•Identifying the core policies, core institutions, and core policy targets of China's AI policy.•Exploring the policy-isssuing trends and policy distribution changes.•Analysis of the evolution of ...China's AI policy targets.•Identifying the characteristics and trends of the policy process.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology policy plays a critical role to steer its applications to broadly relevant endpoints, and contributes to critical governance of innovations by governments, industry and society at large. In this paper, we adopt a bibliometrics-based research framework to characterize the development and evolution of China's AI policy. The framework integrates bibliometric methods, semantic analysis, and network analysis for identifying core policy elements and their evolution in the AI policy process. Specifically, we first collect China's central-level AI-related policies and identify four stages of its evolution based on policy-issuing frequency, policy trends, and core policy issuing time nodes. We then identify the core policies, core institutions, and core policy targets in each stage. Then we explore the policy issuing trends, policy distribution changes, and evolution of policy targets. Finally, patterns and characteristics of the policy process are identified, and trends are predicted. We used the PKULaw database to collect the policy-relevant data on AI in China, and the time frame is from 1990 to 2019. Our findings and the reported quantitative map might usefully inform AI policy in China and elsewhere around the world. It could also help broader stakeholder engagement in policy discussions on AI technology, industry and society.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Climate migration is an emerging policymaking area not yet regulated by European Law. Given the absence of a legally-binding treaty governing this phenomenon, the scope of this study focuses on ...policy documents issued by the most relevant European Institutions: the EU Commission, EU Parliament, and the Council. Thanks to this document-based analysis, the present contribution will show the different roles the selected EU institutions played and whether they have a common denominator. The main findings show that despite the different ontologies and approaches, the selected EU institutions seem to converge into a significant securitization of climate migration, with scant attention to gender and environmental justice within the most relevant EU documents concerning migration and asylum. Indeed, such perspectives are more likely to be mentioned in EU policy documents dedicated to gender but are not integrated into the migration policies where they would matter. A detailed analysis of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum reveals its substantially gender and environmental justice-blind approach despite the gender mainstreaming ontology that has been invoked in numerous policy documents largely focused on gender.
The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers' role in stimulating democratic spaces. We ...have termed this Teachers' Democratic Assignment. We examine changing notions of teachers' democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using a Critical Discourse Analysis. We tested our hypothesis that teachers' democratic assignment has changed in unprecedented ways using an analysis of policy documents in teacher education. Our findings reported a substantive converging paradigm shift from a predominantly progressive (reconstructivist) curriculum discourse where democracy was seen as inextricably linked to everyday practice in the early years of this century, to a more essentialist (perennialist) discourse in recent times. The findings will have interest for a wider audience and have implications for the role of democracy in teacher education as well as the question of education as a social responsibility for a vibrant democracy.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Policymakers are increasingly focusing on the participation of children in the child protection system (CPS). However, research shows that actual practice still needs to be improved. Embedding ...children’s participation in legislation and policy documents is one important prerequisite for achieving meaningful participation in child protection practice. In this study, the participation of children in the Dutch CPS under the new Youth Act 2015 is critically analyzed. National legislation and policy documents were studied using a model of “meaningful participation” based on article 12 of the UNCRC. Results show that the idea of children’s participation is deeply embedded in the current Dutch CPS. However, Dutch policy documents do not fully cover the three dimensions of what is considered to be meaningful participation for children: informing, hearing, and involving. Furthermore, children’s participation differs among the organizations included in the child protection chain. A clear overall policy concerning the participation of children in the Dutch CPS is lacking. The conclusions of this critical analysis of policy documents and the framework of meaningful participation presented may provide a basis for the embedding of meaningful participation for children in child protection systems of other countries.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
In the current UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), societal impact measurements are inherent parts of the national evaluation systems. In this ...study, we deal with a relatively new form of societal impact measurements. Recently, Altmetric—a start-up providing publication level metrics—started to make data for publications available which have been mentioned in policy documents. We regard this data source as an interesting possibility to specifically measure the (societal) impact of research. Using a comprehensive dataset with publications on climate change as an example, we study the usefulness of the new data source for impact measurement. Only 1.2 % (
n
= 2341) out of 191,276 publications on climate change in the dataset have at least one policy mention. We further reveal that papers published in
Nature
and
Science
as well as from the areas “Earth and related environmental sciences” and “Social and economic geography” are especially relevant in the policy context. Given the low coverage of the climate change literature in policy documents, this study can be only a first attempt to study this new source of altmetrics data. Further empirical studies are necessary, because mentions in policy documents are of special interest in the use of altmetrics data for measuring target-oriented the broader impact of research.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
•Proposing a bibliometrics-based research framework for studying changes in policy.•Building joint policy-issuing networks to identify the core government ministries, and how these ministries change ...over time.•Identifying the policy target keywords and constructing the policy target keyword co-occurrence network.•Identifying core policy targets and the evolution of a specific policy domain.
Qualitative methods for analyzing policy evolution are often unequipped to process high volumes of policy texts that involve many domains and long timespans. This makes it difficult to take full advantage of the semantic information contained in policy literature. It is also difficult to use traditional qualitative methods to systematically analyze the characteristics of a complex policy mix network, such as the locations, evolution, and relationships between policy actors/targets. In order to address these issues, we propose a bibliometrics-based research framework for exploring policy evolution. We first collect all relevant policy documents from a target domain. We then construct networks of policymaker based on co-occurrence relationships in policy promulgation, in order to determine core policymakers, as well as changes in their status in the networks over time. Lastly, we use semantic analysis to identify policy targets and construct policy target keyword co-occurrence networks for discrete time periods. The evolution of a specific policy domain can then be examined based on changes in network centrality. Information technology policies in China were used as a case study to demonstrate the reliability of our method. The results reflect the practical value of using this method for the quantitative analysis of policy documents.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The protection of children from maltreatment has become extremely challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. The public's gaze is focused on the urgent health crisis, while many children are at risk ...due to social isolation and reduced social services.
Examine child protection in Israel during COVID-19, as portrayed in mainstream news media and government policy documents.
The study analyzed all policy documents and mainstream media reports published in Israel from March to May 2020, during the initial mandatory nationwide quarantine.
(1) Search of relevant articles in mainstream news websites; (2) Search of documents in official websites of relevant government ministries and agencies.
28 government policy documents and 22 media articles were found relevant. When examined chronologically, what stood out was the initial decision to shut down social services, including some of the residential care units for youth at risk, and declare social workers “non-essential”. These decisions were revoked a few weeks into the quarantine, following persistent media pressure by child advocates, resulting in minor changes in policy.
Children were initially invisible to Israeli policymakers facing the pandemic, highlighting the centrality of advocates promoting children's rights and of mainstream news media in disseminating the discourse of protecting children from maltreatment, especially in times of crisis. Moreover, the study points to the heightened threat to at-risk children due to inadequate policies, and to the urgent need to develop child protection policies in order to avoid further risk in future global crises.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•The policy network approach is used to study innovation policymaking.•Three mechanisms of network evolution – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence – are explored.•A social ...network analysis (SNA)-based method quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network.•Mixed mechanisms affect network’s evolution.
Literature on innovation policy reveals little of how relations between government agencies as policymakers evolve. Taking the policy network approach, this paper investigates three mechanisms underlining the evolution of inter-government agency relations in emerging economies – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence, and applies them to the analysis of the evolution of innovation policymaking in China. Operationally, the paper proposes a social network analysis (SNA)-based method to quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network, which consists of 463 innovation policy documents formulated by its central government ministries between 1980 and 2011. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has been not only sustained through the intervention of policy agendas but also self-organized because of policy network’s nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in China’s innovation policy network’s evolution differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. This work advances our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and has implications for innovation policymaking in emerging economies.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
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