by Allegra Fullerton (Digital Associate Editor) and Sarah Brown (Senior Journals Manager)
The articles featured here demonstrate how collaborative governance, policy narratives, evidence use and policy design shape environmental policy, revealing how coordination, meaning, knowledge and calibration interact to influence policy targets, implementation pathways and outcomes. What links the four contributions is not only their theoretical pluralism but also a shared methodological ambition: each pushes an established policy process framework in new empirical directions, drawing on approaches ranging from evolutionary game modelling to natural language processing and multilevel Bayesian regression.
A new framework for collaborative climate governance
Our first featured article, A new framework for collaborative climate governance, by Zhou and Richardson-Barlow, explores how collaborative governance arrangements structure collective action in climate policy. The authors revisit collaborative governance not simply as a coordination mechanism, but as a dynamic system through which public and private actors negotiate authority, responsibility, and implementation. Combining extensive fieldwork in China’s climate governance: 60 interviews with government officials and enterprise representatives, plus 175 project documents with evolutionary game modelling, the authors bring more quantitative approaches to collaborative governance. They develop a ‘consensus to action’ framework that distinguishes four emergent governance patterns: productive, unproductive, independent and symbolic. In doing so, the article offers a refined framework for understanding how collaboration operates under conditions of uncertainty and complexity, raising questions about when and how such arrangements can deliver effective environmental outcomes.
How policy narratives shape sustainability governance
Our second article, Angst et al.’s How policy narratives shape sustainability governance, turns to the narrative policy framework to examine how stories about environmental problems influence governance processes. Here, policy narratives are understood as structured accounts that assign roles, causality and solutions. The article bridges sustainability science and policy process theory by reinterpreting Adloff and Neckel’s three sustainability trajectories as policy paradigms that can be traced through the Narrative Policy Framework. Methodologically, the study is ambitious: the authors build discourse networks from over a million newspaper paragraphs covering 12 years of transportation debate in Zürich. In doing so they introduce a novel ‘motif’ heuristic for measuring how closely actors’ discourse positions align with ideal-type macro narratives. The article shows how competing narratives shape not only public understanding but also institutional responses to sustainability challenges. In this way, it foregrounds the interpretive dimension of environmental policy, suggesting that governance outcomes are partly contingent on how problems are constructed and communicated.
Patterns in the use of problems and solution oriented evidence in legislative discourse
Our third article, Patterns in the use of problem and solution oriented evidence in legislative discourse by Reber et al., uses a case study of pesticide policy in Switzerland. It focuses on the role of evidence in policymaking, interrogating how it is mobilised, interpreted and contested in environmental governance. Drawing on a decade of Swiss parliamentary debates using fine-tuned transformer models on over 10,000 paragraphs of parliamentary text, the authors distinguish problem-oriented evidence (in other words, evidence that a remedy works). So, rather than treating evidence as a neutral input, the authors highlight the social and institutional processes through which evidence is selected and used. This perspective complicates linear models of evidence-based policymaking, suggesting instead that evidence use is shaped by political, organisational and epistemic factors. The article therefore contributes to ongoing debates about the conditions under which evidence can meaningfully inform environmental policy.
Calibration in policy design: rethinking targets of energy-efficency rebates
Our fourth and final article, Scott et al.’s, Calibration in policy design: rethinking targets of energy-efficiency rebates shifts attention to policy design, and specifically to the calibration of instruments. Using the case of an energy-efficiency rebate program – Xcel Energy’s residential cooling rebates in Colorado, examined through Public Utility Commission documents and multilevel Bayesian regression on nearly 7,700 Denver permit records – the authors show how micro-level design features—such as accountability rules and training requirements—can reshape who a policy actually targets. While rebates appear to target consumers, their calibration also governs contractor behaviour, producing measurable effects on installation practices, costs and efficiency. The article’s key theoretical contribution lies in distinguishing between intermediate and end targets, thereby refining how policy design scholarship understands the pathways through which instruments generate outcomes.
Taken together, these articles highlight the analytical value of theoretical pluralism in environmental policy research. Collaborative governance emphasises coordination across actors; the narrative policy framework foregrounds meaning-making; studies of evidence use interrogate knowledge processes; and policy design scholarship reveals how instruments operate through calibration. Read collectively, they suggest that environmental policy outcomes emerge from the interaction of these dimensions, raising important questions about how governance, interpretation, evidence and design align—or fail to align—in practice. Each article also travels beyond its immediate case, inviting application to other policy domains.
All articles are free to access from May 1 – July 31 so download them from the links below now for your Spring and Summer reading! We’d be interested to hear which of these speaks most to your own work.
You can read the original articles here:
A new framework for collaborative climate governance
How policy narratives shape sustainability governance
Patterns in the use of problem and solution oriented evidence in legislative discourse
Calibration in policy design: rethinking targets of energy-efficiency rebates
Policy & Politics Journal Blog 