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.

A system dynamics model for supporting decision-makers in irrigation water management.

Water management is a controversial environmental policy issue, due to the heterogeneity of interests associated with a shared resource and the increasing level of conflict among water uses and users. Nowadays, there is a cumulative interest in enhancing multi-stakeholder decision-making processes, overtaking binding mercantile business, in water management domain. This requires the development of dynamic decision-aiding tools able to integrate the different problem frames held by the decision makers, to clarify the differences, to support the creation of collaborative decision-making processes and to provide shared platforms of interactions. In literature, these issues are faced by concepts such as Ostrom's action arena and Ostanello-Tsoukiàs' interaction space (IS). The analysis of the interactions structure and of the different problem framing involved are fundamental premises for a successful debate for the management of a common-pool resource. Specifically, the present paper suggests a dynamic evolution of the IS, highlighting its criticalities. It develops an alternative perspective on the problem, using a System Dynamics Model (SDM), exploring how different actions can influence the decision-making processes of various stakeholders involved in the IS. The SDM has been implemented in a multi-stakeholders decision-making situation in order to support water management and groundwater protection in the agricultural systems in the Capitanata area (Apulia region, Southern Italy).