Design and Non-Design in Policy-Making: When and How Policy Design Matters

Public policies are the result of efforts made by governments to alter aspects of their own or social behaviour in order to carry out some end or purpose and are comprised of complex arrangements of policy goals and policy means. In this view policy design involves the effort to more or less systematically develop efficient and effective policies through the application of knowledge about policy means gained from experience, and reason, to the development and adoption of courses of action that are likely to succeed in attaining their desired goals or aims within specific policy contexts. Re-focusing on the issue of policy design is a promising way to better understanding the processes through which policies are formulated and implemented and see how their content is continuously chosen and developed. From this point of view the “new” policy design wave in public policy is a fruitful way through which different theoretical and empirical streams in political science can join together on a specific strategic research theme related to the nature of policy advice and decision-making dynamics both in theory and practice. In fact to understand how policy design matters in policy-making means to read from a multi-theoretical perspective on the different stages of the policy-making trying to understand how institutional arrangements, governance modes, institutional behaviors institutionalized patterns of actors’ relations, conflicting policy ideas interact each other in designing the content of agendas, political decisions, implementation strategies. Seen from this point of view, to call for a renewed focus on policy design means to call for a convergence of those streams of research, both in political science and in public policy, which study how political and policy decisions are made and implemented, that is, in other words, how the policy design space is delimited and fulfilled.