Policy Design and Non-Design: Towards a Spectrum of Policy Formulation Types
By Michael Howlett, Ishan Mukherjee. 2014
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Public policies are the result of efforts made by governments to alter aspects of behaviour—both that of their own agents and of society at large—in order to carry out some end or purpose. They are comprised of arrangements of policy goals and policy means matched through some decision-making process. These policy-making efforts can be more, or less, systematic in attempting to match ends and means in a logical fashion or can result from much less systematic processes. “Policy design” implies a knowledge-based process in which the choice of means or mechanisms through which policy goals are given effect follows a logical process of inference from known or learned relationships between means and outcomes. This includes both design in which means are selected in accordance with experience and knowledge and that in which principles and relationships are incorrectly or only partially articulated or understood. Policy decisions can be careful and deliberate in attempting to best resolve a problem or can be highly contingent and driven by situational logics. Decisions stemming from bargaining or opportunism can also be distinguished from those which result from careful analysis and assessment. This article considers both modes and formulates a spectrum of policy formulation types between “design” and “non-design” which helps clarify the nature of each type and the likelihood of each unfolding.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca7896b9e5c27d1d246321994bdbc351da01bb95
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In Political Science and International Relations
In Public Administration
Citations in the corpus
- Resilience and robustness in policy design: a critical appraisal (2017, background): “In some instances, it might not be possible to ‘design’ resilient policies in an intentional manner (Howlett and Mukherjee 2014).”
- An in-depth analysis of the evolution of the policy mix for the sustainable energy transition in China from 1981 to 2020 (2020, background): “4 Research gap Investigating designs of complex policy mixes is a trending direction in policy design research [45] and is becoming popular in areas of environment policy, energy policy and innovation policy.”
- Policy Integration and Multi-Level Governance: Dealing with the Vertical Dimension of Policy Mix Designs (2017, background): “…tools and instruments from one era have been ‘layered’ on top of others in an often less than rational process of matching overall pol- icy means with goals, resulting in inconsistencies and incongruencies in tools embedded in such arrangements (Howlett & Mukherjee, 2014; Howlett & Rayner, 2004).”