What is Policy Analytics? An Exploration of 5 Years of Environmental Management Applications.

Our digital age is characterized by both a generalized access to data and an increased call for participation of the public and other stakeholders and communities in policy design and decision-making. This context raises new challenges for political decision-makers and analysts in providing these actors with new means and moral duties for decision support, including in the area of environmental policy. The concept of "policy analytics" was introduced in 2013 as an attempt to develop a framework, tools, and methods to address these challenges.

Adapting participatory processes to fine-tune conservation approaches in multiactor decision settings.

Conservation decisions are typically made in complex, dynamic, and uncertain settings, where multiple actors raise diverse and potentially conflicting claims, champion different and sometimes contradictory values, and enjoy varying degrees of freedom and power to act and influence collective decisions. Therefore, effective conservation actions require conservation scientists and practitioners to take into account the complexity of multiactor settings. We devised a framework to help conservation biologists and practitioners in this task.

The Effects of Public Participation on Multi-Level Water Governance, Lessons from Uganda.

Water governance occurs at multiple levels, from the local to the supra-national, which are often highly fragmented. The interconnected nature of water requires interactions among these multiple governance levels. Public participation may foster such interactions.

Four challenges in selecting and implementing methods to monitor and evaluate participatory processes: Example from the Rwenzori region, Uganda.

Participatory approaches are now increasingly recognized and used as an essential element of policies and programs, especially in regards to natural resource management (NRM). Most practitioners, decision-makers and researchers having adopted participatory approaches also acknowledge the need to monitor and evaluate such approaches in order to audit their effectiveness, support decision-making or improve learning. Many manuals and frameworks exist on how to carry out monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for participatory processes.

Managing frame diversity in environmental participatory processes - Example from the Fogera woreda in Ethiopia.

Many participatory processes fail to generate social change and collaborative outcomes. This failure can partly be explained by how divergent stakeholders' frames are handled. This paper builds on the framing and participation literature to explain how facilitators can manage frame diversity and foster collaborative outcomes.

The MEPPP Framework: A Framework for Monitoring and Evaluating Participatory Planning Processes.

Evaluating participatory processes, participatory planning processes especially, can be challenging. Due to their complexity, these processes require a specific approach to evaluation. This paper proposes a framework for evaluating projects that have adopted a participatory planning approach: the monitoring and evaluation of participatory planning processes (MEPPP) framework.

Drivers of Environmental Institutional Dynamics in Decentralized African Countries.

This paper builds on the assumption that an effective approach to support the sustainability of natural resource management initiatives is institutional "bricolage." We argue that participatory planning processes can foster institutional bricolage by encouraging stakeholders to make their own arrangements based on the hybridization of old and new institutions. This papers aims at identifying how participatory process facilitators can encourage institutional bricolage.

Towards understanding participatory processes: Framework, application and results.

Many scholars point out that in complex and contested decision-making and planning situations, participatory processes have clear advantages over "traditional" or non-participatory processes. Improving our understanding of which participatory process elements or combination of elements contribute to specific outcomes demands a comparative diagnosis of multiple case studies based on a systematic framework. This paper describes the theoretical foundation and application of a diagnostic framework developed for the description and comparative analysis of participatory processes.