A policy is typically described as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. The term is not normally used to denote what is actually done, this is normally referred to as either procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by the Board of or senior governance body within an organization whereas procedures or protocols would be developed and adopted by senior executive officers. Policies can assist in both subjective and objective decision making. Policies to assist in subjective decision making would usually assist senior management with decisions that must consider the relative merits of a number of factors before making decisions and as a result are often hard to objectively test e.g. work-life balance policy. In contrast policies to assist in objective decision making are usually operational in nature and can be objectively tested e.g. password policy.

A Policy can be considered as a "Statement of Intent" or a "Commitment". For that reason at least, the decision-makers can be held accountable for their "Policy".

The term may apply to government, private sector organizations and groups, and individuals. Presidential executive orders, corporate privacy policies, and parliamentary rules of order are all examples of policy. Policy differs from rules or law. While law can compel or prohibit behaviors (e.g. a law requiring the payment of taxes on income), policy merely guides actions toward those that are most likely to achieve a desired outcome.

Policy or policy study may also refer to the process of making important organizational decisions, including the identification of different alternatives such as programs or spending priorities, and choosing among them on the basis of the impact they will have. Policies can be understood as political, management, financial, and administrative mechanisms arranged to reach explicit goals.'''

Impact

Intended effects

The intended effects of a policy vary widely according to the organization and the context in which they are made. Broadly, policies are typically instituted to avoid some negative effect that has been noticed in the organization, or to seek some positive benefit.

Corporate purchasing policies provide an example of how organizations attempt to avoid negative effects. Many large companies have policies that all purchases above a certain value must be performed through a purchasing process. By requiring this standard purchasing process through policy, the organization can limit waste and standardize the way purchasing is done.

The State of California provides an example of benefit-seeking policy. In recent years, the numbers of hybrid cars in California has increased dramatically, in part because of policy changes in Federal law that provided USD $1,500 in tax credits (since phased out) as well as the use of high-occupancy vehicle lanes to hybrid owners (no longer available for new hybrid vehicles). In this case, the organization (state and/or federal government) created an effect (increased ownership and use of hybrid vehicles) through policy (tax breaks, highway lanes).

Unintended effects

Policies frequently have side effects or unintended consequences. Because the environments that policies seek to influence or manipulate are typically complex adaptive systems (e.g. governments, societies, large companies), making a policy change can have counterintuitive results. For example, a government may make a policy decision to raise taxes, in hopes of increasing overall tax revenue. Depending on the size of the tax increase, this may have the overall effect of reducing tax revenue by causing capital flight or by creating a rate so high that citizens are deterred from earning the money that is taxed. (See the Laffer curve.)

The policy formulation process typically includes an attempt to assess as many areas of potential policy impact as possible, to lessen the chances that a given policy will have unexpected or unintended consequences. Because of the nature of some complex adaptive systems such as societies and governments, it may not be possible to assess all possible impacts of a given policy.

Policy cycle

In political science the policy cycle is a tool used for the analyzing of the development of a policy item. It can also be referred to as a "stagist approach". One standardized version includes the following stages: # Agenda setting (Problem identification) # Policy Formulation # Adoption # Implementation # Evaluation

An eight step policy cycle is developed in detail in ''The Australian Policy Handbook'' by Peter Bridgman and Glyn Davis: (now with Catherine Althaus in its 4th edition)

# Issue identification # Policy analysis # Policy instrument development # Consultation (which permeates the entire process) # Coordination # Decision # Implementation # Evaluation

The Althaus, Bridgman & Davis model is heuristic and iterative. It is intentionally normative and not meant to be diagnostic or predictive. Policy cycles are typically characterized as adopting a classical approach. Accordingly some postmodern academics challenge cyclical models as unresponsive and unrealistic, preferring systemic and more complex models. They consider a broader range of actors involved in the policy space that includes civil society organisations, the media, intellectuals, think tanks or policy research institutes, corporations, lobbyists, etc.

Content

Policies are typically promulgated through official written documents. Policy documents often come with the endorsement or signature of the executive powers within an organization to legitimize the policy and demonstrate that it is considered in force. Such documents often have standard formats that are particular to the organization issuing the policy. While such formats differ in form, policy documents usually contain certain standard components including :

A purpose statement, outlining why the organization is issuing the policy, and what its desired effect or outcome of the policy should be.

An applicability and scope statement, describing who the policy affects and which actions are impacted by the policy. The applicability and scope may expressly exclude certain people, organizations, or actions from the policy requirements. Applicability and scope is used to focus the policy on only the desired targets, and avoid unintended consequences where possible.

An effective date which indicates when the policy comes into force. Retroactive policies are rare, but can be found.

A responsibilities section, indicating which parties and organizations are responsible for carrying out individual policy statements. Many policies may require the establishment of some ongoing function or action. For example, a purchasing policy might specify that a purchasing office be created to process purchase requests, and that this office would be responsible for ongoing actions. Responsibilities often include identification of any relevant oversight and/or governance structures.

Policy statements indicating the specific regulations, requirements, or modifications to organizational behavior that the policy is creating. Policy statements are extremely diverse depending on the organization and intent, and may take almost any form.

Some policies may contain additional sections, including:

Background, indicating any reasons, history, and intent that led to the creation of the policy, which may be listed as motivating factors. This information is often quite valuable when policies must be evaluated or used in ambiguous situations, just as the intent of a law can be useful to a court when deciding a case that involves that law.

Definitions, providing clear and unambiguous definitions for terms and concepts found in the policy document.

Typologies

Policy addresses the intent of the organization, whether government, business, professional, or voluntary. Policy is intended to affect the 'real' world, by guiding the decisions that are made. Whether they are formally written or not, most organizations have identified policies.

Policies may be classified in many different ways. The following is a sample of several different types of policies broken down by their effect on members of the organization.

Distributive policies

Distributive policies extend goods and services to members of an organization, as well as distributing the costs of the goods/services amongst the members of the organization. Examples include government policies that impact spending for welfare, public education, highways, and public safety, or a professional organization's benefits plan.

Regulatory policies

Regulatory policies, or mandates, limit the discretion of individuals and agencies, or otherwise compel certain types of behavior. These policies are generally thought to be best applied when good behavior can be easily defined and bad behavior can be easily regulated and punished through fines or sanctions. An example of a fairly successful public regulatory policy is that of a speed limit.

Constituent policies

Constituent policies create executive power entities, or deal with laws. Constituent policies also deal with Fiscal Policy in some circumstances.

Miscellaneous policies

Policies are dynamic; they are not just static lists of goals or laws. Policy blueprints have to be implemented, often with unexpected results. Social policies are what happens 'on the ground' when they are implemented, as well as what happens at the decision making or legislative stage.

When the term policy is used, it may also refer to:

Official government policy (legislation or guidelines that govern how laws should be put into operation)

Broad ideas and goals in political manifestos and pamphlets

A company or organization's policy on a particular topic. For example, the equal opportunity policy of a company shows that the company aims to treat all its staff equally.

The actions the organization actually takes may often vary significantly from stated policy. This difference is sometimes caused by political compromise over policy, while in other situations it is caused by lack of policy implementation and enforcement. Implementing policy may have unexpected results, stemming from a policy whose reach extends further than the problem it was originally crafted to address. Additionally, unpredictable results may arise from selective or idiosyncratic enforcement of policy.

Types of policy analysis include:

Causal (resp. non-causal)

Deterministic (resp. stochastic, randomized and sometimes non-deterministic)

Index

Memoryless (e.g. non-stationary)

Opportunistic (resp. non-opportunistic)

Stationary (resp. non-stationary)

These qualifiers can be combined, so for example you could have a stationary-memoryless-index policy.

Types

Company Policy

Communications and Information Policy

Human resource policies

Privacy policy

Public policy

* Defense policy

* Domestic policy

* Economic policy

* Education policy

* Energy policy

* Environmental Policy

* Foreign policy

* Health policy

* Housing policy

* Information policy

* Macroeconomic policy

* Monetary policy

* Population policy

* Public policy in law

* Science policy

* Security policy

* Social policy

* Transportation policy

* Urban policy

* Water policy

Other uses of the term

In enterprise architecture for systems design, policy appliances are technical control and logging mechanisms to enforce or reconcile policy (systems use) rules and to ensure accountability in information systems.

In insurance, policies are contracts between insurer and insured used to indemnify (protect) against potential loss from specified perils. While these documents are referred to as policies, they are in actuality a form of contract - see insurance contract.

In gambling, policy is a form of an unsanctioned lottery, where players purport to purchase ''insurance'' against a chosen number being picked by a legitimate lottery. Or can refer to an ordinary Numbers game

In artificial intelligence planning and ''reinforcement learning'', a policy prescribes a non-empty deliberation (sequence of actions) given a non-empty sequence of states.

In debate, the term "policy" is slang for policy or cross-examination debate.

See also

Mandate (politics)

Overton window

Policy alienation

Policy analysis

Policy studies

Political science

Program evaluation

Public administration

Public health

Public policy (law)

Public policy schools

Public services

Social contract

Social welfare

Social work

Think tank

References

Howard, Cosmo. "The Policy Cycle: a Model of Post-Machiavellian Policy Making?" The Australian Journal of Public Administration, September 2005.

Stone, Diane."Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy Communities and their Networks", ''Journal of Policy Sciences'', 2008

External links

Category:Government * Category:Politics by issue Category:Decision theory

da:Policy de:Policy ko:정책 hi:नीति id:Kebijakan it:Policy (politica) he:מדיניות nl:Beleid ja:政策 sv:Policy yi:פאליסי zh:政策

name	Peter H. Duesberg
alt	Peter Duesberg, a white male with grey hair and a blue shirt, sitting in front of a stand of plants
birth date	December 02, 1936
birth place	Münster, Germany
residence	Oakland, California
fields	Cancer
workplaces	University of California, Berkeley
alma mater	University of Frankfurt
known for	Oncogene research; AIDS denialism
signature
footnotes	}}

Peter H. Duesberg (born December 2, 1936 in Münster, Germany) is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his cancer research and for his central role in AIDS denialism as an early and vocal proponent of the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Duesberg received acclaim early in his career for research on oncogenes and cancer. With Peter Vogt, he reported in 1970 that a cancer-causing virus of birds had extra genetic material compared with non-cancer-causing viruses, hypothesizing that this material contributed to cancer. At the age of 36, Duesberg was awarded tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received an Outstanding Investigator Grant (OIG) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1986, and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.

Long considered a contrarian by his scientific colleagues, Duesberg began to gain public notoriety with a March 1987 article in ''Cancer Research'' entitled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality". In this and subsequent writings, Duesberg proposed his hypothesis that AIDS is caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or antiretroviral drugs, and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. The scientific consensus is that HIV is the causal pathogen that leads to AIDS; Duesberg's HIV/AIDS claims have been rejected as incorrect and disproven by the scientific community. Reviews of his opinions in ''Nature'' and ''Science'' asserted that they were unpersuasive and based on selective reading of the literature, and that although Duesberg had a right to a dissenting opinion, his failure to fairly review the evidence for HIV causing AIDS meant that his opinion lacked credibility.

Duesberg's views on HIV/AIDS are cited as major influences on South African policy under the administration of Thabo Mbeki. Duesberg served on an advisory panel to Mbeki, convened in 2000. The failure of South Africa to provide antiretroviral drugs in a timely manner, due in part to the influence of AIDS denialism, is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable AIDS deaths and HIV infections. Duesberg disputed these findings in an article in the journal ''Medical Hypotheses'', but the journal's publisher, Elsevier, later retracted the article over accuracy and ethics concerns as well as its rejection during peer review. The incident prompted several complaints to the University of California, Berkeley, which began a misconduct investigation of Duesberg in 2009. The investigation was dropped in 2010, with University officials finding "insufficient evidence...to support a recommendation for disciplinary action."

Duesberg continues his research on cancer in both Berkeley and an alternative lab in Germany, as well as his activities within the AIDS denialist community.

Biography

Duesberg grew up during World War II, raised as a Catholic in Nazi Germany. He moved to Berkeley, California, in 1964 to work at the University of California, Berkeley, following completion of a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.

Work

Cancer

In the 1970s Duesberg won international acclaim for his groundbreaking work on cancer. Duesberg's early work on cancer included being the first to identify the oncogene ''v-src'' from the genome of Rous sarcoma virus, a chicken virus believed to trigger tumor growth.

Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer. He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri.

Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely. Duesberg along with other researchers, in a 1998 paper published in ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', reported a mathematical correlation between chromosome number and the genetic instability of cancer cells, which they dubbed "the ploidy factor," confirming earlier research by other groups that demonstrated an association between degree of aneuploidy and metastasis. Although unwilling to concur with Duesberg in throwing out a role for cancer genes, many researchers do support exploration of alternative hypotheses. Research and debate on this subject is ongoing. In 2007, ''Scientific American'' published an article by Duesberg on his aneuploidy cancer theory. In an editorial explaining their decision to publish this article, the editors of ''Scientific American'' stated: "Thus, as wrong as Duesberg surely is about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is significantly right about cancer."

AIDS

In his 1996 book ''Inventing the AIDS Virus'' and in numerous journal articles and letters to the editor, Duesberg asserts that HIV is harmless and that recreational and pharmaceutical drug use, especially of zidovudine (AZT, a drug used in the treatment of AIDS) are the causes of AIDS outside Africa (the so-called Duesberg hypothesis). He considers AIDS diseases as markers for drug use, e.g. use of poppers (alkyl nitrites) among some homosexuals, asserting a correlation between AIDS and recreational drug use. This correlation hypothesis has been disproven by evidence showing that only HIV infection, not homosexuality nor recreational/pharmaceutical drug use, predicts who will develop AIDS.

Duesberg asserts that AIDS in Africa is misdiagnosed and the epidemic a "myth", claiming incorrectly that the diagnostic criteria for AIDS are different in Africa than elsewhere and that the breakdown of the immune system in African AIDS patients can be explained exclusively by factors such as malnutrition, tainted drinking water, and various infections that he presumes are common to AIDS patients in Africa. Duesberg also argues that retroviruses like HIV must be harmless to survive, and that the normal mode of retroviral propagation is mother-to-child transmission by infection in utero.

Since Duesberg published his first paper on the subject in 1987, scientists have examined and criticized the accuracy of his hypotheses on AIDS causation. Duesberg sustained a long dispute with John Maddox, then-editor of the scientific journal ''Nature'', demanding the right to rebut articles that HIV caused AIDS. For several years Maddox consented to this demand but ultimately refused to continue to publish Duesberg's criticisms: }}

A number of scientific criticisms of Duesberg's hypothesis were summarized in a review article in the journal ''Science'' in 1994, which presented the results of a 3-month scientific investigation into some of Duesberg's claims. In the ''Science'' article, science writer Jon Cohen interviewed both HIV researchers and AIDS denialists (including Duesberg himself) and examined the AIDS literature in addition to review articles written by Duesberg. The article stated: See also The Controversy over HIV and AIDS, the full set of articles by Cohen.}}

The article also stated that although Duesberg and the AIDS denialist movement have garnered support from some prominent scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, most of this support is related to Duesberg’s right to hold a dissenting opinion, rather than support of his specific claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. Duesberg has been described as "the individual who has done the most damage" regarding denialism, due to the apparent scientific legitimacy his scientific credentials give to his statements.

In a 2010 article on conspiracy theories in science, Ted Goertzel highlights Duesberg's opposition to the HIV/AIDS connection as an example in which scientific findings are disputed on irrational grounds, relying on rhetoric, appeal to fairness and the right to a dissenting opinion rather than on evidence. Goertzel stated that Duesberg, along with many other denialists frequently invoke the meme of a "courageous independent scientist resisting orthodoxy", invoking the name of persecuted physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Regarding this comparison, Goertzel stated:

Duesberg's advocacy of AIDS denialism has, by all accounts, effectively blackballed him from the worldwide scientific community.

Consequences of AIDS denialism

In 2000, Duesberg was the most prominent AIDS denialist to sit on a 44-member Presidential Advisory Panel on HIV and AIDS convened by then-President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. The panel was scheduled to meet concurrently with the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban and to convey the impression that Mbeki's doubts about HIV/AIDS science were valid and actively discussed in the scientific community. The views of the denialists on the panel, aired during the AIDS conference, received renewed attention. Mbeki later suffered substantial political fallout for his support for AIDS denialism and for opposing the treatment of pregnant HIV-positive South African women with antiretroviral medication. Mbeki partly attenuated his ties with denialists in 2002, asking them to stop associating their names with his. In response to the inclusion of AIDS denialists on Mbeki's panel, the Durban declaration was drafted and signed by over 5,000 scientists and physicians, describing the evidence that HIV causes AIDS as "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous."

Two independent studies have concluded that the public health policies of Thabo Mbeki's government, shaped in part by Duesberg's writings and advice, were responsible for over 330,000 excess AIDS deaths and many preventable infections, including those of infants.

A 2008 Discover Magazine feature on Duesberg addresses Duesberg's role in anti-HIV drug-preventable deaths in South Africa. Jeanne Linzer interviews prominent HIV/AIDS expert Max Essex, who suggests that,

Academic misconduct investigation

In 2009, Duesberg and co-authors including David Rasnick published an article in the journal ''Medical Hypotheses'', which is not peer reviewed. The article had been rejected previously by the journal ''JAIDS'', and a peer reviewer had warned that the authors could face scientific misconduct charges if the paper were published. The article was not revised in response to these criticisms. In the article, Duesberg questioned research reporting that drugs policies implemented by the South African government on the advice of Duesberg, Rasnick and others had led to excess AIDS deaths. Observing that the overall population of South Africa has increased, Duesberg claimed that HIV must be a harmless "passenger virus" that has not caused deaths in South Africa or elsewhere. Duesberg stated that HIV does not replicate in the body and that antiviral drugs, which he calls "inevitably toxic", do not inhibit HIV. In addition, Duesberg wrote that neither he nor his co-authors had financial conflicts of interest.

Scientists expressed concerns to Elsevier, the publisher of ''Medical Hypotheses'', about unsupported assertions and incorrect statements by Duesberg. After an internal review and with a unanimous recommendation of rejection by five ''Lancet'' reviewers, Elsevier stated that the article was flawed and of potential danger to global public health. Elsevier permanently withdrew the Duesberg article and another AIDS denialist publication and asked that the editor of the journal implement a peer review process. Letters of complaint to the University of California, Berkeley, including one from Nathan Geffen of the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), prompted university officials to open an inquiry into possible academic misconduct related to false statements and failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

The investigation was dropped in 2010, with University officials finding "insufficient evidence...to support a recommendation for disciplinary action." The investigation did not endorse Duesberg's article, and TAC's Geffen stated that "this finding does not exonerate Duesberg".

Footnotes

Further reading

The Controversy over HIV and AIDS, a set of five articles published in ''Science'' systematically examining and discrediting Duesberg's assertions.

External links

Duesberg's homepage and faculty webpages

Mainstream scientific opinion

"À Duesberg, Adieu!", a review of ''Inventing the AIDS Virus'', John Moore, ''Nature'', Volume 380, Issue 6572, pp. 293–294 (1996)

Category:1936 births Category:AIDS denialism Category:American scientists Category:Cell biologists Category:Virologists Category:Living people Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Goethe University Frankfurt alumni Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences

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