Environmental law, institutional and policy analyses
As governments move forward with developing and implementing policies to address environmental challenges, there is a growing need to better understand the policy lifecycle of individual policies and their interaction and coherence with the broader regulatory frameworks. NIVA provides interdisciplinary research, using innovative mixed methods, to assess the development, implementation, evaluation and coherence of policies domestically and internationally.
Policy analysis is a research arena broadly focused on understanding the policy lifecycle and what makes policies successful. This field is gaining importance as governments move forward with the development and implementation of environmental, and other policies to address complex challenges. Research questions associated with policy analysis vary and can examine past, current, and future policies.
Such questions can include:
Policy landscape
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What is the policy landscape for a given environmental challenge? What are governments doing to address a specific environmental challenge?
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What policy instruments are available to decision makers to address environmental challenges?
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Which (or whose) interests are represented within existing policies?
Policy formulation processes
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How are policy documents developed? Who participates in these processes, and who has the decision-making power? Whose voices are heard (or not)?
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How do social, political, economic and cultural factors shape policy designs?
Policy coherence
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How coherent are existing and related environmental policies?
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Is cross-compliance enabled among and between policies?
Policy effectiveness
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Which environmental policies are effective at achieving their targets or objectives?
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How do we measure policy effectiveness? What are standard metrics or indicators that can be used in policy monitoring?
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How do social, political, economic and cultural factors influence compliance and the effectiveness of policies?
Best practices
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What are enabling conditions for effective, just, sustainable, and inclusive policy development and implementation?
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How can we build the bridge between science and policy?
Increasingly, interdisciplinary research projects include one or a selection of the above research questions as a component of their work, to help understand baseline conditions or to inform the development of future policies.
NIVA can contribute to this
Across NIVA are many researchers with interdisciplinary training on conducting robust policy analysis on many topics including pollution, coastal and marine governance, habitat restoration, and climate change. In their capacities, NIVA researchers have expertise in developing, tailoring, implementing, and disseminating the results of policy research. NIVA researchers are skilled at tailoring critical policy analysis approaches that are relevant, methodologically robust, and based on existing methodologies such as the critical policy analysis approach, and the interpretive policy analysis approach.