This book presents detailed accounts of policymaking in contemporary risk communication. Specifically, it expands on the understanding of the policy decision-making process where there is little or no evidential base, and where multiple interpretations, power dynamics and values shape the interpretation of public health risk issues. The book argues that public health risk communication is a process embedded within multiple dimensions of power and set out practical way forward for public health risk communication.
The problem of balancing power through institutional design -- always a central concern of constitutional theory -- has taken on even greater salience in current scholarship in light of contemporary concerns over economic inequality and failures of American democracy today. This paper extends these concerns into the realm of administrative law and the design of regulatory policy. I argue that in an era of increasing (and increasingly interrelated) economic and political inequality, we must design public policies not only with an eye towards their substantive merits, but also in ways that redress disparities of power. In particular, we can design policies to institutionalize the countervailing power of constituencies that are often the beneficiaries of egalitarian economic policies, yet lack the durable, long-term political influence to sustain and help implement these policies over time.This concept of “policymaking as power-building” rests on a descriptive and normative claim. Descriptively, the paper shows how historical and contemporary analyses of administrative governance indicates that regulatory institutions and policies are already involved in shaping and responding to the balance of power among civil society groups. Normatively, the paper argues that this reality should be harnessed to pro-actively design policies that mitigate power disparities, and in so doing promote greater democratic responsiveness through regulatory policy design. The paper develops this argument through case studies of power-balancing policy design in local regulatory bodies around economic development initiatives, and in federal regulation around the case of financial reform. The paper then theorizes a more general framework for designing similar power-shifting policies that are portable across substantive areas of law and policy and across federal, state, or local level administration. This framework should be of interest to policymakers, advocacy groups, and other practitioners designing regulatory policies and concerned about dangers of capture and disparate influence.This account of policymaking as power-building synthesizes literatures in law, social science, and political theory to offer a more institutionally-rich account of power and the interactions between constituencies on the one hand and policymaking institutions on the other. It also extends the current debates on power and public law, law and inequality, and administrative and local government law.
On topics from genetic engineering and mad cow disease to vaccination and climate change, this Handbook draws on the insights of 57 leading science of science communication scholars who explore what social scientists know about how citizens come to understand and act on what is known by science.
Public policy can be considered a design science. It involves identifying relevant problems, selecting instruments to address the problem, developing institutions for managing the intervention, and creating means of assessing the design. Policy design has become an increasingly challenging task, given the emergence of numerous ‘wicked’ and complex problems. Much of policy design has adopted a technocratic and engineering approach, but there is an emerging literature that builds on a more collaborative and prospective approach to design. This book will discuss these issues in policy design and present alternative approaches to design.
In 1999, Texas passed a landmark clean energy law, beginning a groundswell of new policies that promised to make the US a world leader in renewable energy. As Leah Stokes shows in Short Circuiting Policy, however, that policy did not lead to momentum in Texas, which failed to implement its solar laws or clean up its electricity system. Examining clean energy laws in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Ohio over a thirty-year time frame, Stokes argues that organized combat between advocate and opponent interest groups is central to explaining why states are not on track to address the climate crisis. She tells the political history of our energy institutions, explaining how fossil fuel companies and electric utilities have promoted climate denial and delay. Stokes further explains the limits of policy feedback theory, showing the ways that interest groups drive retrenchment through lobbying, public opinion, political parties and the courts. More than a history of renewable energy policy in modern America, Short Circuiting Policy offers a bold new argument about how the policy process works, and why seeming victories can turn into losses when the opposition has enough resources to roll back laws.
Pathways of Power provides a framework that integrates the roles of political interests and policy ideals in the contemporary policy process. This book argues that the policy process can be understood as a set of four distinctive pathways of policymaking--pluralist, partisan, expert, and symbolic.
Attention in the AI safety community has increasingly started to include strategic considerations of coordination between relevant actors in the field of AI and AI safety, in addition to the steadily growing work on the technical considerations of building safe AI systems. This shift has several reasons: Multiplier effects, pragmatism, and urgency. Given the benefits of coordination between those working towards safe superintelligence, this book surveys promising research in this emerging field regarding AI safety. On a meta-level, the hope is that this book can serve as a map to inform those working in the field of AI coordination about other promising efforts. While this book focuses on AI safety coordination, coordination is important to most other known existential risks (e.g., biotechnology risks), and future, human-made existential risks. Thus, while most coordination strategies in this book are specific to superintelligence, we hope that some insights yield “collateral benefits” for the reduction of other existential risks, by creating an overall civilizational framework that increases robustness, resiliency, and antifragility.
Risk is a popular topic in many sciences - in natural, medical, statistical, engineering, social, economic and legal disciplines. Yet, no single discipline can grasp the full meaning of risk. Investigating risk requires a multidisciplinary approach. The authors, coming from two very different disciplinary traditions, meet this challenge by building bridges between the engineering, the statistical and the social science perspectives. The book provides a comprehensive, accessible and concise guide to risk assessment, management and governance. A basic pillar for the book is the risk governance framework proposed by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC). This framework offers a comprehensive means of integrating risk identification, assessment, management and communication. The authors develop and explain new insights and add substance to the various elements of the framework. The theoretical analysis is illustrated by several examples from different areas of applications.
This monograph applies Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework to two policymaking episodes of implementing pay for performance in general practice, conducted in England and New Zealand. The Framework’s explanatory power for policymaking in Westminster majoritarian jurisdictions is tested and, based on rigorous comparative analysis, recommendations are made for its refinement. The monograph also offers striking lessons for policymakers about how to negotiate successfully with general practitioners.
