzek, Hans Bressers, Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider, G. B. Doern, Stephen Linder and B. Guy Peters, Renate Mayntz, Christopher Hood, Eugene Bardach, Evert Vedung, Peter May, Frans van Nispen, and Michael Trebilock writing extensively on policy formulation, policy instrument choice, and the idea of designing policy outcomes. After the early 1990s, however, this literature tailed off, and although some writings on policy design have continued to flourish in specific fields such as economics and environmental studies, in the fields of public administration and public policy, the idea of "design" was largely replaced by the study of institutional forms and decentralized governance arrangements. This article traces this decline to two related hypotheses about the changing nature of society and policy responses—the "government to governance" and "globalization" narratives—which it is argued crowded out more nuanced analyses of state options in the policy-making process in favor of decentralized market and "third" or "fourth" sector collaborative network mechanisms. Importantly, these latter designs are often seen as inevitable and "natural," obviating the need for reflective studies of design and metadesign processes and outcomes. We argue that the denouement of design research has, in fact, hurt the scholarship on governance and institutions and call for a renewal of the notion of policy design.