Episode 5: Dr. Shan Zhou, Dr. Xue Gao, Dr. Adam Wellstead, and Dane Kim
On Episode 5 of Art of Science, Dr. Shan Zhou from Purdue University, Dr. Xue Gao from Florida State University, Dr. Adam Wellstead from Michigan Technological University, and Dane Kim from Michigan Technological University discuss their article "Operationalizing social equity in public policy design: A comparative analysis of solar equity policies in the United States" in the Policy Studies Journal.
Below is a transcript of the conversation:
Graham Ambrose: So hello and welcome back to Art of Science. My name is Graham Ambrose, the host of Art of Science, and this is a quarterly interview podcast that coincides with each issue of the Policy Studies Journal. And if you're listening either live or recorded, please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast. With that, I want to introduce our four guests today. First Dr. Shan Zhou, she is an assistant professor of political science at Purdue University; Dr. Xue Gao, assistant professor of public administration at Florida State University; Dr. Adam Wellstead, a professor of public policy and social science at Michigan Technological University, and Dane Kim, who recently finished up his PhD. in environmental and energy policy at Michigan Technological University. So in the November issue of PSJ, our authors here had a paper published entitled “Operationalizing social equity in public policy design: A comparative analysis of solar equity policies in the United States.” And just kind of starting off, would you guys kind of want to talk about what was included in that paper and just a broad interview – or a broad overview of what you wrote about?
Shan Zhou: Maybe I can go ahead.
Adam Wellstead: You’re the lead.
Shan: Yeah, sure. So in this paper we use solar equity policy as an empirical example to study how social equity considerations or justice in general are perceived by policymakers and reflected in policy design. So we collected solar equity policy documents for about 54 solar equity policies and programs all across the country, and these policies usually, you know, they have a goal of promoting equity or justice in distributed solar deployments in this country. And then we coded the policy documents based on three dimensions. We look at policy goals, policy instruments, as well as the micro-level policy settings and calibrations. So that's basically like a very broad overview of what we did in the paper.
Graham: Wonderful. Adam, Xue, Dane–
Adam: Sure, yeah, I mean, that's sort of how it – I mean, I think there was sort of two things that were going on here. Shan was responsible for doing – sort of collecting all the documentation. And then, you know, we were – this is when Shan was at Michigan Technological University, we just were talking about the work, the paper, and the data she was collecting. And I said, well, why don't we look at it from a sort of policy design perspective? And so those three aspects are part of that policy mix literature that's out there. And you know, the interesting thing here is it's a very rich paper in that it's a very descriptive paper, but I think it really lays a good foundation for future research. But it just lays it out there for scholars and practitioners that, you know, the whole basic definition of what is policy is, it's, you know, it's more complex than what people think and that's where we looked at the, you know – we did some of the deep dive into well, what are the policy goals? What are the instruments? And then I think for me, I mean the most interesting thing is the part of the calibrations, the technical aspects which a lot of people just don't want to look at. They want to look at the instruments, but not the necessary – the technical calibrations which I think is really critical. So like I said, it was – I thought it was – and some of my best cited stuff has been sort of this – sort of descriptive thing that people can latch onto and then sort of work from there on. That's what I hope this particular paper will do so.
Xue Gao: Yeah, I think I can add more about our basic findings here regarding this paper. So like Adam mentioned that policy calibration is kind of a major piece of this paper. And regarding that, we mainly focus on the target population regarding this kind of equity issue. And we found that most of the policy tools or we call policy instruments used in these equity issues in the solar adoption, they mainly use income-based vulnerabilities. So it's kind of very – so from our perspective it’s somewhat narrow kind of perspective on the ground, we cannot calibrate it to the target populations. And also in terms of the spacing kind of the policy tools used in this area, we found that kind of policymakers mainly use this redistribution – redistributive policies, for example, the subsidies, kind of monetary policies to provide some subsidies to kind of promote solar adoptions and also the community solar program, those are two major policy instruments we found that from this paper. So basically, we found – we're glad to see that there are some kind of policies, right, they can now try to mitigate these equity issues in solar adoptions. However, the kind of policy tools used on the ground and also the target populations for – kind of the targeted here are somewhat narrow. So I think for the kind of local governments or practitioners probably this paper has also implications there, for example, some other programs related to education, right, or kind of more broad – the kind of the calibrations for the target population would be beneficial to kind of – to solve these, yeah, issues.
Graham: So I just – I guess I want to break this apart, right, because as Adam has already alluded, this paper is incredibly rich. So one of the things – and you talked about this in your intro even is that there's kind of three components that you advance in this paper: thinking about how energy justice and policy design kind of come together, breaking out the macro, meso, and micro components of policy design and applying those, and also thinking about these kind of temporal and spatial components. So I guess kind of going in order, I'm curious kind of how these interests – first thinking about the policy design and the energy justice kind of – where do those dynamics and interests come from? From past research or – if you could just kind of dive into that first component first, that'd be wonderful.
Adam: The policy design part? Sure. I mean, I've been working on this for a while because I'm the oldest one here. So I started doing this work when I was an assistant professor and I started doing – looking at policy design, policy mix, looking at first at the Alberta oil sands and reclamation policy and I've just sort of used that and it comes from the sort of a historical institutional approach to policy design, sort of using that sort of three mixes, you know. And then – so that's sort of where it came from for me. So I've like worked with other graduate students who have used this in their thesis, dissertations. And so this is – and then you know, I saw that, you know, this particular project, which I wasn't involved in the data collection, which then we'll talk about I would imagine later, but I thought well, let's just use it here. I mean it just seems like a perfect way to really – I can like do, like I said before, these deep dives into the richness of this policy area. So – and particularly that justice aspect that people are starting to look at – but how can again from my perspective as somebody who does this, uses more theoretical approach, how can I apply it – I think that's important, because there's lots of work on policy design and theoretical approaches, but you know it's – I think the challenge is actually trying to apply it, which I think Shan, everybody else was like, how are we going to apply this? And it was challenging, but I think it paid off in the paper. Just all the reviewers liked it so, and I hope the readers out there like it as well. So that's where it came from. I just – it was, so two things going on at the same time and it's just a conversation I had with Shan and I said hey, why don't we do this and that's just – that's how it was implemented into the paper.
Graham: So Shan, would you be willing to kind of dig into that further? I mean talking about maybe the arc of this kind of project more broadly and how that ended up connecting with this kind of notion of policy design.
Shan: Yeah, sure. So I think I was heavily influenced by my postdoc advisor, Dr. Doug Noonan, at IUPUI. So he's an economist and he does a lot of environmental justice work. So I worked with him on a few environmental justice analysis projects and we published some papers, you know, understanding equity and justice and environmental amenities, things like that. But the majority of my work focuses on energy, like clean energy technology adoption. So I wrote a paper with him, you know, I think that was kind of the original idea I had. So as a policy scholar, as someone who is trained in public policy, I always want to build that bridge between public policy and environmental justice or energy justice, I think that's a really meaningful research direction. I wrote – so I wrote a paper with him – so that one was more about offering a conceptual framework to discuss, you know, how can we link different types of clean energy policy instruments with the three tenets of energy justice, including the distributional, procedural, and recognitional justice. So – but that one was like very at the high level general discussion, conceptual, you know, framework. And then I think, you know, maybe Xue will add more details to that I might share, you know, we knew each other for a long time, we met in APPAM, so we are – we were both very interested in renewable energy and then we came together, we discussed, you know, it would be very interesting to just focus more narrowly on the policies that, you know, try to enhance equity in the energy sector. Right, there are a lot of things going on more broadly, but since both of our interests are in the energy sector, so we want to focus more on that. Yeah, so that's kind of the long story from my perspective. And I'm sure Xue will add to that.
Xue: Yeah, so basically solar is the topic that I studied for my dissertation. So at that time I mainly focused on the technological innovation. So about 10 years ago, we more care about the price, the costs of such new technologies, right, and later on, when more and more people started to adopt this technology, this kind of equity issue becomes more and more important. There are a lot of discussions, a lot of kind of the concerns about the disparity, the kind of the surrounding the adoption of this emerging technologies, especially those that play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions and addressing climate change, such as solar, electrical vehicles, right? So it's very similar to probably all the new technologies in different sectors, so they typically follow this kind of – we call S diffusion curve, so it meaning that beginning it will have this kind of very low and slow adoptions and we know that kind of these technologies at the beginning, their prices are very, very high. So basically mainly the wealthier families, they are able to afford such kind of high upfront investment. So that’s bringing these equity issues, right? And on the policy front, yeah, as I mentioned, there are a lot of subsidies, tax credits kind of aimed at promoting this earlier adoption, however – so there are concerns about these subsidies will be – and actually, in practice, is also predominantly benefited wealthier households because they are the adopters, right? So there are more kind of concerns about the potential impacts of the distribution of the policy benefits, and also kind of discussions on the impacts of the electricity price for non-adopters as more the rich household installed solar panels, so they may increase the electricity price for non-adopters, so that make this a very kind of important topic – the disparity of the solar adoptions, it's very important kind of topics. So given all these concerns – so Shan and I have this conversation and we think we should kind of focus more on the social aspect of the technologies – so we want to understand the policymakers' understanding of these issues. So we started to collect data as to kind of want to examine the policies and programs currently in place at both local and utility levels to address these equity issues and that's kind of how we start this paper and what were some kind of the discussions regarding this topic.
Graham: That's wonderful, and I appreciate kind of this discussion of these broad and maybe diffuse interests that are kind of colliding in the middle to become this paper. And I guess that's where my next question is coming from, this conversation that starts to emerge into this paper – but I'm curious if you all can talk about how like the specific questions started to solidify into this paper, did they emerge and they were always the same or you originally were looking for something and something else that was more interesting ended up emerging once you dove into it? I'm curious to just kind of hear more about, you know, how that kind of solidification into what we see as the paper ended up occurring.
Shan: Adam, you want to go ahead?
Adam: You’re the lead author, so I’ll defer to you first.
Shan: So I think – I checked our rough draft before this interview, like tried to get an idea where we were at the very beginning. I think we have changed a lot. I still remember that the revision process was pretty tough and we spent about seven or eight months just, you know, trying to get more data, more, you know, detailed analysis of the policy documents and there's a high level of granularity in terms of the textual data analysis – I'm sure a lot of the qualitative researchers as well will share the same feelings with us. But so in that way, I feel that the research focus, including the theoretical framework, has been changed over time. At the beginning we didn't quite know like what we are looking for among the textual data, right? We know that we are interested in understanding policymakers’ perception of energy justice. But what does that mean, right? It's pretty much an open-ended question. And as we went through the data collection, data analysis, as we play with those textual data in which, you know, Dane spent a lot of time on these efforts, you know, we tend to gradually narrow down to some of the more interesting things that we want to tease out and then present in the paper, but I think we also struggled a lot in terms of what kind of theoretical concepts that we want to latch to. Adam’s experience in policy design is definitely helpful, but at the beginning we didn't specifically focus on the policy settings and calibrations. We were more broadly looking at the target populations per se, because those are the, you know, the people, the population that will be affected by those policies. So we were looking at that, but we didn't have a very clear theoretical focus like how can we apply some of the policy concepts to better, you know, help us categorize all the justice concepts in the data. So that was my, yeah, when I look back, those are some of my reflections.
Graham: So I guess a follow up question for that, both for Dane and Adam – Adam, so you were talking about kind of having this top-down approach of thinking about macro, meso, micro, and Dane kind of digging through what was actually there, I'm curious how you met in the middle or like what started to emerge – the meeting in the middle seemed to become more clear. I'm just curious about that process, yeah, again both for Dane and Adam.
Adam: I’ll let Dane go first.
Dane Kim: So from my end I've been pretty much being through websites collecting the data for all the states and for me, my role in this research was to gather the data and after that I was – while I was doing it, I was like, second year PhD student so I didn't have that much of a connection between this empirical research and theoretical contributions to – of this research and probably Adam will explain further on that theoretical perspectives. But me seeing from this empirical research, the data collection to the – I guess I'm pretty much having the same answer or question that you're asking, Graham, exactly that connection between those two were the ones that I pretty much most learned from this experience, so I guess to that, I'll defer to Adam to discuss.
Adam: Well, I mean, for me, I'm not an expert on solar or energy justice. My area – substantive environmental area is climate change adaptation. So I came into this not knowing anything. And to my colleagues’ credit they were able to develop the data and the results in a way that we could use the framework. And so I can flip this around for people who are interested in policy design, this is a good paper to go to as well as people who are in the environmental energy policy sector, this is also a worthwhile paper so that it should appeal to both audiences. And so again, my colleagues did all the hard work in terms of just grinding it out with all that, you know, all the empirical stuff and I was just pleased the way despite the revisions how it just sort of fit in quite nicely, into the policy mix framework. So we have something that's really nice that people can work from, I hope we can talk about that later on. So no, my – I guess my job was the easiest of everybody, I just said, hey, I got this framework and you do all the hard work and we can sort of try and fit it in – but again I think one of the issues was is just – we have so much stuff, so we have to make that judgment as to what are we going to put into this paper, what else it's – you know, we were at 10,000 words as it was so we had to do a lot of cutting and that's a really hard part of the, I think, of the subsequent 8 months of drafts. It's like, what are we going to put in, what are we going to leave out? And we did it. But again, it's that – I think that was the toughest, the toughest part with what to take out because it was all interesting. Maybe we should have written a book.
Graham: So I guess, like one aim of this podcast, right, is, I think, all of us, especially junior scholars, who look at these papers that end up, that they're published, right, and you see this, like, manicured, very thoughtful paper that comes out, but you often don't see kind of the nitty gritty or like the kind of toil and trouble that is actually embedded behind that published paper. And I'm curious kind of given the comments that you've made so far, if you could kind of walk through the review process, talk a little bit more about, you know, being pushed back on, responding, that kind of maybe emotional roller coaster that you might go through as you're trying to understand what you want to respond to in comments. I think just kind of talking about that experience is broadly pretty helpful for especially junior scholars. So if you could kind of talk about that process, that'd be wonderful.
Shan: Yeah, sure. And I just want to thank my coauthors for being so patient with me during that eight months of revision. It was difficult, like for qualitative research. After a while, you know, with the dealing with the data, and then, when the reviewers’ comment came in with all these very, you know, needed greater details that you have to address and then it really, I mean I found it's very difficult for me to pick up everything again and then trying to revisit, I always need to pour myself a cup of wine or something before I sit down with the manuscript and then revisit the data. But I think the reviewers’ comments are extremely helpful, very constructive, they are really the experts in the field, I can sense that. So in the process, I think, you know, addressing their comments also helped us think about the theoretical contributions and how we can connect our empirical research with the policy design literature. So that's really – I'm really grateful for that too.
Xue: Yeah, exactly like Shan mentioned. So we highly value kind of those constructive comments and suggestions provided by the reviewer or I think the kind of main point is kind of the reviewer, they encouraged us to push the kind of boundary of our original idea. So basically their insights challenged us to not only contribute to the energy field, I think in the original draft that we emphasize a lot about this kind of the ongoing discussions, debates regarding disparities of solar adoptions, but the reviewers, they challenged us and push us to extend our impact to the policy design domain. So in response to the reviewers’ comments, so we engaged in this kind of the iterative revision process like Shan mentioned. So we basically revisited our theoretical framework, we assess our methodology and also the kind of research goals and the – a lot of details of the research. So basically I think really the real world kind of revision process helps us a lot here. It helps us to get now to align our contribution with this broader landscape of policy design literature, not only contribute to the kind of energy field, but the broader regulative design literature, so we really appreciate the comments from the reviewers. And coming back to your question about the younger scholars, sometimes we complain about reviewers, right? Sometimes the comments are very on the negative side, but I think those are also opportunities, right, to challenge, to push to really help improve each paper in that process.
Adam: As a not so young scholar, I gotta say that I'm flattered that we, you know, we made it through the review process, I told Shan, I said, well, what are our backup journals? You know, because PSJ has a very high rejection rate that – going well, we should be prepared to be rejected and we made it and I’m flattered that the reviewers who, as Shan said, were very knowledgeable in the field thought that our paper is worthy of publication in this journal. And so it's like – and I agree that the comments were great, I mean they were right on, they were – because sometimes you get kind of weird reviews, sometimes some – and this is like, OK, we have to do this, this, and this. I think trying to find the time to do it if we didn't have to teach, perhaps we could have got it done in a month or so, but we have other constraints in our careers and – but you know, they gave us a lot of leeway to get it done, so we did. But yeah, so I mean, although I've published more papers than my other colleagues here, it's still the same feeling I have and that's what keeps me going in this field, this sort of is – what do people think of your work and will people learn from it and the impact our work will have and I think this work will serve – thinking for me personally, so thinking back upon what a good piece this actually is, I didn't – because it's fairly descriptive, I was a bit hesitant at first because when I – the work I've done in policy design is looking at sort of the dynamic features of policy design, but again, we've got 10,000 words on a very descriptive piece, they’re very informative and that – I think a lot of people in the energy policy field will go, well, this is a different perspective than I thought, I think that's made it worthwhile. So yeah, for me it was just, you know, was waiting for that e-mail to come with the decision. And you're scared to open up the e-mail because you don't know what's going to go on and your heart is beating and Shan had to go through that, not me, so – and it happened, it’s happened throughout my career and so for younger scholars, it's the same for, I guess, for senior scholars as well, those who still continue to publish, emotions for many, the decision comes through so and again – it was for me – it was very special for, you know, to get finally – I have never had a paper in PSJ, so this was a first for me. So it was very flattering.
Graham: I guess just opening it up then. So we've talked a little bit about moving through or advice for moving through the revision process, but for each of you, do you have advice more broadly for younger scholars how to approach work or how to think through research ideas?
Adam: I can start with that because for me it's, you know, don't be afraid to – if you've seen a paper at a conference or online, and you have an idea from another – somebody else has written the paper that you're interested in, contact them, say, hey, I like your paper, do you – are you working on other things, do you want to collaborate? That I think, you know – and in this day and age, that's quite easy, easy to do and I think don't be afraid to talk to other people who are in the field because it's – the public policy field is a big field with a lot of good and I would say friendly people who want to collaborate. So don't hide away thinking that people don't want to work with you.
Shan: Maybe I can go next. So I would think that, especially for female scholars like me, I feel like I tend to overthink and then always think that the work is not perfect, correct, and then sometimes that delays the process. So my advice for junior scholars would be – for younger generation would be, you know, just put the ideas in action. You can always, you know, improve – the revision process is huge, you know, driver – driving force for improvement. Also send out to conferences, to workshops, seminars, you know, your peers, your colleagues can also provide suggestions, feedback for you to improve. It's a process, so don't always think that, you know, I have to be perfect in the first draft, so yeah.
Adam: Exactly, let the reviewers do the work for you as well, so–
Shan: Yeah, I tend to hold back – like I tend to, I want to send out like the perfect draft for the first round review. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but it does – it's very, you know, it does take a lot of time, you know, for you to polish without getting enough comments from outside. So I think, yeah, recently I have, you know, I have started to reflect on that.
Graham: So I have to ask a follow up, is there advice about finding the sweet spot of like – I shouldn't say just good enough, but good enough to get those reviewer comments. Do you have any thoughts–
Shan: Yeah, that's a good question.
Graham: On that – where the sweet spot or how you start figuring out when you should start sending stuff out?
Shan: That's exactly the question that I would want to ask. Thank you, Graham.
Adam: Yeah, I tend to be on the “let's just get it out,” you know, approach. And again, make sure it's – you sound competent and, you know, it's written well and the grammar is good and it flows, but again, you're going to have three people who are going to review your paper and they're going to, hopefully, it's part of the constructive way of being a reviewer, is have good ideas that could completely alter what your intention was to be so, you know, don't polish it too much. And then I guess the other side of it for advice I would have is, you know, we – our paper was accepted and that's great, but, you know, PSJ has a rejection rate of what, 85%, 80 – 90%. So there's going to be 90% of the people who submit something to PSJ, they're going to get rejected. But don't take it personally. You can grumble for a little bit, but don't go online and complain how bad your life is. It's part of the business of doing this, and I know it's hard to say for some people, but it – you just have to treat it that way. And I just see so many, particularly junior scholars who just, you know, think it's the end of the world. There's, you know, there's a lot of other good journals, other than PSJ out there. And sometimes it's just not a fit, what they're looking for, for this whole host of reasons for being rejected and some of them are kind of weird sometimes, but don't take it personally, that's my thing. This is part of the business of what we do. And if you're confident in your work, eventually it's going to get published somewhere, so that's sort of – contributing to what Shan is saying is, sometimes people polish their paper so much, they spend so much time and then they get – it gets rejected and sometimes for often for good reasons and then people think about all the work they put into it and so it sort of spirals into a lot of sadness at times. So that's one piece of advice I would have, that this is part of our business of – and rejection is part of that our business.
Xue: Yeah, exactly. So I just want to say that usually I send out my paper at the moment I start feeling I don't want to look at this anymore, I don't want to touch it, I don't want to open it anymore, so just send it out, let somebody else to look at that. So I will sleep over it and reopen that to see whether I can – I want to rework on that. If still the answer is no, just let someone else to do that job, so send it out. I don't know whether that is good advice or not, but it's typically what I do in my, yeah, in my situation. And related to that, probably a different topic related to that, I think as we all mentioned that this research journey is very demanding, right, so I think the interest is very, very important, so work on the topics you are really passionate about. So we really need this kind of the interest, the passion to serve as this consistent source of the motivation to kind of go through this demanding process.
Graham: I appreciate you use that research journey, right, and I guess that leads into my next question of – as you've all gone on your research journey here, I'm curious if there's advice that you would give a younger version of yourself, something that you took too seriously at the time that you're telling yourself to not worry about, or maybe the opposite, something that you overlooked but now looking back, you're like, oh, I wish I would have considered X. I wonder if there's anything that you kind of would tell a younger version of yourself looking back.
Xue: OK, I can start. Adam, do you want to start, go ahead.
Adam: No, no, no, you go, I'm still trying to think this one through, I've been thinking about this for a while.
Xue: OK, I think I have probably two advice to the younger version of myself. First is I would tell myself kind of how important it is to immerse myself in extensive literature. So I think kind of investing more time in understanding the literature, staying kind of well informed about my study field is very important. So in my personal experience – so I devoted substantial efforts to improve my methodology – methodological skills during my PhD. Journey. So I earned a degree in kind of the – master degree in statistics and data science, concurrently with my PhD, so I put a lot of effort on the methodology and want my methods to be good, to be accurate, right? I want my evidence to be reliable, right? So this is kind of something I emphasize a lot in my PhD journey. So if I kind of can go tell the younger version of myself I want to tell her that a more comprehensive engagement with literature is really important. And I'm – I think I cannot, I think – we can do that at a later stage, right? To read more literature, but I just feel that at the later stage scholar’s career, we have more responsibilities as a mentor, as an instructor, editor, organizer, or other kind of the responsibility, as Adam mentioned, right? So I think the kind of PhD journey opens – offers this unique window of opportunity, right, to close ourselves as this kind of – into the literature at a desk. So I will tell myself spending more time on literature would be kind of rewarding. And another point of – I think it's more applied to interdisciplinary studies – so I study technology innovation, also the social aspect of technology innovations, right, and the policy. So basically this is very interdisciplinary area. So it can be published at the technology innovation policy journals, energy journals, science journals, policy journals. So usually I start just with the idea and work on the paper, so I didn't think about the suitable outlets or suitable journals before writing my papers. I think I would advise myself to carefully consider potential outlets for the research before the writing process. So yeah, I think it's pretty important for the interdisciplinary study. Sometimes it's really challenging to find a suitable kind outlets for such interdisciplinary study. So yeah – so basically, I think that's – so be basically – be mindful of the target audience, it's more important at the early stage of research rather than the kind of later stage of the research, yeah.
Graham: If I could ask one follow up question. When you talk about kind of understanding the literature more broadly, are you like thinking about theory or you thinking domain specific stuff? I'm curious like what aspects of literature you really wish you would have dug into?
Xue: I think kinda both energy domain and also the theoretical perspective because in the – by the end of the day we need to connect this, two, right, and also – so previously when I read literature, I focused more on the methodology part, I want to know how they find the answers to their question, whether their evidence are reliable or not, but later realized finding the questions is very important, especially what are the important questions, what would be the meaningful questions, impactful questions, I think that should come before that. And also for a lot of methodologies, probably we can learn specific methodologies that's suitable for research questions. So that should serve – methodological should serve the research question. So I think the question should come first – we know what are the most important, meaningful, impactful questions in the field from both the practical perspective and theoretical perspective. So I think that's can only – not only be learned, but learning that from the literature would be very effective.
Adam: Who wants to go next? How about the younger Dane?
Graham: The most recent through the finish line, but maybe the most interesting thing to say back a few years.
Dane: I think right now these questions you're asking Graham are very valuable to me as well, because you don't really get to hear this kind of valuable insights from, like, senior scholars. And now that I'm almost at the end of the line and also trying to publish few papers, these insights kind of bring me back to also, like, the beginning, like, am I answering the right question – or asking the right questions? Or my answer is backed by good chunk of literature and – these are things that I need to think about right now. So thank you for asking the questions, thank you for the insights everyone, thank you.
Graham: Thank you.
Shan: Let's save the best for the last. I will go next. I really agree with Xue, what she said about, you know, reading, be familiar with the literature, I think especially for me, I feel like I didn't do very well in my graduate school, so definitely reading more literature, not only in the part of the literature that's relevant – directly relevant to my research, but maybe like broadly in public policy. So not only in environmental energy policy, I think that would be really helpful. And another thing would be, again, the imperfect paper is better than incomplete paper, so that's something I would definitely want to improve over time – still, yeah.
Graham: It has a nice ring to it too: the imperfect paper is better than the incomplete paper.
Shan: Right.
Adam: Exactly. What I tell the younger version of myself? Well, I mean, I came into academia from a career in government – I was in government for 12 years, actually 15 kind of. And so I'm relatively new academic and I guess, really what the young version of me would be is, like, how do I make what we did sort of pay off for people who actually do policy work? I mean, what is the relevance of that for those people who ought to read this stuff, because one of the things we hear and drives me crazy as a – in PhD exams, Dane did not do this, is we go, what is the relevance – the policy relevance of your work and so all students say, well, it's going to inform the policymakers which we know our work doesn't usually, but how can we sort of make that link to people in the actual policy world, because a lot of us are divorced from it. I mean, I'm not, I still study – but in my other research I do study policy work, but how can we actually inform policy makers in a meaningful way, not as they're going to be reading our work, but how can we engage them so that – because I think what a lot of the things we did in our paper are relevant to people on the ground and who don't have Ph.ds in public policy, who don't read into the literature extensively as we want to do. To me, that's the kind of thing thinking back, is important. And it's become important in my career, I've moved away from the big long papers like the PSJ paper we're talking about today to doing these shorter pieces, like, the 3,000-5,000 word papers that link to the practitioner, because if we don't, then yeah, we're talking to ourselves, we're making important academic contributions, but public policy is also – has that professional element to it and we need to – we shouldn't forget about that and we have to keep that in mind. And I know PSJ has that new short paper section that they've introduced and recently my colleagues submitted a paper to that and again with that more practical – and I think we could probably have rewritten this paper – not rewritten, but we could have another version of this paper at that practitioner level. So for me it's thinking back, it’s like how would it – how would all this applied in my previous professional professional life? So that's my answer. It took me a lot to figure that out because I was like because I've, I mean, I've had a great career. So I have no regrets, I have to say. So it's not much I would want to change in what I’ve done and I’ve got to work with wonderful colleagues here and I’ve worked with a lot of other great people. And so it's always new projects. And so that's again, what I encourage people out there to do is to think about different projects and different – certain new challenges as well, because I see for this paper for instance, I think this is your lead up question, where could we go from here? And I can see, again, a lot of work here in – through the policy capacity area, you talk about these three levels, but how can our ideas, how can these instruments and calibrations be carried out, which is a question of policy capacity as well so, again, there's lots of avenues to go with this work.
Graham:Wonderful. I appreciate all of the thoughts and all the advice, especially zooming out and asking this question of impact and what are we actually doing in our research and how does that actually interact with the real world around us. As we kind of come to the top of the hour here, I just want to say thank you to each of our guests. I appreciate the last hour that you've spent here discussing your paper with me and also just kind of dissecting your thoughts about kind of this art that ends up happening behind these papers and kind of revealing what that process ends up being. So with that, I appreciate it, thank you so much. I have to also thank Policy Studies Journal and also the Center for Policy Design and Governance, both are co-sponsoring this podcast, so thank you for both of them. And with that I will say thank you again to our guests and I'll see everybody next quarter and the PSJ Art of Science podcast. So with that, thank you so much.
Adam: Thank you.
Shan: Thank you.
Dane: Thanks.
Xue: Thank you.
Watch on YouTube:
Listen to Spotify:
Check out the Policy Studies Journal and PSJ Blog!
Follow on X: @ArtOfSciencePod
Hosted by Dr. Graham Ambrose and produced and transcribed by Erica Ivins.
"Grandma Funk" performed by Pavlo Butorin used under license from Shutterstock.