Layering appears to be a crucial characteristic of disabled policy. Disabled policy functions within three models of policy-making, that are diverse by its problem understandings (what disability is and who is a person with disability, how is that person approached, and what’s general policy orientation), by its goals (definitions of purposes of state interventions), and by implementation (what adjectival policies are dominant, and what instruments are crucial). Oldest model of disability policy-making is ‘medical model’. It gets new layers of goals, understandings and instruments by ‘social model’ of disability policy, and then throughout ‘human rights model’. Symptomatic is the fact that newer aspects of policy-making do not completely dismantle older features, but change them a bit and mostly coexist with them. So disability policy changes form “pure” social policy to complex cluster policy, with strong emphasis on identity policy.
Is this structure of disabled policy the result of low barriers to authoritative policy change and high barriers to internal policy conversion (Hacker, 2004: 248)? This question will be researched on the case study of Croatian disabled policy. Research approach will be inspired by historical institutionalism, and policy change in this sector will be traced from Croatian independence in 1990 till today. Research will try to identify potential drivers of policy change of Croatian disabled policy: political regime transformation and democratic consolidation; international actors’ influence and policy transfers; civil society transformation and NGO activity; institutional redesign and creation of new ministry; etc. The aim is to enlighten and reconstruct specific process that ends-up with policy layers, to help in revealing necessary aspects of theoretical concept of policy layering.
