Analysis and Decision Support for Educators and Practitioners with the Policy Explorer Platform (PEP)

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Abstract

PolicyAnalyzR is an R shiny platform designed to: i. guide the policy analysis process and ii. provide a single, updateable repository of documents and data necessary for evaluating policy instruments and their tradeoffs. PolicyAnalyzR was originally designed as a policy analytic extension to AgQuery to support analysts in Ministries of Agriculture and Statistics to more effectively visualize and use farm household survey data as part of a global data initiative 50x2030. The Evans School Policy and Research group (EPAR), demonstrated the platform to 30 participants in Cambodia in December, focused on using the App to support the government’s objectives in agriculture. This proposed workshop builds on the successful pilot with domestic applications and data, for example, using the national Panel Study of Income Dynamics Data or the Washington state Greenhouse Gas Inventory to understand sector-wise implications under different instruments addressing goals within the Clean Energy and Transportation Act passed in 2020.

PolicyAnalyzR distinguishes itself from traditional dashboards in the following ways:

1. Policy Context: Once populated, the platform cues the user to consider goals, values, stakeholders, the legality, speed, and cost of different policy instruments, the likely distribution of price, quantity and quality changes on stakeholders, and  relevant evidence from the literature on estimated impacts. Users can look at pre-populated maps or create their own with the hosted data, download literature, explore bivariate relationships, and calculate basic benefit cost estimates.


2. Open-source platform: The code for developing PolicyAnalyzR  is open-source,  free of charge and publicly available to modify or reuse.


3. Customizable Data: Data can be easily modified, extended, or replaced as new surveys are released without requiring modifications to the code. R Shiny is a platform for building graphical user interfaces that can be used to construct dashboards, but also to create applications with much greater flexibility, allowing analysts to enrich analyses with external sources and HTML-based web pages, and update data, or add information such as interactive tables with notes and links to resources or supplementary visualizations.

The platform operates on four principles relevant to survey data:

1. Increasing the accessibility, equity & efficiency of high-quality data (writing commonly used back end and data processing code once)


2. Improving the transparency & standardization of common indicators across countries (including aggregation, merging, and cleaning decisions)


3. Supporting local ownership, customization and maintenance (the platform is modular and can be updated with Excel, reducing the time required to make updates and the need for coding)


4. Connecting data to the fuller policy analysis process

The workshop will be divided into three 30-minute slots: an overview of PolicyAnalyzR and the Github site and code, a hands-on demonstration with a domestic policy issue, and individual modifications for interested participants on how to customize the data and structure. The target audience for this workshop is anyone who is directly engaged in conducting or teaching policy analysis.

Policy Area

• Workshops

Moderator

• Didier Yelognisse Alia, University of Washington

Organizer

• C. Leigh Anderson, University of Washington

Speakers

• Vanisha Sharma, University of Washington

• Grant Blume, University of Washington

• Andrew Tomes, University of Washington

• Joaquin Mayorga, University of Washington