Conceptualising policy design in the policy process

The study of policy design has been of long-standing interest to policy scholars. Recent surveys of policy design scholarship acknowledge two main pathways along which it has developed; one in which the process of policy designing is emphasised and one in which the output of this policy designing process – for example, policy content – is emphasised. As part of a survey of extant research, this article discusses how scholars guided by different orientations to studying policy design are addressing and measuring common policy design concepts and themes, and offers future research opportunities. The article also provides a platform for considering how insights stemming from different orientations of policy design research can be integrated and mapped within the broader public policy process. Finally, the article raises the question of whether a framework that links different conceptualisations of policy design within the policy process might help to advance the field.

POLICY PERSPECTIVES OF MITIGATION AND RECOVERY DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC: A NARRATIVE REVIEW

Background: The world is in the grip of an unprecedented novel COVID-19 pandemic. These have resulted in massive impacts on humans as well as on economies invariably. Hence, planning for a future pandemic is vital in minimizing deleterious effects.Aims: The current review aimed to derive common policy perspectives that are important in future planning of a pandemic.Methods: A narrative review was conducted by searching published articles from PubMed, Medline, Scopus, CINAHL, and Google Scholar. Forty-eight articles were selected for the review.Results: The policy perspectives derived under mitigation were rearranged into surveillance, epidemiology, and lab activities. The policy perspectives under recovery derived were related to economy, supply chain management, sustainable and green concept, and health system.Conclusion: Understanding common policy perspectives is important in the mitigation and recovery planning of a pandemic with similar nature in the future. The spillover effects in response to the mitigation measures are deemed vital in planning mitigation and recovery measures for future pandemics. Global and regional resource sharing mechanisms are vital when a universal shortage of healthcare resources occurs.Keywords: mitigation, pandemic management, policy perspectives, recovery

Contesting Autocracy: Repression and Opposition Coordination in Venezuela

Opposition coordination varies widely in electoral autocracies. Sometimes, opposition parties are highly coordinated and create alliances, present joint candidates or common policy platforms. Yet, at other times, oppositions choose to challenge incumbents individually. This article seeks to explain what drives opposition parties to coordinate in non-democratic regimes. It finds that opponents’ decision-making and strategy formation is influenced by the amount of repression they face from the incumbent regime. It argues that repression has a curvilinear relationship with opposition coordination. When repression is low and high, opposition coordination will be informal or clandestine. However, when repression is at intermediate levels, opposition parties will formally coordinate to dislodge authoritarian incumbents. This article illustrates this argument through an analysis of the Venezuelan opposition under Chavismo (1999–2018), combining 129 interviews with party elites, journalists, academics, and regime defectors, along with archival research at key historical moments.

Informal Practices in Illicit Border-Regimes: The Economy of Legal and Fake Travel Documents Sustaining The EU Asylum System

On their route to secure asylum in the EU, asylum seekers rely on various strategies involving both licit and illicit paper practices. Based on ethnographic research with asylum seekers on the move between Turkey, Greece, and Germany, this article takes the realm of legal documents to probe the economy of legality and illegality that sustains the EU asylum system. Looking at how asylum seekers differentiate between their papers, the article demonstrates how efficacy rather than legality is the organizing principle through which papers are evaluated. Rather than being preoccupied with whether a paper is legal or illegal, ‘unauthorized’ migrants on the move evaluate papers on the scale of strong/not strong or dangerous/safe, asking what is more likely to work or pose less threat, and in what circumstances. The notion that both licit and illicit papers have a fickle efficacy in producing legality problematizes common policy and scholarly conceptions of the counterfeit as an informal space that is either external to the law or a perversion of it. Instead, it highlights how the European border and asylum regime exploits the legal/illegal distinction to criminalize asylum-seeking while obscuring how illegality is systematically embedded within it.

Fully distributed actor-critic architecture for multitask deep reinforcement learning

We propose a fully distributed actor-critic architecture, named diffusion-distributed-actor-critic Diff-DAC, with application to multitask reinforcement learning (MRL). During the learning process, agents communicate their value and policy parameters to their neighbours, diffusing the information across a network of agents with no need for a central station. Each agent can only access data from its local task, but aims to learn a common policy that performs well for the whole set of tasks. The architecture is scalable, since the computational and communication cost per agent depends on the number of neighbours rather than the overall number of agents. We derive Diff-DAC from duality theory and provide novel insights into the actor-critic framework, showing that it is actually an instance of the dual-ascent method. We prove almost sure convergence of Diff-DAC to a common policy under general assumptions that hold even for deep neural network approximations. For more restrictive assumptions, we also prove that this common policy is a stationary point of an approximation of the original problem. Numerical results on multitask extensions of common continuous control benchmarks demonstrate that Diff-DAC stabilises learning and has a regularising effect that induces higher performance and better generalisation properties than previous architectures.

Importance of Azerbaijan snd Central Asia in EU Energy Security

Providing the energy security of European Union has become one of the most significant issues for European politicians and academics, especially after the Ukrainian crisis with Russia. The most critical point is the fact that there is not a common policy of EU countries concerning energy security. Individual choices of member states have more influence on the energy supply. EU's failure of developing a common policy for the security of energy supply has led to disagreement about other foreign policy issues. Different reactions among EU member states about sanctions against Russia after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 has been the most recent example. Common policy of energy security is the diversification of resources and suppliers. Accordingly, with their hydrocarbon resources, Azerbaijan and Central Asian states have become alternatives for EU.

Men, women and STEM: Why the differences and what should be done?

It is a well-known and widely lamented fact that men outnumber women in a number of fields in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths). The most commonly discussed explanations for the gender gaps are discrimination and socialization, and the most common policy prescriptions target those ostensible causes. However, a great deal of evidence in the behavioural sciences suggests that discrimination and socialization are only part of the story. The purpose of this paper is to highlight other aspects of the story: aspects that are commonly overlooked or downplayed. More precisely, the paper has two main aims. The first is to examine the evidence that factors other than workplace discrimination contribute to the gender gaps in STEM. These include relatively large average sex differences in career and lifestyle preferences, and relatively small average differences in cognitive aptitudes – some favouring males, others favouring females – which are associated with progressively larger differences the further above the average one looks. The second aim is to examine the evidence suggesting that these sex differences are not purely a product of social factors but also have a substantial biological (i.e. inherited) component. A more complete picture of the causes of the unequal sex ratios in STEM may productively inform policy discussions.

Global community security: manifestations, priorities, and threats

The authors investigate the nature, components and features of globalisation in terms of its manifestations in society, development priorities, potential threats. It is proved that the processes that occur in the globalisation environment require the unity of efforts and implementation of a common policy of eliminating threats. The aggravation of conflicts due to the environmental issues and the social response to it are defined. It is determined that the common policy will facilitate the environmental protection, create the background for ensuring the global security by reducing social tensions. The common policy on a partnership basis allows to join forces for environmental protection, raise awareness of the ecological problems, introduce cost-effective approaches to the use of certain types of natural resources, conservation of ecosystems. It is determined that the practical realisation of ecological tasks at the national, regional and local levels must comply with the ratified agreements, implement the standards of the international law, take note of the actual transboundary threats. It is substantiated that the coordinated ecological policy, responsibility at different levels of government, sufficient funding of ecological projects will help to reduce the temperature rise and prevent the global ecological catastrophe. The environmental dimensions of global adaptation must have not only a quantitative impact on the environment, but also aggregate the ethical and moral indicators of measuring the social attitude to nature. The practical necessity of using the Environmental Code and the Environmental Court is determined. The efficiency of the partnership-based cooperation, coordination of actions with the environmental organisations, movements, eco-activists is proved. The global economic prospects should be oriented towards environmental dimensions, taking into account the need to ensure the global social security.