Overview
The research paper is meant to help you develop a technical and legal basis for your policy recommendations (the policy brief). It will define the problem including geographic scope, identify stakeholders, summarize the history of policy approaches addressing the problem, and analyze potential policy solutions to the issue. Your emphasis should be on the history of policy approaches. You will first submit a draft of the paper for feedback from the instructor.
Length: 500-750 words (final paper should be >1500 words)
Examples: Final research paper example attached below
Content: The draft should contain the structure of your research paper, with bullet points or numbered lists of the sections and their content, or full paragraphs. Please see the final research paper components below for guidance on contents. The more you include at this stage, the better feedback you will get for development of the next steps.
- Problem Definition: Define the problem, including ecological, environmental, social, and or/economic dimensions. Document the urgency of addressing the problem now. Provide evidence for the problem. Define the spatial bounds of the issue you wish to tackle in your project.
- Stakeholders: Identify major stakeholders involved in the debate (e.g., regulated entities, public interest groups, political leaders, underrepresented groups) and their likely or actual positions on the issue.
- Regulatory History: Review legislation, rules and regulations, and court decisions connected with the problem in the geography of interest. You may consider including attempts at passing legislation if there is no existing legislation.
- Potential Solutions: Identify and analyze potential approaches to address the problem; these approaches could be completely new or may be based on existing approaches used in other contexts (e.g., other locations, times, or issues). You don’t need to make recommendations (that is the policy brief), but you should address which approaches are likely to be most successful, and why.
- Figures/Tables: These are optional but may be useful. They should be numbered and referred to in the text.
- Works Cited: The final paper should use proper citations and have a works cited/bibliography/references list. Style (e.g., Chicago, APA) is up to you, but must be used consistently.
Topic: Zero Waste Plan in NYC. Implementing the zero waste plan by means of reducing waste, increasing recycling and composting, which in turn will divert waste to US landfills and release harmful methane emissions. Jessica Tisch, Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation. She is in charge of the department that is responsible for everything from collection to sanitation to transportation of the city’s trash. She has recently claimed that she wants to be very tough on rats and increase compositing of organics.