From Design to Implementation: a Typology of Enforcement Configurations Across Policy Stages

Many policies that establish obligations are expected to structure behaviour but often fail in practice. One of the key elements is enforcement, which is frequently treated as a single dimension and analysed separately at the stages of policy design and implementation. This article develops a theoretical typology of enforcement configurations by analytically disentangling enforcement embedded in design and enforcement realised through implementation, and by distinguishing between strong and weak enforcement along both dimensions. Cross-tabulating these dimensions yields four enforcement configurations that integrate social and legal forms of enforcement and clarify how enforcement logics may align or misalign across policy stages. This typology allows for comparative research on enforcement across and within policies, and policy stages.