Introduction

Analysis of public policy is a daunting task. The esteemed Canadian writer Richard Simeon acknowledged this some decades ago when he rejected the emphasis on narrow analytical policy skills (Simeon, 1976), and instead called for a broad analytic approach that is ‘holistic and contextually situated’ (Skogstad and White, 2017: 666). However, over the last 40 years, policy approaches have fractured and scattered rather than become holistic and integrated, with theorists attempting to make sense of this variety by identifying strands or families of theory, or proposing models for, or thematic approaches to, theoretical synthesis (Ayres and Marsh, 2013). Some are driven into narrow areas of specialisation where they build sub-fields that, in our view, lose efficacy and relevance for complex problem-solving solving insofar as they neglect broader political and systemic contexts. However, not all policy analysis is concerned to assist with problem-solving and improved policy, as we are in this book, nor concerned with our focus on the governance of wicked problems, crisis responses and the building of more resilient, effective policy contexts.

Our book is inspired by the conviction that useful knowledge comes from building on various sources of policy analysis expertise, while also recognising the wider context of policymaking, and the value of policy theories anchored in evaluative, empirical and comparative case studies. We have also argued that policy studies should refocus on state capacity, and on the roles of politics, policy and institutions in building capacity to effect positive change. We are interested in policy change and policy improvement because of the persistence of challenging problems, like climate change, massive inequalities in health and housing, cyber security, urban congestion and the like – and the longstanding failure of states and policy processes to alleviate or resolve them. We are interested in resilience in the face of crises and in new forms of governance, often collaborative, and the reinvention of the state that is inspired by policy evaluation, learning and adaptation.

We believe, as applied theorists, that policy studies should be relevant to problem-solving. We suggest that making policy analysis relevant requires an understanding of theory and practice, but also engagement with political and institutional structures, processes and systems.

Introduction

Policy studies are in a rut. While policy problems have grown in complexity, decision makers and policy analysts have struggled to develop models and frameworks to assist both understanding and action (Kay, 2006). The need for better theories about the policy process – systemic but also empirically grounded – has been evident to many observers. Since the 1980s, the scholarly development of new approaches to policy studies has been mainly through deeper engagement with particular aspects of the policy process. For example, scholars have fruitfully explored the topics of policy design, policy implementation and how policy agendas are changed through political debate.

New theoretical approaches have proliferated, most of which were abstracted from deep empirical observation of US policy developments and institutional patterns. Cairney and Heikkila identified eight such theories, or theoretical lenses, each focusing in different ways on actors, institutions, networks, ideas or beliefs, context and events (Cairney and Heikkila, 2014). However, despite the best of intentions, it has not been possible to combine such lenses and insights to form an integrated contemporary approach to policy studies that would offer an assured basis for building knowledge (Pierre and Peters, 2000).

Despite the analytical eclecticism that therefore characterises much of policy studies, some important progress has been made. The critique (from policy studies) of ‘traditional’ policy analysis has brought a focus on the need for a more nuanced epistemology, one that acknowledges that policymaking should not be seen in purely instrumental or technocratic terms. Normative questions of value and goals of social progress have been reintroduced to scholarship as well as an acute awareness of the contested nature of policy problems themselves. Indeed, as the work by Bacchi and others reveals, what makes some set of social conditions a ‘public policy’ problem are its political features. Further still, the way a problem is represented and defined paves the way for a favoured set of policy solutions.

However, even with this relativistic streak, policy studies did not develop as a fully fledged ‘critical’ discipline, except in the sense used in discourse analysis. In the real world, policy-related debates became dichotomised. The right, for example, has been focused on the economy, the left on problems of identity politics, human rights and equity (Béland, 2017).

Introduction

The provision of policy advice has underpinned governing since earliest times, however, the practice is much changed in the contemporary era. Advice and the context in which it is delivered have broadened, with more diverse sources of advice, more diverse settings for generating it and many more complex means of influencing state action. Policy advising is an activity that supports decision-making by analysing problems and proposing solutions (Halligan, 1995), however, advice has always varied, as has the preparedness of governments to listen to it. The literature has focused recently on ‘policy advisory systems’ (PASs) both descriptively (see Seymour-Ure, 1987; Halligan, 1995; Prasser, 2006) and in terms of their dynamics (Craft and Howlett, 2013; Craft and Halligan, 2017) and subsystems (Craft and Wilder, 2017). Advice is well understood, but PASs are less so, despite having much in common with policy networks.

We have seen in previous chapters that the modern state and its operations are complex, with policy boundaries now multi-layered, and partnering within and beyond government a more common approach to problem-solving. Policy advising needs to be understood within this context. Traditional, largely internal advising is alive and well, whether as political judgement, or impartial analysis, however, new forms of advisory activity are common. There has always been a systematic approach to the generation and uptake of advice in politicoadministrative terms, but the broadening of the advisory landscape has complicated this in terms of more complex systems. However, such complexity, while challenging in traditional policy-making terms, is commonly argued to be well suited to collaborative efforts at tackling more complex problems (Scott and Baehler, 2010: 6).

There are a range of reasons for this. Firstly, wicked, or persistent, problems have long been recognised as requiring complex, deliberatively generated solutions that are appropriate in any case in an era of heightened social reflexivity. Expert knowledge alone very often does not suffice (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Secondly, liberal democratic states that have experienced neo-liberal downsizing now already augment their policy and problem-solving capacity by broadening their advisory sources. Thirdly, issues have grown more complex and their resolution has increasingly required, not only a broadened range of insight, but also the mediation of competing and contested values, beliefs and knowledge bases (Ney, 2009).

Why the state matters

There is a longstanding, varied and occasionally unruly academic literature on how, why and the extent to which the state should be central to the study of public policy. Much of policy studies accepts the idea of the state as the modern equivalent of the sovereign ruler; a set of enduring political institutions which enjoy a monopoly of formal, legal authority over an organised political community marked by clear territorial borders. In this historical analogy, public policy is the democratically endorsed roadmap or guide for the use of state power to improve, for example, social welfare. Within this taken for granted view, there are two counterpoints in public policy analysis; in broad terms, state-centred and society-centred perspectives, which disagree markedly on the extent to which the state has autonomy, is an organisation with agency, or is essentially a clearing house for outside forces from the market and civil society. The purpose of this chapter is not to reach some resolution of these two positions or stand on one side or the other in terms of their ability to deal with complexity. Instead, we argue that a reconsideration of the state in terms of policy studies for the governance era needs to reflect both perspectives and draw on the blurring of state-society boundaries as a central feature in what is ‘public’ in public policy. In a complementary argument to that presented in Bell and Hindmoor (2009), we advance a claim about the enduring power of the state in policy studies; both as a set of public institutions and organisational arrangements, and an analytical concept to describe the foundations of a polity and sources of authority in policymaking. Building on notions of a policy-making system elaborated in Chapter 2, we reconsider the position of the state in policy studies by investigating the interactions and inter-dependency between the state and society rather than in making a binary choice between state-centred and society-centred governance. We follow Sellers (2011) who argues that scholars should converge around a broadly similar line of inquiry: that society provides crucial elements of support for a state to be effective, and that a state is critical to collective action in society.

Introduction

Policy change occurs when the goals, methods or effects of a policy are modified. Policy change can occur at many levels and scales, ranging from small adjustments to existing regulations (for example, minor reductions in corporate income tax), through to introducing new social security programs or new environmental protection policies. For many leaders, managers and citizens, the arguments about policy change are the centrepiece of public policy debates. To understand the dynamics of these debates and understand how policy change occurs, we must focus on the interplay between actors, ideas, interests, institutions and political contexts. These dynamics occur under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, and operate at various levels – local, national and global.

This chapter focuses on the theories and frameworks developed by scholars for explaining how policy change actually occurs, and how proposals are modified through conflict and compromise, in the real world of public policymaking. The absence of change in the face of large challenges – such as climate change – deserves close attention and explanation, because the failure of policy systems to learn from knowledge and experience and to develop more effective policies is a major indicator of their capacity for good governance.

Policy debates and negotiations, whether in favour of policy reform or policy continuity, are always conducted within structured contexts. Firstly, policy decisions are embodied in programs and practices that, by their very nature, are institutionalised in rules that operate at several levels (see Chapter 3). Thus, explanations of policy change and stability need to take into account the rules and practices of organisations, which themselves are shaped by the interplay between complex systems – socio-economic, technological, organisational and environmental (see Chapter 2). Secondly, in democratic regimes, explanations of policy change also need to address issues of leadership in mobilising organisational and network support for various options, conservative or radical. Key policy actors – whether government leaders, public sector managers and diverse stakeholders – will typically exhibit a spectrum of views about the feasibility and desirability of modifying existing practices. Thirdly, explanations need to address the capabilities of public decision makers to select appropriate policy instruments and to undertake the ‘steering’ required to orchestrate the cross-organisational arrangements necessary to achieve agreed public purposes.

Introduction

The term ‘system’ is widely used in the policy sciences to denote a field of interest characterised by multiple, interconnected actors (for example, education system, health system, policy subsystem, and so on). In this reconsideration, we argue for the development and use of systems thinking as a way of expanding our understanding of the relationships through which policies achieve their effects. Systemsbased analysis provides an important means for bringing together policy and governance.

This type of thinking is far from mechanistic: indeed in focusing on human action in multiple contexts, it moves beyond reductionism to more nuanced notions of cause and effect (Chapman, 2004). A common response to policy failure, for example, is to tighten control, while more significant causes, such as failures of leadership, funding or communication may be neglected. While systems thinking in the policy sciences is not new (Stewart and Ayres, 2001), after a promising start, policy analysis has failed to provide a clear rationale and structure for the use of this mode of analysis, whether the purpose be prescriptive (analysis ‘for’ policy), or descriptive (analysis ‘of ‘ policy). A reconsideration is timely.

We make two general claims for the approach: firstly, systems thinking is likely to be particularly productive where policy problems defy conventional solutions and unintended consequences are rife. In these situations, systems thinking has the ability to move beyond the specifics of each problem to identify and depict underlying complexity; secondly, in the governance era, sites of policy-relevant action are more likely than in the past to lie outside the formal boundaries of government, and to require complex interactions among stakeholders. The long-running difficulty of implementation – relating policy intentions to effective action ‘on the ground’ – is exacerbated (Chapter 8). In these situations, systems thinking helps the policy analyst to find associations and linkages that might otherwise be hard to discern.

Specifically, when we apply systems thinking:

• • we think about context, the political and institutional setting of the policy in question;

• • we think about scope – what's in, what's out; who's in, who's out;

• • we think about actors (both stakeholders and organisations);

• • we think about interconnections between actors (flows of information, money and influence);

• • we think about interconnections between systems – problems observed in one system may be caused by developments in another;

Why borders matter

A recurrent theme in this volume is that the world in which public policy actors seek to move towards their preferred futures is an increasingly complex one. One dimension of this increasing complexity in policymaking is in the relationship between the territorial scale of existing political and administrative jurisdictions, such as nation states on a map, and the scale of major policy problems. From clean rivers, to population health, to migration, to crime, to macroeconomic management, to climate change, there are a series of contemporary policy challenges, which are so large in scale that they cross national borders. The problem of borders in public policy is easily stated in the abstract: these are an increasing number of important policy challenges that cannot be solved by the policy actions of states within their own borders. However, the consequences for complex problem-solving are less straightforward to identify. Hence the reconsideration of borders in this chapter and investigation of policy capacity for collective action across borders, at the international and national levels, and involving governments, private interests as well as civil society.

From the perspective of policy practice, borders may be open or closed to varying degrees to encourage or prevent flows of goods, services, capital and people. They can be reshaped as increasingly hard or soft to pursue policy objectives and goals in terms of economic growth, social development outcomes and security. From the analytic perspective, the challenge of framing transnational policymaking in those policy sectors where actors and ideas operate across, and beyond borders, to shape agendas, policy content and modes of governing, is an active and burgeoning seam of public policy scholarship (Skogstad, 2011).

Wimmer and Schiller (2002) present a wide-ranging critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences, teasing out the effects on scholarship of the assumption that a system of nation states is the natural order of the world. As with any methodology, assumptions are required about the nature of the world being studied, or in other terms, an ontology needs to be adopted about borders. The criticism that methodological nationalism acts as a brake on policy scholarship inevitably involves some claim about the changing nature of borders in the study of public policy (Stone, 2008; Callaghan, 2010).

Introduction

Public policy in a democracy is ideally about the successful pursuit of collectively agreed goals and desired outcomes. The democratic policymaking process needs to generate a reasonable level of agreement and clarity about these goals and outcomes. ‘Implementation’ consists of the organisational processes through which policy goals are pursued and realised. In practice, these goals become further refined through the managerial and negotiation processes of implementation, especially in complex programs involving many stakeholders.

The realities of policy implementation in modern governance are far from being neat and predictable. Firstly, policy needs to be understood in a holistic sense as including the program management, monitoring and evaluation processes. Policy is not just the initial ‘idea’ of what needs to be done, but includes the practices that constitute the policy delivery and consequent impacts. Secondly, the mechanisms of implementation are seldom simple, often requiring multi-organisational partnerships or contractual oversight relationships. Thirdly, the interpretive and persuasive dimensions of policy remain very active during ‘implementation’, with service-delivery staff having to deal with emerging uncertainties and managers having to make professionally informed choices during program implementation (Laws and Hajer, 2008). And fourthly, while attempting to address and manage complex or wicked issues, the underlying problems may continue to evolve, and various stakeholders might engage in disputes or reinterpretations of the required actions.

We argue that closer attention should be given to understanding and improving policy implementation, but we also need to identify and absorb the lessons already known. In seeking out these lessons, much can be harvested from studies that do not always bear the label ‘implementation’. For example, there is much value in exploring the relationships between traditional managerial ‘implementation’ literature and the large reservoirs of knowledge encompassed by governance studies and complexity studies. The former emphasise the relational networks underpinning policy design and policy management, while the latter emphasise the evolutionary and unpredictable nature of emerging issues and organisational responses. Implementation processes often encounter governance challenges that were unforeseen, arising from difficulties in the coordination of partnerships or from rapid changes in external events.

Introduction

Information (observations on and about the world) is the basic material of all public policies, and appears in many guises across a wide range of policy-related literatures. These literatures include analyses of how policies are made, as well as inquiries into the content of policy in the form of ideas and knowledge. In this chapter, we suggest that information, broadly understood, warrants a prominent place in the general analysis of public policy. It is not as if information is ignored in contemporary analysis, but rather, that its presence is taken for granted. Information needs to be problematised if the implications of the growing complexity and difficulty of ‘doing’ policy are to be understood and addressed. In this chapter, ‘reconsidering’ means using information as a lens with which to clarify both the content and conduct of policy.

Two streams of reconsideration are explored: information within public policy, and information as an object of public policy. The first stream brings together key concepts in policy analysis, and enables us to scope the importance of informational processes within policy systems. Reconsidering in the second sense enables us to identify shifts in the relationship between information and public policy as a field of action. Both perspectives help us to draw conclusions about the relationship between public policy and the state.

Information matters because governing is impossible without information on the governed. At a very basic level, states cannot survive without taxation, which requires information on citizens – who they are, where they live and what they own. Tax policies shape and refine relationships with the state based on this information. Similarly, health and pensions policies exist in and through the information that is held on citizens and the way it is deployed.

In addition, information has an intimate relationship both to governance (Peters, 2016) and to public policy. At the policy level, the neo-liberal ascendancy in Western democracies has privileged market-oriented governance in the form of national and international deregulation (and re-regulation), and a dispersal of decision-power away from the nation-state and towards corporate interests and other (more strategic) states.

Introduction

Institutions have always been fundamental to the study of public policy, as constraining, enabling and structuring settings and influences upon policy actors and outcomes. Institutions endure, whether as the formal structures of politics and policymaking, or informal influences, routines and processes. Institutions, both formal and informal, shape policy, but they are also shaped by it. They exist within political, economic and societal contexts, and are themselves subject to overt and covert power and influence that may or may not induce change. There are many varying approaches to explaining this, and to explaining the ongoing role that institutions play in politics, society and policymaking (Rhodes et al, 2008). We see institutions as critical to understanding public policy because, as policy theory and policy challenges have advanced in complexity, so too have institutions and institutional theory kept pace through constant reinvention. We reconsider institutions here from the policy perspective with an interest in the evolution of the theory, the dynamics of institutions and institutional change in the governance era, and the problem-solving, policy-shaping role of institutions in contemporary times.

Although institutions are now central to the study of public policy, the focus upon them has shifted over time. They have been, variously, central to analysis, marginalised in analysis and, more recently, rediscovered as central, but in more complex, networked circumstances. The seminal work of ‘rediscovering institutions’, or rediscovering their study as central in political analysis, in reaction to the behaviourism and rational choice approaches, was March and Olsen's (1983; 1989). Prior to that, March and Olsen saw the discipline of political science as having been led astray by pluralistic depictions of politics as entirely society dependent, neglecting, at least in the US, the role, and the changing role, of the state (Peters, 2012). New institutional analysis is focused on understanding and improving political systems, with an emphasis upon how institutions ‘fashion, enable and constrain political actors’ (March and Olsen, 2006: 4).