Regulatory sandboxes are authority-involved arrangements for bounded regulatory inquiry that combine temporary regulatory accommodation or intensified guidance with structured regulatory evaluation. They generate evidence under test-specific conditions, while receiving authorities may later exercise continuing authority under different evidentiary requirements and legal responsibilities. The policy problem is how such authorities determine what an experimental record can support in a standing decision beyond the test. This study develops policy absorption as the documented formal use of a specified experimental output by the authority responsible for an identified standing decision. An abductive documentary comparison traces 14 output-to-decision pathways across nine regulatory settings. Institutional conversion captures three connections between bounded inquiry and receiving assessment: correspondence of the tested and receiving objects, an authorised decision opportunity, and a procedural basis for assessment. The reconstructions show that conversion continues within receiving assessment as authorities supplement the record, exclude inapplicable material, and delimit the scope of reliance. The comparison also identifies two decision-stage boundaries: documented use may precede later implementation requirements, and use within a completed statutory assessment need not extend to subsequent legislative choices. The findings move experimental policy design beyond whether evidence reaches a receiving procedure by showing how that procedure determines the grounds and limits of reliance. They refine knowledge-use research by locating formal use in the treatment of specified material within a particular decision. For sandboxes intended to inform standing decisions, traceable receiving routes can make reasons for reliance, further assessment, restriction, or refusal explicit.
Policy analytical capacity is essential for addressing recurring and emerging policy challenges, particularly in developing countries, where bureaucratic inefficiencies and resource constraints are pronounced. At the individual level, analytical capacity comprises skills that enable policy workers to frame policy problems, analyze data, and contribute to policy-making. Despite its importance, the role of education, especially Public Administration, in shaping policy analytical capacity has received little attention. This study examines the extent to which Public Administration education (PAE) contributes to individual-level analytical capacity (IPAC), and tests whether this relationship is moderated by civil servants' on-the-job training and policy sector. Drawing on survey data from federal civil servants, the findings reveal that PAE significantly influences IPAC, and that this effect holds robustly regardless of training exposure or sectoral placement. These findings extend policy capacity theory to a Global South administrative context, testing assumptions that were developed largely in Western civil service settings. They also have direct implications for how capacity-building investments should be targeted. In addition, they contribute to ongoing debates in the policy capacity literature.
This study aims to empirically construct authorization environments—a core concept in public value theory—at the national level and to derive a cross-national typology within the context of climate policy. Using data from the World Values Survey (WVS), this study conducted a cluster analysis based on standardized national-level indicators capturing environmental value support, equity perception heterogeneity, institutional trust, and citizen participation orientation across 66 countries. The analysis identified three distinct authorization environment types: (1) participation-compensated authorization environments, (2) institutionally anchored authorization environments, and (3) structurally weak authorization environments. These differences indicate that even similar policy goals or instruments may be authorized through fundamentally different pathways, including participatory compensation, institution-based legitimacy, or fragile and fragmented support structures. This finding suggests that policy resistance or failure should not be interpreted solely as a consequence of flawed policy design or limited implementation capacity, but rather as a potential mismatch between policy strategies and their surrounding authorization environments. By comparatively analyzing authorization environments through the lens of public value theory, this study offers an analytical foundation for anticipating and mitigating climate policy failure in a more context-sensitive manner.
Governance systems must remain sufficiently stable to guide conduct while retaining capacity to respond to changing knowledge, conditions and implementation experience. This tension is particularly important for adaptive governance (AG), where flexibility may enable learning and adjustment but also weaken predictability and accountability. This article examines how legislative design can structure reconsideration without sacrificing legal certainty. It develops process certainty as the legally structured predictability of how an existing arrangement is reconsidered and, where justified, retained or changed over time. The argument is examined through a qualitative, theory-building comparative legal study of marine spatial planning (MSP). The Maritime Spatial Planning Directive 2014 (MSPD), England, Finland and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park provide contrasting configurations of legal effect, institutional responsibility, review and adjustment. The comparison demonstrates that information does not necessarily produce learning, review is not equivalent to adjustment, legal bindingness does not determine implementation, and adaptation must be distinguished according to its institutional object and level. It further demonstrates that the practical operation of legal architecture depends upon institutional capacity and political commitment. Drawing these findings together with the theoretical framework, the article translates six elements of process certainty into six corresponding legislative design principles concerning information, review initiation, institutional responsibility, evaluative criteria, participation and bounded adjustment authority. These principles are modular and context-sensitive rather than a universal model of AG, and may provide a basis for comparative testing in other policy domains characterised by recurring review and legally revisable public instruments.
This article empirically investigates how different institutional designs of implementation arrangements are associated with specific configurations of policy capacity and, in turn, with variation in implementation outputs. Building on the policy capacity framework developed by Wu et al. (2015) and its extension to collaborative settings, the article analyses three irrigation public–private partnership (PPP) projects in Kenya—Galana Kulalu, Perkerra, and Chakama—through a small-N, case-oriented comparative design. The study suggests that variation in implementation outputs is best understood through the interaction between institutional design and the configuration of analytical, managerial, and political capacities activated across individual, organizational, and systemic levels. The findings indicate that political capacity serves as an important enabling condition for more effective collaborative arrangements, while the relative weight of analytical and managerial capacities varies with the coordination logic embedded in each arrangement. More hierarchical and rule-based arrangements are associated with stronger implementation outputs where analytical and managerial capacities are institutionalized, whereas more networked and adaptive arrangements rely more heavily on managerial-political capacities rooted in trust, partner mobilization, and negotiated coordination. By connecting policy capacity research with implementation research on collaborative arrangements, the article contributes to a more relational, institutionally grounded understanding of why similar policy interventions yield different implementation outputs under broadly comparable conditions.
