This research project investigates how policy innovations such as the Water Framework Directive’s principles can become locked-in and/or have their initial meaning altered through the policy cycle and ongoing reframing debates. From their original design to their diffusion outside Europe, it will reveal how their trajectory is shaped by the ways the science-policy interface shares different knowledge regimes, select and represent them.
Along the trajectories of one biophysical and one political-economic principle, I will compare the arbitrages, institutional settings and processes of knowledge production that lead to their emergence, stir their adoption in the political agenda, and enable them to persist in time and to be diffused. To this end, I will explore in particular the conditions and dynamics of the science-policy interface that enhance or limit the credibility, salience and legitimacy of these policy innovations over their life cycle.