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1. Forest policy and management approaches for carbon dioxide removal

   https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2020.0001  

   vonHedemann, Nicolena ; Wurtzebach, Zachary ; Timberlake, Thomas J. ; Sinkular, Emily ; Schultz, Courtney A. ( October 2020 , Interface Focus)

   Forests increasingly will be used for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) as a natural climate solution, and the implementation of forest-based CDR presents a complex public policy challenge. In this paper, our goal is to review a range of policy tools in place to support use of forests for CDR and demonstrate how concepts from the policy design literature can inform our understanding of this domain. We explore how the utilization of different policy tools shapes our ability to use forests to mitigate and adapt to climate change and consider the challenges of policy mixes and integration, taking a close look at three areas of international forest policy, including the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and voluntary carbon offset markets. As it is our expertise, we then examine in detail the case of the USA as a country that lacks aggressive implementation of national climate policies but has potential to increase CDR through reforestation and existing forest management on both public and private land. For forest-based CDR to succeed, a wide array of policy tools will have to be implemented in a variety of contexts with an eye towards overcoming the challenges ofmore »policy design with regard to uncertainty in policy outcomes, policy coherence around managing forests for carbon simultaneously with other goals and integration across governance contexts and levels.« less
2. Policy innovation lab scholarship: past, present, and the future – Introduction to the special issue on policy innovation labs

   https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2021.1940700  

   Wellstead, Adam ; Gofen, Anat ; Carter, Angie ( October 2021 , Policy design and practice)

   The past decade has seen a rapid rise in the number of policy innovation labs (PILs). PILs that are found both inside and outside of government address a wide range of social issues. Many PILs share a few distinct common characteristics: a commitment to the design-thinking methodology, a focus on applying experimental approaches to testing and measuring the efficacy of comprehensive public policy and intervention program prototypes, and the use of user-centric techniques to stakeholders in the design process. In this introduction to the special issue on PILs, we begin by taking stock of the policy lab literature published to date by providing an overview of 70 related publications (peer review articles,book chapters, theses, reports, and catalogs) and the extent that they engage the policy literature. This review demonstrates the underexplored practitioner perspective, which serves as the theme for this special issue. Next, the six articles that comprise this special issue are introduced. They are written from a practitioner perspective and include contributions from Brazil, Canada, Finland, and the United Kingdom. Finally, suggestions for future research are highlighted, including the role of PILs in policy work, PILs as street-level policy entrepreneurship settings, and the need for more rigorous inferential methods.
3. Building a Pillowfort: Political Tensions in Platform Design and Policy

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3492835  

   Dym, Brianna ; Pasupuleti, Namita ; Fiesler, Casey ( January 2022 , Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Social media platforms make trade-offs in their design and policy decisions to attract users and stand out from other platforms. These decisions are influenced by a number of considerations, e.g. what kinds of content moderation to deploy or what kinds of resources a platform has access to. Their choices play into broader political tensions; social media platforms are situated within a social context that frames their impact, and they can have politics through their design that enforce power structures and serve existing authorities. We turn to Pillowfort, a small social media platform, to examine these political tensions as a case study. Using a discourse analysis, we examine public discussion posts between staff and users as they negotiate the site's development over a period of two years. Our findings illustrate the tensions in navigating the politics that users bring with them from previous platforms, the difficulty of building a site's unique identity and encouraging commitment, and examples of how design decisions can both foster and break trust with users. Drawing from these findings, we discuss how the success and failure of new social media platforms are impacted by political influences on design and policy decisions.
4. Precision conservation: Linking set‐aside and working lands policy

   https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13240  

   Swinton, Scott M. ( January 2022 , Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy)

   Abstract Innovations in precision agriculture now enable the identification of crop field patches whose retirement offers high environmental benefits and the low opportunity cost of crop yield loss. Precision conservation can lower costs to farmers and payment costs for government agencies. Precision conservation incentive policy should unite elements of land retirement (set-aside) and working lands policies that pay for environmental services. Key decisions surround how to bundle land fragments in a contract, keep contract design simple, evaluate environmental benefits, monitor compliance, and measure the additionality of those benefits.
5. Dependable Public Ledger for Policy Compliance, a Blockchain Based Approach

   Wu, Zhou ; Williams, Andrew ; Perouli, Debbie ( July 2019 , 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2019))

   The ever increasing amount of personal data accumulated by companies offering innovative services through the cloud, Internet of Things devices and, more recently, social robots has started to alert consumers and legislative authorities. In the advent of the first modern laws trying to protect user privacy, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, it is still unclear what are the tools and techniques that the industry should employ to comply with regulations in a transparent and cost effective manner. We propose an architecture for a public blockchain based ledger that can provide strong evidence of policy compliance. To address scalability concerns, we define a new type of off-chain channel that is based on general state channels and offers verification for information external to the blockchain. We also create a model of the business relationships in a smart home setup that includes a social robot and suggest a sticky policy mechanism to monitor cross-boundary policy compliance.