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This study aims to explore small and medium enterprises (SMEs) acceptance of the halal certification policy in Indonesia, aiming to understand their perspectives and characteristics, as well as the primary considerations of business actors in implementing the policy. This study seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of SME actors’ views toward halal certification policies, which is crucial for strengthening the government’s efforts in building a robust halal system and creating awareness in the community.

This study uses a mixed method. This study uses a random sampling technique on SMEs in Bandung, Indonesia. A total of 400 respondents participated in filling out the study questionnaire. Meanwhile, five SME actors were interviewed to gain deeper insight into the topic of this study. The data analysis technique used descriptive analysis and verification with confirmatory factor analysis.

The results of the study indicate that the halal certification policy is generally accepted by business actors, but there are criticisms regarding knowledge and information about halal certification. Halal awareness and perceived effectivity have the highest acceptance scores, while halal knowledge and information, religious behavior, individual background, and personal and social aims have the lowest scores. All acceptance indicators meet the criteria of a good fit model, with system indicators having a greater impact. Acceptance is based not only on theological–religious considerations but also on pragmatic considerations related to business operations.

This study has several limitations that should be considered. First, the topics and variables studied are focused only on the dimensions of acceptance of the halal certification policy. It would be more comprehensive if integrated with other variables in correlational and implicative studies. Second, the measurement model used in this study is modified from the policy acceptance model, which focuses on normative and systemic aspects of the policy without considering theological values of the halal certification policy. A more complex model is required to measure the acceptance of a comprehensive halal certification policy that considers both normative and theological aspects.

The implications of this study are as follows: First, the implementation of the halal certification policy must take into account the various indicators of policy acceptance, particularly from the business actors who are responsible for implementing the policy. Second, the implementation of the halal certification policy must also take into account the heterogeneous characteristics of the business actors. Third, the certification policy should focus on two critical indicators, namely, halal awareness and the perceived effectivity of policy implementation, which can be reinforced by other indicators.

The results of this study confirm that the government must take into account the response of business actors to ensure the effectiveness of implementing the halal certification policy. The government can take an important step in this regard by conducting a survey of business actors who have participated in the halal certification program to understand the benefits and satisfaction they receive from the policy and identify the factors that hinder them from accepting the halal certification policy.

This study highlights the response of SME actors regarding the acceptance of the halal certification policy. This study provides a new perspective regarding the acceptance of SMEs toward halal certification policies that are important for future implementation.

This chapter addresses the topic of ‘localisation policies’ (measures and incentives for attracting and developing companies) in relation to the actual subjects of such policies, their aims and targets. The existence of business relationships and networks, and the ubiquity of interaction processes make contemporary policy measures problematic in all these three aspects. Conceiving the business landscape as interactive and heterogeneous business networks leads the authors to argue that policy measures become ineffective when these neglect the networked nature of the business landscape. It is argued that localisation policies consist of multiple initiatives and involve ‘a network of policy actors’, rather than only one institution. Acknowledging the plurality of policy actors and means leads to focus on the need to orchestrate multifaceted localisation policies. Incentives, regulatory frameworks and public investments are some of the elements of the toolbox of localisation policy. The authors also argue that the business network perspective translates into the need to tailor policy measures differentiated for specific companies.

This article aims to explore (1) specific frames of dyadic relationship in policy network beyond a simplistic dichotomy of “friend or foe” and (2) the multi-dimensional drivers behind the framing patterns.

To that end, the interviews with the key actors in a nuclear energy policy network in South Korea were conducted, and their relationships in terms of three dimensions were analyzed: belief accordance, communication frequency and resource symmetry.

As a result, 12 relationships that can occur in the policy networks were identified: helping, collaborating, cooperating, unconcerned, stabilizing, observing, pushing, confronting, challenging, ignoring, watching and avoiding. These 12 frames were observed in various in-/congruent patterns between network actors.

The findings provide theoretical and practical implications on why and how the network actors may assess one another through the 12 discrete frames, which are drawn from the three dimensional drivers of belief accordance, communication frequency and resource symmetry.

Previous IMP research has shown that innovation benefits tend to gravitate across organisational, company and legal borders. However, OECD and EU policy assume that innovation investments will create benefits in close spatial relation to where these were made. The overall purpose of this paper is to consider how opportunities and obstacles of innovation appear from the perspective of: a national policy actor, its regional mediators and a policy supported and research-based firm engaged in innovation. A specific interest is directed to what interactive aspects that are considered by these actors; in the using, producing and developing settings.

Influenced by the research question and theoretical point of departure the authors investigate what type of interfaces our focal actors recognise in the using, producing and developing settings. A total of 41 face-to-face and phone interviews focusing on each actor’s approach were conducted; 23 interviews in order to investigate the “policy side” of innovation attempts, while 18 interviews have been performed in order to understand a single business actor’s innovation approach.

The study shows that both the national policy agency and the regional policy mediators primarily operate within a developing setting, and furthermore, applies a rather peculiar interpretation of proximity. As long as the developing setting of the innovation journey is in focus, with the task to transfer academic knowledge advances to commercial actors, the proximity aspect is rather easy to fulfil. However, as soon as the producing and using settings of the innovation is taken into consideration, the innovation, if it survives, will gravitate to a producing setting where it can contribute to investments in place.

The study investigates the opportunities and obstacles of innovation; the spatial aspects included, and how these are considered by: a national policy agency, a regional mediator and a policy-supported innovating firm, in order to juxtapose the policy doctrine with the experience of the business actors such policy wishes to support.

This chapter examines factors that maximize collaboration among various stakeholders with the purpose of health policy making in Turkey. The field research reveals that policy networks have been formed in the sub-areas of public health, healthcare construction, and health tourism in the years between 2011 and 2015. Content analysis of 24 semi-structured interviews with policy and professional experts is conducted to assess Network Collaborative Capacity, built upon three dimensions, namely, structural, relational, and institutional. The findings reveal that networks differ in their capacity to collaborate as well as their impact on policy making resulting in three distinct models of network policy making. In the cases under investigation, network impact takes the form of (a) policy innovation through expertise sharing and evidence-based policy making associated with particularly high levels of relational capacity; (b) policy effectiveness through contract enforcement within a clear legal framework associated with particularly high levels of institutional capacity; and (c) policy coherence through organizational-knowledge-sharing and actor coordination. Findings also suggest that institutionalization in the form of network embeddedness in the surrounding political and economic environment is crucial for maintaining a collaborative momentum as well as achieving policy effectiveness at the stage of policy implementation. Based on these findings, further studies should focus on the institutionalization of policy networks, particularly in those middle-income countries such as Turkey that aim and often fail to address various policy challenges through short-lived practices of multi-stakeholder action. Finally, this study emphasizes the importance of incorporating neo-institutional approaches to network analysis.

This paper analyzes scholarly literature and the development of a nonstate food strategy in Canada, the Conference Board of Canada's Canadian Food Strategy, to explore the role of the administrative state in food policymaking.

This research is based on an exploratory case study drawing data from 38 semistructured interviews, including elite interviews. It also draws on policy documents from the nonstate food strategy.

This paper shows that various nonstate actors, including large food industry players, identify a role for the state in food policy in two ways: as a “conductor,” playing a managing role in the food policy process, and as a “commander,” taking control of policy development and involving nonstate actors when necessary. The complex and wicked aspects of food policy require the administrative state's involvement in food policymaking, while tamer aspects of food policy may be less state-centric.

This paper fills gaps in studies exploring food policymaking processes as well as the administrative state's role in food policymaking in a governance era. It contributes to a better understanding of the state's role in complex and wicked policy domains.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how different policy perspectives or logics regarding industry organising affect network interaction, with particular focus on how the availability of resources is organised.

To examine this, the authors compare two cases from the Norwegian seafood industry: in the pelagic industry, the main resource (mackerel) is caught at sea by fishing vessels and trade is restricted by an auction system, whereas in the salmon industry, the main resource (farmed salmon) is an industrial product produced at fish farms and there are no such restrictions.

The results indicate that conditions under which resources are available to a network have strong effects on connected relationships: in the pelagic industry, interaction in the network becomes supplier-directed in an attempt to reduce the uncertainty created by unstable and restricted availability of resources, whereas in the salmon industry the interaction becomes customer directed as resource availability is stable and predictable. Here the actors can broaden the scope of interaction and they can direct their efforts to solve their customers’ problems, whereas this is difficult in the pelagic industry. The authors conclude that policy considerations play a major role in these effects. If the resource (fish) is seen as a commodity and the interaction is seen as a market mechanism, the policies designed to facilitate the exchange of resources will be beneficial for the actors directly involved, but may have unintended negative consequences for indirect relationships.

For policy makers this implies that whenever developing an industrial policy there are strong reasons to look beyond the single transaction in order to create policies that are effective and/or beneficial for all involved and connected parties.

This contribution argues that there is a fundamental problem for the multi-level governance (MLG) approach in that what the approach is trying to explain has never been fully agreed by the vast group of scholarship that references it. The chapter then examines and proposes that ideas and concepts from network governance, principal–agent (PA) and learning can provide the necessary micro foundations for the MLG approach.

The chapter examines and critiques the original MLG formulations and the later efforts at elaboration. It then reviews the literature and concepts for three public policy approaches that have been associated with European governance to see how core explanations can be elaborated upon in a multi-level context: network governance, principal–agent (PA) and learning.

This contribution suggests that co-ordination, and the resources that help maintain this co-ordination, is the key dependent variable that underpins the MLG approach. With multiple principals and multiple agents, operating at a number of levels of analysis, direct authority and control is harder to evoke. The key explanatory variable underpinning this MLG co-ordination is learning by the participants.

Researchers need to concentrate both their theoretical and empirical efforts in understanding the conditions that support multi-level governance and that sustain its effort.

The contribution outlines some of the key practical questions that policy-makers must face. Can they manage resources and induce learning from all the relevant public and private stakeholders to engage in the MLG effort?

Not only does an effective MLG process involve engaging a wide range of societal stakeholders, these stakeholders have to be persuaded to invest effort in learning about the nature of the governance system, the challenges of the policy problem and the implications of the efforts to resolve these problems.

This chapter isolates the fundamental lacuna at the heart of the MLG project and offers academics and practitioners a conceptual lens for building a clearer analytical structure for studying MLG.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

This study aims to explain the emergence and development of the concept of “Policy Networks” as a unit of analysis in the realm of public policies and their role in formulating a comprehensive policy for health insurance. The developments that took place over the past few decades had impacted a shift in the state’s role in shaping public policies, from a sole, key actor to one among other actors, both governmental and non-governmental, working interdependently through a set of networks.

The present study adopts the social network analysis as an approach and the social policy network as a tool to analyze public policymaking. The approach suggests the presence of a number of actors and interest groups that are actively involved in public policy and decision-making. These groups may vary from a cause to another and also from time to time. This research investigates and juxtaposes a selected sample of members of the health insurance policy network in Egypt.

In light of the study findings, one can see the existence of a policy network for the comprehensive health insurance system in Egypt. The study reveals the interrelations among a number of official and non-official key actors. The network has gone through several phases; the pre-establishment phase during the early stages of policymaking; the official establishment phase during the formative stage; and finally, the network operation phase during the implementation stage. The study also concludes that the policy network has influenced the different stages of policymaking through several tools and strategies. Moreover, the roles of different actors varied within the network; international organizations were the primary influencer in the early stages of policymaking; syndicates dominated the formative stage; and the public sector played the leading role in the implementation stage.

Serious attempts were made to benefit from policy networks with a particular focus on using the strengths of each actor while establishing an official institutional framework that consolidates coordination and cooperation among the involved parties. This framework should keep pace with global changes and developments. It should also have an official meeting venue. Above all, all parties should be listened to and their demands should be considered seriously as long as they are not actualized at the expense of the public interest nor do they undermine the sovereignty of the state. The study also enhances researchers to use policy networking as a unit for analyzing public policy and their effect on these policies.

Public policymaking in Egypt can become more responsive to people’s demands and more democratic once it was made through informative and interactive policy network. This pattern of policymaking will enhance both efficient and responsive.

Practical Implications: public policy making in Egypt can become more responsive to people demands and more democratic once it was made through informative and interactive policy network. This pattern of policymaking will enhance both efficient and responsive.

In addition to its practical contributions to the field of policymaking, this research fills a gap in the literature on the theoretical level.