Patching vs Packaging in Policy Formulation: Assessing Policy Portfolio Design

By Michael Howlett, J. Rayner. 2013

354 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Thinking about policy mixes is at the forefront of current research work in the policy sciences and raises many significant questions with respect to policy tools and instruments, processes of policy formulation, and the evolution of tool choices over time. Not least among these is how to assess the potential for multiple policy tools to achieve policy goals in an efficient and effective way. Previous conceptual work on policy mixes has highlighted evaluative criteria such as "consistency" (the ability of multiple policy tools to reinforce rather than undermine each other in the pursuit of individual policy goals), "coherence" (or the ability of multiple policy goals to co-exist with each other in a logical fashion), and "congruence" (or the ability of multiple goals and instruments to work together in a uni-directional or mutually supportive fashion) as important design principles and measures of optimality in policy mixes. And previous empirical work on the evolution of existing policy mixes has highlighted how these three criteria are often lacking in mixes which have evolved over time as well as those which have otherwise been consciously designed. This article revisits this early design work in order to more clearly assess the reasons why many existing policy mixes are sub-optimal and the consequences this has for thinking about policy formulation processes and the practices of policy design.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51b883e26093ca093afe66a4690e26b97503fdfd

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Citations in the corpus

From tools to toolkits in policy design studies: The new design orientation towards policy formulation research (2015, background): “Understanding how such processes operate is a subject of interest in current studies (Hickle, 2013; Howlett and Rayner, 2013).”
Policy Design and Non-Design: Towards a Spectrum of Policy Formulation Types (2014, background): “Where there was a relatively high policy “lock-in” on existing tool arrangements, this could preclude consideration or adoption of potentially superior alternatives (Howlett & Rayner, 2013).”
The need for comprehensive and well targeted instrument mixes to stimulate energy transitions: The case of energy efficiency policy (2017, positive): “…replacement of existing arrangements through new policy packages, more recently it has been argued that also strategic ‘policy patching’ (in the same way as software patches fix issues) can be a suitable strategy to improve the coherence and consistency of the mix (Howlett and Rayner 2013).”
Resilience and robustness in policy design: a critical appraisal (2017, background): “Consequently, policy designers tend to favour incremental processes of ‘layering’ or ‘patching’ in which new instruments are added to the existing mix of instruments without the need for large-scale changes rather than a complete redesign of current policy mixes (Howlett and Rayner 2007, 2013).”
Causal logics and mechanisms in policy design: How and why adopting a mechanistic perspective can improve policy design (2019, background): “availability (or not) of adequate resources or capacities on the part of state actors, and the like (Howlett and Rayner, 2013a, 2013b).”
Do policy mix characteristics matter for low-carbon innovation? A survey-based exploration of renewable power generation technologies in Germany (2018, background): “Third, the overall policy mix consistency captures the consistency of the instrument mix with the policy strategy, implying that they work together in a unidirectional or mutually supportive fashion (Howlett and Rayner, 2013).”
Energy efficiency and the policy mix (2016, background): “In reality, the process of ‘designing’ policy mixes is much more complex and by definition inherently political (Bressers & O’Toole, 2005; Howlett & Rayner, 2013; Rogge & Reichardt, 2013); energy-efficiency policy is no exception (Varone & Aebischer, 2001).”
An in-depth analysis of the evolution of the policy mix for the sustainable energy transition in China from 1981 to 2020 (2020, background): “packaging process [35,36,44], and it occurs when a completely new policy area emerges or when the existing policy mix faces total overhaul [36,40].”
The parameters of policy portfolios: verticality and horizontality in design spaces and their consequences for policy mix formulation (2015, background): “…eye on promoting coherence and integration in complex environments, can achieve complex and ambitious policy goals in as efficient and effective a way as those designs that are consciously created as interlocking packages of measures (Feindt and Flynn, 2009; Howlett and Rayner, 2013; Kay, 2007).”
Conceptual and empirical advances in analysing policy mixes for energy transitions (2017, background): “Drawing on institutional theory, Howlett and Rayner [47] for example have suggested that policy mixes typically evolve through four processes: layering, drift, conversion and replacement ([90]).”
Energy democracy: Goals and policy instruments for sociotechnical transitions (2017, background): “Given its integrated social change focus, the energy democracy approach may present better prospects for achieving the renewable energy transition than more traditional energy innovation and climate mitigation efforts that are often isolated from other social issues [26,21].”
Going around in circles? Conceptual recycling, patching and policy layering in the EU circular economy package (2019, background): “; see also Howlett and Rayner 2013b).”