Toward sustainable policy instruments: assessing instrument selection among policy actors

Abstract

To address complex environmental problems we need sustainable policy solutions, which are often disregarded by policy actors in charge of addressing these problems. In this article, we study factors that promote or hinder policy actors’ selection for sustainable policy instruments using the case of flood risk management in Switzerland. We evaluate flood risk management instruments based on three key sustainability dimensions and forgo conventional approaches to categorizing policy instruments. In a survey, we ask policy actors which policy instruments they prefer and thus evaluate which policy actors select sustainable policy instruments. Results indicate that problem perception is the key determinant influencing policy actors’ selection of sustainable flood risk management instruments. Results also suggest that the tendency to select sustainable flood risk management instruments differs depending on actor type and actor level. These findings help us understand which settings promote the selection of sustainable policy solutions to tackle complex environmental problems.

Keywords:

• policy instruments
• instrument selection
• sustainability performance
• problem perception
• flood risk management

Acknowledgements

The data gathering process was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation within the Sinergia Project ‘CCAdapt’. The authors wish to thank Prof. Dr. Karin Ingold and Prof. Dr. Martino Maggetti for their helpful comments. The authors would also like to thank participants of the public policy panel at the Annual Congress of the Swiss Political Science Association in 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2021.1944847.

Notes

1 Policy actors are individuals or groups of individuals with direct or indirect government or non-government affiliations who seek to influence the outcome of a policy process. Policy actors can include representatives from government agencies, associations, interest groups, industry or scientific institutions (Weible and Ingold 2018).

2 We discuss sub-catchment differences further in the SI Online.

3 We are aware that sustainable instruments are not necessarily the instruments guaranteeing the most effective physical protection from complex environmental problems, one expectation about instruments often expressed in the population (Parsons et al. 2019). We therefore also calculated our regression models including an instrument selection index based on the effectiveness evaluation of instruments. There is no correlation between sustainable instrument choice and effective choice (see SI Online).