Policy design: From tools to patches.
Howlett, Michael ; Mukherjee, Ishani
Policy design involves the purposive attempt by governments to link policy instruments or tools to the goals they would like to realize. The study of policy design focuses on these tools, their advantages and disadvantages and better understanding the processes around their selection and deployment in order to improve policy-making efforts and outcomes. The roadmap for the development of this approach to the policy sciences stretches from early works in public policy studies around the identification of policy tools and the classification of instrument types in the 1960s and early 1970s (Design 1.0), to present-day studies that strive to effectively formulate effective and context-appropriate policy alternatives given the specific historical legacies and political realities in which policy selection and implementation takes place (Design 2.0). Canadians have been leaders in both eras, with many well-known works on policy tools as well as more recent works on policy design written by Canadian authors. This contribution sets out five key sets of articles in each era in this field, featuring a major work in the discipline and a matching article from Canada in each time period examined. We have chosen to organize the discussion below chronologically featuring the two major policy design "eras" and the major theoretical developments that have defined them.
Design 1.0: the identification of policy tools
Lowi, T. J. 1966. "Distribution, regulation, redistribution: The functions of government." In Public Policies cuui Their Politics: Techniques of Government Control, edited by R. B. Ripley. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 27-40.
Simeon, R. 1976. "Studying public policy." Canadian journal of Political Science 9 (4): 548-80.
Among seminal initial works on policy instruments in the early period of policy design studies are those of Theodore Lowi. Policy analysts the world over were influenced by Lowi's mid-1960s endeavour to classify the policies that US governments have at their disposal and differentiate them based on the degree of coerciveness that governments exercise in their implementation at different periods in American history (Lowi 1966). In one of the earliest contributions to the policy design literature and the study of instrument choice, Lowi developed a four-part typology for major types of government activity, based on the specificity of coercion directed at individual or collective policy targets and the probability of its actual application. This included "distributive" policies that are individually targeted and weakly enforced; "regulatory" policies that are individually targeted and strongly sanctioned; generally targeted and weakly enforced "constituent" policies and "redistributive" policies that are generally targeted and strongly sanctioned. Lowi's impact was felt strongly in Canada with authors of key public policy texts such as G. Bruce Doern and his colleagues at Carleton University and elsewhere citing Lowi's work extensively as did the archetypal 1976 contribution from Richard Simeon which marked the start of formal policy studies in Canada.
Design 1.1: assessing the rationale for instrument choice
Salamon, L. M. 1981. "Rethinking public management: Third-party government and the changing forms of government action." Public Policy 29 (3): 255-75.
Doern, G. B., and V. S. Wilson, eds. 1974. "The concept of regulation and regulatory reform." In Issues in Canadian Public Policy. Toronto: Macmillan, pp. 8-35.
The second step in this first era of policy design studies moved the study of policy tools beyond typologies to better understanding why particular tools were selected in specific circumstances, both in theory and practice. In the US this work was pioneered by Lester Salamon (1981) who examined changes in preferred forms of government activity in that country in the late 1970s as waves of privatization and de-regulation altered traditional forms of governance. The foundational studies of this aspect of instrument choice, however, were largely carried out in Canada by scholars such as G. Bruce Doern at Carleton University and Michael J. Trebilcock of the University of Toronto. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Doern and his colleagues utilized and expanded upon Lowi's observation that governments make distinct choices about how much coercion to use in any specific situation to develop a spectrum of regulatory tools based on this criterion. They adapted Lowi's four-part configuration of policy choices into a continuum model of instrument choice depicting various degrees of "legitimate coercion" that could be utilized by governments, ranging from minimum government involvement in private, self-regulation to full public ownership through crown- and mixed-corporations (Doern and Wilson 1974). They linked this to such considerations as the desire of decision makers to be re-elected as well as traditions of government and concerns for efficiency and effectiveness. This work heavily influenced design thinking at the time and continues to do so up to the present.
Design 1.2: the idea of policy mixes and the first considerations of anticipatory instrument selection
Linder, S. H., and B. G. Peters. 1989. "Instruments of government: Perceptions and contexts." Journal of Public Policy 9 (1): 35-58.
Woodside, K. 1979. "Tax incentives vs. subsidies: Political considerations in governmental choice." Canadian Public Policy 5 (2): 248-56.
These discussions influenced others such as Linder and Peters (1989) who in the late 1980s and 1990s put forward a synthetic approach to instrument choice which grounded this analysis in the targeting and political risks that each choice involved, meaning that some instruments may be more feasible given the specific nature of constraints faced by policymakers at specific points in time and hence more likely to be chosen by governments. This emphasis on design analytically distinguished for the first time between the process of design ("design as a verb") and the design artefact or policy instrument ("design as a noun"), a hallmark of all subsequent design studies. This analytical separation allowed scholars to think not just about appropriate choices for specific contexts as had earlier works but also to delve more deeply into the objective characteristics and prerequisites of each tools. This more fine-grained analysis allowed the strengths and weaknesses of different tools to be more systematically compared and contrasted with each other, furthering this aspect of policy design work. This followed up on earlier work in Canada where scholars such as Woodside (1979) had developed thinking about instrument trade-offs in policymaking and helped to further the work of economists and others focused on the ex ante evaluation of tool characteristics and relationships
Design 2.0: formalizing policy design studies
Cunningham, N., and D. Sinclair. 1999. "Regulatory pluralism: Designing policy mixes for environmental protection." Law and Policy 21 (1): 49-76.
Howlett, Michael, and Raul P. Lejano. 2013. "Tales from the crypt: The rise and fall (and rebirth?) of policy design." Administration & Society 45 (3): 357-81.
The formative works of the first-generation set of tool and instrument studies helped to usher in a new era of policy design studies focussed on policy mixes or bundles of tools arranged in policy "portfolios." This study began with the consideration of the idea of multiple tools addressing policy issues over a length time rather than just the analysis of single choices made at one point in that process and was pioneered by the work of Gunningham and Sinclair in Australia in the late 1990s dealing with the environment.
Although the governance and globalization "turn" which occurred at this same time often established a priori preferences for market-based tools and an emphasis on the potential role of non-state actors in policy-making, key works such as Gunningham and Sinclair's on "Smart Regulation," continued and extended the idea that the trade-offs and complementarities that existed between different kinds of policy tools could be better analyzed in the context of thinking about how bundles of tools evolve over time rather than as stand-alone discrete choices. A renaissance of policy design studies built around these concepts occurred in the wake of failures such as the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 which had resulted in part from applying overly simple design precepts such as de-regulation during the globalization "turn." Scholars such as Howlett and Lejano (2012), for example, called for "greater conceptual clarity and the methodological sophistication needed to sift through the complexity of new policy regimes, policy mixes, alternative instruments of governance, and changing governance networks and link these to a deeper theory of design" (Howlett and Lejano 2012: 370). This movement towards the (re-)recognition of the complexity of design contexts in multiple tool situations characterizes the current, contemporary emphasis of policy design studies both internationally and in Canada.
Design 2.1: patches and packaging
Howlett, Michael, and Jeremy Rayner. 2013. "Patching vs packaging in policy formulation: Assessing policy portfolio design." Politics and Governance 1 (2): 170-82.
Howlett, Michael, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jeremy Rayner. 2014. "The elements of effective program design: A two-level analysis." Politics and Governance 2 (2): 1-12.
The renaissance of policy design studies over the past several years now sees scholars working on developing a clearer set of concepts and vocabulary suited to better understand policy formulation and inform tool selection and design, as called for by critics of earlier efforts. Canadians again figure prominently in this development. Howlett and Rayner (2013), for example, have examined the processes through which design occurs over time, in which processes of policy "layering" are common. While earlier studies tended to suggest that design could only occur in spaces where policy packages could be designed "en bloc" and "de novo," they recognized that most design circumstances involve issuing "patches" or updates to existing design constructs, much like software designers do to correct flaws in existing products to allow them to adapt to changing circumstances. Other works such as Howlett, Mukherjee and Rayner (2014) also continued to move forward the modern discourse on policy design with a more refined focus on topics such as consideration of design effectiveness in complex mixes. This work has extended discussion of the differences between design and "non-design" found in earlier works as well as considerations of who designs policy and towards what ends. These more recent forays into the discussion of policy design quality, for example, ponder the characteristics of the evaluative criteria that can be used to discern whether design is done well or poorly, and include the effort to detail several "first principles" for policy mix or "toolkit" design such as notions of "maximizing complementarity" and "goodness of fit" with existing governance arrangements (Howlett and Rayner 2013). This work constitutes a continuation of the both older tradition of instrument studies and extends this work into the leading edge of policy design studies internationally.
The future research agenda for scholars in this new design orientation includes continuing to outline principles of design quality, better understanding design spaces, their evolution, and the evaluation of new kinds of tools such as behavioural "nudges," crowd-sourcing and others. Scholars from many countries are now contributing to this approach, including many Canadians such as Adam Wellstead, Bryan Evans, Pat Dutil, Evert Lindquist, Amanda Clarke, Eric Montpetit, Daniel Beland, Jonathan Craft, Luc Bernier, Carolyn Johns, Justin Longo and Daniel Henstra, to name only a few, actively writing, researching and contributing to the generation of new knowledge on these subjects.
Michael Howlett is Burnaby Mountain Professor at Simon Fraser University and Yong Pung How Chair at the National University of Singapore.
Ishani Mukherjee is Post-Doctoral research fellow at the National University of Singapore.
