Holy Grail or inflated expectations? The success and failure of integrated policy strategies

ABSTRACT

Governments and international organizations increasingly pursue the development of integrated policy strategies to govern persistent societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional jurisdictions. In spite of the rising popularity of such integrated strategies, little is known about their effects. Although it is generally assumed that integrated strategies result in better outcomes, the evidence base to support this claim is sparse. This is not to say that no attempts to study the relationship between integrated strategies and policy outcomes have been undertaken at all; this paper presents a research synthesis of the fragmented evidence base. Eligible studies are interpreted and discussed by using a heuristic that distinguishes between programmatic and political success and failure. Apart from synthesizing the impacts that integrated strategies have had, the paper reflects on associated explanatory conditions and methodological approaches that have been used. The review almost exclusively finds reports of failure and constraining conditions. At the same time, methodological approaches are found to be largely unconvincing and considerable research gaps remain. The paper, therefore, ends with a nuanced answer to the question of whether integrated strategies are worth pursuing and sets out various avenues for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy integration
• integrated policy strategy
• policy outcome
• policy success
• policy failure
• implementation

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Robbert Biesbroek and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on a previous draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jeroen Candel is an assistant professor at the Public Administration and Policy Group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His area of expertise is food (security) governance and policy, which he approaches through a Public Policy lens. He has a particular interest in conceptualizing and measuring policy integration. Dr. Candel has published in both high-ranking public policy and food journals. Beside his research and teaching, he engages closely with policymakers and stakeholders to advise about improving food governance arrangements and practices.

Notes

1 Which can in their turn result or be embedded in an IPS.

2 In McConnell’s approach, process success or failure refers to the extent to which governments are successful in carrying out their basic governance processes, such as problem identification, policy formulation, and decision-making (cf. Peters and Pierre 2016); programme success is about whether a policy’s goals are achieved; and political success is whether decision-makers manage to reap political benefits from a policy. Contrary to the approach of Bovens and ‘t Hart, McConnell thus approaches programmatic and political success more in terms of the locus of success than as distinct evaluation rationales (which was pointed out by Bovens in a commentary, see: Bovens 2010, the arguments of which are the reason to adopt the distinction between programmatic and political rationales in this paper.