Making and Implementing Public Policy

Key Concepts and Issues

Catherine Bochel, Hugh Bochel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350313422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This brand new text examines power and inequalities and how these are central to our understanding of how policies are made and implemented. It introduces the concepts and theoretical approaches that underpin the study of the policy process, reflects upon key developments and applies these the practice of policy formulation and implementation.

1

Public Policy and Policy Analysis

This chapter discusses the meanings and scope of public policy and the ways in which the term is used in this book. It considers the development of interest in policy analysis and the uses to which it can be put. The chapter outlines the importance of power and the ways in which it can be exercised. It then considers different approaches to analysing the policy process, including those that consider ‘stages’ and those grounded in more dynamic perspectives.

The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of important themes and developments under governments since 1979, including the ongoing influence of neo-liberal thinking, changes such as the introduction of the devolved legislatures, and the referendum decision in 2016 to leave the EU, with significant implications for the policy process across all tiers of government.

The study of the making and implementation of public policy is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing upon subjects such as politics, sociology, economics and history, and indeed many others. It is also dynamic and constantly changing, both with respect to the world that we seek to understand, and the concepts, models and methods that we have available to assist us.

While the subject matter covered by this book is wide-ranging, including both theoretical perspectives on and real-world examples of public policy, at its heart might be said to lie a consideration of the exercise of power, and, in particular, who has it (and who does not) and how it is used and applied in the public policy arena. Public policy making is obviously, at least to some extent, about responding to problems. But, equally obviously, public policy responds to problems in many ways, with different aims and different outcomes. The book therefore examines the processes by which public policies are formulated, implemented and evaluated. This includes outlining and applying models of agenda setting and decision making, the variety of actors in the policy process, including politicians, bureaucrats and managers, and considering the operation of different levels of government, including supra-national, central and local government, the tools that they use, and how policies are evaluated and those assessments fed back into policy making. The focus is not simply on who makes decisions, but on a broader concern with the entire policy process. In addition, the book seeks to go slightly beyond the common focus of much of the literature, the ‘how’ element of Lasswell’s (1936/1858) ‘who gets what, when, how’, to argue that the ‘how’ significantly influences the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’, and to explore this in the context of public policy in the United Kingdom in particular, while recognising that both ideas and policies are subject to international, and indeed global, influence.

The book is designed to present a broad approach to the topic, drawing on a wide range of concepts and models that can help us to contextualise, understand, explain and evaluate developments from a perspective that encourages us to consider how power is exercised in contemporary society, and by whom. It also highlights the fundamental point that there are important inter-relationships between many of the ideas and structures discussed in the separate chapters, so that, for example, many of the ideas outlined in the later chapters may be better understood by utilising those from the earlier chapters. The book is also intended to support the analysis of case study material, with the reader applying particular ideas as appropriate to develop their own understanding and interpretation of particular issues. The remainder of this chapter therefore outlines some key debates about the nature of public policy and the study of the topic, as well as developments under governments since 1979, while the subsequent chapters consider concepts, ideas, models and structures in greater depth.

Why look at public policy?

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the role of the state was relatively limited, focused largely on diplomacy and warfare, and the raising of finances with which to pay for them, through borrowing and taxation. However, over time, governments began to be increasingly involved in setting frameworks for developments in the economy, transport and urban planning, and, particularly from the mid-twentieth century, in the direct provision of services, such as education, health care and pensions. Indeed, the post-war period saw a broad acceptance of a greater role for the state in responding to a range of ‘problems’, although from the 1980s state involvement has been ‘rolled back’, at least to some extent and in some areas. The effects of public policies continually surround us, not just in terms of services provided by the public sector, but also in setting the framework for and regulating private activities, such as private health care and education, as well as planning, transport and much economic activity, including employment laws and banking, for example. However, in many respects the world appears more complex and uncertain than it once did. Challenges such as global warming, migration, ageing populations and terrorism create problems to which we often expect governments to respond, at a time when the abilities of governments to do so perhaps appear more limited than they once did. Understanding the scope and options for public policy is therefore significant on an individual, state and global basis. However, in order to achieve that, it is helpful to consider in rather more depth what constitutes ‘public policy’.

What is policy and what makes it public?

There is no clear consensus on what constitutes ‘policy’. It has been described as ‘whatever governments choose to do or not to do’, and as ‘a course of action or inaction rather than specific decisions’ (Dye, 1984, p. 1). Birkland (2011) defines a policy ‘as a statement by government – at whatever level – of what it intends to do about a public problem’ (p. 9), although he recognises that it may also be what a government chooses not to do, while Anderson (1997) suggests that conceptualising policy through an emphasis on actions, rather than intentions, is useful, and that such an approach helps to differentiate between decisions, following which there may be no action, and policy. This suggests that a deliberate decision to do something, or indeed not to do something, is policy, reflecting the arguments of those writers who argue that ideas such as ‘non-decisions’ or the ‘mobilisation of bias’ need to be taken more into account (as discussed further in Chapter 3). Others, such as Easton (1953 and 1965) and Jenkins (1978, p. 15), suggest that while policy may sometimes involve one decision, more often ‘it involves a course of action or a web of decisions’ (see also Hill, 2009, pp. 15–16), and that this encourages us to understand policy making as a dynamic process, and to recognise a government’s capacity to act, and the limitations on it, such as resource constraints or the opposition of particular interests.

In terms of what makes something ‘public’, most commentators emphasise that it involves some sort of specific social issue or problem, rather than a problem facing an individual or even individuals, although clearly something that is experienced by many individuals may become a public problem, and that it involves a response by a public agency. Public policies therefore refer to actions or inactions of public actors, although in many instances other actors are likely to be involved in influencing decision making or implementing policies, a situation that has arguably grown as many governments have sought to shift what had been governmental functions to other bodies. However, contemporary writers generally continue to take a position broadly in line with that of Howlett et al. (2009) that ‘[g]overnments enjoy a special role in public policy making due to their unique ability to make authoritative decisions on behalf of citizens … Hence, when we talk about public policies we are always talking about initiatives sanctioned by governments’ (p. 5). Knoepfel et al. (2011) identify eight constituent elements of a public policy that help highlight these factors, seeing it as characterised by:

1.a solution to a public problem – a policy aims to resolve a social problem that is politically acknowledged as public;

2.the existence of target groups that should be able to resolve the problem by changing their behaviour;

3.intentional coherence, with decisions and actions connected in the attempt to resolve the problem;

4.the existence of several decisions and activities, rather than a single or specific decision;

5.an intervention programme, so that the decisions and actions are to some extent concrete and specific;

6.a key role for public actors – in order to be considered as public policy;

7.the existence of formalised measures and a concrete implementation phase, so that this view is normally different from those that see non-decisions as constituting a policy;

8.decisions and activities that impose constraints or incentives.

Governments may decide to introduce policies for a variety of reasons. Peters (2015), for example, suggests that market failure and social failure are important reasons for the public sector intervening in the economy and society, while recognising that different ideological perspectives will give different positions on such issues. There can be a number of types of market failure, such as: public goods that cannot be priced and marketed, for example clean air or national defence, where provision by governments and payment through taxation are likely to be appropriate; a lack of information, especially for buyers, so that markets do not work effectively; monopoly or near monopoly situations, as with many public utilities, where there may be a preference for a regulated market; externalities can also be a problem, with Peters using the example of pollution, where the social costs, such as health problems and lower property values, are not reflected in the price of goods that cause pollution; and, perhaps more ideologically controversial, economic inequality arising from the workings of the market, where high levels of inequality may be seen by some as unacceptable, although others may disagree and even argue that they provide incentives to work and invest. Failures in society, such as crime, poverty and family breakdown, are often highly politicised, and tend to be seen by those on the left as significantly influenced by the poor functioning of markets and a failure of governments to intervene appropriately, while those on the right are more likely to identify the problem as failures of individuals and families, and indeed what they may see as excessive and inappropriate intervention by governments. Similarly, those on the left tend to be much more willing to identify reasons for action, while those on the right tend to argue that the state should intervene only in exceptional circumstances.

Policy making is likely to involve conflict, although it may not necessarily do so, with decisions being made from a number of alternative options, and this involves the exercise of power, which will reflect the power relationships within society. Importantly for this book, and the consideration of inequalities in terms of power and policy outcomes, considerable areas of government activity from the mid-twentieth century have been around social policies, and in that regard it has been argued, for example, that ‘[s]ocial policy uses political power to supersede, supplement or modify operations of the economic system in order to achieve results which the economic system could not achieve on its own’ (Marshall, 1975, p. 15). This quotation highlights that for much of the period from 1945 it was seen by many as appropriate to use political power to intervene in the workings of the market, and to a greater or lesser extent to seek to redistribute wealth (and opportunities) from richer to poorer members of society. However, as discussed elsewhere in this book, such approaches have become much less widely used since the 1980s, although more recently increasing attention has also been paid to the actual or potential distributional outcomes of a wide range of policies, including in relation to transport, the economy, and income and wealth.

Peters (2015) identifies a number of characteristics that can be considered in relation to policy problems, including: the extent to which they fall within or across boundaries (such as functional, geographical and sector); the extent to which they require the creation of public goods, or a balance of public and private goods; scale, with large-scale problems, for example, potentially making coherent decisions difficult; solubility, the extent to which a problem can be ameliorated, or even solved; complexity, in both technical and political senses; certainty and risk, with some problems being fairly predictable, while many have considerable uncertainty, and assessment of the level of risk from particular actions or inactions; difficult (or ‘tragic’ (Brown, 2007)) choices, where whatever is done in a given situation will be from at least one perspective seen as acting wrongly; and the extent to which problems can be addressed with money, or require other types of response (Peters, 2015).

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the idea of ‘wicked problems’, originally outlined by Rittel and Webber (1973). Although initially applied to planning theory, and to urban and social problems, the concept has become more widely used in relation to complex and stubborn problems. Peters (2015) identifies several criteria that can be used to characterise wicked problems:

1.they are hard to define – it is not easy to say exactly what the problem is;

2.the problems are multi-causal and have many interconnections;

3.they are therefore often unstable, with small changes in one possible cause producing large-scale effects;

4.they have no clear solution, and sometimes not even a set of possible solutions;

5.because the solutions are unclear, any intervention may have unforeseen consequences;

6.they involve multiple actors and are socially complex.

Indeed, some writers have gone further and argued that there are ‘super wicked’ problems, which have four additional characteristics (Levin et al., 2012; Peters, 2015):

1.time is running out;

2.there is no central authority, or only a weak central authority to manage the problem;

3.the same actors seeking to solve the problem are also contributing to it;

4.the future is discounted rapidly so that contemporary solutions become less valuable.

These ideas around super wicked problems are clearly linked to contemporary issues such as climate change, but would also be applicable to topics such as economic issues and migration, or even so-called ‘troubled families’ (for example, Hayden and Jenkins, 2014), which produce severe challenges and which lack an entity that can make decisions to solve, or even ameliorate, the problem.

It is also important to be aware that both policies and definitions clearly change over time. For example, national security, while still concerned to some extent with the threat of armed warfare with other nation states, also involves challenges such as cyber threats from both nation states and other groups, and terrorism, while others argue that a much broader definition is necessary to account for other potential risks, such as those arising from environmental change or from economic challenges. Similarly, there may be some periods when policies seek to encoura...