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Governments and international organizations increasingly pursue the development of integrated policy strategies to govern persistent societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional jurisdictions. In spite of the risi...
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Governments and international organizations increasingly pursue the development of integrated policy strategies to govern persistent societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional jurisdictions. In spite of the rising popularity of such integrated strategies, little is known about their effects. Although it is generally assumed that integrated strategies result in better outcomes, the evidence base to support this claim is sparse. This is not to say that no attempts to study the relationship between integrated strategies and policy outcomes have been undertaken at all; this paper presents a research synthesis of the fragmented evidence base. Eligible studies are interpreted and discussed by using a heuristic that distinguishes between programmatic and political success and failure. Apart from synthesizing the impacts that integrated strategies have had, the paper reflects on associated explanatory conditions and methodological approaches that have been used. The review almost exclusively finds reports of failure and constraining conditions. At the same time, methodological approaches are found to be largely unconvincing and considerable research gaps remain. The paper, therefore, ends with a nuanced answer to the question of whether integrated strategies are worth pursuing and sets out various avenues for further research.
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Increased recognition of the persistent and interconnected nature of food system challenges resulted in the creation of the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP) in 2015. MUFPP signatory cities commit themselves to contribute to a ...
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Increased recognition of the persistent and interconnected nature of food system challenges resulted in the creation of the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact (MUFPP) in 2015. MUFPP signatory cities commit themselves to contribute to a better functioning food system by adopting integrated approaches. This study assesses the number of MUFPP cities that have developed food strategies and the choices local policymakers make in the design of these strategies. The results show surprising similarities between cities across regions in terms of goals and instruments. At the same time, local governments clearly put different emphases and seem to vary in policy styles.
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Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional government sectors and levels, including climate ch...
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Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional government sectors and levels, including climate change, food insecurity, terrorism, and the instability of financial markets. Public policy scholars have recently suggested to study such attempts by conceptualizing policy integration as a multi-dimensional process. Although such a processual perspective has helped to comparatively assess policy (dis)integration, the mechanisms of (dis)integration over time remain undertheorized. Past studies have reported a number of relevant factors, but these have remained rather functionalistic observations that lack explanatory value. To address this gap, we propose a mechanism-based approach that uncovers the political processes that underlie policy (dis)integration over time. Rooted in different strands of social science literature, the mechanistic approach offers a model of causation to assess the plausible chain of key processes that are triggered under particular contextual conditions. We illustrate the framework by empirically investigating the mechanisms that explain the policy (dis)integration of food and climate change adaptation policy in the Netherlands. We end the paper with discussing various implications of our findings for processual approaches to policy integration.
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The role of policy integration in the governance of cross-cutting policy problems has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Nevertheless, the concept of policy (dis)integration is still under theorized, particu...
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The role of policy integration in the governance of cross-cutting policy problems has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. Nevertheless, the concept of policy (dis)integration is still under theorized, particularly regarding its inherent processual nature. The main argument of this paper is that policy integration should be understood as a process that entails various elements that do not necessarily move in a concerted manner but may develop at different paces or even in opposite directions. To study such dynamic integration pathways, the paper proposes a multi-dimensional framework. Drawing on existing literature, the framework distinguishes four dimensions of integration: (1) policy frame, (2), subsystem involvement, (3) policy goals, and (4) policy instruments. For each of these dimensions, we describe different manifestations that are associated with lesser or more advanced degrees of policy integration within a governance system. Apart from offering an innovative theoretical approach that does justice to the dynamic and oftentimes asynchronous nature of integration processes, the framework allows for holding decision-makers accountable for promises they make about enhancing policy integration. Simultaneously, it is argued that the merit of lower degrees of integration should not be underestimated, as these may sometimes be the most feasible or appropriate for the governance of a cross-cutting problem.
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Policy integration has come to be known as the Holy Grail of public policy. Given the increased complexity of societal problems, academics and policymakers alike have called for better integrated governance approaches to deal with...
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Policy integration has come to be known as the Holy Grail of public policy. Given the increased complexity of societal problems, academics and policymakers alike have called for better integrated governance approaches to deal with these problems more effectively. Despite the intuitive appeal of these calls, pursuing policy integration may not always be expedient, as it comes with significant costs and pitfalls. So far, the question of when pursuing policy integration may be considered opportune has remained largely unaddressed in the public policy literature. This article takes up this question and addresses it by discussing two interrelated elements: the desirability and the feasibility of policy integration. The former is reflected upon by synthesizing the main pros and cons that emerge from previous studies. The latter is addressed by proposing a heuristic that evaluates policy integration possibilities based on two key determinants: integrative capacity and leadership. Together, the synthesis and heuristic can serve as a point of departure for more critical reflections on pushes for more policy integration and on how to allocate scarce resources. The other way around, the heuristic allows policy entrepreneurs pushing for integrated "solutions" to focus their attention on the variables that matter most.
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The European Commission has emphasised that a more resilient farming sector is required to better respond to current and future economic, societal, and environmental challenges. Consequently, supporting resilience has become an im...
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The European Commission has emphasised that a more resilient farming sector is required to better respond to current and future economic, societal, and environmental challenges. Consequently, supporting resilience has become an important aim of the proposals of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020. However, interactions between public policies and resilience outcomes have hardly been researched in-depth. This study analyses whether and how the CAP and its national implementations enable or constrain the resilience of farming systems. For this purpose, we introduce the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT): a heuristic that conceptualises how policy outputs enable or constrain farming systems' resilience. The tool consists of three dimensions (robustness, adaptability, and transformability) with four indicators each. The ResAT is applied to a Dutch case study: the intensive arable farming system in De Veenkoloniedn. We conclude that the CAP and its national implementation strongly support the robustness of this farming system, but that the policy enables adaptability much less and rather constrains transformability. The article ends with a reflection on how the application of the ResAT allows for new insights into how EU agricultural policies influence the resilience of farming systems.
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In order to foster a transition of the food system toward more sustainable outcomes, scholars have increasingly pointed at the need for organizing strengthened food democracy. By increasing the participation of citizens and food s...
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In order to foster a transition of the food system toward more sustainable outcomes, scholars have increasingly pointed at the need for organizing strengthened food democracy. By increasing the participation of citizens and food system actors, democratic innovations, such as food policy councils, are believed to promote the quality and legitimacy of food policymaking. However, the question of whether and how food democracy initiatives do indeed contribute to more democratic modes of governance largely remains unexplored. This study addresses this gap by performing a systematic literature review of the existing scholarship on food democracy, assessing democratic innovations for their contributions to four democratic goods: inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment and transparency. The analysis shows that food democracy initiatives tend to be dominated by organized interests, have more influence on agenda-setting and implementation compared to decision-making, and generally aim for some form of deliberation or knowledge exchange. The precise selection mechanisms, processes and quality of deliberation, and transparency of democratic innovations remain important research gaps. The paper ends with a plea to better connect food democracy scholarship with the broader political sciences, as well as various suggestions for future research.
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To overcome pressing food system challenges, academics and civil society actors have called for the development of integrated food policies. Municipalities have increasingly picked up on these calls by developing municipal food st...
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To overcome pressing food system challenges, academics and civil society actors have called for the development of integrated food policies. Municipalities have increasingly picked up on these calls by developing municipal food strategies. It remains unclear, however, whether and how these commitments have resulted in a genuine institutionalization of food governance across local administrations. We address this gap through an in-depth study of how food governance ideas were institutionalized in the Dutch municipality of Ede, which is considered a frontrunner in municipal food policy. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, we explore how actors, ideas and discourses mutually shaped the institutionalization process. Our analysis shows that food governance ideas were institutionalized following a discursive-institutional spiral of three stages. First, an abstract food profile discourse emerged, which was institutionalized exclusively amongst a small group of policy makers. In the second stage, the discourse shifted to a more elaborate integrated food policy discourse, which was institutionalized across various departments. Finally, a food system discourse emerged, which was institutionalized across an even broader range of policy departments. Our study suggests that integrated food policy can be institutionalized within a relatively short time span. A food strategy, budget and organizational innovations seem key in this process, although they can also be constraining. At the same time, we conclude that retaining a food policy institutionalized remains challenging, as sudden ideational change may cause rapid deinstitutionalization.
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Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the region...
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Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms, farmers' organizations, service suppliers and supply chain actors are embedded in local environments and functions of agriculture. We define resilience of a farming system as its ability to ensure the provision of the system functions in the face of increasingly complex and accumulating economic, social, environmental and institutional shocks and stresses, through capacities of robustness, adaptability and transformability. We (i) develop a framework to assess the resilience of farming systems, and (ii) present a methodology to operationalize the framework with a view to Europe's diverse farming systems. The framework is designed to assess resilience to specific challenges (specified resilience) as well as a farming system's capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise (general resilience). The framework provides a heuristic to analyze system properties, challenges (shocks, long-term stresses), indicators to measure the performance of system functions, resilience capacities and resilience-enhancing attributes. Capacities and attributes refer to adaptive cycle processes of agricultural practices, farm demographics, governance and risk management. The novelty of the framework pertains to the focal scale of analysis, i.e. the farming system level, the consideration of accumulating challenges and various agricultural processes, and the consideration that farming systems provide multiple functions that can change over time. Furthermore, the distinction between three resilience capacities (robustness, adaptability, transformability) ensures that the framework goes beyond narrow definitions that limit resilience to robustness. The methodology deploys a mixed-methods approach: quantitative methods, such as statistics, econometrics and modelling, are used to identify underlying patterns, causal explanations and likely contributing factors; while qualitative methods, such as interviews, participatory approaches and stakeholder workshops, access experiential and contextual knowledge and provide more nuanced insights. More specifically, analysis along the framework explores multiple nested levels of farming systems (e.g. farm, farm household, supply chain, farming system) over a time horizon of 1-2 generations, thereby enabling reflection on potential temporal and scalar trade-offs across resilience attributes. The richness of the framework is illustrated for the arable farming system in Veenkolonien, the Netherlands. The analysis reveals a relatively low capacity of this farming system to transform and farmers feeling distressed about transformation, while other members of their households have experienced many examples of transformation.
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The quest for political commitment to reducing malnutrition in sub-Sahara Africa draws attention to the role of national parliamentarians. Whereas parliamentarians have the authority to ratify legislation, monitor policies and bud...
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The quest for political commitment to reducing malnutrition in sub-Sahara Africa draws attention to the role of national parliamentarians. Whereas parliamentarians have the authority to ratify legislation, monitor policies and budgets and transform behaviour, to date little is known about how malnutrition is understood and debated in sub-Saharan African political arenas. This study addresses that gap by exploring how (mal)nutrition has been framed by parliamentarians in Uganda between 2001 and 2017. Applying framing theory we performed a qualitative content analysis of 131 Parliament Hansards transcripts to determine the different meanings of nutrition. Our analysis distinguishes seven co-occurring frames that entail different, sometimes competing, understandings of the drivers and possible solutions of malnutrition. The frames are: (i) the emergency nutrition frame, (ii) the chronic vulnerability frame, (iii) the school feeding frame, (iv) the disease-related frame, (v) the diversification frame, (vi) the overnutrition (among politicians) frame and (vii) the poverty and inequality frame. These frames are sponsored by different groups of parliamentarians, most notably politicians representing constituencies with high degrees of malnutrition, the president, some ministers and politicians in parliamentary forums concerned with children and women issues. Our analysis helps to understand why policy measures get prioritized or disregarded by policymakers. Overall, we show that frame sponsors prioritize short-term tangible solutions, such as food assistance and agricultural inputs, over longer term solutions. We suggest that a more comprehensive policy frame is prerequisite to developing a more effective governance approach to malnutrition in Uganda.
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