Reconsidering borders

This chapter considers policy-making beyond the ‘shadow’ of a powerful state. Cross-border policy-making presents a unique dilemma. From the practice perspective, borders open or close to encourage or prevent transnational flows. They can be reshaped to enhance economic growth, social development outcomes, and/or security. From the analytic perspective, the challenge of framing transnational policy-making in open economy sectors, where actors and ideas operate across and beyond borders to shape agendas, policy content, and modes of governing, is a work in progress. Some see policy studies as a ‘methodological prisoner of the state,’ unable to adapt analysis of state capacity to a globalising world. This chapter separates national policy processes from those at the international and global levels. In the context of multiple and diffuse sources of sovereignty at the global level, where porous boundaries between public and private spheres of governance, the conventional dilemmas of policy studies remain but often look importantly different.

Reconsidering the state

State-centred and society-centred explanations in comparative public policy analysis disagree markedly on the extent to which the state has autonomy or is essentially a clearing-house for outside forces. In this chapter, we reconsider the position of the state in policy studies by investigating the interactions and inter-dependency between the state and society rather than making a binary choice between state-centred and society-centred perspectives on governance. The core argument is that policy studies can improve its ability to apprehend the position of the state in dilemmas of contemporary policy-making by acknowledging that the state is, at once, both critical to collective action and reliant on crucial elements of societal support for its policy effectiveness. In such terms, governance is a useful label for the variety of ways in which society is not simply acted upon by the state, but actively shapes the actions of and outcomes of state activity.

Reconsidering institutions

Although institutions are central to the study of public policy, the focus upon them has shifted over time. This chapter is concerned with the role of institutions in problem solving and the utility of an evolving institutional theory that has significantly fragmented. It argues that the rise of new institutionalism in particular is symptomatic of the growing complexity in problems and policy making. We review the complex landscape of institutional theory, we reconsider institutions in the context of emergent networks and systems in the governance era, and we reflect upon institutions and the notion of policy shaping in contemporary times. We find that network institutionalism, which draws upon policy network and community approaches, has a particular utility for depicting and explaining complex policy.

Reconsidering policy – our agenda revisited

In this chapter, we review our findings, relating each chapter’s conclusions to the over-arching re-consideration agenda. Policy learning and evaluation, and the continuing importance to policy analysis of policy change, are emphasised. We conclude that, appropriately refreshed, the public policy perspective remains critical to understanding and resolving complex problems in governing.

Reconsidering information

Information is intrinsic to governing and, by extension, to public policy. Policy-related information defines relationships between the state and its citizens. Through public policies, governments seek to understand and influence the environment in which they operate. Information technologies and social media have extended and complicated these relationships in ways that have proved difficult for policy studies to absorb. This chapter suggests a way forward. Two streams of reconsideration are explored: information within public policy, and information as an object of public policy. The first stream brings together key concepts in policy analysis, and scopes the importance of informational processes within policy systems. Reconsidering in the second sense helps to identify shifts in the relationship between information and public policy as a field of action. Both perspectives help us to draw conclusions about the relationship between public policy and the state. Throughout, this discussion is linked with the general framework of the systems thinking developed in Chapter Two. The chapter concludes with some suggestions as to how an informational perspective can be used to advance research agendas in relation to accountability and forms of governance.

Reconsidering policy – our agenda

Policy studies are in a rut. Just as politics in both the global and domestic spheres have been taking more partisan forms, policy studies itself has become more inward looking, and less interested in politics and practice than in the past. The authors suggest that making public policy relevant again, requires an understanding, not just of policy development and selected policy-related themes, but a broader engagement with structure, process and system: as a way of depicting not just the formation of policy, but also its modes of action in the world. Doing this involves building on earlier iterations of policy thought and relating them, not only to the complexity of current policy problems, but also to the immense technological and political changes that have occurred in the twenty-first century.

Reconsidering implementation

Scholarly interest in implementation theory has waxed and waned despite enduring concerns with practitioner competences and the causes of policy failure or policy success. Attention to understanding and improving policy implementation needs to build on previous attempts to identify and absorb the lessons already known. Implementation processes often encounter governance challenges that were unforeseen, arising from difficulties in coordination of partnerships or from rapid changes in external events. This chapter reconsiders the role of implementation analysis in the era of governance, which sees implementation as joined-up networked practices discounts the significance of state capacity and centrality. The chapter recounts the manner in which implementation theory has evolved, from early instrumental accounts, to top-down, bottom-up and synthesised analysis, to current interest in the utility of implementation theory in addressing complexity of policy problems. It argues that, despite the shift in emphasis to governance-based and interpretive accounts, implementation as a structural and process challenge in government policy practice remains a vital concern. So do the problems of failure and success, learning and capacity, monitoring and evaluation that implementation theory has highlighted. Policy change agendas are foreshadowed, for further analysis in the following chapter.

Reconsidering advice and advisory systems

Policy advice and policy advisory systems tend to be underplayed or neglected in policymaking literature despite robust policy advisory research efforts, and concerns with the character and dynamics of domain specific advisory systems within and beyond the state. In this chapter we reconsider policy advice in several key senses. We revisit the significance of the role of policy advising, and depictions of the transformation of the practice of policy advising; we draw upon governance and policy systems frames in our reconsideration of advisory systems; and we reflect upon the place of expert advice in PASs in problem solving today. We explore the role of advice and advisory systems in addressing complex problems in the governance era, and ask whether a more diverse advisory landscape helps or hinders the generation and transmission of policy relevant knowledge.

Reconsidering policy change

Explaining how policies may be changed over time is a fundamental theme common to the study of public policy and governance. Scholars have developed several competing perspectives on how and why policy change occurs; while policy practitioners are largely focused on the successful negotiation and implementation of policy improvement and occasional major policy reforms. This chapter focuses on frameworks for explaining how policy agendas shift, how policy change occurs, and how some proposals for change are constrained. In the real world of complexity, wicked problems and mediatised debate, the authority and capacity of the state are subjected to many countervailing pressures. The explanation of policy change must take account not only of how Ministers are involved in setting priorities and mobilising political support, but also how public agencies manage the policy process – including their contributions to policy framing, policy design, engagement, evaluation, and managing conflicting views within civil society. In the governance era, policy change has become a complex and nuanced enterprise. This chapter reconsiders the utility of classic accounts of policy dynamics concerning evidence-based policy, ideology, and populist partisanship in addressing complex policy challenges.

Reconsidering policy systems

Systems thinking has been neglected in the policy sciences, to the detriment of both broad understandings of the role of policy, and of policy-making capacity. This chapter remedies this deficiency by tracing the trajectory of systems thinking in the policy sciences, introducing and explaining themes from complexity science in policy-relevant terms, and concluding with practical examples of applications of systems thinking to real-world policy problems. To illustrate: complex adaptive systems are discussed in the context of regulation and control. Two general claims are made for this approach: firstly, systems thinking is likely to be particularly productive where policy problems defy conventional solutions and unintended consequences are rife. In these situations, systems thinking has the ability to move beyond the specifics of each problem to identify and depict underlying complexity; secondly, in the governance era, sites of policy-relevant action are more likely than in the past to lie outside the formal boundaries of government, and to require complex interactions among stakeholders.