Freedom of Information (FOI) laws are widely adopted to promote transparency, yet their implementation diverges from formal legal expectations. This article examines how variations in FOI requests shape administrative responses and what these patterns reveal about bureaucratic behavior in municipal administrations. Drawing on a randomized field experiment across Belgian municipalities, the study analyzes how public officials respond to identical FOI requests varying by requester identity and legal framing. The findings show that responsiveness is not neutral but varies systematically across request characteristics and contexts. Ordinary citizens receive higher disclosure rates than institutional or advocacy actors, and invoking FOI law increases compliance for some requesters while reducing it for others. These patterns suggest that administrative responses – understood as observable expressions of bureaucratic behavior – are shaped by how officials interpret implications of requests, including perceived risk and accountability. The article advances a behavioral interpretation of FOI implementation as an embedded administrative practice.

Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption is increasing across South Asia, alongside a growing burden of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Although countries in the region have introduced measures including taxation, nutrition labelling and restrictions in institutional settings, policies remain fragmented and implementation is uneven. Drawing on lessons from tobacco control, we propose Surveil, Protect, Offer, Warn, Enforce, and Raise (S-POWER) as an implementation framework to strengthen SSB regulation in South Asia. S-POWER brings together six complementary policy domains: surveillance of consumption and policy impact; protection of children from unhealthy food environments; provision of healthier alternatives; front-of-pack nutrition labelling; restrictions on marketing and promotion and health-oriented taxation. Rather than proposing new policy instruments, the framework seeks to connect existing evidence-based measures within a coherent regulatory approach. S-POWER may provide a practical basis for strengthening policy implementation in South Asia and other settings facing similar nutrition transitions and commercial pressures.

This study examined the factors influencing the process underlying the implementation of social impact bonds (SIBs). While early research primarily emphasised the technical challenges, limited recent research has suggested that political and historical factors also influence a region’s SIB development. This paper augments the SIB literature by documenting an empirical case of SIB development in Hong Kong. Using the advocacy coalition framework, we uncovered that SIB’s development involved tension and contestation between two competing coalitions driving the discourse and how discreet coordination among the dominant coalition opposing the SIB agenda helped constrain the development. The findings underscore that a region’s SIB development likely involves power dynamics between opposing actors favouring and resisting the idea. The conceptual fluidity of SIBs enables actors to narrate what SIBs per se represent and to pursue their own coalition’s agendas.

China’s ‘Four Frees and One Care’ policy provides people living with HIV (PLHIV) with free antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), while the recent inclusion of new ARVs in medical insurance policy has created policy overlap. Guided by the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, this qualitative study used semi-structured interviews with 42 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and medical staff across China to examine institutional interactions and tensions in implementing the ‘Four Frees and One Care’ policy under policy overlap. The findings indicate that CDC and medical institutions exhibit divergent perceptions regarding the scope of beneficiaries for free ARVs, the allocation of responsibilities during implementation, and preferences in ARVs recommendations. CDC staff place greater emphasis on expanding antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage to achieve public health goals for HIV control at the population level, whereas medical institutions focus more on individual treatment outcomes and the healthcare service performance. This divergence results in CDC favouring the free ARVs policy in practice, while medical institutions are more inclined toward ARVs accessed through medical insurance. Such tensions not only affect the coordination of policy implementation but may also have potential adverse impacts on PLHIV access to ART services, ART adherence, and public health outcomes.

Across global and Pacific contexts, inclusive education policies often struggle to move from adoption to practice, leaving a persistent gap between commitments and classroom realities. In Vanuatu, inclusive education is both a constitutional and a statutory obligation: the Constitution of the Republic of Vanuatu guarantees equal rights without discrimination, the Education Act No. 9 of 2014 mandates culturally relevant schooling, and Vanuatu 2030: The People’s Plan: National Sustainable Development Plan 2016–2030 positions inclusion as central to national progress. Building on this foundation, the Ministry of Education and Training has launched the Inclusive Education and Training (IET) Policy 2025–2030, which sets ambitious goals for equitable access, teacher development, and systemic transformation. This article applies the Kokonas Research Methodology (KRM), a Vanuatu-born Indigenous implementation framework grounded in kastom (customary knowledge) and storian (dialogue), to the IET Policy. KRM structures implementation through five stages — initiation, validation, intervention, monitoring and support, and replication — which are mapped to policy priorities to demonstrate how culturally grounded processes can guide enactment in practice. Findings highlight the national significance of KRM in strengthening legitimacy and ownership of reforms in Vanuatu, while also offering transferable lessons for other Pacific countries and contributing to wider Asia-Pacific debates on inclusive education.

Approximately 20% of Nigerians experience a mental health condition, yet fewer than 10% receive minimally adequate care. This scoping review synthesises the development, implementation and outcomes of mental health policies in Nigeria from 1916 to 2025. Using Arksey and O’Malley’s framework, systematic searches were conducted across PubMed, Web of Science, PsycINFO, AJOL and Google Scholar (inception–December 2024), supplemented by grey literature from governmental and non-governmental sources. The Walt and Gilson Policy Triangle guided the analysis of policy context, content, processes and actors. Nigeria’s policy trajectory demonstrates normative progress, transitioning from custodial approaches under the Lunacy Ordinance (1916) to a rights-based orientation in the Mental Health Act (2023). However, implementation outcomes remain constrained. Workforce expansion has been modest (psychiatrists increased from 250 in 2018 to approximately 350 in 2024), treatment coverage remains low (10–15%) and budget allocation is insufficient (3.3% of the health budget). Barriers include inadequate financing, weak coordination across federal and state levels, limited stakeholder engagement and insufficient integration of community, traditional and faith-based providers. Comparative analysis highlights that Ghana’s autonomous Mental Health Authority, South Africa’s provincial directorates and Kenya’s community health volunteer model provide governance and implementation structures absent in Nigeria. Findings indicate that Nigerian mental health policies, while necessary, are insufficient alone for system strengthening. Effective policy translation requires increased and protected financing (target: 5% of health budget by 2027), task-shifting strategies, establishment of a National Mental Health Information System, federal incentives for state-level adoption, integration into primary healthcare (5,000 PHCs by 2028) and inclusive governance that incorporates service users and traditional healers.

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.