Tag: environmental governance

How do public policies diffuse, and how can diffusion processes be actively governed without direct coercion?

by Kai Schulze

Diffusion has emerged as an important concept for studying how public policies spread across jurisdictions. Scholars have identified several mechanisms that drive policy diffusion, including learning, competition, emulation, and coercion. At the same time, policy diffusion is also a popular governance approach, particularly for higher levels of government that want to promote certain policies at lower levels, but do not want to or cannot mandate policy action. However, the governance potential of policy diffusion is poorly captured by the prevailing mechanism-centered concept, which is difficult to measure and typically emphasizes direct coercion or “hard” interventions, such as preemptive legislation or conditional funding. It therefore risks overlooking important less coercive or “soft” interventions that higher levels of government can use to promote policy development at lower levels. 

This neglect of soft interventions limits the analytical value of the diffusion concept, especially in multilevel environments with varying levels of authority and in policy areas where direct coercion is unavailable or undesirable, including in climate policy. For example, in many countries, higher levels of government lack the constitutional authority to mandate local climate action, or local authorities lack the capacity to comply with such mandates, so they resort to various interventions that are scattered throughout the literature but have not yet been compared more systematically.

To address these issues, I present a new channel-centered framework that distinguishes between six soft policy diffusion channels that can be broadly placed on a continuum of coerciveness or state intervention: autonomous, collaborative, exemplary, persuasive, organized, and funded diffusion (see Table 1). Autonomous diffusion refers to voluntary and noninstitutionalized exchanges between jurisdictions at the same level of government, collaborative diffusion to the bottom-up creation of formal networks, exemplary diffusion to policy development by higher-level governments to set an example, persuasive diffusion to the provision of informational resources, organized diffusion to networks created by higher-level governments, and funded diffusion to financial incentives and the provision of additional resources.    

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I probe the framework by studying local climate change adaptation policy using original survey data collected from the administrations of 190 municipalities located in the central German state of Hessen. The regression results indicate that the local institutionalization of adaptation in Hessen such as the development of adaptation plans and new staff dealing with adaptation is associated with several interventions by higher levels of government, including the provision of a policy model, a municipal climate network, and grant programs. However, the density of concrete adaptation measures–such as the creation of open-air corridors, education programs, drainage and retention areas, and surface unsealing–is associated with noninstitutionalized exchanges between municipalities. These results demonstrate the usefulness of the framework for distinguishing and comparing different diffusion channels and thus for understanding policy diffusion as a governance approach. In particular, the results suggest that different types of interventions may be needed to support adaptation policy development at the local level. This is important information for the efficient allocation of scarce (local) resources and for policymakers seeking to capitalize on policy diffusion.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Schulze, Kai. 2024. “ The Soft Channels of Policy Diffusion: Insights From Local Climate Change Adaptation Policy.” Policy Studies Journal 52(4): 881–906. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12555.

About the Author

Kai Schulze is an Adjunct Professor with the Institute of Political Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany leading the Junior Research Group on Integrated Systems Analysis. His research focuses on comparative public policy and politics, particularly in the fields of energy, climate, and environment. His work has appeared in journals such as Climate Policy, European Journal of Political Research, Global Environmental Politics, Regional Environmental Change, Regulation & Governance, Review of Policy Research, WIREs Climate Change.

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Building Blocks of Polycentric Governance

by Tiffany H. Morrison, Örjan Bodin, Graeme S. Cumming, Mark Lubell, Ralf Seppelt, Tim Seppelt, & Christopher M. Weible

Many governance systems are plagued by coordination problems. Polycentricity is often presented as key to resolving such problems.  Polycentric systems are characterized by a decentralized and self-organized style of governance, where actors operating across diverse venues work together to make decisions through collective action. But despite their pervasiveness, as well as numerous studies that have looked into different polycentric governance arrangements, we still don’t have tools for studying how coordination within a polycentric governance system changes over time, and how those changes impact the success or failure of that system.

Our paper, “Building blocks of polycentric governance,” introduces a “building blocks” model for understanding polycentric governance. It treats polycentric governance as a network of decision-making venues, governance actors, and policy issues that are linked to one another. Our model focuses on three permutations of those linkages: venue-to-actor, venue-to-issue, and venue-to-actor-to-issue. If a polycentric governance system has certain permutations of venues, actors, and issues that appear regularly, we refer to those as building blocks. Those building blocks can then be used to study how coordination in that system evolves over time. Figure 1 shows different kinds of building blocks that can emerge in a polycentric system.

Figure 1. Proposed typology of building blocks of polycentricity

We applied our model to study the polycentric system that governs the Great Barrier Reef. We chose the Great Barrier Reef because of its longevity (it dates to the 1970s), the wealth of publicly available quantitative and qualitative data, the presence of prior studies, and its status as an innovator in polycentric governance. We mapped out the network for three years: 1980, 2005, and 2015. Figure 2 shows the results.

Figure 2. 3-Mode network models of the polycentric Great Barrier Reef regime

Our network analysis yielded several findings. First, between 1980 and 2015, coordination among actors participating in the same venue increased. Across that same period, there was also greater coordination between venues and issues, meaning that venues became increasingly specialized in the specific governance issues that they tackled. That said, venues were more crucial in coordinating actors than issues. This suggests that it’s easier for venues to bring actors together than to evolve to take on new issues. Finally, the governance system became more polycentric over time, as new policy issues resulted in new actors joining the system and new venues were created to address those issues. However, those newcomers have been at a disconnect from the other actors, issues, and venues in the system, operating independently rather than embedding themselves within pre-existing relationships.

By capturing the linkages among actors, venues, and issues and showing how they change over time, our building blocks model reveals the key role that venues play in facilitating – and hindering – coordination within a polycentric governance system. On the one hand, venues can help bring diverse governance actors together and facilitate specialization on specific policy issues. At the same time, the introduction of new venues can cause the governance system to fragment: actors who participate in new venues may not necessarily work with actors in other venues, or new venues will focus on a specific policy issue (or set of issues) without considering its relationship to other issues.

The Great Barrier Reef governance system is small and has changed slowly over time. Additionally, in the interest of presenting an application of our model that was easy to digest, we focused narrowly on actors, venues, and issues. We welcome studies that apply our building blocks model to larger and more dynamic polycentric governance systems. There are, of course, many more variables present in any polycentric governance system, and we would love to see future studies that incorporate that complexity into applications of our model. Benefits of extending our building blocks approach therefore include: (1) understanding how structure and agency influence environmental efforts (for example, if a new ‘polycentric’ governance system is only partially successful, are its failures due to structural inadequacies?); (2) detection of threshold effects and feedbacks (for example, does a system need to be strongly polycentric in order for a particular social process to occur?); and (3) more direct comparison between different case studies, facilitating practical insights for policymakers and other stakeholders interested in improving the performance of a specific environmental governance system.

You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at

Morrison, Tiffany H., Örjan Bodin, Graeme S. Cumming, Mark Lubell, Ralf Seppelt, Tim Seppelt, and Christopher M. Weible. 2023. Building blocks of polycentric governance. Policy Studies Journal 51: 475–499. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12492

About the Authors

Tiffany Morrison holds professorial appointments in the School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Melbourne University, the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University & Research, and the College of Science & Engineering at James Cook University. Her expertise is in the governance of environmental change, policy responses to warming ecosystems, and governance of new interventions in warming ecosystems. She has twenty years of experience conducting innovative interdisciplinary research spanning human geography, political science, climate science, and ecology.

Örjan Bodin is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, Sweden. He employs a cross-disciplinary approach, integrating methods from various scientific disciplines to study social-ecological systems. He is particularly interested in using network analysis to study various aspects of ecosystems governance.

Graeme S. Cumming is an academic and researcher with a background in Zoology and Entomology. He is currently a Professor and Premier’s Science Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Graeme has a wide range of interests, centering around understanding spatial aspects of ecology and the relevance of broad-scale pattern-process dynamics for ecosystem (and social-ecological system) function and resilience. He is also interested in the applications of landscape ecology and complexity theory to conservation and the sustainable management of natural resources.

Mark Lubell is Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis and the Director of its Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior. Lubell studies cooperation problems and decision making in environmental, agricultural, and public policy. His research topics include water management, sustainable agriculture, adaptive decision-making, climate change policy, local government policy, transportation behavior, plant disease management, invasive species, and policy/social network analysis.

Ralf Seppelt is a professor for landscape ecology and Resource Economics at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he lectures course on Environmental Modelling. He is head of the department for Computational Landscape Ecology. His major research focus is land resources management based on integrated simulation and modelling systems. He thus is interested in the interactions and interrelationship of anthropheric and biospheric processes. 

Tim Seppelt is a fourth-year PhD student at RWTH Aachen University. He is interested in graphs and more specifically in theoretical and algorithmic notions concerning the similarity of two graphs. A central theme of his PhD is homomorphism indistinguishability, which describes the similarity of graphs in terms of numbers of homomorphisms.

Christopher M. Weible is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. His research focuses on policy process theories, contentious politics, and environmental policy. He is the Editor of Theories of the Policy Process (Routledge, 2023), Co-Editor of Methods of the Policy Process (with Samuel Workman, Routledge, 2022), Co-Editor of Policy & Politics, and Co-Director of the Center for Policy and Democracy.

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