From tools to toolkits in policy design studies: The new design orientation towards policy formulation research

By Michael Howlett, Ishan Mukherjee, J. J. Woo. 2015

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A roadmap for ‘new policy design’ studies now exists in the orientation which has emerged in recent years towards the formulation of complex policy mixes. The new design orientation focuses on bundles or portfolios of tools and the interactive effects which occur when multiple tools are used over time in policy packages designed to address multiple goals, and upon more complex multi-policy and multi-level design contexts. This review article examines the differences between the ‘old’ instrument orientation and the ‘new’ design one, setting out the current research agenda in this field and its rationale.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15741f7716f65cc6d4f444309fbd860608924cc3

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Management Science and Operations Research

In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

Policy integration: mapping the different concepts (2017, background): “Put differently, the study of policy integration may benefit from liaising with scholars working on questions related to policy design and policy evaluation (e.g. Howlett and Ramesh 2014; Howlett, Mukherjee, and Woo 2015).”
Going around in circles? Conceptual recycling, patching and policy layering in the EU circular economy package (2019, background): “In reality, much of this change appears to be incremental modification, with policy instruments ‘layered’ or ‘patched’ (see Howlett et al. 2015, Howlett and Mukherjee 2017, van der Heijden and Kuhlmann 2017) onto pre-existing institutional frameworks.”
An in-depth analysis of the evolution of the policy mix for the sustainable energy transition in China from 1981 to 2020 (2020, background): “version or drifting processes to patch flaws in an existing policy mix, just as software designers use “patches” to correct flaws in their operating systems and programs [40,41].”
Assessing the regulatory challenges of emerging disruptive technologies (2021, methodology): “This involves carefully assembling a combination of “substantive” and “procedural” tools in a policy “mix” or “portfolio” or “package” (Chapman 2003; Hennicke 2004; Taeihagh et al. 2013; Howlett et al. 2015).”