In the last decade and a half policy scholarship have made significant theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances by uncovering the ways in which policy instrument ‘mixes’ might be fostered to nurture more efficient and effective implementation of specified policy goals and objectives. These advances include uncovering somewhat linear, albeit complex processes through which the careful disentangling of policy settings, calibrations and mechanisms reveal endogenous internal subsystem change processes, as well as exogenous interactions through cross sector and multi-level interactions. These efforts have even been shown to initiate creative ideas within the policy subsystem that are either consistent with dominant norms governing instrument logics, and/or for, even expanding the normative framework to include what had been evaluated previously as politically infeasible. While great strides have been made, this literature still seems to offer its greatest insights for looking backwards at explaining policy outcome, when, in fact, its greatest potential role in helping foster, and advancing, new ways to engage practitioners and scholars towards forward looking applied policy analysis. To overcome this gap, and to integrate active agents in policy mixes and implementation, we develop an 11-step protocol that integrates public policy scholarship on learning, policy instruments, with power & interests and influence. For analytical traction we focus our attention on the ways in which global interventions might be drawn on to travel pathways of influence through smart policy mixes. We focus on research lessons about the co-generation of practitioner and scholar collective causal understandings, and innovative strategic options that emerge that bind together the problem focused community in a collective endeavor to develop policy mixes that have “plausible causal influence logics” for addressing a particular problem, or set of problems, in question. We make reference to a number of empirical examples from forest and climate governance.