Peter J. May

Policy Learning and Failure

Multiple knowledges are available for utilisation in policy choice. The rank ordering of knowledges for use in decisionmaking is thus a fundamental predecision. This article shows how this predecision necessarily constrains the processes associated with a politics of ideas, using cases from American international commodity policy. Even when the supposed preconditions of this sort of politics are present, policy change did not occur when the proposed ideas arose from a knowledge accorded secondary status in policymaking circles. Several implications are discussed for the influence and the study of ideational politics. Ultimately, the politics of ideas, so often portrayed through cases of innovation, may be quite conservative, contained by knowledge hierarchies which reflect prior politicaxl circumstances.

Environmental management and governance: intergovernmental approaches to hazards and sustainability.

Problems for environmental management are taking on a new urgency. This book addresses aspects of environmental management that raise fundamental questions about governmental roles and the relationship of humans to the environment. It examines the interaction of local and national governments and the strengths and weaknesses of co-operative vs. coercive environmental management, through a focus on the management of natural hazards. Leading experts in the field examine new and innovative environmental management and planning programmes with particular focus on North America and Australia. This book offers a new understanding of environmental problems and explores the appropriate policy mix that must be developed for environmental management to strive towards environmental sustainability.

Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery

Whenever a major earthquake strikes or a hurricane unleashes its fury, the devastating results fill our television screens and newspapers. Mary C. Comerio is interested in what happens in the weeks and months after such disasters, particularly in the recovery of damaged housing. Through case studies of six recent urban disasters--Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, Hurricane Andrew in Florida, the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes in California, as well as earthquakes in Mexico City and Kobe, Japan--Comerio demonstrates that several fundamental factors have changed in contemporary urban disasters. The foremost change is in scale, and as more Americans move to the two coasts, future losses will continue to be formidable because of increased development in these high-hazard areas. Moreover, the visibility of disasters in the news media will assure that response efforts remain highly politicized. And finally, the federal government is now expected to be on the scene with personnel, programs, and financial assistance even as private insurance companies are withdrawing disaster coverage from homeowners in earthquake- and hurricane-prone regions. Demonstrating ways that existing recovery systems are inadequate, Comerio proposes a rethinking of what recovery means, a comprehensive revision of the governments role, and more equitable programs for construction financing. She offers new criteria for a housing recovery policy as well as real financial incentives for preparedness, for limiting damage before disasters occur, and for providing a climate where private insurance can work. Her careful analysis makes this book important reading for policymakers, property owners, and anyone involved in disaster mitigation.

Reconsidering Policy Design: Policies and Publics

One of the emerging areas in the public policy literature concerns new modes of thought about the construction and analysis of public policy. This article extends notions about politics within the ‘policy design’ literature by considering the implications of different political environments for policy design and implementation. Two different political environments – policies with and without publics – that form ends of a continuum of policy publics are discussed. A contrast is drawn between these two polar political environments with respect to differing policy design and implementation challenges, as well as with respect to differing opportunities for policy learning.

Reconsidering Styles of Regulatory Enforcement: Patterns in Danish Agro-Environmental Inspection

This study addresses enforcement styles of regulatory inspectors, based on an examination of the municipal enforcement of agro-environmental policies in Denmark. Our findings make three contributions to the regulatory literature. One contribution is to add empirical support for theorizing about inspectors enforcement styles as consisting of multiple components, rather than a single continuum. We show that inspectors enforcement styles comprise the degree of formalism and the degree of coercion that they exercise when carrying out inspections. A second contribution is in showing the relationship of different types of enforcement styles to the two underlying dimensions of the concept. A third contribution is an examination of the ways in which inspectors enforcement styles relate to their enforcement actions. The consistency of our findings with those of other studies suggests that the dimensions and types of inspectors enforcement styles that we observed in Denmark can be generalized to other settings.

Improving Compliance with Regulations: Choices and Outcomes for Local Government

Abstract Several recent reviews of development and environmental management programs have found shortfalls in compliance. In this article, we examine the critical choices planning administrators must make to improve compliance. We also offer suggestions about what they can do to ensure that contractors, builders, and developers follow the regulations once they have been adopted. Using data collected from a national sample of cities and counties, we find that improving compliance is not simply a matter of enhancing the capacity to detect and correct violations. We show that it also entails steps to increase the willingness of the private sector to comply with regulations voluntarily. Such steps include making greater use of incentives and employing techniques to facilitate compliance.

Making Sense Out of Regulatory Enforcement

This study of enforcement of building codes addresses two issues in the growing body of research about regulatory enforcement. One issue is the definition of key concepts. We undertake empirical analyses to clarify distinctions between enforcement philosophy and strategy. We identify two enforcement philosophies that underlie agency actions and that are consistent with prior theorizing. A second issue is the distinction between descriptions of stylized enforcement strategies and what actually happens in practice. We find that code enforcement agencies vary in the degree to which they have embraced the two enforcement philosophies. This, in turn, leads them to pursue one of three different enforcement strategies that we identify. Two of these – what we term strict enforcement and creative enforcement– correspond to previous conceptualizations. The third strategy, which is also one of the most frequently used, is an accommodative enforcement strategy found where enforcement philosophies are highly unsystematic, are only moderately facilitative, and entail little overall agency effort.

Mandate design and implementation: Enhancing implementation efforts and shaping regulatory styles

This research addresses the influence of mandate design upon implementation efforts and regulatory styles. Empirical analyses of these relationships are conducted for state-level land-use and development-management mandates enacted by California, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington. Three key findings provide insights about the role of mandate design in facilitating policy implementation. First, implementation efforts are more easily influenced than regulatory styles. Second, it is more difficult to foster conciliatory regulatory styles than it is to foster more legalistic styles. Third, a high degree of statutory coherence is not a necessary condition for strong implementation efforts. More generally, the findings show that policy designers can enhance implementation efforts and shape regulatory styles by altering key mandate features.

Coercive versus cooperative policies: Comparing intergovernmental mandate performance

Cooperative policies hold out promise of an improvement over coercive mandates as ways to enhance implementation of intergovernmental programs. By treating subordinate governments as regulatory trustees and emphasizing substantive compliance, the cooperative mandates avoid the onerous aspects of heavy-handed regulatory federalism. Our comparison of state hazard-mitigation policy in Florida and in New South Wales, Australia addresses procedural and substantive compliance under the two forms of intergovernmental policies. When local governments are not committed to state policy objectives, the coercive policy produces better results as evidenced by higher rates of procedural compliance and greater effort by local governments to achieve policy objectives. When local government commitment exists, the cooperative policy produces substantive results that are at least the equivalent to the coercive policy. Moreover, over the long run cooperative policies may have greater promise in sustaining local government commitment. The dilemma is to figure out how to motivate lagging jurisdictions that seem to require a coercive policy, while not straightjacketing leading jurisdictions that are capable of thriving under a cooperative regime.

Addressing public risks: Federal earthquake policy design

This article considers the design of federal earthquake policy as an illustration of the difficulties of addressing “public risks” when public indifference, despite general awareness of the risks, is the norm. The present federal earthquake policy attempts to overcome this indifference through strategies aimed at building local governmental commitment to risk reduction and improving nonfederal capacity to implement risk reduction programs. Because of the fundamental difficulties in influencing actions among less capable and willing jurisdictions, federal efforts have resulted in disjunctive impacts among seismic prone regions. Some “leading” communities have become more prepared, while other “lagging” communities in the same region fall further behind. The preferred approach for overcoming these gaps entails a mix of federally backed earthquake insurance coupled with development of local regulatory standards. More generally, strategies for addressing public risks entail modification of the policy tools for addressing such “private risks” as crime and job-related accidents. The changes involve mechanisms that shift from individual responsibility to shared responsibility for addressing the risks.