Reconstructing policy transfer in adult and vocational education and training

The article contributes to the understanding of educational policy transfer with a particular focus on VET and labour-market related training. A review of VET policy transfer literature is followed by a description of travelling VET reforms in adult and vocational education and training around the globe. Historical foundations of VET policy transfer are described with an emphasis on lending and borrowing from the global North to the global South. Finally, contemporary forces that influence global policy transfer, derived from personal observation, are described. We aim to contribute to a better understanding of policy cycles by depicting the influence of different dynamics on decision-making for policy transfer in VET. We argue that there can be various reasons to policy transfer, not just attractiveness of a particular educational system or approach, but also global industry demands for workforce development or the influence of big data and social media.

The Inconsistency of Immigration Policy: From Macro- to Micro- approaches

Weberian research has often assumed that written immigration policies reveal governments’ objectives to restrict or not restrict migration. As a result, this research struggles to make sense of the finding that immigration policies are frequently inconsistent: combining or alternating between restrictive and non-restrictive measures. This study uses global data sets to reveal what proportion of immigration policies are inconsistent and develops a measure of policy inconsistency to track how immigration policy inconsistency varies across time. We use these techniques to generate limited empirical support for macro-political explanations of policy inconsistency, which focus on variables located at the national scale such as policy-cycles, ‘grand bargains’ between advocacy coalitions, and policy-maker selectivity. We then use these findings of the limited support for macro-political explanations to argue in favour of further research into micro-political explanations, which focus on the behaviour of ordinary officials and migrants at the local scale. We then discuss the potential for improving dialogues between quantitative and qualitative research in order to further explore the impact of micro-political factors on national immigration policies.

Ignoring Implementation: Defects in Canada’s “Rape Shield” Policy Cycle

This article employs a “policy cycle” framework to explore Bill C-51, legislation which contains Canada’s latest amendments to the “rape shield.” Through an in-depth evaluation of earlier rape shield reforms, as well as a content analysis of the legislative proceedings of Bill C-51, this paper reveals that, while the impetus for introducing rape shield legislation is to protect the equality and privacy rights of sexual assault complainants, the legislative process of these “policy cycles” focuses disproportionately on remedying due process concerns and less on the problems that arise in judicial implementation of the provisions. We situate this finding within the larger trend towards the “judicialization of politics,” and trace some of the institutional and structural obstacles that impede Parliamentarians from more effectively legislating to improve sexual assault trials for complainants.

Making Sense of the Complexity of Business-Government Relations in the EU

In this chapter, we develop a political theory of the firm that draws from a micro-, meso-, and macro-perspective. In doing so, we develop a theory that brings together a set of pieces that form a sum greater than its parts. Specifically, it looks at how the structure and functions of institutions affect how the firm behaves in the political arena. It goes on to look at the variation in business behaviour across policy areas and stages of the policy cycles and it concludes with the focus on the internal features of the company. The chapter concludes by providing some recommendations for scholars of business and politics, policy-makers, and lobbyists.

Einleitung: Interessengruppen und Recht, Interessengruppen im Recht

Wie nutzen Interessengruppen das Recht, um Interessen zu realisieren? Wie werden umkehrt ihre Aktivitäten in den verschiedenen Phasen des Policy Cycles durch Recht strukturiert? Und welche Verbände vertreten innerhalb des Rechtssystems welche Interessen? Für eine politik- und verwaltungswissenschaftlich orientierte Interessengruppenforschung sind diese Fragen zentral, hat sich doch aufgrund der zunehmenden Verrechtlichung aller Lebensbereiche in modernen Demokratien Recht zu einer zentralen Ressource für Interessengruppen entwickelt. Der Beitrag zeichnet die Konturen des Forschungsfelds Interessengruppen und Recht, Interessengruppen im Recht nach und setzt sich auf der Basis eines systematischen Literaturreviews kritisch mit dem aktuellen Stand und den Perspektiven der deutschsprachigen Forschung in diesem Feld auseinander. Es wird gezeigt, dass zwar die These vom Recht als zentraler Ressource für Interessengruppen uneingeschränkt geteilt wird, ein tiefergehendes Verständnis des Zusammenspiels von Recht, Politik und Interessen dennoch ein Forschungsdesiderat bleibt.

What should be the goal of public policies?

Should subjective wellbeing, as measured by life evaluation, be the sole criterion for policies? This article answers this question negatively based on three arguments. First, it is important to distinguish between people's life evaluations, their emotional experiences and their sense of purpose; each has different drivers and consequences, implying that no single measure can adequately subsume the others. Second, while subjective wellbeing provides information missed by more conventional measures, the reverse is also true. This implies that information on the intrinsic importance of other key wellbeing dimensions cannot be derived from just looking at their instrumental value in raising subjective wellbeing. Third, the ‘utilitarian calculus’ implicit in subjective wellbeing regressions shines little light on normative decisions such as the attention we should focus on the worst off or on future generations. In contrast to the ‘automatic pilot’ approach to policies advocated by Frijters et al., this article favours an approach based on dashboards of indicators used to inform all of the stages of the policy cycles, as recently implemented by several OECD countries.

Políticas para la gestión de la educación pública obligatoria en Uruguay

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the management of public education policies in Uruguay, taking as a reference time frame, two relevant milestones: (i) the period 1995-2004, which we will call “Rama Reform,” and (ii) the period 2005-2018, which we will call "FA Administration". To analyze both periods we have used a model developed by Joan Subirats, which defines a series of moments in the public policy cycles,which in this case, we will associate with the educational ones. From this perspective, public policies are considered a “continuous flow of decisions and procedures that are intended to make sense” (Subirats et al., 2012, p. 33). This perspective allows us to establish some common parameters from which to analyze two different historical moments: identify the hierarchical issues as "relevant" or "problematic" that require solution; place the place that these issues took on the national public agenda; analyze the formulation and management of programs that emerged, and identify the evaluation proposals that were defined and implemented to monitor and evaluate their impact. This model addressed substantial issues on the educational agenda within the mandatory range. For their implementation, all the analyzed innovative components required the revision of current regulations and the strengthening of management. This study identifies articulation and disruption processes that were generated between both cycles, as a way of analyzing local capacities to produce synergies between the different innovative processes implemented during the last decades.

Business Cycle Drivers in an Open Economy

In this paper, I investigated the sources of business cycles in Nigeria over the period, 1960-2013. Nigeria was a lower middle class economy that pursued open economy policies. The propositions tested in the study cut across most of the schools of thought prominent in the subject area. All policies/factors examined were assumed to generate cycles that were subsequently tested for causal relations with the cycles of domestic output and industrial productions. The causality approach adopted for the analysis was of the Granger type. Detrending of the various data series was undertaken using two filters. Unit root tests were conducted to assure integration of the cyclical components of detrended series. The analysis produced some interesting results showing in particular that only monetary policy cycles and cycles linked to exogenous shocks of different varieties credibly drove the cycles of domestic output and industrial productions in the country.