12 pages, Knowledge brokers are often portrayed as neutral intermediaries that act as a necessary conduit between the spheres of science and policy. Conceived largely as a task in packaging, brokers are expected to link knowledge producers and users and objectively translate science into policy-useable knowledge. The research presented in this paper shows how brokering can be far more active and precarious. We present findings from semi-structured interviews with practitioners working with community-based groups involved in collaborative water planning in New Zealand’s South Island region of Canterbury. Working in a highly conflicted situation, our brokers had to navigate different knowledges and epistemic practices, highly divergent values and grapple with uncertainties to deliver recommendations for regional authorities to set water quality and quantity limits. Conceiving science and policy as interlinked, mutually constitutive and co-produced at multiple levels, rather than as separate domains, shows how the brokers of this study were not only bridging or blurring science policy boundaries to integrate and translate knowledges. They were also building boundaries between science and policy to foster credibility and legitimacy for themselves as scientists and the knowledge they were brokering. This research identifies further under-explored aspects of brokering expertise, namely, the multiple dimensions of brokering, transdisciplinary skills and expertise, ‘absorptive’ uncertainty management and knowledge translation practices.
7 pgs, Extension is uniquely positioned to deliver data-driven solutions to complex community issues with University applied research, particularly through crises like COVID-19. Applying the Policy, Systems and Environmental (PSE) framework to community development is an effective, innovative approach in guiding Extension leaders to create, document, and share long-term transformative change on challenging issues with stakeholders. Beyond the public health sector, applying a PSE approach to community development provides leverage points for population-level benefits across sectors. This article describes current public health approaches, methodologies, and how the PSE framework translates to other programs with four examples of high-impact, systems level Extension projects.
15 pages, Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on-going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.
31pgs, This article aims at investigating the impact of financial supports from agricultural policy on farm-size dynamics. Since not all farms may behave alike, a non-stationary mixed-Markov chain modelling (M-MCM) approach is applied to capture unobserved heterogeneity in the movements of farms across economic size (ES) classes. A multinomial logit specification is used for transition probabilities and the parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method and the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm. An empirical application to an unbalanced panel from 2000 to 2018 shows that French farming consists of ‘almost stayers’, with a high probability of remaining in the same ES class over time, and ‘likely movers’, which present a higher probability of a change in size. The results also show that the impact of subsidies and other economic factors depends greatly on the type that a farm belongs to. These findings confirm that individual characteristics of farmers may be relevant for policy efficiency and more attention should thus be paid to unobserved farm heterogeneity in both policy design and the assessment of their impacts on farm-size dynamics.