Under the federal structure of the United States government, states play a central role in interpreting and implementing national social policies. Understanding the processes that shape state-level social policy decisions is therefore important for understanding whether national commitments to low-income citizens are realized in practice. Within the political science literature, scholars have d...

This article focuses on two broad groups of actors, international NGOs (INGOs) and international consultancy companies (ICCs), and situates them within wider trends in aid and development policies. In the context of a neo-liberal policy agenda, many leading INGOs reorganised so that they became closer to emerging ICCs, as consulting, outsourcing, and sub-contracting became key features of aid a...

In Uganda, environmental and natural resource management is decentralized and has been the responsibility of local districts since 1996. This environmental management arrangement was part of a broader decentralization process and was intended to increase local ownership and improve environmental policy; however, its implementation has encountered several major challenges over the last decade. T...

In this paper, we present a formal model, named PobSAM (Policy-based Self-Adaptive Model), for modeling self-adaptive systems. In this model, policies are used as a mechanism to direct and adapt the behavior of self-adaptive systems. A PobSAM model consists of a set of self-managed modules(SMM). An SMM is a collection of autonomous managers and managed actors. Managed actors are dedicated to fu...

INTRODUCTION Achieving health equity is a pertinent need of the developing health systems. Though policy process is crucial for planning and attaining health equity, the existing evidences on policy processes are scanty in this regard. This article explores the magnitude, determinants, challenges and prospects of 'health equity approach' in various health policy processes in the Indian State of...

among the many reasons that may limit the adoption of promising reform ideas, policy capacity is the least recognized. the concept itself is not widely understood. although policy capacity is concerned with the gathering of information and the formulation of options for public action in the initial phases of policy consultation and development, it also touches on all stages of the policy proces...

India’s patent reforms represent a shift in India’s policy from one of enormous opposition to revising patent laws according to the WTO, to one of compliance with many aspects of TRIPs (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement. Industry and civil society had a strong interest in blocking reforms on IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights), and initially played an important role in preve...

Policy Coordination in an Ecology of Water Management Games Mark Lubell, UC Davis, [email protected] Garry Robins, Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne Peng Wang, Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne AJPS, First Submission Abstract Policy outcomes in all but the simplest policy systems emerge from a complex of ecology of games featuring multiple actors, governance insti...