The Hidden Successes Of Three Sustainability Policies

This book provides a practical demonstration of policymaking and policy life-cycle analysis.

We all hear about a government policy or scheme when it is formally announced in the newspaper, or on television but we do not know where the initial idea comes from, nor how and why the idea is transformed into a formal political agenda. These are some of the important questions we need to understand in the field of policymaking. Equally important is to explore how and why a policy loses its relevance.

This book answers these behind-the-scenes questions. It provides a framework to investigate the life cycle of a public policy and a multi-disciplinary approach to understand the level of commitment towards holistic sustainability (environment, economic, and social). This makes the book unique and unconventional and therefore, it can be used as a practical guide for research students, academics, and public policy practitioners.

A public policy is like a product, and it has a shelf life. However, the success of a policy lies in its commitment and legacy. The book also outlines a process to analyse public agencies' internal commitment to the sustainability agenda. In addition to providing practical illustrations of policy analysis, this book also presents an overview of how the sustainable development agenda is disseminated and incorporated into the public policy domain. Each of the selected policies had a role in advancing the sustainable development agenda in the political domain.

Overall, the book is bold and informative, addresses both the national and international contexts, and uses parliamentary discussions, budget, public agency's annual reports, stakeholders' comments, and other statistical data to seek answers to the question of impact. It also provides clarity and precision through the use of relevant diagrams and tables that summaries the text.

This empirical research also demonstrates that the very idea of sustainability can, if only gradually, have a positive impact on the decision-making culture of an organisation if sufficient support from policy champions is given. We reaffirmed this point in our postscript chapter.

Finally, the book reveals that institutional factors may facilitate the diffusion of a sustainable development value-based policy model, but the actual implementation of the policy framework depends on fortuitous political-economic factors. Hence, the book highlights the relevance of understanding and analysing the political dimension of sustainable development

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