Helen Ingram

Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications for Politics and Policy.

We argue that the social construction of target populations is an important, albeit overlooked, political phenomenon that should take its place in the study of public policy by political scientists. The theory contends that social constructions influence the policy agenda and the selection of policy tools, as well as the rationales that legitimate policy choices. Constructions become embedded in policy as messages that are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations and participation. The theory is important because it helps explain why some groups are advantaged more than others independently of traditional notions of political power and how policy designs reinforce or alter such advantages. An understanding of social constructions of target populations augments conventional hypotheses about the dynamics of policy change, the determination of beneficiaries and losers, the reasons for differing levels and types of participation among target groups, and the role of policy in democracy.

Improving Implementation Through Framing Smarter Statutes

Statutory design is the source of many problems encountered in implementation, yet policy scholars have not made much headway in providing coherent and consistent advice for framing smarter statutes. There is a great deal of disagreement about how much discretion statutes should leave to implementers, and four distinct and conflicting schools of thought have emerged. This article advises that none of the perspectives is always correct and patterns for allocating discretion should take into account the implementation context. Contexts vary from statute to statute and may change for different policy elements within particular policies. The core elements in policy content are identified and linked in a scheme that is more comprehensive and relevant to policy results than previous work. The article also provides a ‘value-added’ conception of implementation in which the extent of discretion exercised by implementers is measured by changes they make in the core elements of policy.

The Importance of Context: Integrating Resource Conservation with Local Institutions

This article focuses on the manner by which resource management regimes, often conceived far away from their areas of application, are integrated into the local institutions, practices, and social structures of a place. This process of contextualization may be especially critical where, for reasons of resource scarcity, remoteness, or system complexity, the state cannot engage in effective program management. The thesis of the article is that if the program is to be sustainable, contextualization may be necessary and, moreover, can induce profound changes in the form and function of the original program. This process can lead to a type of governance that operates through webs of social relationships rather than hierarchical and bureaucratic lines of authority. We use this mode of analysis to show how a unique and viable species conservation program evolved on the Turtle Islands, Philippines, how the process of contextualization transformed it, and why it all unraveled.

Boundaries seen and unseen Resolving Transboundary Groundwater Problems

Abstract International groundwater problems represent a distinct and important category of transboundary groundwater problems, but not all transboundary groundwaters are international. This paper considers transboundary groundwater problems in both intranational and international settings. First, difficulties attending the resolution of transboundary groundwater problems are identified, with intranational and international setting compared as general categories. Second, a set of intranational transboundary groundwater problems in the U.S. setting of southern California is compared with the analysis and recommendations that have emerged in the literature of recent decades on international transboundary groundwaters. The purpose of these comparisons of intranational with international transboundary groundwater problems is to more fully identify and understand what is, and is not, special about the challenges of resolving international groundwater problems. While international transboundary problems require the involvement (and in many instances the development) of different institutional arrangements, there are sound reasons to believe that in both international and intranational settings, the processes by which problem resolution is achieved may be more important than the content of the resolution.

The Political Economy of Regional Water Institutions

Water experts, prominent among them resource economists, typically suggest a unified regional organization as the appropriate institutional approach to an entire range of problems. Yet, the performance of multistate regional organizations has been disappointing. It is argued here that failure of regional institutions to innovate is largely determined by the restraints imposed by political viability. The article describes the political environment of regional organizations and the incentives and disincentives for various interests to associate themselves with regional organizations. Finally, various possible strategies whereby a regional organization can build support are outlined.

Traversing Boundaries: a Public Policy Approach To the Analysis of Foreign Policy

HT HIS article traverses boundaries in two different senses: the conceputal division between foreign and other policy, and the political dividing line between the United States and Mexico. The ideas and frameworks used by scholars of public policy and foreign policy have remained separate even though complex interdependence has come to characterize world politics, and the line between domestic and international affairs has blurred (Hanreider 1970; Keohane and Nye 1977). Public policy scholars have mainly focused on domestic issues and rarely upon foreign policy. For their part, foreign policy scholars have noted and developed theories about the extent to which domestic politics has become mixed with international relations but have not generally utilized public policy categories and insights. This gap in analysis is unfortunate for the understanding of foreign policies with strong domestic implications. Among such policies are those related to bi-national problems arising between nations that share a boundary. The two thousand mile long boundary between the United States and Mexico has a profound impact on U.S. policy toward Mexico which causes it to be different from U.S. policy concerning most other nations except, perhaps, Canada. United States/Mexico relations present an extreme example of complex interdependence, where multiple channels link societies, multiple issues exist that are not arranged in any clear or consistent hierarchy, and military force is not used as an instrument of foreign policy (Keohane and Nye 1977: 24-29). Reflecting this multifaceted and complex relationship between the two countries, U.S. policy toward Mexico generally has lacked coherence and consistency (Bagley 1981). However, no conceptual framework yet exists to order and explain how and why a variety of policies arise. The large body of literature on border studies is expecially rich in explaining social and political behavior, and in documenting the handling of specific issues through individual case studies. U.S./Mexico scholars have found it difficult, however, to derive general rules that explain the particulars of inconsistent U.S. policy.

What’s the story? Creating and sustaining environmental networks

Networks have been embraced as appropriate means for environmental governance because of their potential inclusivity, flexibility, resilience, and ability to comprehend multiple values and ways of knowing. Analysis of networks, however, falls short of accounting for the emergence and persistence of these innovative and complex modes of governance, as well as their failures. We offer a framework for using narrative to understand and evaluate networks. We understand networks to be sets of relationships, between humans and also between humans and their environment, that define and guide behaviour. Narrative is a constitutive element of these networks; narrative and network are co-produced. Narrative analysis enables a critical investigation of environmental action and policy that at the same time captures the variety of environmental relationships and associated meanings and emotions that can inspire collaborative behaviour. Using a case study of the development of alternative agriculture in the United States, we provide a methodology for investigating ‘narrative-networks’ that affords deeper explanations of how and why emergent, often informal and unlikely, environmental networks endure over time.

You Never Miss the Water till the Well Runs Dry: Crisis and Creativity in California

Water resource management in California is a complicated business. The San Francisco Bay Delta in northern California supports the state’s largest habitat for fish and wildlife and provides a nursery and migration corridor for two-thirds of the state’s salmon. It also contains Suisun Marsh, the largest contiguous salt-water marsh in the United States. The systems that were built to serve California’s increasing population — dams, canals, pipelines, and so on — attempt to regularize and borrow water from these natural systems.1 Indeed, two-thirds of California’s residents, the majority of whom are in southern California — some 600 miles away — receive some or all of their drinking water from the San Francisco Bay Delta, and its waters irrigate over 200 types of crops which, between them, produce 45 per cent of the United States’ fruits and vegetables. Huge quantities of water are also moved (by federal, not state, projects) across the desert from the Colorado River. In addition to all these transfers, water that originates in the Owens Valley comes east through the mountains to Los Angeles, and some of southern California’s water comes northwards from Mexico.

Scientists and Agenda Setting: Advocacy and Global Warming

The important contribution that scientists make to agenda setting has not been sufficiently recognized in scholarly literature. The students of agenda setting have only recently come to realize the importance of ideas that come from sources outside the government. There has been little research that identifies the scientific community as a source of agenda topics. While there is a large literature devoted to the relationship between science and government, it has generally been concluded that there is no scientific elite with an undue influence upon government. Instead, the principal concern has been the perversion of science by politics. The activity of subgroups of scientists acting as entrepreneurs to set the public agenda on topics in which they have a strong interest has not been widely acknowledged.

Modeling the commons as a game with vector payoffs

Since Hardin first formulated the tragedy of the commons, researchers have described various ways that commons problems are solved, all based on the model of individual rationality. Invariably, these institutional solutions involve creating some system of property rights. We formulate an alternative model, one not founded on property rights but on decision-making around so-called vector payoffs. The model is formalized and an existence proof provided. The new model is shown to be effective in explaining some anomalous results (e.g., unanticipated cooperation) in the experimental games literature that run counter to the rational model. We then use the case of the buffalo commons to illustrate how the new model affords alternative explanations for examples like the rise and fall of the buffalo herds in the Great Plains. We find the vector payoff model to complement, though not displace, that of individual rationality.