Healing the Ozone Layer

The Montreal Protocol—the regime designed to protect the stratospheric ozone layer—has widely been hailed as the gold standard of global environmental governance and is one of few examples of international institutional cooperative arrangements successfully solving complex transnational problems. Although the stratospheric ozone layer still bears the impacts of ozone depleting substances (ODSs), the problem of ozone depletion is well on its way to being solved due to the protocol. This chapter examines how the protocol was designed and implemented in a way that has allowed it to successfully overcome a number of thorny challenges that most international environmental regimes must face: how to attract sufficient participation, how to promote compliance and manage non-compliance, how to strengthen commitments over time, how to neutralize or co-opt potential ‘veto players’, how to make the costs of implementation affordable, how to leverage public opinion in support of the regime’s goals, and, ultimately, how to promote the behavioural and policy changes needed to solve the problems and achieve the goals the regime was designed to solve. The chapter concludes that while some of the reasons for the Montreal Protocol’s success, such as fairly affordable, available substitutes for ODSs, are not easy to replicate, there are many other elements of this story that can be utilized when thinking about how to design solutions to other transnational environmental problems.

Germany’s Labour Market Policies

Germany has become one of the most competitive economies in the world. Only a decade and a half ago it was widely derided as stagnant, and ridden by political paralysis in reforming its labour market policies. However, in 2002, the discovery of manipulated statistics in the German Employment Agency opened a window of opportunity to break the stalemate in corporatist policymaking. In response, the government convened a commission to design labour market policy reforms: the Hartz Committee, named for its chair, Peter Hartz. Including experts, politicians, and members from interest groups in the commission enabled the government to promote the ‘Hartz Reforms’ on the basis of expertise and compromise. Their focus was on creating incentives for seeking employment. Job search assistance and monitoring gained importance, whereas ineffective job creation and early retirement schemes were abolished or reduced. These activating reforms successfully tackled structural unemployment and increased the overall employment rate. Their success in strengthening economic resilience was demonstrated during the 2008 economic crisis, when in combination with other measures such as the extension of short-time work, and controlled unit labour costs, they led Germany’s labour market through the deep recession.

Estonia’s Digital Transformation

Estonia’s transition to free-market capitalism and liberal democracy is marked by three distinct features: economic success, digital transformation of its public sector, and a rapid increase and persistence of social inequality in Estonia. Indeed, Estonia has become one of the most unequal societies in Europe. Economic success and increasing social inequality can be explained as different sides of the same coin: a neoliberal policy mix opened markets and allowed globalization to play out its drama on a domestic stage, creating winners and losers. Yet Estonia has been highly successful in its digital agenda. Particularly interesting is how the country’s public sector led the digital transformation within this highly neoliberal policy landscape. While within economic policy, Estonia did indeed follow the famed invisible hand in rapidly liberalizing markets, in ICT, Estonia seems to have followed an entirely different principle of policymaking. In this domain, policy has followed the principle of the hiding hand, coined by Albert Hirschman: policy-makers sometimes take on tasks they think they can solve without realizing all the challenges and risks involved— and this may result in unexpected learning and creativity. The success of Estonia’s e-government has much to do with the principle of the hiding hand: naïvety and optimism propelled initial ‘crazy ideas’ in the early 1990s to become ingrained in ICT policy, enabling the creation of multiple highly cooperative and overlapping networks that span public–private boundaries.

The Finnish Comprehensive School

For a decade, Finnish education, claimed to be among the best in the world, has basked in international glory. This reputation is largely due to the country’s success in the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA), run by the OECD. The aim of this chapter is to critically examine this purported policy success of the Finnish comprehensive school from the perspective of complexity theories. By drawing on different research and statistical data, the chapter critically analyses the extent to which the Finnish comprehensive school can be seen as a success story in terms of performance. Using the well-reported history of the comprehensive school, it teases out the milestones of its development, while pointing to contingencies and path dependencies along the way, which have led to its legitimate position. It also reviews scholarly accounts in contrast to the political debates. Finally, the chapter sums up the complex development of comprehensive education and discusses the question under heated debate: what, if anything, can we learn from it?

How to ‘See’ Great Policy Successes

In this chapter, the editors make the case for positive policy evaluation. They survey classic and contemporary public policy and governance research and debates to demonstrate how they are slanted towards fault-finding, the language of disappointment, failure and crisis. They reflect on the contributions and the limitations of this state of the art and argue that it needs to be complemented by a more sustained and systematic conceptualization and empirical study of highly (and perhaps improbably) successful public policy endeavours. This chapter ends by outlining the analytical protocol used in this project, and debating the methodological strengths and limitations of the brand of positive policy evaluation applied in this volume.

Brazil’s Bolsa Família Programme

The first experiences with conditional cash transfers (CCTs) took place in the mid-1990s in Brazil, at the local level. They were later adopted at the national level in Mexico (in 1997, with the Prospera programme), in Brazil (by 2001, with several CCTs), as well as in other Latin American countries. In 2003, the Bolsa Família programme unified previous national CCTs and massively expanded their number of beneficiaries. It managed to reach almost a quarter of the Brazilian population and became the most progressive cash transfer made by the state. Over time, numerous evaluations measured the programme’s impacts on the reduction of poverty and inequality and the improvement of education and health indicators. Domestically, these impacts, together with strong support by researchers and multilateral organizations, eventually translated this ‘good policy’ (quality design and implementation) into ‘good politics’ (political support from beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries alike, and public commitment to the programme’s maintenance by all relevant political forces). The Bolsa Família ‘model’ is now adopted in sixty-seven different countries according to the World Bank in 2017.

The Copenhagen Metropolitan ‘Finger Plan’

The metropolitan region of Copenhagen in Denmark has successfully avoided urban sprawl through a comprehensive public plan initiated more than seventy years ago. Given the well-known challenges to urban planning, it is surprising how successful this so-called Finger Plan has been in governing the process of expansion and development to satisfy both public planners and private citizens. Formulated in the optimistic post-war years, 1945–7, when the pressure on land use outside the city centre was still limited, the plan was initiated by the private Urban Planning Lab. In today’s terminology, this was a bottom-up grassroots initiative which maintained support from local, regional, and national decision-makers. Higher than expected growth in population, economy, and transportation infrastructure has been achieved through robust adaptation. Now considered by many to be one of the greatest Danish planning achievements in history, it was included in 2006 on the national list of celebrated cultural icons. The chapter analyses the conditions for and adaptive development of the Finger Plan. The analysis of the factors driving the successful formulation and implementation of the Finger Plan pays attention to the question of timing, the professional process management, the political coalition building, the strength of metaphors, and the ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The Remarkable Healthcare Performance in Singapore

Singapore’s healthcare system ranks among the best in the world in terms of infant mortality rate, longevity, disability adjusted years, and so on. What is most remarkable, however, is that it achieved these fine outcomes at less than half the costs in comparable countries. The achievement of high healthcare outcomes at low costs is what constitutes ‘success’ in the case of Singapore. While the factors underlying the success are wide-ranging, a lot of the credit must be attributed to the government’s policy. In this chapter, the evolution of the policy measures since Independence will be tracked, along with their impact on improving healthcare services while containing costs. The measures have evolved with epidemiological and technological shifts as well as the rising expectations of a more prosperous and contestable society. The future continuation of the salutary trajectory will depend on the technical merits of the policy measures in the face of changing circumstances as much as their political legitimacy.

The Dutch Delta Approach

The Netherlands is an extreme example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding. After the disastrous flooding of 1953, the Dutch established a legal framework for flood protection and realized a series of impressive delta works. A powerful institutional regime of autonomous regional water boards, a well-developed expert community, and the Rijkswaterstaat (the executive agency of the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment) maintained this framework making the Netherlands one of the best protected delta areas of the world, and an international hallmark for delta management. More recently, the Dutch reformulated their ‘delta approach’ in order to adapt to the possible but uncertain impacts of climate change. This chapter unravels the factors that could explain the long-standing policy success and the reinvention of this policy. Reinventing successful policies is not self-evident, because path dependency often prevents learning and change, and core competencies easily become core rigidities. In hindsight, the Dutch Delta Programme—an external vehicle to come to a revision of the Dutch delta approach—can be seen as a device to successfully combine exploitation (sustaining the successful elements of the former flood management regime) and exploration (developing new strategies and avenues to deal with new challenges related to climate change).

The ‘Social Warfare State’

The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also called the GI Bill or the ‘New Deal for Veterans’, constituted one of the most expansive social policies in US history. In one deft move, a bi-partisan coalition passed a surprisingly and under-appreciatedly progressive social agenda providing training vouchers, family allowances, up to a year’s worth of transitional unemployment payments, and low-interest, federally guaranteed loans for homes, farms, and businesses to nearly 8 million citizens. Every Second World War military service member was made eligible, regardless of race or ethnicity. The bill extended access to higher education, social support, and homeownership to 75 per cent of the young male cohort in post-Second World War America. As a consequence, higher educational attainment grew by 20 per cent. More generally, the bill boosted social mobility, creating the ‘civic generation’. The policy was so successful and popular that it has been routinely expanded and renewed for veterans in the seventy years since. It endures as a core component of compensation for service members today.