Best Practices for Policy Practitioners in Extension

There are over 1,000 documents, publications and/or journal articles that reference Best Practices for Extension Policy Practitioners. This information needs to be scanned and summarized to inform WCMER’s objective of training Urban Extension staff to help enact policy effectively. The project will

1. Produce a best practices policy scan that assesses both successful policy enactment, as well as gaps and obstacles encountered in not-so-successful policy work.
2. Perform a Meta-scan of the literature available in pre-identified databases, national publications, journal articles, and more.
3. Focus will be spent searching specific terms that are important for WCMER, such as policy creation/adoption/enactment, urban policy work, successful policy, and more.
4. Recommend additional data sets and sources to scan, then perform research accordingly.

Assemble the best practices found, organize them under common “themes,” then summarize the data as seen through a national lens.  Such work would enable a description of takeaways and next steps concerning the process of successful policy enactment, as well as how to avoid the pitfalls of faulty policy creation.

Limited examples of best practices were found from existing published documents.  Focus has moved to developing the points along a policy development-implementation continuum where Extension professionals can be in involved, either directly or by partnering with others.

Manuscript for submission to JOE is under development.

Dana Emmonns