The role of expertise in policy development: Towards a De-carbonized British road transport Infrastructure

Boundedly rational policy specialists simultaneously interact, learn and adapt their behaviour and the rules that guide them. Collective structures and norms incrementally change along the way. The research presented in this paper further investigates the possibility of a reciprocal causal relationship between the emergence of policy specialists’ generic understanding of a decision situation and the development of collective structures from a realist perspective. Of particular interest is how expertise on techno-scientific and ecological issues enters into and influences this process. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) guides the investigation. The ACF describes the ways in which fundamental policy core beliefs concerning strategies to deliver ontological axioms could lead to conflict, coordination and collective action. Furthermore the ACF explains how perturbations external to the system, and learning processes within the system, might change how individuals with an interest in the policy area perceive a decision situation and possibly alter the relations between them. The empirical work in this investigation develops on Dudley and Richardson’s ACF-based study of British road transport policy. Their study described the links between policy-oriented learning and change towards a more sustainable approach to road transport in the 1990s. This investigation is a longitudinal, record-based, micro-level study into how policy specialists, who share a common interest in the case, exchanged, utilized and readjusted their expertise over the period between January 1988 and December 2011. Social network analysis was used to identify case relevant specialists and the relational structure between them. The method to transcribe their policy core beliefs from archival records follows Axelrod (1976). Citations made verbally during policy development were recorded, to map and closely examine cases in which one individual evidently influenced the expertise of another

Digital pioneers in rural regional development: A bibliometric analysis of digitalisation and leadership

While research into digitalisation in cities has grown strongly in recent years, rural areas have now also clearly shifted into the focus of attention. An important strand of research into digitalisation in rural areas can be described as agency perspectives. Current studies point to the driving, transformative force of key figures, for example social entrepreneurs, smart villagers or spatial pioneers. At heart, these studies propose that paths for collective action can be developed via key figures, thus generating ways to change established rules and norms. This paper represents a methodological contribution to this strand of research by subjecting the debate on leadership through key figures to a quantitative, bibliometric analysis, on the basis of which a heuristic is proposed in order to develop relevant research questions. Based on different strands of discourse, our results show that unequal spatial development ismanifested in an urban bias, but also demonstrate the potential of the growing research field in rural regional development.Während das Forschungsfeld zu Digitalisierung in Städten zuletzt stark angewachsen ist, rücken nun auch ländliche Räume deutlich in den Fokus. Ein wichtiger Forschungsstrang zur Digitalisierung in ländlich geprägten Räumen kann als agency perspective beschrieben werden. Aktuelle Studien verweisen auf die treibende transformative Kraft von Schlüsselfiguren, beispielsweise social entrepreneurs, smart villagers oder spatial pioneers. Sie vertreten im Kern die Annahme, dass über Schlüsselfiguren Pfade für gemeinschaftliches Handeln entwickelt werden und es so zu Veränderungen in den bestehenden Regelwerken und Normen kommen kann. Dieser Aufsatz leistet einen methodischen Beitrag zu diesem Forschungsstrang, indem er über eine quantitative bibliometrische Analyse die englischsprachige Debatte zu leadership durch Schlüsselfiguren analysiert und daran folgend eine Heuristik vorschlägt, um Fragen zu entwickeln. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen anhand unterschiedlicher Diskursstränge die ungleiche räumliche Entwicklung im Sinne eines urban bias, aber auch das Potenzial eines wachsenden Forschungsfeldes in der ländlichen Regionalentwicklung auf

Measuring the Use of Knowledge in Policy Development

Public hearings are frequently used on all levels of government to systematically collect and analyze information in the early stages of legislative policymaking. The methods currently employed measure knowledge utilization in this context by means of citation analysis of edited articles and/or reports that summarize the information shared at these meetings. By combining citation analysis and social network analysis, this article develops a methodology that can be used to capture citations in transcripts of public hearings that precede these reports. In order to demonstrate its strengths and weaknesses, the method is utilized to analyze the 2009 hearings that informed the 2010 House of Commons Transport Committee report on developing the capacity of major roads in the United Kingdom to meet the country’s strategic transport needs. The research shows a good degree of consistency between two independent coders who employed this method to distinguish citations from non-citations and classify the data. It is concluded that the method can be utilized to reliably measure knowledge utilization at public hearings, and that it can be employed in conjunction with research that focuses on measuring citations in memos, briefings, articles or reports integrating some of the evidence given at these meetings.publishe

Insights from ‘policy learning’ on how to enhance the use of evidence by policymakers

This article uses the policy-oriented learning literature to provide practical insights on how to enhance the use of evidence by policymakers. After a short introduction to the field, this article presents four steps to understanding and responding to policy learning. First, all people interpret the world through the lens of their beliefs, and learn by combining heuristics and analytical processing. Second, people learn in different ways according to their roles. A novice would not be advised to learn about a specialist isue in the same way as a scientist. Instead, a modified communication strategy would be used to ensure understanding and uptake of evidence. Third, learning is a political process: we interact with our social environment and some actors—including entrepreneurs and brokers—influence the process more than others. Therefore, to encourage learning from scientific evidence we need to move beyond communication towards entrepreneurship and brokerage roles. In other words, policy-oriented learning is as much about interaction and leadership as information.publishe

Learning in post-recession framing contests : changing UK road policy

Based on a longitudinal case study on the frame contest in British trunk road policy from 1980 till 2011, the chapter draws on Heikkila and Gerlak’s (2013) collective learning framework and highlights the need to understand the link between various aspects of the collective learning process and learning products on different collective levels.publishe

Looking Beyond the Plan and Understanding the Process : Lessons from Rea Vaya

African cities have to manage rapid urbanization and mobilization to decrease road congestion and air pollution that hinder economic development and social cohesion. This paper presents public policy research that applied the concepts and language of Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis Development (IAD) framework to systematically describe the implementation of sustainable public transport policies in the Greater Johannesburg Area/South Africa. This mixed-method study focuses, in particular, on the process of developing a single trunk route of the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit system (Phase 1A).publishe

Evaluating learning spaces in flood risk management in Germany : Lessons for governance research

Efforts to collaboratively manage the risk of flooding are ultimately based on individuals learning about risks, the decision process, and the effectiveness of decisions made in prior situations. This article argues that much can be learned about a governance setting by explicitly evaluating the relationships through which influential individuals and their immediate contacts receive and send information to one another. We define these individuals as “brokers,” and the networks that emerge from their interactions as “learning spaces.” The aim of this article is to develop strategies to identify and evaluate the properties of a broker's learning space that are indicative of a collaborative flood risk management arrangement. The first part of this article introduces a set of indicators, and presents strategies to employ this list so as to systematically identify brokers, and compare their learning spaces. The second part outlines the lessons from an evaluation that explored cases in two distinct flood risk management settings in Germany. The results show differences in the observed brokers' learning spaces. The contacts and interactions of the broker in Baden‐Württemberg imply a collaborative setting. In contrast, learning space of the broker in North Rhine‐Westphalia lacks the same level of diversity and polycentricity.publishe

Impact of Scientific Scrutiny after the 2016 Braunsbach Flash Flood on Flood-Risk Management in the State of Baden-Württemberg, Germany

This paper presents interdisciplinary research focusing on the municipality of Braunsbach in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, where, in May 2016, a flash flood attracted media attention and scientific scrutiny that highlighted the fact that certain aspects of flood risk were overlooked during earlier assessments conducted by the municipality, such as sediment transport. Using a network analysis and a focus-group discussion, we traced the flow of knowledge through the reported interactions between governmental, private, and academic actors in the two and a half years after the event. From our analysis, we learned that the extreme event attracted scientists to the formal and informal assessment of the hazard and the associated damages. Most importantly, we found conditions under which scientific scrutiny is not detached from but becomes integrated in a governance setting. While it is through this process that sediment transport has become an integral part of flood-risk management in Baden-Württemberg, with an evident impact on the measures already implemented, the impact of morphological changes, as well as large wood and sediment transport, have not been factored into the risk assessment as of yet. These variations in scientific impact on the assessment can be explained by decision biases that can occur when decision makers are under pressure to tackle vulnerabilities and thus lack the time to deliberate in a way that uses all the available evidence.publishe

Evaluating learning spaces in flood risk management in Germany: Lessons for governance research

Efforts to collaboratively manage the risk of flooding are ultimately based on individuals learning about risks, the decision process, and the effectiveness of decisions made in prior situations. This article argues that much can be learned about a governance setting by explicitly evaluating the relationships through which influential individuals and their immediate contacts receive and send information to one another. We define these individuals as “brokers,” and the networks that emerge from their interactions as “learning spaces.” The aim of this article is to develop strategies to identify and evaluate the properties of a broker's learning space that are indicative of a collaborative flood risk management arrangement. The first part of this article introduces a set of indicators, and presents strategies to employ this list so as to systematically identify brokers, and compare their learning spaces. The second part outlines the lessons from an evaluation that explored cases in two distinct flood risk management settings in Germany. The results show differences in the observed brokers' learning spaces. The contacts and interactions of the broker in Baden‐Württemberg imply a collaborative setting. In contrast, learning space of the broker in North Rhine‐Westphalia lacks the same level of diversity and polycentricity.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659MWK Baden‐Württember