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1. The structure of environmental governance: How public policies connect and partition California's oil and gas policy landscape

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112069  

   Heikkila, T. (October 2021, Journal of environmental management)

   In this paper, we ask how the written composition of public policies structure an environmental governance system. We answer this question using semi-automated text analyses of 22 state-level policies governing oil and gas development in California between 2007 and 2017. The findings portray an environmental governance system that is both partitioned and connected into different focal areas (called “targeted action situations”) through certain actors, issues, and rules. We conclude with substantive insights about California’s oil and gas governance system, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions for analyzing the composition of public policy to advance knowledge about hybrid governance. 

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2. Human Rights in the Oil and Gas Industry: When Are Policies and Practices Enough to Prevent Abuse?

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503211017435  

   Olsen, Tricia; Rehbein, Kathleen; Westermann-Behaylo, Michelle; Snelson-Powell, Annie (July 2021, Business & Society)

   null (Ed.)

   Multinational enterprises are aware of their responsibility to protect human rights now more than ever, but severe human rights violations, including physical integrity abuses (e.g., death, torture, disappearances), continue unabated. To explore this puzzle, we engage theoretically with the means-ends decoupling literature to examine if and when oil and gas firms’ policies and practices prevent severe human rights abuse. Using an original dataset, we identify two pathways to mitigate means-ends decoupling: (a) while human rights policies alone do not reduce human rights abuses, firms with a high-quality human rights policy over the long-term reduce severe human rights abuses; (b) firms that combine preparedness—which we define as a firm’s capabilities, practices, and engagement—with a long-term human rights policy also reduce the likelihood of human rights abuses. Preparedness, we argue, can lead to reinforcement dynamics between long-term policy efforts and additional capabilities that provide a more holistic understanding of firm behavior. 

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3. Local support of climate change policies in Germany over time

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acd406  

   Levi, Sebastian; Wolf, Ingo; Sommer, Stephan; Howe, Peter D. (June 2023, Environmental Research Letters)

   Abstract Political conflicts about energy and climate change policies often have local implications, yet little is known about local public opinion towards these policies. Here, we estimate support towards 26 climate change mitigation policies for 402 German counties and for up to four points of time using multilevel regression and poststratification. We find that local support for climate policies varies by up to 60 percentage points across German counties with large disparities between the rural and urban population. While support for the expansion of wind power plants and solar power plants have converged over the last years, attitudes on the phase-out of coal power have polarized across regions. Using a spatial panel analysis, we find that support for the expansion of wind and solar plants correlate with the actual development of solar and wind capacities in these regions. Moreover, the spread of climate policy opinion is strongly determined by spatial diffusion as change in one region positively influences the trajectory of policy opinion among its neighbors. 

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4. The long mid-transition: tracking decades of coastal oil well decommissioning in California

   https://doi.org/10.1088/2753-3751/ad7bbd  

   Partridge, Tristan; Barandiaran, Javiera (September 2024, Environmental Research: Energy)

   Abstract This article presents an account of four different experiences of oil well decommissioning and abandonment along the Santa Barbara coast in California, together forming an ongoing process that began over a century ago and which has, more recently, become a component of statewide transition plans. The cases include the re-abandonment of nineteenth century wells in Summerland; offshore oil platform removal in the 1990s; and two different areas of operational closures due to infrastructure failures and bankruptcies. Informed by this history, we suggest that decommissioning must be actively managed through coordinated, well-funded, multi-agency action, grounded in historical awareness of policy trajectories. Additionally, the scale of the need together with the economics and policies in place mean that oil well decommissioning will be happening for a very long time, even if no new wells are built. 

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5. SPID: A New Database for Inferring Public Policy Innovativeness and Diffusion Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12357  

   Boehmke, Frederick J.; Brockway, Mark; Desmarais, Bruce A.; Harden, Jeffrey J.; LaCombe, Scott; Linder, Fridolin; Wallach, Hanna (June 2019, Policy Studies Journal)

   Despite its rich tradition, there are key limitations to researchers' ability to make generalizable inferences about state policy innovation and diffusion. This paper introduces new data and methods to move from empirical analyses of single policies to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. We have gathered policy adoption data appropriate for estimating policy innovativeness and tracing diffusion ties in a targeted manner (e.g., by policy domain, time period, or policy type) and extended the development of methods necessary to accurately and efficiently infer those ties. Our state policy innovation and diffusion (SPID) database includes 728 different policies coded by topic area. We provide an overview of this new dataset and illustrate two key uses: (i) static and dynamic innovativeness measures and (ii) latent diffusion networks that capture common pathways of diffusion between states across policies. The scope of the data allows us to compare patterns in both across policy topic areas. We conclude that these new resources will enable researchers to empirically investigate classes of questions that were difficult or impossible to study previously, but whose roots go back to the origins of the political science policy innovation and diffusion literature. 

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