Policy statement coherence: A methodological proposal to assess environmental public policies applied to water in Chile

Abstract

Research on analytical and assessment methods regarding environmental policies are scarce, despite the growing concern on environmental topics within governments and civil society. This proposal addresses such gap by offering a methodological tool used to elaborate, monitor and reformulate environmental policies. By using the theory of policy domains, we developed an analytical framework consisting of topics and objectives that build the environmental public policy domain, from which we assess its degree of coherence with the environmental regulatory response. This methodology, called policy statement coherence, will contribute towards the understanding of public policy formulation and implementation processes, an important methodological contribution in this field of research. This proposal revolves around the analysis of water policies in Chile. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.