Capitalizing the Policy Sciences

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In the aftermath of the Cold War, politicians and citizens call for more direct and immediate public benefits from public investments in research. A case in point is the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), with its mandate to `combine and interpret data from various sources to produce information readily usable by policy makers attempting to formulate effective strategies for preventing, mitigating, and adapting to the effects of global climate change.` This project is a response to current difficulties in accessing the relevant literatures and communicating across specializations. The project will identify, develop, and integrate the accumulated concepts, theories and methods of the policy sciences and the broader policy movement in ways that will allow researchers, staff and administrators involved in global change research to use them to produce accessible information for practical policy purposes. Over the last half century, the policy sciences have contributed toward integrating ethics, science and policy. While policy specialists have not achieved concensus, the intellectual tools have survived decades of practice and peer review and converged on a common outlook that is contextual, problem-oriented, and multi-method. Its methods involve translation among functional equivalents in the specialized vocabularies of the disciplines; historical, case, and comparative methods; and the methods of applied ethics. Using these concepts and methods, the principal investigator will develop a book and presentations and articles that will assist a wide variety of specialists and lay persons with research and policy mandates concerning global change to address practical policy issues.