3.3. Conceptual framework

In this thesis, the concepts proposed by Peter Knoepfel in his work public policy analysis will be adopted to understand China's policy of importing solid waste.

In the work of Public Policy Analysis, a public policy is defined as a set of decisions and activities resulting from the interaction between public and private actors, whose behavior is influenced by the resources at their disposal, the general institutional rules (that is, the rules concerning the overall functioning of the political system) and specific institutional rules (that is, the rules specific to the area of intervention under scrutiny).

In the basic triangle of the policy actors proposed by Knoepfel, the political-administrative authorities who are vested with public authority, target groups (the actors whose behaviour is politically defined as the (in)direct cause of a problem or who are able to take action to deal with it), and end beneficiaries (actors who experience the negative effects of a particular problem and whose situation should be improved following the implementation of public intervention), these different types of actors, constitute the three points of the triangle. Actors affected indirectly by policy (third parties constituting either negatively affected third parties or positively affected third parties) are located at the peripheries of two of these three poles.

The causal hypothesis provides a political response to the question as to who or what is guilty or objectively responsible or able to make changes to enable the collective problems to be resolved. Thus, the definition of the causal hypothesis of a policy consists in designating the policy target groups and the end beneficiaries.

The intervention hypothesis establishes how the collective problem requiring resolution can be mitigated and, indeed, resolved by a policy. It defines the methods of government action that will influence the decisions and activities of the designated target groups so that these will be compatible with the political aims. Thus the state can compel them to change their behavior, induce a change of behaviors by positive or negative economic incentives, or again suggest it through the manipulation of symbols and information.

The availability of different resources to the actors involved in a policy process, their production, management, exploitation, combination, and even their substitution or exchange, can exert a significant influence on the processes, results and effects of a policy. The book mainly proposes the following types of resources: force, law, personnel, money, information, organization, consensus, time, infrastructure, political support.

Thus, a policy process can be interpreted in terms of the following four main stages: (1) the stage of political agenda setting, that is, the placing of the problem to be resolved on the governmental agenda; (2) the stage of policy programming, that is, the legislative and regulatory programming of the public intervention; (3) the stage of policy implementation, that is, the implementation of the political-administrative program (PAP) by means of action plan (APs) and formal acts (outputs); and (4) the stage of policy evaluation, that is, the evaluation of the resulting effects (impacts and outcomes).

Therefore, there are six products in the four stages of a policy process.

Figure III：The policy cycle of four stages (Knoepfel, 2011)

In the analysis model proposed by Peter Knoepfel, the substantive and institutional dimensions of policy products are variables to be explained, while the actors' game, the resources and the institutional rules are explanatory variables. Besides, there are two postulates. Firstly, the substantive and institutional results of a policy stage (for example, the PAP and PAA) directly influence the results of the following stages (for example, the APs and formal implementation acts). Secondly, during each stage, the public policy actors resort to institutional rules and combination of resources to influence the results of the stage in question if necessary even deviating from the results of the previous stages.