Unpacking policy portfolios: primary and secondary aspects of tool use in policy mixes

ABSTRACT

A recent resurgence of interest in policy design has fostered renewed efforts to better understand how specific combinations of policy tools arise and shape policy outcomes. However, to date, these efforts have been stymied by under-theorization of the dif- ferent purposes to which tools are directed in policy mixes and a corresponding failure to acknowledge both these in conceptual work on the subject and in policy practice. Existing frameworks do not adequately recognize the complexity of contemporary policy tool mixes, especially their hybrid and multilayered features, and how procedural and substantial tools operate and interact together in priority and supportive roles. To close this gap, we propose a revised tool framework that distinguishes between first and second-order aspects of instruments used in policy mixes and highlights the particular salience of procedural tools within them.

KEYWORDS:

• policy tools
• policy mixes
• policy instruments
• policy sciences
• policy design
• health policy
• Singapore

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Adam Hannah, Paul Fawcett, Ishani Mukherjee, Jenny Lewis, Gilberto Capano Isabelle Engeli, and participants at the Public Policy Network Meeting in Auckland in January 2019; The Future of Policy Sciences Workshop at the Education University of Hong Kong in September 2019, and the Melbourne-NUS Policy Tools Workshop in January 2020 for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Azad Singh Bali

Azad Singh Bali in Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Australian National University. His research interests lie at the intersection of policy theory, and social policy in Asia.

Michael Howlett

Michael Howlett is the Burnaby Mountain Chair and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) at the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. He has published extensively in the fields of public policy, governance, and environmental policy.

M Ramesh

M Ramesh is the UNESCO Chair Professor of Social Policy Design at the LKY School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Ramesh is widely published in the areas of public policy, governance, and social policy.