The criteria for effective policy design: character and context in policy instrument choice

ABSTRACT

Recent studies of policy design have grappled with such issues as policy tool use, overcoming historical policy legacies, the nature of policy mixes and issues around policy formulation and the nature of ‘design’ and ‘designing’ in policy-making. These studies have begun to establish insights into what makes a policy design ‘effective’ or likely to succeed in being adopted or implemented or both. This paper draws lessons from both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ design work to establish several basic criteria for effective design and designing. As the review of the literature shows, the kinds of lessons that can be drawn from these studies fall into two categories: those dealing with matching design activity to the context of policy-making and those which focus on the character of the tools deployed in a design. The paper sets out both these elements and shows how they can be combined to generate lessons, insights and practices for both policy scholars and practitioners alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy design
• policy tools
• policy instruments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. They first placed only self-regulation, exhortation, subsidies, and regulation on this scale (Doern, 1981) but later added in categories for ‘taxation’ and public enterprise (Tupper & Doern, 1981) and finally, an entire series of finer ‘gradations’ within each general category (Doern & Phidd, 1983).

2. It is often simply assumed, for example, that policy ‘targets’ are rational self-maximizers, calculating their best interests hedonically in deciding whether or not to comply with the demands of government instruments and mechanisms such as regulation, laws and subsidies (Stover & Brown, 1975 ; Araral, 2014; Duesberg et al., 2014; Gevrek & Uyduranoglu, 2015; Weaver, 2014; Jones, Pykett, & Whitehead, 2014; Maskin, 2008). Many studies of policy instruments, heavily influenced by economists, for example, assume both decision-makers and policy targets are motivated exclusively by relatively narrow utilitarian self-interest maximization (Dewees, 1983; Stokey & Zeckhauser, 1978; Trebilcock & Hartle, 1982). Other studies often reflected this view in part because they followed the lead of economists in focussing on the use of economic tools such as regulation, public enterprises, or subsidies which more or less directly affected the type, quantity, price or other characteristic of goods and services being produced in industrial and environmental policy spheres, which could in fact be analysed in largely economistic terms (Bemelmans-Videc, Rist, & Vedung, 1998; Peters & Van Nispen, 1998 ; Salamon, 1989).

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Michael Howlett

Michael Howlett is Burnaby Mountain Chair in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University and Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in public policy analysis, political economy, and resource and environmental policy. He is the current chair of Research Committee 30 (Comparative Public Policy) of the International Political Science Association and sits on the executive committee of the International Conference on Public Policy. His most recent books are the Handbook of Policy Formulation (Edward Elgar 2017) edited with I. Mukherjee, Policy Work in Canada (University of Toronto Press 2017) edited with J. Craft and A. Wellstead and Policy Capacity and Governance (Palgrave 2018) edited with X. Wu and M. Ramesh.