#GideonEmmanuel

[tuftsuep]

Gideon Emmanuel: UEP Thesis Award Nominee, 2023

A Form of Government Capable of Accomplishing the Agenda of the Hour: The policy paradigms and organizational dynamics of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

This thesis builds on an extensive review of the literature around public support of economic innovation. The author creates their own framework for assessing how a public agency can pursue this mission, and then applies it to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Through extensive interviews, the author establishes a history of the origins and evolution of MassCEC that is a contribution to the field.

Abstract

Can the state attempt to steer the economy towards democratically determined goals, and how might progressive policy makers build a government capable of enacting such a program? To explore these questions, this research project applies a novel framework for exploring the complexity of a microeconomic policy agency to a case study of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, an agency founded in 2008 to help develop Massachusetts's clean energy economy. The primary goal of the research was to describe a microeconomic policy agency's articulation and delivery of an economic agenda. The secondary goal was to see if conceptual typologies from the literature could reveal opportunities for the agency. The analysis revealed significant opportunities for the agency to increase its impact, better deliver its core tasks, and more clearly tell its story by clarifying its purposes and reorganizing itself.