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The paper seeks to propose the basic competencies of environmental social scientists regarding policy analysis for sustainable development. The ultimate goal is to contribute to an improvement of educational programmes in higher education by suggesting a toolbox that should be integrated in the curriculum.

Starting from the basic research questions regarding governance for sustainable development, five methods are identified capable of answering the following questions: reconstruction of policy theories; stakeholder analysis; impact assessment; cost‐benefit analysis; discourse analysis. Relevant information was collected through a literature review and practical experience by the authors.

These include: minimum content of the toolbox with methods of policy analysis for sustainable development; examples of how the toolbox can be applied; strengths and weaknesses of the methods; specification of competencies of environmental social scientists active in the area of policy analysis for sustainable development.

The paper proposes which methods of policy analysis for sustainable development should be integrated in higher education as well as how this should be done.

The paper systematically analyses the implications of the policy context in the domain of sustainable development for policy analysis in this area. In addition it gives a review of five basic methods: how they can be used to analyse policy issues from a sustainable development perspective. Aiming at reinforcing the input of scientific research in policy‐making, the paper eventually aims to promote sustainable development.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the policy instruments used by the China's Government on prefabricated construction (PC) development, with the aim to clarify the pattern and discover the focus of the policy instruments using the methods of bibliometric analysis and content analysis.

Through a thorough screening by all researchers, 25 policies were identified from 1995 to 2021 were selected and analysed. The external attribute analysis clarified the issuing year, organisation, and the format of each policy. The content analysis was adopted firstly to analyse the policy instrument. An analysis framework including environmental instruments, supply instruments and demand instruments was applied in categorising and counting of each policy instrument. The bibliometric analysis was then carried out to extract keywords of the policy instruments, construct a co-word network and complete the cluster analysis.

The results indicate that the policies lack consistency and had relatively low authority. The results of content analysis show that the policy system relies heavily on environmental and supply instruments, whilst the use of demand instruments seems to be grossly inadequate. The results of the bibliometric analysis identify the core ideas of each policy instrument category, discuss the existing problems and then put forward the corresponding countermeasures.

This study comprehensively and systematically analysed the policy instruments on facilitating the development of PC in China which broaden the research perspectives of the PC development by introducing the methods of political science. The research findings afford helpful information for future policy adjustments and elucidate the effective delivery of policies to facilitate PC development for developing countries.

This study provides an in-depth understanding of policy instruments used by China's Government on PC development. By integrating the policy instrument analysis framework into the mixed methods of content analysis and bibliometric analysis, this study provides an innovative way to conduct policy instrument analysis.

Policy analysis derives from a long tradition of assessing the activities of government. The most sophisticated analyses are distinguished by their concern to identify linkages between variables that represent causes and effects of social conditions, or the impacts to be expected from policy details. Inherent in their sophistication are methodological choices which invite dispute. Because of the controversies they generate, such analyses may contribute more to the knowledge about policy making than to the support of policy options.

The purpose of this paper is to present a composite framework for critical policy analysis drawing from discourse analysis and post-structuralist analysis. Drawing on an interpretive paradigm (Yanow, 2014), this paper provides a thick description (Geertz, 1973) of the processes involved in the application of these tools in a critical policy analysis project, focusing on disability policy within the Irish context. Methodologically, this is a resourceful cross-fertilization of analytical tools to interrogate policy, highlighting its potential within critical disability policy analysis and beyond.

Merging a critical discourse analysis framework and a policy problematization approach, the combination of tools presented here, along with their associated processes, is referred to as the critical discourse problematization framework.

Potentially, the framework can also be employed across a number of cognate social policy fields including education, welfare and social justice.

The value of this paper lies in its potential to be used within analytical practice in the field of critical (disability) policy work by offering an evaluation of the analytical tools and theoretical framework deployed and modeled across an entire research process.

The framework has the potential and has been used successfully as a tool for disability activism to influence policy development.

The analytical framework presented here is a methodically innovative approach to the study of policy analysis, marrying two distinct analytical tools to form a composite framework for the study of policy text.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Nick Moore’s information policy matrix and how it has been used by Moore and others.

This study involved secondary search and a bibliographic study of the impact Moore’s work has had on other authors.

It is clear that there have been two quite separate trains of research in information policy, one in the USA and one in Europe, and that it appears from the literature that there is limited awareness of each other’s work. Focusing on the UK and European research, the papers the authors inspected that report information policy analyses make no mention of Moore’s work. It could be argued that Moore’s matrix is too simplistic for such a complex topic as information policy, but it may also be the case that there is a lack of awareness of how the matrix can be used in policy analysis as Moore’s published papers were general descriptions of the matrix, reported the findings of his analyses or suggested policy goals. Moore did not publish theoretical or methodological papers to explain how to go about policy analysis using his matrix.

This study is based on secondary research and bibliographic analysis. Furthermore, primary research could have revealed deeper insights into use and impact of Moore’s framework by analysts and policy makers.

The paper highlights potential opportunities for international collaboration on information policy research, to explore more deeply theoretical models that could be used to underpin policy analysis as well as the potential value of Moore’s matrix.

Academic research into entrepreneurship policy is particularly interesting due to the increasing relevance of the topic and since knowledge about the evolution of themes in this field is still rather limited. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the key concepts, topics, trends and shifts that have shaped the entrepreneurship policy research agenda during the period 1990–2016.

This paper uses text mining techniques, cluster analysis and complementary bibliographic data to examine the evolution of a corpus of 1,048 academic papers focused on entrepreneurship-related policies and published during the period 1990–2016 in ten relevant journals. In particular, the paper follows a standard text mining workflow: first, as text is unstructured, content requires a set of pre-processing tasks and then a stemming process. Then, the paper examines the most repeated concepts within the corpus, considering the whole period 1990–2016 and also in five-year terms. Finally, the paper conducts a k-means clustering to divide the collection of documents into coherent groups with similar content. The analyses in the paper also include geographical particularities considering three regional sub-corpora, distinguishing those articles authored in the European Union (EU), the USA and South and Eastern Asia, respectively.

Results of the analysis show that inclusion, employment and regulation-related papers have largely dominated the research in the field, evolving from an initial classical approach to the relationship between entrepreneurship and employment to a wider, multidisciplinary perspective, including the relevance of management, geographies and narrower topics such as agglomeration economics or internationalisation instead of the previous generic sectorial approaches. The text mining analysis also reveals how entrepreneurship policy research has gained increasing attention and has become both more open, with a growing cooperation among researchers from different affiliations, and more sophisticated, with concepts and themes that moved the research agenda forward, closer to the priorities of policy implementation.

The paper identifies main trends and research gaps in the field of entrepreneurship policy providing actionable knowledge by presenting the spectrum of both over-explored and understudied research themes in the field. In practical terms the results of the text mining analysis can be interpreted as a compass to navigate the entrepreneurship policy research agenda.

The paper presents the heterogeneity of topics under research in the field, reinforcing the concept of entrepreneurship as a multidisciplinary and dynamic domain. Therefore, the definition and adoption of a certain policy agenda in entrepreneurship should consider multiple aspects (needs, objectives, stakeholders, expected outputs, etc.) to be comprehensive and aligned with its complexity. In addition, the paper shows how text mining techniques could be used to map the research activity in a particular field, contributing to the challenge of linking research and policy.

The exploratory nature of text mining allows us to obtain new knowledge and reveals hidden patterns from large quantities of documents/text data, representing an opportunity to complement other qualitative reviews. In this sense, the main value of this paper is not to advise on the future configuration of entrepreneurship policy as a research topic, but to unwrap the past by unveiling how key themes of the entrepreneurship policy research agenda have emerged, evolved and/or declined over time as a foundation on which to build further developments.

The rationality of the selection and application of policy instruments in current policy schemes for promoting the development of low-carbon eco-cities in China is examined and, in view of existing problems, effective suggestions for scientifically and reasonably organizing and designing policy instruments are proposed, which is of great significance to optimize the policy system for the development of low-carbon eco-cities in China and thereby promote sustainable urban development.

In the study, using 117 policy documents focusing on the development of low-carbon eco-cities issued by the Chinese central government as well as the relevant ministries and commissions between 2010 and 2019 and comprehensively adopting bibliometric and content analysis methods, the contents of policy documents are quantitatively analyzed from three dimensions: policy instrument, policy area and policy target.

The study finds the following. Ecological environment and low-carbon development are the focus of policy attention. Policy-promulgating institutions have formed a core subnetwork, that is, an “iron triangle.” There exists a structural imbalance in the use of policy instruments, and the distribution of policy instruments in different policy areas exhibits significant differentiating characteristics. Driven by different policy targets, the proportion of the policy instrument types adopted by the government is constantly changing. According to these findings, suggestions are put forward to optimize China's low-carbon eco-city development policy.

(1) A three-dimensional policy analysis framework is conducted from the perspective of policy instrument, which is innovative in theory. (2) This paper finds the selective utilization rationality and evolution rule of China's low-carbon eco-city development policy instruments. (3) Recommendations on optimizing China's low-carbon eco-city development policies are discussed systematically, which plays a theoretical guiding role in optimizing the development policies of low-carbon eco-cities in China.

This paper aims to explain and demonstrate how business model frameworks can be used to understand market developments and to assess the role of policy in (multi‐sided) ICT markets.

The research approach in the paper builds on integrated business model frameworks, which cover (much) more than the financial decisions of one single firm. A case study approach is implemented and tested in two studies on digital content platforms.

Relevant policy instruments are identified and explored. To some extent, the findings are complementary or contradictory to the findings of existing studies on digital content platforms. The paper includes policy recommendations related to mobile and fixed content platforms.

Limitations of the study are due to the explorative and qualitative approach, and are to be complemented by other approaches. Policy makers and researchers can use the approach to analyse digital content platform developments and the impact of policy. Stakeholders in innovation processes can use the approach to address business models as well as policy issues for emerging platforms and services.

The use of business model analysis in the context of policy analysis is a relatively new approach that is inspired by research findings on information communication technology (ICT) platforms and multi‐sided networks, progress in business model studies, challenges in the policy mix for ICT, and the importance of case study methods for impact assessment.

Among the current discourses around social media risk management (SMRM) is whether institutions perceive social media (SM) as more of an opportunity to be embraced and regulated, or a risk to be avoided or mitigated, how this is reflected in their policies and how institutional stance reflects their regulation and management of SM use and practices. There is currently no scholarly literature that addresses these for the memory sector where SM use has proliferated. This research aims to address this gap by putting a focus on national memory institutions (MIs), whose strategies and operations are often governed by a public/civic mandate.

This research involves a comprehensive literature review and a content analysis. The review includes studies that have analysed institutional SM policies in other sectors. The review informs our content analysis both in terms of approaches and in terms of identifying areas for comparisons. Following an initial scoping review and a close inspection, a sample of eight policies of national MIs were included in the content analysis.

The content analysis led to the identification of 8 core themes and 36 sub-themes. The main themes are concerned with account management, audience management, rules for use, protecting institutional interests, legal considerations, the purpose of the policy, nature of postings and referencing information. Also emerged from the findings are a few gaps that we expect will provide a platform for further discourses with regard to the potentially complex role SM policies have in MIs and the broader cultural heritage sector in relation to their public/civic mandates.

This is the first close SM policy analysis for the memory sector focusing on national MIs. This research contributes insights into how national-level MIs tend to frame the opportunities and the risk of SM use, the ways in which they govern SM usage and their different approaches to SMRM. The findings have implications for SM policy development and implementations, and further iterations of SM policies in the memory sector.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-09-2020-0421