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

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 demand-orientedness, 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.

Evaluating participatory modeling: developing a framework for cross-case analysis.

Participatory modeling is increasingly recognized as an effective way to assist collective decision-making processes in the domain of natural resource management. This article introduces a framework for evaluating projects that have adopted a participatory modeling approach. This evaluation framework--known as the "Protocol of Canberra"--was developed through a collaboration between French and Australian researchers engaged in participatory modeling and evaluation research. The framework seeks to assess the extent to which different participatory modeling initiatives not only modify perceptions among and interactions between participants, but also contribute to collective decision-making. The article discusses the development of the framework and its application to three case-studies, two from Australia and one from the Pacific Island of the Republic of Kiribati. The article concludes with some comments for future use of the framework in a range of participatory modeling contexts.