In the arena of salmon recovery policy, stakeholders often propose that science should guide policy, frame their positions in scientific terms, and construct scientific arguments to support their positions. However, there are also appeals to involve citizens more thoroughly in policymaking. An important step in bringing science and citizens together is to investigate how citizens understand the...

Introduction At the start of a complex negotiation process, the relevant issues and actors to join the negotiation process have to be identified. Although the need to identify issues and actors for negotiations has been acknowledged (Lim 1999, Thiessen Loucks and Stedinger 1998, Rangaswamy and Shell 1997) and discussed (Keeney 1992) in the literature on decision making and negotiation analysis,...

This dissertation explores and analyses the challenges and needs that developments in the information society are bringing to knowledge production supporting policy development and strategic decision making in the field of transport. Currently, the context of transport policies is about to shift from a transport infrastructure network design towards the development of a large socio-technical sy...

background the unregulated availability and irrational use of tuberculosis (tb) medicines is a major issue of public health concern globally. governments of many low- and middle-income countries (lmics) have committed to regulating the quality and availability of tb medicines, but with variable success. regulation of tb medicines remains an intractable challenge in many settings, but the reason...

In many states and localities, citizens make laws by initiative. Many winning initiatives, however, are later ignored or altered substantially. Why? Our answer emerges from two underappreciated aspects of the initiative process. First, many initiatives contain policies that powerful governmental actors once prevented from passing via traditional legislative channels. Second, implementation can ...

Francis Fukuyama (2004.42) wrote "... today, the claim that institutions are the key development variable is already part of conventional wisdom." In recent years, the focus of analysis has moved from the contents of public policy towards the ways of doing politics. While it is still crucial to succeed in the design of each specific policy, what matters fundamentally now is how the whole cycle ...

Dynamic Actor Network Analysis (DANA) is a software-supported method that aims to enhance an analyst’s capacity for reflection on a policy issue as a subjective social construct. The problem perceptions of actors in a policy network are represented as “perception graphs”: causal maps that show relations between goals, policy actions and external influences. Assuming rational choice, the DANA so...

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a ...

Preliminary references to the Court of Justice for the European Union are unevenly distributed across the EU, creating differing access to justice for European citizens. This study presents case studies of the UK and France, exploring factors affecting rates of social policy preliminary references from 1996-2009. The UK had a rate twice that of France. What accounts for this difference? Analysi...