Policy Learning, Policy Failure, and the Mitigation of Policy Risks: Re-Thinking the Lessons of Policy Success and Failure

Policy failures are often assumed to be unintentional and anomalous events about which well-intentioned governments can learn why they occurred and how they can be corrected. These assumptions color many of the results from contemporary studies of policy learning which remain optimistic that ongoing policy problems can be resolved through technical learning and lesson drawing from comparative case studies. Government intentions may not be solely oriented toward the creation of public value and publics may not abide by government wishes, however, and studies of policy learning need to take these “darksides” of policy-making more seriously if the risks of policy failure are to be mitigated.

From STEM to PAVAM: A unified arts strategy for innovation, industrial and regional policy

The potential of the arts and sciences for economic and social development is under conceptualized. However, the recent development of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), justifying increased support for training in the sciences, shows a parallel pathway forward for the arts. The arts are increasingly relevant to the economy, amenable to policy influence as well as an area of human activity in their own right. The authors posit a unified arts framework: PAVAM (performing arts, visual arts, and music), complementing STEM as the basis for a strategy of arts-based interdisciplinary “industrial” policy making. The growing salience of the arts as an industrial sector in the UK and USA is shown. By identifying sources and pathways of value creation from the arts, clear entry points for policy action become identifiable to promote innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development. Comparative case studies suggest a typology of the arts’ potential as sources of creativity, innovation, and regional economic development.

Sponsor Partnerships - It's a lot like dating

<p>This research is an investigation into the scope and evaluation of corporate sponsorship relationships with performing arts organisations (PAOs). Based primarily on Relationship Theory, the aim of this research is to develop a framework for investigating strategic business-to-business marketing and development opportunities. The idea is to find a simple lens to explore ways to enrich the current sponsorship relationship beyond the dollars for tickets experience. This investigation is based on behavioural observations that are the result of a complex mix of variables from business and artistic environments. The phenomenological approach focuses on interpreting behaviours from each participants’ point of view and the interaction of those behaviours (Bryman & Bell, 2011, pp16-19). The method adopted was one of comparative case studies built on the experiences of multiple expert informants. Data was primarily collected through a series of semi-structured interviews covering both sides of the sponsorship relationship. In searching for existing best practice materials in current literature, it became evident that many of the approaches suggested by the studies strongly resembled dating. From this the Dating Analogy Model was developed (Appendix A). The findings of the interviews strongly correlate with the framework of the dating analogy following many of the same behaviours one would expect to find in any successful partnership. The key repeated themes were: • Research • Values congruence • Communication • Partnership • Investment of time • Regular evaluation This report finds that the Dating Analogy Model provides an opportunity to examine the interaction of each perspective. While transactional sponsorship arrangements appear to dominate, they also have elements that create deeper, enduring, high value engagements that strongly align with partnering relationship theory. How those relationships look varies according to the nature of the business of the sponsor, the nature of the interaction (in kind, cash or a combination), and the reasons for sponsoring that particular PAO. This report also shows that the high time component of relationship management needs to be balanced against the expected value of the gains. This report also acknowledges that the analysis conducted has limitations. Cost and time comparisons with other trust funding sources were not included in this study. It is also acknowledged that the validity of the Dating Analogy Model would benefit from practical application or a workshop exercise.</p>

Ideology and Muslim militancy in India: Selected case studies of the 1857 Indian rebellion

<p>This thesis examines the ways in which ideologies of royalism, militarism, and Jihad influenced the behaviour of contending Muslim factions in the 1857 Indian rebellion. The historiography has focused almost exclusively on the ideological motivation of Muslims who fought against the East India Company, with little mention of the large number of Punjabi Muslims and North West Frontier Pathans who chose to collaborate with the British against their co-religionists. The dominant themes of anti-colonialism, nationalism, proto-nationalism and Jihad that emerge in the literature overlook the role of moderating factors that link ideology to behaviour. Another tendency has been to apply the essentially modern concepts of nationalism and its variants to a pre-modern Indian Muslim setting. This thesis addresses these gaps by providing a framework for analysing the ideological functions of royalism, militarism and Jihad for both pro and anti-British Muslims. Drawing on insights from political and cognitive approaches of decision-making, this study demonstrates how the dynamics of information processing moderated the relationship between these ideologies and the combat behaviour of the belligerents. It finds that the process produced different outcomes of behaviour for the key individuals and groups in the 1857 rebellion. The methodology employed is comparative case studies of four regions with the most active Muslim resistance and collaboration groups. This thesis hopes to contribute to the growing literature on new approaches to the study of the 1857 Indian rebellion.</p>

Sponsor Partnerships - It's a lot like dating

<p>This research is an investigation into the scope and evaluation of corporate sponsorship relationships with performing arts organisations (PAOs). Based primarily on Relationship Theory, the aim of this research is to develop a framework for investigating strategic business-to-business marketing and development opportunities. The idea is to find a simple lens to explore ways to enrich the current sponsorship relationship beyond the dollars for tickets experience. This investigation is based on behavioural observations that are the result of a complex mix of variables from business and artistic environments. The phenomenological approach focuses on interpreting behaviours from each participants’ point of view and the interaction of those behaviours (Bryman & Bell, 2011, pp16-19). The method adopted was one of comparative case studies built on the experiences of multiple expert informants. Data was primarily collected through a series of semi-structured interviews covering both sides of the sponsorship relationship. In searching for existing best practice materials in current literature, it became evident that many of the approaches suggested by the studies strongly resembled dating. From this the Dating Analogy Model was developed (Appendix A). The findings of the interviews strongly correlate with the framework of the dating analogy following many of the same behaviours one would expect to find in any successful partnership. The key repeated themes were: • Research • Values congruence • Communication • Partnership • Investment of time • Regular evaluation This report finds that the Dating Analogy Model provides an opportunity to examine the interaction of each perspective. While transactional sponsorship arrangements appear to dominate, they also have elements that create deeper, enduring, high value engagements that strongly align with partnering relationship theory. How those relationships look varies according to the nature of the business of the sponsor, the nature of the interaction (in kind, cash or a combination), and the reasons for sponsoring that particular PAO. This report also shows that the high time component of relationship management needs to be balanced against the expected value of the gains. This report also acknowledges that the analysis conducted has limitations. Cost and time comparisons with other trust funding sources were not included in this study. It is also acknowledged that the validity of the Dating Analogy Model would benefit from practical application or a workshop exercise.</p>

Ideology and Muslim militancy in India: Selected case studies of the 1857 Indian rebellion

<p>This thesis examines the ways in which ideologies of royalism, militarism, and Jihad influenced the behaviour of contending Muslim factions in the 1857 Indian rebellion. The historiography has focused almost exclusively on the ideological motivation of Muslims who fought against the East India Company, with little mention of the large number of Punjabi Muslims and North West Frontier Pathans who chose to collaborate with the British against their co-religionists. The dominant themes of anti-colonialism, nationalism, proto-nationalism and Jihad that emerge in the literature overlook the role of moderating factors that link ideology to behaviour. Another tendency has been to apply the essentially modern concepts of nationalism and its variants to a pre-modern Indian Muslim setting. This thesis addresses these gaps by providing a framework for analysing the ideological functions of royalism, militarism and Jihad for both pro and anti-British Muslims. Drawing on insights from political and cognitive approaches of decision-making, this study demonstrates how the dynamics of information processing moderated the relationship between these ideologies and the combat behaviour of the belligerents. It finds that the process produced different outcomes of behaviour for the key individuals and groups in the 1857 rebellion. The methodology employed is comparative case studies of four regions with the most active Muslim resistance and collaboration groups. This thesis hopes to contribute to the growing literature on new approaches to the study of the 1857 Indian rebellion.</p>

Application of Multi-Criteria Analysis on Theatres’ Efficiency – Czech and Polish Comparative Case Studies

Institutions (theatres) evaluated in this paper are mediators of an unrepeatable interpretive art and they need funds from public resources of different government levels to ensure their activities. The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the efficiency of theatre management of 93 evaluated public theatres in the Czech Republic and Poland through 11 indicators. The evaluated weights of chosen indicators were determined by the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), in combination with the chosen objective method for determining the importance of indicators. From the results it is evident that big multi-genre theatres producing more genres of interpretive art (drama, opera, ballet, musical) with a bigger number of employees had the worst results in both states.

Behind the Veil of the Old

This chapter begins by surveying the petering out of the debate over sequence in interpretation in seventeenth-century India and speculating about the reasons for its decline. At this point, the chapter returns to the broad question of innovation with which this book began, and places the story in the context of the “New Intellectuals” in South Asia and that of a few comparative case studies in order to present a broader survey of modes of novelty in scholastic traditions. The rhetorical stance of traditionalism that masks substantive innovation in the book's main case study has significant parallels in other intellectual traditions, suggesting a larger pattern that may merit further investigation. The “oldness of the will” discussed in chapter 1 may be only a pretense, after all, and a new one at that.

A Bayesian Alternative to Synthetic Control for Comparative Case Studies

This paper proposes a Bayesian alternative to the synthetic control method for comparative case studies with a single or multiple treated units. We adopt a Bayesian posterior predictive approach to Rubin’s causal model, which allows researchers to make inferences about both individual and average treatment effects on treated observations based on the empirical posterior distributions of their counterfactuals. The prediction model we develop is a dynamic multilevel model with a latent factor term to correct biases induced by unit-specific time trends. It also considers heterogeneous and dynamic relationships between covariates and the outcome, thus improving precision of the causal estimates. To reduce model dependency, we adopt a Bayesian shrinkage method for model searching and factor selection. Monte Carlo exercises demonstrate that our method produces more precise causal estimates than existing approaches and achieves correct frequentist coverage rates even when sample sizes are small and rich heterogeneities are present in data. We illustrate the method with two empirical examples from political economy.