The Black Box of Policy Implementation – Policy Design and the Challenges of Actors, Sequencing and Power Shifts

The goal of most policy makers shall be to create and implement successful policies that not only achieve the glory of re-election and community acceptance, but also simply work. To achieve the latter, policy design is presented as an idea for holistic policy making, where the design of policies is tested against the principles of consistence, coherence and congruence (Howlett and Rayner 2013). But what if these principles are well matched, but the respective actors involve/addressed act not accordingly to the plans? This problem is somewhat common in large infrastructure projects that involve a greater number of citizens and private actors, like the (re-)building of living quarters within cities to match modern ideas of transportation. After the policy leaves the stages of definition, agenda setting and formulation, it enters uncertain territories, like a Black Box, where political actors have to deal with consumers learning wrong or even harmful behaviour (in regards to the intended policy) and the power shifting towards private actors due to the nature of dealing with facts, rather than theories. Building on recent attempts to combine policy design and policy implementation (Tosun and Treib 2018) this research intends to tackle the challenges that appear after the ‘final’ political decision and before the policy can be called implemented. Its goal is to describe how these power shifts toward private actors happen and why consumers start to act not as planned. Also, it delivers a concept based on policy design to get through this phase without falling into chaos while implementing this kind of policies. The findings of this paper are based on interviews with key actors involved in creating several infrastructure projects like the one mentioned above, where the implementation process is dragged out, sometimes spanning to over a decade. References Howlett, Michael; Rayner, Jeremy (2013): Patching vs Packaging in Policy Formulation: Assessing Policy Portfolio Design. In Politics and Governance 1 (2), pp. 170–182. DOI: 10.17645/pag.v1i2.95. Tosun, Jale; Treib, Oliver (2018): Linking Policy Design and Implementation Styles. In Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee (Eds.): Routledge Handbook of Policy Design. New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.: Routledge, pp. 316–330.