consensus

Highlights collection from Policy & Politics: free to access from 1st May – 31st August 2026 on Environmental policy through theory: collaboration, narratives, evidence and design 

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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.  

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Collaborative climate governance: linking consensus-building and collective action 

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By Cheng Zhou and Clare Richardson-Barlow 

This article develops a new framework for understanding how collaboration between governments and enterprises evolves in climate governance. The analysis connects two processes that are often studied separately: the development of consensus among stakeholders and the emergence of collective action to address climate change.  

Collaborative governance has become an increasingly important approach to addressing complex policy challenges such as climate change. These issues typically require cooperation between multiple actors, including governments, firms, and other organisations. While existing frameworks explain many institutional features of collaboration, they often pay less attention to how collaborative behaviour develops between participants over time. 

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