Addressing Policy Instruments Over Time: Trajectories, Mechanisms and Feedbacks?

Abstract

Policy Design undertakes to understand whether and in what way effective policies can be formulated and implemented.The contemporary study of policy design recognises that public policies are generally the product of the deliberate and concerted efforts of multiple levels of government and other important policy actors to address policy goals by using policy instruments. The content of these instruments embodies the purpose-driven mission of the public sector to articulate policy goals and objectives, and connects these goals with the means that are anticipated to achieve them. Who designs public policies, how they do so, whether and how they use existing knowledge, and why they make the design decisions they do are fundamental questions to be asked not only to explain policy design but also to prescribe ways for better design. In this panel, we assume a diachronic perspective in studying policy design, by focusing on how three elements can model and drive it: trajectories, mechanisms, and feedbacks. The focus on trajectories emphasises that policy design develops over time according to different sequences that can more or less structure path dependence and different level of decisional inheritance. The focus on mechanisms is based on the assumption that the process through which policy design produces its effects can be analysed in terms of chains of mechanisms that must be activated by design actions to reach their purposes. Finally, the focus on feedbacks is essential to understand the effects of previous design processes and reached outputs and outcomes on the following redesign activities.

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