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1. Engaging Youth Environmental Alliance in Higher Education to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

   Whipple, S. (September 2021, Scholarship and practice of undergraduate research)

   null (Ed.)

   The authors present a new approach to show how interdisciplinary collaborations among a group of institutions can provide a unique opportunity for students to engage across the science-policy nexus using the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Through collaboration across seven higher education institutions in the United States and Australia, virtual student research teams worked together across disciplines such as economics, ecology, and other earth and social sciences to address research questions centered on sustainable development goals. The teams presented their findings in person to diplomats and delegates at the 2019 United Nations Conference of the Parties meeting in Madrid, which also had strong qualitative impacts on their perceptions of international science-policy interfaces. 

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2. Hierarchical Interactions and Compliance in Comparative Courts

   https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231183915  

   Masood, Ali S.; Bowie, Jennifer (June 2023, Political Research Quarterly)

   Given their place within the judicial hierarchy, judges on lower courts face a complex array of challenges including heavy caseloads, mandatory dockets, and the threat of Supreme Court reversal. Despite the extensive scholarship on the American courts, little is known about judicial interactions in comparative contexts. We articulate and evaluate a framework for lower court adherence to Supreme Court precedents by leveraging a cross-national design in three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—with similar systems but meaningful institutional variability. We find that the mechanisms promulgating adherence to Supreme Court precedents do not substantially vary across design or institutional context. Instead, our results demonstrate that legal factors exert a consistent, homogeneous effect on lower court compliance across judicial systems. Our work offers new and important implications for studies on law and courts and comparative institutions, more broadly. 

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3. Institutions, Voids, and Dependencies: Tracing the Designs and Robustness of Urban Water Systems

   https://doi.org/10.4000/irpp.3455  

   Deslatte, Aaron; Koebele, Elizabeth A.; Bartels, Lauren; Wiechman, Adam; Vicario, Sara Alonso; Coughlin, Celeste; Rybolt, Desi (July 2023, International Review of Public Policy)

   Urban water systems across the United States are facing a variety of challenges to existing supply and demand dynamics. Responding to these challenges and working toward sustainability in these complex socio-environmental systems (SES) requires integrating various types of information – ranging from hydrologic data to political considerations and beyond – into policy and management decisions. However, the design of institutions, i.e. the formal rules in which urban water utilities are embedded, impact the flow of various types of information, especially across diverse actor groups critical to developing and implementing policy. Drawing on a neuroscience-informed Bayesian application of the Robustness of Coupled Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Framework, this study examines the institutional designs of two urban U.S. water systems. It aims to advance our understanding of these systems by: A) theoretically linking cognitive science and its action-oriented predictive processing approach to the institutional configurations that shape collective-action; and B) identifying potential institutional dependencies and voids that may limit the use of formalized climate-related guidance in systems facing increased risks. We utilize process-tracing along with an institutional analysis approach called the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT) to parse the institutions into their semantic and syntactic components, identifying institutional dependencies, voids, or conflicts which may influence long-range performance of the systems. Our findings have important implications for the (re)design of institutions that better facilitate the flow of information among key policy actors and support policy changes that promote sustainable long-term urban water supply. 

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4. The ARIS Broader Impacts Toolkit: An Online Guide to Support Broader Impact Project Development and Evaluation for Researchers and BI Professionals

   https://doi.org/10.54656/jces.v17i2.644  

   Hotaling, Liesl; Lichtenwalner, Charles S; McDonnell, Janice D; O'Connell, Kristin; Ferraro, Carrie (November 2024, Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship)

   The Center for Advancing Research Impacts in Society (ARIS) Broader Impacts (BI) Toolkit is a collection of online, interactive tools focused on the generation of broader impacts activity plans that satisfy the criteria of proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The BI Toolkit includes a set of ARIS Guiding Principles, a Planning Checklist, the BI Wizard, and the BI Rubric. Over a three-year period, the ARIS BI Toolkit was pilot-tested with BI professionals located within ten institutions geographically distributed across the United States. The participating institutions represented a range of R1 and R2 institutions, Land-Grant Institutions, and Minority Serving Institutions with BI professionals serving in centralized and decentralized capacities within the institutions. This paper discusses the development of the ARIS BI Toolkit, its evolution through usability testing, a description of the BI Toolkit as it currently exists, and goals for future expansion. 

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5. Grads on the go: Measuring college‐specific labor markets for graduates

   https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22553  

   Conzelmann, Johnathan G.; Hemelt, Steven W.; Hershbein, Brad J.; Martin, Shawn; Simon, Andrew; Stange, Kevin M. (December 2023, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management)

   Abstract This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50% of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67% in‐state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4‐year institutions as for 2‐year institutions. However, more than one quarter of 2‐year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4‐year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college‐specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of “brain drain” across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education. 

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