What is Policy Analytics? An Exploration of 5 Years of Environmental Management Applications

Abstract

Our digital age is characterized by both a generalized access to data and an increased call for participation of the public and other stakeholders and communities in policy design and decision-making. This context raises new challenges for political decision-makers and analysts in providing these actors with new means and moral duties for decision support, including in the area of environmental policy. The concept of "policy analytics" was introduced in 2013 as an attempt to develop a framework, tools, and methods to address these challenges. This conceptual initiative prompted numerous research teams to develop empirical applications of this framework and to reflect on their own decision-support practice at the science-policy interface in various environmental domains around the world. During a workshop in Paris in 2018, participants shared and discussed their experiences of these applications and practices. In this paper, we present and analyze a set of applications to identify a series of key properties that underpin a policy analytics approach, in order to provide the conceptual foundation for policy analytics to address current policy design and decision-making challenges. The induced properties are demandorientedness, performativity, normative transparency, and data meaningfulness. We show how these properties materialized through these six case studies, and we explain why we consider them key to effective policy analytics applications, particularly in environmental policy design and decision-making on environmental issues. This clarification of the policy analytics concept eventually enables us to highlight research frontiers to further improve the concept.

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“…Many fields such as environmental and public health care sciences seek to engage citizens, including laypeople, in complex decision-making processes [e.g., [1][2][3]. How to best engage citizens in complex public decision-making is still unclear, but relying on information and communication technology appears to offer substantial promise [4,5].…”

De la faculté de juger les zones humides

“…La présente contribution cherche à se placer dans un espace que ces différentes approches laissent de côté. Il s'agit de mettre l'analyse de l'expertise au service des tâches qui sont assignées aux experts eux-mêmes, dans une posture performative, au sens précisé par Meinard et al (2021), tout en maintenant l'exigence critique qui est la raison d'être et l'apport distinctif des sciences humaines 5 . Sur le plan méthodologique, il s'agit donc d'allier la finesse descriptive d'une recherche participante (Platt, 1983), qui consiste en une « immersion totale dans le terrain » (Soulé, 2007) permettant aux chercheurs de « vivre la réalité des sujets qu'ils observent » (Touret et al, 2019), et l'ambition de s'inscrire dans une visée d'amélioration de l'expertise et des projets qu'elle sert.…”