The promise of community-based participatory research for health equity: a conceptual model for bridging evidence with policy.

Insufficient attention has been paid to how research can be leveraged to promote health policy or how locality-based research strategies, in particular community-based participatory research (CBPR), influences health policy to eliminate racial and ethnic health inequities. To address this gap, we highlighted the efforts of 2 CBPR partnerships in California to explore how these initiatives made substantial contributions to policymaking for health equity. We presented a new conceptual model and 2 case studies to illustrate the connections among CBPR contexts and processes, policymaking processes and strategies, and outcomes. We extended the critical role of civic engagement by those communities that were most burdened by health inequities by focusing on their political participation as research brokers in bridging evidence and policymaking

Strategy and its discontents: the place of strategy in national policymaking

This paper presents a collection of views about the definition, role, purpose and health of strategic policymaking. Introduction One of the liveliest debates to have taken place on ASPI’s blog, The Strategist, concerned the place of strategy in Canberra’s policymaking community. It seems that there’s little consensus around what strategy’s core business should be, let alone who should practice it and whether indeed enough strategy is being done by DFAT, Defence or other parts of government. The 11 short pieces printed here by eight authors with quite diverse perspectives span a broad range of views about the definition, role, purpose and health of strategic policymaking. There’s no more important debate in public policy than on the place of strategy in meeting complex national challenges. This paper hopefully will encourage a more structured debate about strategy’s place at the heart of national policymaking

Public Participation Organizations and Open Policy:A Constitutional Moment for British Democracy?

This article builds on work in Science and Technology Studies and cognate disciplines concerning the institutionalization of public engagement and participation practices. It describes and analyses ethnographic qualitative research into one “organization of participation,” the UK government–funded Sciencewise program. Sciencewise’s interactions with broader political developments are explored, including the emergence of “open policy” as a key policy object in the UK context. The article considers what the new imaginary of openness means for institutionalized forms of public participation in science policymaking, asking whether this is illustrative of a “constitutional moment” in relations between society and science policymaking

Planning and Policymaking for Transit-Oriented Development, Transit, and Active Transport in California Cities

This report provides research findings from the first year of a two-year research project on patterns of local policymaking in California to support transit-oriented development (TOD), transit, and active transport. The project aims to assess motivations, perceived obstacles, and priorities for development near transit, in relation to patterns of local policy adoption, from the perspective of city planners in the state’s four largest regions: the San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento metropolitan areas. This first-stage report discusses research and policy context that informed the methodology, findings from the analysis of results from an online survey of city planning directors administered in the spring of 2019, and findings from two case studies of TOD policymaking in urban central cities, namely Los Angeles and Sacramento. A sampling methodology for conducting further case studies of TOD policymaking during the upcoming second phase of the project is also described, based on findings from the first year of the research.View the NCST Project Webpag

The Presence and Consequences of Abortion Aversion in Scientific Research Related to Alcohol Use during Pregnancy.

Recent research has found that most U.S. state policies related to alcohol use during pregnancy adversely impact health. Other studies indicate that state policymaking around substance use in pregnancy-especially in the U.S.-appears to be influenced by an anti-abortion agenda rather than by public health motivations. This commentary explores the ways that scientists' aversion to abortion appear to influence science and thus policymaking around alcohol and pregnancy. The three main ways abortion aversion shows up in the literature related to alcohol use during pregnancy include: (1) a shift from the recommendation of abortion for "severely chronic alcoholic women" to the non-acknowledgment of abortion as an outcome of an alcohol-exposed pregnancy; (2) the concern that recommendations of abstinence from alcohol use during pregnancy lead to terminations of otherwise wanted pregnancies; and (3) the presumption of abortion as a negative pregnancy outcome. Thus, abortion aversion appears to influence the science related to alcohol use during pregnancy, and thus policymaking-to the detriment of developing and adopting policies that reduce the harms from alcohol during pregnancy

Central Bank Independence, Democracy, and Dollarization

Is there a fundamental conflict between insulating monetary policy from popular pressures, seen as essential to sound monetary policy, and making policy responsive to the popular will, seen as fundamental to democracy? We argue that strongly independent monetary policy is not inconsistent with democratic control of policymaking, once one realizes that a key feature of democratic policymaking is the decision to remove some decisions from “day-to-day” political pressures. This is the essence of "constitutionalism," central to the functioning of democracy, by which certain decisions are made difficult to reverse. It is further argued that a conflict between popular sovereignty and policymaker independence is not unique to monetary policy, but actually characterizes most policymaking in a democracy, with institutions designed to insulate policymaking from popular pressures. A constitutional perspective implies that extreme forms of commitment, such as a dollarization, are similarly consistent with democracy. One argument for such constraints on monetary policy (as opposed to fiscal policy, for example) is agreement on what good monetary policy means.central bank independence; constitutional democracy; democratic control

Agriculture and Political Reform in Japan : The Koizumi Legacy

Given former Prime Minister Koizumis reformist zeal, agriculture might have been expected to be high on his list of targets for so-called structural reform. However, an investigation of the record of his administration on agricultural policy reveals only modest achievements in terms of policy innovation for agriculture and farm trade. To some extent Japans farming sector has been impacted by processes of fiscal reform and deregulation as well as cutbacks in rural public works. Koizumi-initiated reforms to the policymaking process have also served to reduce the power of individual ruling Liberal Democratic Party politicians as representatives of special interests. However, the bureaucratic, party and interest group actors within the agricultural policy community retain their independent policymaking authority over the farm sector. Furthermore, the vertically segmented nature of Japans policymaking process will continue to limit the possibility of trade-offs between agriculture and business over issues such as Free Trade Agreements (FTAs).agriculture, Political Reform, Japan

Interjurisdictional Spillovers, Decentralized Policymaking and the Elasticity of Capital Supply

This paper points to the important role which the elasticity of aggregate capital supply with respect to the net rate of return to capital plays for the efficiency of policymaking in a decentralized economy with mobile capital and spillovers among jurisdictions. In accordance with previous studies, we show that under the assumption of a fixed capital supply (zero capital supply elasticity) the decentralized policy choice is optimal. If the capital supply elasticity is strictly positive, however, capital tax rates are inefficiently low in the decentralized equilibrium.decentralized policymaking, spillovers, capital supply elasticity

Mergers and acquisitions in TV production, aggregation and distribution: challenges for competition, industrial and media policy

This paper focuses on the recent wave of M&A activity, both vertical and horizontal in TV production, aggregation and distribution industries, and discusses the implications of M&A activity for competition, industrial and media policymaking. Moreover, it aspires to set a forward-looking perspective on the regulation of M&A in the TV industry. It is argued that while EU competition policy has difficulties to fully grasp anti-competitive effects resulting from vertical M&A activity in particular, industrial and media-specific policies dealing with the creation of an economically and culturally sustainable, European broadcasting and distribution sector are virtually absent from national and European policy agendas. It is particular in the latter two domains of policymaking that policy action is necessary