Evaluation of US State Pollinator Plans Using Three Evidence-Based Policymaking Frameworks

After the US federal government created a federal pollinator plan in 2015, there was a movement to create pollinator plans in every US state at the state level.  In fall 2018, we found and downloaded every existing, publicly available US state pollinator protection plan. This project aims to compare and contrast the goals, scope, and implementation of state-level pollinator protection plans across the US, using three frameworks for evidence-based policymaking. Then we scored them using the frameworks, to assess whether the plans were using known best practices - in any framework - for evidence based policymaking. Most states did not score highly on the majority of the frameworks. 

We evaluated and scored all the publicly available US state pollinator plans using 3 evidence-based policymaking frameworks: US Department of Interior Adaptive Resources Management (ARM), US Environmental Protection Agency management pollinator protection plan (MP3) guidance, and Pew Trusts Pew-MacAthur Results First Project elements of evidence-based policymaking. We assessed all existing state pollinator plans (33 out of 50 states had a plan as of January 2019) using these three frameworks. A full explanation of how we evaluated and scored them is in the metadata file. 

In order to use these files, please read and use the metadata document to understand the scoring categories and criteria. Additionally, you would need to download / read the state pollinator plans, specifically the versions that existed online publicly at the time of our analysis (December 2018 / January 2019).