Understanding Public Policy 2nd edition

All going well, it will be out in November 2019. We are now at the proofing stage.

I have included below the summaries of the chapters (and each chapter should also have its own entry (or multiple entries) in the 1000 Words and 500 Words series).

 

Policy in 500 Words: the Social-Ecological Systems Framework

Think of the SES framework as the combination of:

• the IAD approach to analyzing ‘the commons’, and
• ecological sciences approaches to ‘complex social-ecological systems’

The result is a framework that resembles CPR studies in key respects. Ostrom’s 2009 article in Science provides a visual emphasis on the interactions between ‘first-level’ concepts including users, their governance system, resource system (such as a protected park) and resource units (such as its trees):

It also raises similar questions, such as ‘When will the users of a resource invest time and energy to avert “a tragedy of the commons”’?

It answers them with reference to ‘second level’ concepts describing factors that encourage users to (a) value long term sustainability and (b) self-organize to secure this outcome. This table summarizes many of them:

Note that Ostrom describes their effect as indicative because, ‘As in most complex systems, the variables interact in a nonlinear fashion …Simple blueprint policies do not work’.

As a result, we have a super-complicated framework to help us understand an even more super-complicated world. For some, the SES framework serves to ‘diagnose’ the sustainability of social-ecological systems and explore the prospect of more effective self-organisation to manage resources. However, as with the IAD, effective use of the framework itself requires a fair amount of immersion in the language of analysis.

See also:

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD) and Governing the Commons

Policy in 500 Words: Ecology of Games

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: it’s time for some game theory

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Rational Choice and the IAD (the older post for the 1^st edition)

Policy Concepts in 100 Words: Multi-centric Policymaking

How to Navigate Complex Policy Designs

How can governments better collaborate to address complex problems?

 

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD) and Governing the Commons

The IAD provides a language, and way of thinking, about the ways in which different institutions foster collective action. The language is so complicated that I have cheated by summarising key terms in this box (and describing polycentric governance in a different post) to stay within the 1000 words limit:

Governing the Commons

For me, the best way to understand the IAD is through the lens of Governing the Commons (and the research agenda it inspired), which explains how to rethink ‘tragedies of the commons’ and encourage better management of common pool resources (CPRs).

Ostrom rejects the uncritical use of rational choice games to conclude – too quickly – that disastrous collective action problems are inevitable unless we ‘privatize’ commons or secure major government intervention (which is tricky anyway when global problems require international cooperation). The tragedy of the commons presents a too-bleak view of humanity, in which it would be surprising to find cooperation even when the fate of the world is in human hands.

Alternatively, what if there is evidence that people often work collectively and effectively without major coercion? People are social beings who share information, build trust by becoming known as reliable and predictable, and come together to produce, monitor and enforce rules for the group’s benefit. They produce agreements with each other that could be enforced if necessary.

The IAD helps us analyse these cooperative arrangements. Ostrom describes 8 ‘design principles’ of enduring and effective CPR management shared by many real world examples:

1. CPRs have clear boundaries. Users know what they are managing, and can identify legitimate users.
2. The rules suit local conditions. Users know what they (a) are expected to contribute to management and (b) receive from CPRs.
3. The actors affected by the rules help shape them (at low cost).
4. CPR monitors are users or accountable to users. They monitor (a) the conduct of users and (b) the state of the CPR. The costs of mutual monitoring are low, and their consequences felt quickly.
5. The penalties for rule-breaking are low if the choice is a one-off and understandable under the circumstances (to avoid alienating the user). The penalties are high if the choice is part of a pattern which makes other users feel like ‘suckers’, or if rule-breaking would be catastrophic.
6. Conflict resolution is frequent, rapid and low cost.
7. Users have the right to self-organise without too much outside interference.
8. Many projects are connected geographically and at different scales – local, regional, national – in ways that do not undermine individual projects.

These design principles help explain why some communities manage CPRs successfully. They allow users to share the same commitment and expect the long-term benefits to be worthwhile.

However, Ostrom stressed that there is no blueprint – no hard and fast rules – to CPR management. There are three particular complications:

1. Trust

Good management requires high trust to encourage norms of reciprocity. Trust is crucial to minimizing the costs of compliance monitoring and enforcement. Trust may develop when participants communicate regularly, share an understanding of their common interests, reciprocate each other’s cooperation, and have proven reliable in the past.

Design principles are important to developing trust and solidarity, but so are ‘evolutionary’ changes to behaviour. Actors have often learned about rule efficacy – to encourage cooperation and punish opportunism – through trial-and-error over a long period, beginning with simple, low-cost operational rules producing quick wins.

2. Rules, rules on rules, more rules, then even more rules

Institutions contain a large, complicated set of rules that serve many different purposes, and need to be understood and analysed in different ways.

Different purposes include:

• how many actors are part of an action situation, and the role they play
• what they must/ must not do
• who is eligible to participate
• who can move from one role to another
• who controls membership, and how
• how many participants are involved in a choice
• what will happen if there is no agreement
• how to manage and communicate information
• the rewards or sanctions
• the range of acceptable actions or outcomes from action.

 

We also need to analyse the relative costs and simplicity of different rules, and the rules about the other rules, including

• ‘operational’ rules on day-to-day issues (such as specific payoffs/ sanctions for behaviour)
• ‘collective choice’ rules about how to make those rules
• ‘constitutional’ rules on who can decide those rules and who can monitor and enforce, and
• ‘metaconstitutional’ analysis of how to design these constitutions with reference to the wider political and social context.

 

3. The world is too complex to break down into simple pieces

By now, you may be thinking that the IAD – and analysis of resource management – is complicated. This is true, partly because each case study – of the physical conditions and social practices regarding resource management – is different in some way. We can use the IAD to compare experiences, but accept that a profoundly successful scheme in one context may fail miserably in another.

Simplicity versus complexity: the world is complex, but should our analysis follow suit?

Indeed, this is why we need to think about rational choice games and the IAD simultaneously, to understand the analytical trade-offs.

Game theory laboratory experiments – built on simple rules and relatively small numbers of parameters – produce parsimonious analysis and results that we can understand relatively easily.

We may reject simple games as unrealistic, but what if we take this criticism to its extreme?

IAD in-depth field studies embrace complexity to try to understand the key dimensions of each study’s context. When we put them all together, there are too many concepts, variables, global applications, and variations-by-context, to contain in a simple theory.

The IAD addresses this trade off by offering a language to help organize research, encouraging people to learn it then use it to apply many different theories to explain different parts of the whole picture.

In other words, it is OK to reject simple models as unrealistic, but to embrace real-world complexity may require a rather complicated language.

See also:

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: it’s time for some game theory

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Rational Choice and the IAD (the older post for the 1^st edition)

Policy Concepts in 100 Words: Multi-centric Policymaking

Policy in 500 Words: the Social-Ecological Systems Framework

Policy in 500 Words: Ecology of Games

How to Navigate Complex Policy Designs

How can governments better collaborate to address complex problems?

 

 

Evidence-based policymaking and the ‘new policy sciences’

[I wasn’t happy with the first version, so this is version 2, to be enjoyed with the ppt & MP3 ]

In the ‘new policy sciences’, Chris Weible and I advocate:

• a return to Lasswell’s vision of combining policy analysis (to recommend policy change) and policy theory (to explain policy change), but
• focusing on a far larger collection of actors (beyond a small group at the centre),
• recognising new developments in studies of the psychology of policymaker choice, and
• building into policy analysis the recognition that any policy solution is introduced in a complex policymaking environment over which no-one has control.

However, there is a lot of policy theory out there, and we can’t put policy theory together like Lego to produce consistent insights to inform policy analysis.

Rather, each concept in my image of the policy process represents its own literature: see these short explainers on the psychology of policymaking, actors spread across multi-level governance, institutions, networks, ideas, and socioeconomic factors/ events.

What the explainers don’t really project is the sense of debate within the literature about how best to conceptualise each concept. You can pick up their meaning in a few minutes but would need a few years to appreciate the detail and often-fundamental debate.

Ideally, we would put all of the concepts together to help explain policymaker choice within a complex policymaking environment (how else could I put up the image and present is as one source of accumulated wisdom from policy studies?). Peter John describes such accounts as ‘synthetic’. I have also co-authored work with Tanya Heikkila – in 2014 and 2017 to compare the different ways in which ‘synthetic’ theories conceptualise the policy process.

However, note the difficulty of putting together a large collection of separate and diverse literatures into one simple model (e.g. while doing a PhD).

On that basis, I’d encourage you to think of these attempts to synthesise as stories. I tell these stories a lot, but someone else could describe theory very differently (perhaps by relying on fewer male authors or US-derived theories in which there is a very specific reference points and positivism is represented well).

The example of EBPM

I have given a series of talks to explain why we should think of ‘evidence-based policymaking’ as a myth or political slogan, not an ideal scenario or something to expect from policymaking in the real world. They usually involve encouraging framing and storytelling rather than expecting evidence to speak for itself, and rejecting the value of simple models like the policy cycle. I then put up an image of my own and encourage people to think about the implications of each concept:

I describe the advice as simple-sounding and feasible at first glance, but actually a series of Herculean* tasks:

• There are many policymakers and influencers spread across government, so find out where the action is, or the key venues in which people are making authoritative decisions.
• Each venue has its own ‘institutions’ – the formal and written, or informal and unwritten rules of policymaking – so learn the rules of each venue in which you engage.
• Each venue is guided by a fundamental set of ideas – as paradigms, core beliefs, monopolies of understanding – so learn that language.
• Each venue has its own networks – the relationships between policy makers and influencers – so build trust and form alliances within networks.
• Policymaking attention is often driven by changes in socioeconomic factors, or routine/ non-routine events, so be prepared to exploit the ‘windows of opportunity’ to present your solution during heightened attention to a policy problem.

Further, policy theories/ studies help us understand the context in which people make such choices. For example, consider the story that Kathryn Oliver and I tell about the role of evidence in policymaking environments:

If there are so many potential authoritative venues, devote considerable energy to finding where the ‘action’ is (and someone specific to talk to). Even if you find the right venue, you will not know the unwritten rules unless you study them intensely. Some networks are close-knit and difficult to access because bureaucracies have operating procedures that favour some sources of evidence. Research advocates can be privileged insiders in some venues and excluded completely in others. If your evidence challenges an existing paradigm, you need a persuasion strategy good enough to prompt a shift of attention to a policy problem and a willingness to understand that problem in a new way. You can try to find the right time to use evidence to exploit a crisis leading to major policy change, but the opportunities are few and chances of success low.  In that context, policy studies recommend investing your time over the long term – to build up alliances, trust in the messenger, knowledge of the system, and to seek ‘windows of opportunity’ for policy change – but offer no assurances that any of this investment will ever pay off

As described, this focus on the new policy sciences and synthesising insights helps explain why ‘the politics of evidence-based policymaking’ is equally important to civil servants (my occasional audience) as researchers (my usual audience).

To engage in skilled policy analysis, and give good advice, is to recognise the ways in which policymakers combine cognition/emotion to engage with evidence, and must navigate a complex policymaking environment when designing or selecting technically and politically feasible solutions. To give good advice is to recognise what you want policymakers to do, but also that they are not in control of the consequences.

From one story to many?

However, I tell these stories without my audience having the time to look further into each theory and its individual insights. If they do have a little more time, I go into the possible contribution of individual insights to debate.

For example, they adapt insights from psychology in different ways …

• PET shows the overall effect of policymaker psychology on policy change: they combine cognition and emotion to pay disproportionate attention to a small number of issues (contributing to major change) and ignore the rest (contributing to ‘hyperincremental’ change).
• The IAD focuses partly on the rules and practices that actors develop to build up trust in each other.
• The ACF describes actors going into politics to turn their beliefs into policy, forming coalitions with people who share their beliefs, then often romanticising their own cause and demonising their opponents.
• The NPF describes the relative impact of stories on audiences who use cognitive shortcuts to (for example) identify with a hero and draw a simple moral.
• SCPD describes policymakers drawing on gut feeling to identify good and bad target populations.
• Policy learning involves using cognition and emotion to acquire new knowledge and skills.

… even though the pace of change in psychological research often seems faster than the ways in which policy studies can incorporate new and reliable insights.

They also present different conceptions of the policymaking environment in which actors make choices. See this post for more on this discussion in relation to EBPM.

My not-brilliant conclusion is that:

1. Policy theory/ policy studies has a lot to offer other disciplines and professions, particularly in field like EBPM in which we need to account for politics and, more importantly, policymaking systems, but
2. Beware any policy theory story that presents the source literature as coherent and consistent.
3. Rather, any story of the field involves a series of choices about what counts as a good theory and good insight.
4. In other words, the exhortation to think more about what counts as ‘good evidence’ applies just as much to political science as any other.

Postscript: well, that is the last of the posts for my ANZOG talks. If I’ve done this properly, there should now be a loop of talks. It should be possible to go back to the first one and see it as a sequel to this one!

Or, for more on theory-informed policy analysis – in other words, where the ‘new policy sciences’ article is taking us – here is how I describe it to students doing a policy analysis paper (often for the first time).

Or, have a look at the earlier discussion of images of the policy process. You may have noticed that there is a different image in this post (knocked up in my shed at the weekend). It’s because I am experimenting with shapes. Does the image with circles look more relaxing? Does the hexagonal structure look complicated even though it is designed to simplify? Does it matter? I think so. People engage emotionally with images. They share them. They remember them. So, I need an image more memorable than the policy cycle.

Paul Cairney Brisbane EBPM New Policy Sciences 25.10.18

*I welcome suggestions on another word to describe almost-impossibly-hard

Evidence-based policymaking and the ‘new policy sciences’

I have given a series of talks to explain why we should think of ‘evidence-based policymaking’ as a myth or political slogan, not an ideal scenario or something to expect from policymaking in the real world. They usually involve encouraging framing and storytelling rather than expecting evidence to speak for itself, and rejecting the value of simple models like the policy cycle. I then put up an image of my own and encourage people to think about the implications of each concept:

I describe the advice as simple-sounding and feasible at first glance, but actually a series of Herculean* tasks:

• There are many policymakers and influencers spread across government, so find out where the action is, or the key venues in which people are making authoritative decisions.
• Each venue has its own ‘institutions’ – the formal and written, or informal and unwritten rules of policymaking – so learn the rules of each venue in which you engage.
• Each venue is guided by a fundamental set of ideas – as paradigms, core beliefs, monopolies of understanding – so learn that language.
• Each venue has its own networks – the relationships between policy makers and influencers – so build trust and form alliances within networks.
• Policymaking attention is often driven by changes in socioeconomic factors, or routine/ non-routine events, so be prepared to exploit the ‘windows of opportunity’ to present your solution during heightened attention to a policy problem.

In most cases, we don’t have time to discuss a more fundamental issue (at least for researchers using policy theory and political science concepts):

From where did these concepts come, and how well do we know them?

To cut a long story short, each concept represents its own literature: see these short explainers on the psychology of policymaking, actors spread across multi-level governance, institutions, networks, ideas, and socioeconomic factors/ events. What the explainers don’t really project is the sense of debate within the literature about how best to conceptualise each concept. You can pick up their meaning in a few minutes but would need a few years to appreciate the detail and often-fundamental debate.

Ideally, we would put all of the concepts together to help explain policymaker choice within a complex policymaking environment (how else could I put up the image and present is as one source of accumulated wisdom from policy studies?). Peter John describes such accounts as ‘synthetic’. I have also co-authored work with Tanya Heikkila – in 2014 and 2017 to compare the different ways in which ‘synthetic’ theories conceptualise the policy process. However, note the difficulty of putting together a large collection of separate and diverse literatures into one simple model (e.g. while doing a PhD).

The new policy sciences

More recently, in the ‘new policy sciences’, Chris Weible and I present a more provocative story of these efforts, in which we advocate:

• a return to Lasswell’s vision of combining policy analysis (to recommend policy change) and policy theory (to explain policy change), but
• focusing on a far larger collection of actors (beyond a small group at the centre),
• recognising new developments in studies of the psychology of policymaker choice, and
• building into policy analysis the recognition that any policy solution is introduced in a complex policymaking environment over which no-one has control.

This focus on psychology is not new …

• PET shows the overall effect of policymaker psychology on policy change: they combine cognition and emotion to pay disproportionate attention to a small number of issues (contributing to major change) and ignore the rest (contributing to ‘hyperincremental’ change).
• The IAD focuses partly on the rules and practices that actors develop to build up trust in each other.
• The ACF describes actors going into politics to turn their beliefs into policy, forming coalitions with people who share their beliefs, then often romanticising their own cause and demonising their opponents.
• The NPF describes the relative impact of stories on audiences who use cognitive shortcuts to (for example) identify with a hero and draw a simple moral.
• SCPD describes policymakers drawing on gut feeling to identify good and bad target populations.
• Policy learning involves using cognition and emotion to acquire new knowledge and skills.

… but the pace of change in psychological research often seems faster than the ways in which policy studies can incorporate new and reliable insights.

Perhaps more importantly, policy studies help us understand the context in which people make such choices. For example, consider the story that Kathryn Oliver and I tell about the role of evidence in policymaking environments:

If there are so many potential authoritative venues, devote considerable energy to finding where the ‘action’ is (and someone specific to talk to). Even if you find the right venue, you will not know the unwritten rules unless you study them intensely. Some networks are close-knit and difficult to access because bureaucracies have operating procedures that favour some sources of evidence. Research advocates can be privileged insiders in some venues and excluded completely in others. If your evidence challenges an existing paradigm, you need a persuasion strategy good enough to prompt a shift of attention to a policy problem and a willingness to understand that problem in a new way. You can try to find the right time to use evidence to exploit a crisis leading to major policy change, but the opportunities are few and chances of success low.  In that context, policy studies recommend investing your time over the long term – to build up alliances, trust in the messenger, knowledge of the system, and to seek ‘windows of opportunity’ for policy change – but offer no assurances that any of this investment will ever pay off

Then, have a look at this discussion of ‘synthetic’ policy theories, designed to prompt people to consider how far they would go to get their evidence into policy.

Theory-driven policy analysis

As described, this focus on the new policy sciences helps explain why ‘the politics of evidence-based policymaking’ is equally important to civil servants (my occasional audience) as researchers (my usual audience).

To engage in skilled policy analysis, and give good advice, is to recognise the ways in which policymakers combine cognition/emotion to engage with evidence, and must navigate a complex policymaking environment when designing or selecting technically and politically feasible solutions. To give good advice is to recognise what you want policymakers to do, but also that they are not in control of the consequences.

Epilogue

Well, that is the last of the posts for my ANZOG talks. If I’ve done this properly, there should now be a loop of talks. It should be possible to go back to the first one in Auckland and see it as a sequel to this one in Brisbane!

Or, for more on theory-informed policy analysis – in other words, where the ‘new policy sciences’ article is taking us – here is how I describe it to students doing a policy analysis paper (often for the first time).

Or, have a look at the earlier discussion of images of the policy process. You may have noticed that there is a different image in this post (knocked up in my shed at the weekend). It’s because I am experimenting with shapes. Does the image with circles look more relaxing? Does the hexagonal structure look complicated even though it is designed to simplify? Does it matter? I think so. People engage emotionally with images. They share them. They remember them. So, I need an image more memorable than the policy cycle.

 

Paul Cairney Brisbane EBPM New Policy Sciences 25.10.18

 

 

*I welcome suggestions on another word to describe almost-impossibly-hard