Linkages Across Policy Stages? Understanding the Policy Process through the IAD and Adjacent Action Situations

The policy stages framework remains the most typical schema used by authors of introductory textbooks and also the most questioned in the public policy field. Much of the critiques center around its linear understanding of the policy process and its disregard to the diversity of actors and institutions that affect outcomes. The framework was not conceived as a grid to dissect the policy process into parts for analysis; however, that became the most popular interpretation and, despite the criticisms, the one that has been shaping much of the public policy scholarship for the last decades. A number of existing policy frameworks pay attention to the policy process as a whole; however, that is done at the expense of disregarding the particular structure of situations that shapes it. In this paper we aim to start filling that gap by building on the essentials of the policy stages framework and combining it with the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and its notion of adjacent actions situations. In a nutshell, we conceive the different functions/stages of the policy process as connected action situations that are participated by different and overlapping actor groups, shaped by the same or different rules, and affected by outcomes through physical constraints and information flows. To illustrate the utility of our approach we analyze four cases that explore examples of forest policy in India, water policy in Spain, marine policy in Canada, and shale gas extraction policy in the US. The case studies show the value of the approach by shedding light on how institutions and other types of cross-situation linkages shape policy outcomes.