Reactions to the Practitioners' Panel Class?

Here is a spot for you to share any reactions or questions arising from Tuesday's class which featured our two guest policy practitioners.

I meant to put this post up days ago, while it would have been fresher in your minds. Oh well, better late than never I hope.

Policy analysis for our parking example

This post is to provide a place for you to keep thinking about our parking example.

Remember that, strictly speaking, our status quo trend should be considered as an alternative too. Let's call it Alternative Zero. Actually, I was a bit naughty to try to avoid treating it as an alternative today in class. It would need to be evaluated along with the other alternatives, despite not being favoured by the President and her team.

Recall that the President of the University frames the problem with a focus on cars searching for parking as a nuisance (or externality).

"It is important that students, staff and faculty who choose to drive a car to campus are able find a parking place quickly and reliably when they arrive and that the campus roadways no longer be clogged with cars circling for a parking place, delaying everyone, including buses."

Her policy analysis team offered three additional options (in addition to status quo, which is obviously not a favoured option):

• Alternative 1: Expand parking from 2000 places to 3000 and keep parking free
• Alternative 2: Ration demand with priced monthly permits
• Alternative 3: "Performance-based” parking pricing

I suggested that the team also distilled the decision criteria down to three main ones (assuming all are designed to be effective initially at least):

1. Acceptable cost to the University
2. Enduring effectiveness
   
3. Acceptable cost to customers (especially students presumably)
   

We began to simulate 'projection of outcomes' by you asking me questions (pretending that I was going off to do the modelling etc). For example you found out that:

• the cost to build a new parking structure (Alt 1) is claimed to be $2 million (about $2000 per space) with annual enforcement costs of $5,000.
  
• that Alternative 1 is projected to result in a renewed parking shortage problem again within 10 years.
• That revenue from parking in Alt 1 is almost zero (small revenue from fines for haphazard parking or parking in restricted locations). So funds for the parking expansion will have to come from cuts elsewhere in the University budget.

We will continue with this next on 16 October. In the meantime, you may have more questions?

Galloping through the Eightfold Path

Today we will be getting into the section of the course that focuses on the practice of Policy Analysis.

We start by taking a quick gallop through Bardach's "Eightfold Path"

1. Define the problem (as much as possible)
2. Assemble (some) evidence
3. Construct (workable) alternatives
4. Select (reasonable) criteria
5. Project outcomes (to the extent possible)
6. Confront the trade-offs
7. Decide!
8. Tell your story

These are practical steps and they are meant as advice for new policy analysts doing the 'applied research' that we call 'policy analysis'. We will have a few comments on each step and will use a tangible example to illustrate and get you thinking about each step.

The example is "Parking Problems on a Campus".


{By the way, you will notice some similarities between Policy Analysis steps and the Stages Model of the policy process. You might wonder what is the difference. Those stages we saw in weeks 3 and 4 were part of an attempt to describe what happens in the policy making process rather than an attempt to say what should happen (although of course we also saw that sometimes they are used to say what should happen). They also aim to describe the whole policy process, not just the applied research (policy analysis) aspect.}

Thoughts on Memo Feedback?

You might like to have a place to put comments on the memo feedback process and on the first memo more generally.

So here it is.

Judging the proposals from Ms Preacher, Mr Incentive and Ms Rule

You may want to continue the discussions in today's sections class via the comments here.

‘MyCountry’ has decided to try to contain emissions from household electricity consumption but three local politicians are championing rather different instruments.

1. Ms Preacher wants an education, awareness-raising and persuasion campaign to prompt voluntary effort (including installing electronic, instantaneous electricity meters in houses to provide instant feedback on the GHG impact of using appliances).
2. Mr Incentive wants a carbon tax (which would raise electricity bills)
3. Ms Rule wants to enact regulations requiring high energy efficiency for all household electric appliances.

How good do these policy instruments look according to some of the criteria we saw in Tuesday's lecture?

• Efficiency
• Ease of evaluation (was labeled as 'visibility', but this may not be a great name)
• Political feasibility
• Coerciveness
• Targeting
• Equity
• Ease of implementation
• Complexity
• Legitimacy

Policy instruments

This week is Policy Instrument week.

Here are a few policy objectives. For each of these can you think of SEVERAL possible policy instruments that could be used to tackle them? (bring your short list to class tomorrow)

1. To reduce domestic violence?
2. To improve equity of access to higher education?
3. To improve road safety?
4. To increase the extent of competition in the software industry?
5. To tackle over-fishing in the Gulf of Thailand?
6. To slow the spread of HIV infections?
7. To address a dangerous form of pollution?

How could we judge each instrument?

Also please try to take a peek at W&V's chapter on this and Bardach's 'Things Governments Do' (Bardach's is shorter and easier, so it is a good place to start).

Link to climate change basic information

Some of you have been asking where to look for basic information on climate change.

Don't go overboard in reading up on the issue, since we are only using it as an example. It is not the primary focus of the course!

Nevertheless, here is a link to quality introductory information on the basics of climate change science and policy discussion.

Global Warming Basics (from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change)

There are various articles at this site. Some should suit your needs, depending on the specific issue you want and how deeply you want to go.

Their 'Climate Change 101: Overview' document provides a concise and non-technical introduction to the whole issue (both science and policy basics).

The Pew Center is not necessarily 'neutral' (whatever that could mean on this issue) but they do seem to be mainstream in their approach and to be fairly careful in their citing of sources and evidence.

In the interests of avoiding information overload, I think I will leave it at that for now.