On Policy Design and Layering

Abstract

The process of policy layering - in which new goals and means are added to, or layered on, existing ones – has attracted recent scholarly attention as part of the broader project of cataloguing the many different policy dynamics beyond the stability-change dualism. Despite its popularity as a term and its intuitive appeal, layering has yet to be fully distinguished analytically from other well-known concepts such as ‘muddling through’ or the change processes of ‘conversion’ and ‘drift’. This panel invites papers which provide theoretically-informed empirical case studies of policy change and design processes in the service of the refinement of the concept of policy layering, both its distinctive characteristics as a process and its consequences for policy-makers’ strategies. For example, does layering inevitably introduce greater complexity rendering policy problems ever more wicked, or is layering a contribution to policy resilience in the face of the unknown unknowns of policy making? Also welcome in this panel are papers that explore the requirement of retrospective coherence in policy layering: how do policy-makers make logical sense of a policy path in which there are significant tensions between the layers?

Title	Details
Policy Layering in Agricultural policy: A Comparative Study of Biofuels Policy Processes in the US and EU	View Paper Details
Layering of Disabled Policy: Case of Croatia	View Paper Details
Layering or Erosion? The Unsettled Trajectory of Italian Pensions	View Paper Details