What happens to the proposals generated by participatory processes? One of the key aspects of participatory processes that has been the subject of rare systematic analysis and comparison is the fate of their outputs: their policy proposals. Which specific factors explain whether these proposals are accepted, rejected or transformed by public authorities? In this article contextual and proposal‐related factors are identified that are likely to affect the prospect of proposals being implemented. The explanatory power of these factors are tested through multilevel analysis on a diverse set of 571 policy proposals. The findings offer evidence that both contextual and proposal‐related variables are important. The design of participatory processes affects the degree of implementation, with participatory budgeting and higher quality processes being particularly effective. Most significant for explaining outcomes are proposal‐level, economic and political factors: a proposal's cost, the extent to which it challenges existing policy and the degree of support it has within the municipality all strongly affect the chance of implementation.

Do more rules improve overall policy performance? To answer this question, we look at rule growth in the area of environmental policy from an aggregate perspective. We argue that impactful growth in rules crucially depends on implementation capacities. If such capacities are limited, countries are at risk of ‘empty’ rule growth where they lack the ability to implement their ever‐growing stock of policies. Hence, rules are a necessary, yet not sufficient condition for achieving sectoral policy objectives. We underpin our argument with an analysis of the impact of a new, encompassing measure of environmental rule growth covering 13 countries from 1980 to 2010. These findings call for ‘sustainable statehood’ where the growth in rules should not outpace the expansion in administrative capacities.

A burgeoning line of research examines nonprofit advocacy, yet few have examined how nonprofits advocate against policy objectives. We explore how groups serve client needs by examining immigrant-serving organizations shaping local enforcement of federal immigration removal policies. We demonstrate how groups have helped to reshape national immigration enforcement through the litigation process. These organizations play a vital role in providing legal aid to individuals facing removal. With information on 1079 nonprofits, we predict regional removal numbers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We find that the availability of nonprofit pro bono legal aid does predict local removal rates. Regions with greater numbers of pro bono attorney groups produce fewer immigration removals, controlling for other factors. The number of non-attorney advocates in a region predicts fewer non-criminal immigrant removals. This finding is important for both scholars and immigrant advocates at a time of heightened national enforcement.

In political research, scholars have increasingly paid attention to the political challenges of integrating new public policies into existing policy subsystems, which bears important implications for the study of eco-social policy and politics. By drawing on policy integration research, we identify and discuss insights and lessons deriving from policy integration scholarship, which appear to be relevant for understanding policy linkages between the social and environmental domains especially regarding the European Green Deal (EGD). More specifically, we focus on the following two aspects: (1) the elements of policy design and implementation practices that are deemed to be helpful for ensuring equilibrium between social and environmental goals and (2) political factors that are likely to affect policy integration dynamics along the social and environmental aspects (eco-social nexus). This article contributes to the literature by tracing novel research trajectories for the eco-social debate to explore in the policy integration perspective.

Implementation arrangements are increasingly recognized as a decisive factor in the success of contemporary welfare policies, particularly those that combine income support with activation requirements. This paper examines the Italian case of minimum income schemes - the Reddito di Inclusione and the Reddito di Cittadinanza - to explore how local implementation arrangements shape one of their core objectives: reintegrating beneficiaries into the labour market. Drawing on an original dataset that integrates administrative data with a unique INAPP survey of local institutions, we operationalize “implementation arrangements” along three dimensions: institutional capacity, alignment between organizational missions and policy goals, and the quality of institutional cooperation within a multilevel governance framework. Using regression models at the municipal level, we find that implementation strength matters, but horizontal cooperation and effective communication between Public Employment Services (PES) and Local Social Planning Institutions (LSPIs) emerge as the strongest predictors of successful outcomes. While PES performance is central due to their policy mandate, LSPIs’ ability to foster integrated networks also contributes positively when well-coordinated. These findings highlight that policy success depends less on formal design than on the quality of local governance and institutional complementarities. The results provide new evidence for the literature on implementation, underscoring the importance of horizontal multilevel governance in active social policies.

Understanding the process of seeking long-term care (LTC) in old age helps identify what contributes to delays and inequalities in accessing it. Current research highlights the roles of individual and policy factors, but pays little attention to how these factors interact. This qualitative study aims to fill this gap by identifying facilitating factors and mechanisms in the initial approaches to LTC policies. It examines care-seeking in two towns in northern Italy, where a demand-based approach, high fragmentation and poor coordination pose significant challenges. In a bottom-up approach to policy implementation, the experiences and perspectives of both care-seekers and professionals are integrated. Indeed, the data collection (April 2023–May 2024) triangulates 100+ hours of participant observation and semi-structured or vignette-based interviews. The study finds that care-seeking entails three interrelated steps: recognising care needs, being willing to receive LTC, and reaching an entry point. At each stage, three mechanisms operate at intrapersonal and interpersonal levels and can be promoted by LTC policies to facilitate care-seeking, especially for those experiencing barriers. The mechanisms are (1) taking the initiative to raise awareness of care needs and share information about available solutions; (2) fostering trust between professionals and care-seekers, who often rely on confidential relationships to discuss care arrangements; and (3) combining primary information with tailored guidance on the local offer, enabling care-seekers to make informed decisions. The findings provide actionable insights into policies and practices that facilitate care-seeking, and offer a conceptual framework that explains the driving factors behind this process and its mechanisms.

This article posits that the multi-level governance literature can benefit from administrative burden theory if scholars are interested in understanding under which conditions policy implementation fails. To support this argument, we build on these two bodies of research to examine how implicit welfare rescaling – where the central government expands its role in a previously devolved policy – may increase administrative burdens for claimants, and to what extent local welfare systems can help to mitigate these burdens despite lacking coordination. To address these research aims, we assess the implementation of the “Ingreso Mínimo Vital,” a national minimum income scheme introduced in Spain within a fragmented regional system. Qualitative fieldwork with frontline professionals and policy experts shows that welfare rescaling heightened claimants’ administrative burdens due to inter-institutional misfit among governance levels. This imposed substantial learning, compliance, and psychological costs on claimants, making frontline professionals essential for guiding them through these challenges.

The analytical framework, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” elucidates how the policy implementation process can be restructured to affect its outputs. Three steps from the framework are applied to the case of Republican officeholders between 1906 and 1913, who centralized their control over immigration, by adding naturalization and enforcement in the new Bureau of Immigration & Naturalization. The Roosevelt and Taft administrations used budgeting, staffing, and infrastructure to regulate immigration and naturalization laws, pivoting between easing and tightening them (resource adjustment). The shifts responded to coalitions for and against immigration (coalition management). Until the Bureau became obsolete and was reconfigured (system redesign). Although immigration was open in the Progressive Era, this study reveals how Republicans managed inflows with mixed results, leading to the structural foundation for the restrictive laws that followed. This furthers the immigration history and political control literatures as they emphasize policymaking through legislative and procedural, not structural, means.

Improved health data governance is urgently needed due to the increasing use of digital technologies that facilitate the collection of health data and growing demand to use that data in artificial intelligence (AI) models that contribute to improving health outcomes. While most of the discussion around health data governance is focused on policy and regulation, we present a practical perspective. We focus on the context of low-resource government health systems, using first-hand experience of the Zanzibar health system as a specific case study, and examine three aspects of data governance: informed consent, data access and security, and data quality. We discuss the barriers to obtaining meaningful informed consent, highlighting the need for more research to determine how to effectively communicate about data and AI and to design effective consent processes. We then report on the process of introducing data access management and information security guidelines into the Zanzibar health system, demonstrating the gaps in capacity and resources that must be addressed during the implementation of a health data governance policy in a low-resource government system. Finally, we discuss the quality of service delivery data in low-resource health systems such as Zanzibar’s, highlighting that a large quantity of data does not necessarily ensure its suitability for AI development. Poor data quality can be addressed to some extent through improved data governance, but the problem is inextricably linked to the weakness of a health system, and therefore AI-quality data cannot be obtained through technological or data governance measures alone.