Among the tools available to enhance the rationality of policy formulation, Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) has captured the attention of many scholars for its potential to enhance the accountability and transparency of regulatory governance. Although almost all EU and OECD member states have adopted RIA, only a sub- set of small-n case comparative studies on institutional, political and administrative impact have been conducted. By filling this gap in the literature and proposing the rigorous operationalisation of concepts such as adoption, extent of implementation, and learning, this thesis ascertains the extent of interdependency among governments in their choices concerning an innovation of regulatory governance. Methodologically, the dissertation draws on a multi-method approach, consisting of qualitative analysis to track the process of institutionalisation, as well as event history analysis, based on a dataset covering thirty-eight countries from 1968 to 2006. The empirical findings show that diffusion is a multifaceted process. In the decision to adopt RIA, the role of the OECD in translating, packaging, and promoting such administrative innovation coexists with previous innovations and other administrative variables. Yet the impact of interdependency is marginal in the successive phases of implementation and evaluation. Earliness of adoption is the major predictor of the extent of implementation. There is little evidence of interaction and communication among adopters on the subject of their learning experience. On balance, this regulatory governance innovation is a domain of symbolic and rhetorical meanings that is not adequately supported by administrative capacity.

Electric end-use efficiency is attracting more and more attentions, but it remains unclear what factors are driving state policy innovations to improve energy efficiency. Controversy also exists over the effectiveness of energy efficiency programs. Several critical problems are facing the policymakers: what factors drive the states taking distinct strategies in policy innovation? Have state policies being able to improve energy efficiency in the past? And, will state policies remain relevant to future efficiency improvements? This dissertation tries to answer these important questions and assumes that policy innovation is relevant to energy efficiency. It first explores the factors that influence the adoption of energy efficiency policies using Internal Determinants models. Results suggest that internal state factors affect policy innovation, including state socioeconomic factors, state fiscal capacity, ideology, and constituent pressure. Policy innovations are found to be correlated with each other. This dissertation also evaluates the impact of policy innovation on energy efficiency by decomposing electricity productivity into activity, structure, and efficiency effects. The findings suggest that financial incentives and building codes have significant impacts on state electricity productivity. Other regulations tend to have mixed effects. In addition, an estimation of the achievable potential of energy efficiency suggests that policies will cost-effectively drive significant electricity savings in the future. Overall, this dissertation offers an in-depth diagnosis of the relationship between policy innovation and energy efficiency. It provides a rigorous statistical analysis covering the most important energy efficiency policies. It represents the first attempt to evaluate policy impact by decomposing electricity productivity. However, the statistical models and energy models are subject to limitations and future research is needed to improve the models.

This dissertation explores the role of ideas, paradigms and ideology in the definition of public policies. To understand this issue, the thesis developed a conceptual framework and a set of propositions based on the academic literature related to the meaning of ideas and paradigm change in public policy, the impact of epistemic communities, the influence of legacies and the role of ideology from the perspective of the socio-cognitive school of Critical Discourse Analysis. In this dissertation ideology is understood as the ‘fundamental beliefs of a group and its members’ (Van Dijk, 2004: 6) that form the basis of social practices (Van Dijk, 2004: 9) whereas paradigms have been defined as ‘taken for granted world views (…) that constrain the range of policy choices’ (Campbell, 2002: 21) and in turn are bounded by ideology. The research examines the case of the Catalan National Agreement on Research and Innovation (CNARI) which was developed between 2007 and 2008. To capture and analyse this process of policy design the research uses qualitative methods that include face to face interviews, documentary research and coding of visual and textual data. The findings suggests that the design of the CNARI was based on ideas that were firmly placed within a widely acknowledged overall paradigm in innovation policy that itself was shaped and limited by a dominant broader ideology. Factors influencing the role of these ideas included the fact that the underlying paradigm was widely shared across different political territories and levels within Europe, and that the ideas were propagated by two key international organisations (EU and OECD) as well as by a number of highly respected representatives of the international epistemic community, which served to re-enforce the overarching policy paradigm, introduced these policy ideas to the Catalan context, and supported their regional adaptation. The dissertation identifies three proposals for future research: 1) an examination of the role of organisational structures in elaborating and implementing policy which does not involve civil servants, 2) an exploration of how a politician’s personal experience impacts the elaboration of a political programme, and 3) an analysis of the role of open and participatory processes to define policies.

The trade-off between innovation and access is a critical problem in pharmaceutical innovation policy. Without adequate intellectual property protection, knowledge is insufficiently appropriable and the output of innovation is sub-optimal. Patents and sui generis forms of intellectual property are policies utilized by the state to foster innovation, creating temporary monopolies for firms to reward their investments in research and development. This paper explores the topic of pharmaceutical innovation policy by discovering the key legal developments that influence the creation of internationally protected and harmonized minimum standards of IP rights. Equipped with a theoretical understanding of IP as a social contract and knowledge about incentives that the law provides, the status quo system of rewarding pharmaceutical innovation is observed though an analysis of the market for new chemical entities, developing an understanding of the relationship between incentives for innovation and market outcomes. Utilizing an extensive analysis of literature, promising policy options are explored for realigning incentives to better optimize the incremental benefits of pharmaceutical innovation while improving access, including public funding of clinical trials, incorporating value-for-money stipulations into reimbursement and marketing approval decisions, and creating prize-based rewards that delink the market for innovations from the market for pharmaceutical products.

Industries and regional economies evolve as a result of the interplay between local and non-local factors. Increasing globalization of both production- and innovation activities implies a shift in the relevant scales of interaction from the local towards the global level. This paper is concerned with the implications of such scale shifts for the role of the region and for cluster-related regional policies. It examines what is left of the role of regional settings in fostering economic development when extra-regional drivers of change increase in importance. We investigate this crucial question with two in-depth case studies of the medical technologies sector, in which such scale shifts have been particularly pronounced. Our findings from empirical material collected in Scania/Sweden and Vienna/Austria illustrate the ways in which changes in national and supra-national regulatory frameworks have had a profound impact on the innovation activities of individual firms and the way to develop and launch new products, and subsequently on the regions in which they cluster. Such scale-shifts have on the one hand limited the potential for regional policy to shape the cluster's path through support for supply-side factors. Yet some critical assets remain local but are increasingly difficult to access. By addressing such barriers to access, regional policy can still strongly affect the opportunities for innovation. Furthermore, in an increasingly open industry system, we see an expanded role for regional policy in supporting firms to access critical assets and sources of innovation found external to the region.

In 1993, the Canadian federal government made a decision with respect to the direction that the country would take in regulating agricultural products of biotechnology, commonly referred to as GMOs or GM crops. Following the lead of the United States, Canada adopted the innovative “product-based” approach to regulation, making it necessary for all GM crops to go through the regulatory system in order to gain approval for commercialization. However, the iteration that Canada’s adoption of the policy took differed from the form that the product-based approach took in the United States. Canada created a category of “plants with novel traits”, which is based on the concept of novelty and reflects the idea that products of newer technologies such as recombinant DNA are not fundamentally different than those developed through more conventional means. The United States does not require regulation on novel plants created through conventional means via a regulatory trigger which seeks out plant pathogens, present only in newer, recombinant technologies. As a result, many crops developed through more conventional modification techniques such as mutagenesis are not subjected to the American regulatory system, but are in Canada. The objective of this paper is to determine how Canada and the United States came to adopt the product-based approach to regulation, where the Canadian system began to differ from the American system, and why the Canadian system has not diffused internationally, despite being the most directly implemented representative of the product-based approach. This is accomplished via the application of the policy change, policy diffusion, and policy innovation literatures. Theories of policy change and diffusion are introduced. I trace the history and diffusion of novelty using the historical method, and test the applicability of other diffusion models to the case study in order to determine their predictive power in an international diffusion scenario. The innovation literature is also applied in order to explain how and why the product-based approach to regulation has been incorporated differently at multiple levels of regulatory policy. I conclude with an argument that Canada has lost a “standards war” with the United States for regulatory superiority, in light of lost marketability and a less permissible regulatory landscape, which must prompt us to re-evaluate our regulatory approach.

The local level has gained prominence in climate policy and governance in recent years as it is increasingly perceived as a privileged arena for policy experimentation and social and institutional innovation. However, the success of local climate governance in industrialized countries has been limited. One reason may be that local communities focus too much on strategies of technology-oriented ecological modernization and individual behavior change and too little on strategies that target unsustainable social practices and their embeddedness in complex socioeconomic patterns. In this paper we assess and compare the strategies of "low-carbon municipalities" (top-down initiatives) and those of "intentional communities" (bottom-up initiatives). We were interested to determine to what extent and in which ways each community type intervenes in social practices to curb carbon emissions and to explore the scope for further and deeper interventions on the local level. Using an analytical framework based on social practice theory we identify characteristic patterns of intervention for each community type. We find that low-carbon municipalities face difficulties in transforming carbon-intensive social practices. While offering some additional low-carbon choices, their ability to reduce carbon-intensive practices is very limited. Their focus on efficiency and individual choice shows little transformative potential. Intentional communities, by contrast, have more institutional and organizational options to intervene in the web of social practices. Finally, we explore to what extent low-carbon municipalities can learn from intentional communities and propose strategies of hybridization for policy innovation to combine the strengths of both models.

The goal of this thesis is to understand the innovation policy of Israel and find recommendations for innovation policy of Czech republic. The first chapter aims to define basic theoretical concepts of innovation and measurements of the efficiency of innovation policy and competitiveness of the economy as such. The second chapter analyzes the innovation policy of Israel, its origins, the factors causing innovative thinking, the government tools for the support of innovation and successful innovation projects. The final chapter contains a comparison of the innovative aspects of the two countries, evaluation of cooperation and inspiration for the Czech innovation system based on my research.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 甲第18486号 / 地環博第120号 / 新制||地環||25(附属図書館) / 31364 / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎地球環境学専攻 / (主査)教授 宇佐美 誠, 教授 ショウ ラジブ, 准教授 森 晶寿 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

The developing knowledge economy affects organizations within the innovation system where higher education institutions (HEI) are regarded as a significant part. There is a large amount of research that focus on different aspects of collaboration such as the outcome, the process and its infrastructure. To emphasize HEIs role in the national and regional innovation systems concepts such as Mode 2 and Triple helix, and the Knowledge triangle, have developed. These concepts have also heavily influenced Swedish innovation policy.   This thesis is set to analyze collaboration work between Swedish HEIs and the public and private sectors, and to understand how collaboration: i) occurs in practice in research and undergraduate education; ii) is influenced by policy efforts, and; iii) influence HEI’s internal and external social capital building. Firstly, research and teaching links is analyzed to highlight the integration of collaboration, research and education within specific research profiles. This is because previous research has neglected collaboration and its effect on undergraduate education. Secondly, social capital theory is used as a framework for the analysis. Social capital theory is used to obtain a thorough understanding of individual researchers’ attitude to collaboration and participation in collaboration activities.   The results indicate that short term projects had long-term effects since it established new education programs and projects. Collaboration also effects undergraduate education through research profiles with their integration of research and education in groups within as well as outside the HEI. The results also show that social capital building through top steered initiatives is complex. In the HEIs there was no relation between researchers expressing a positive attitude towards different forms of collaboration and a high participation level in collaboration activities. This suggests that building of external social capital within HEIs is not related to the nature of the internal social capital. There was interfaculty differences in both the researchers’ attitude to collaboration activities and participation in collaboration activities. As expected, professors had more opportunities and ability for collaboration. They also indicated a resistance to use a central infrastructure for collaboration to build external social capital. The opposite was demonstrated for professors from the humanities who had little experience of collaboration. They still did not to use the infrastructure to a large extent. Suggestively policy makers should encourage a more efficient external social capital building through earmarked funding for collaboration on a department level rather than on the HEIs’ central level.