Public Policy and Administration

The persistence of policy failures is a recognized but not well-understood phenomenon in the literature of the policy sciences. Existing studies offer only limited insights into the persistence of policy failures as much of the literature on the subject to date has focused on conceptualizing the topic and differentiating between different types of failures. Much less attention has been paid to systematically examining the sources of the problems which lead to recurrent failures. Collectively, the articles in this issue move this discussion forward and show the persistence of policy failures can be better understood by examining a wide range of factors both within and beyond a policy subsystem, especially the nature of the political system and its influence on decision making, governance capacity and the impact of its limitations on the chances for policy success, and levels of uncertainty in policy knowledge and practice, which continue to plague decision making and decision makers.

The discipline of public policy has struggled to come to terms with how we may conceive of ‘policy failure’. It tends to assume either that failure is self-evident or that it can be assessed by means of examining the gap between government goals and outcomes. Often, there are multiple caveats that seem too difficult to address – particularly the role of perceptions, which in turn are often dependent on whether or not the policy is supported. This ground-breaking article builds on and refines existing literature. It turns on its head the multiple methodological challenges surrounding what constitutes policy failure (such as competing goals and variance over time) and suggests that such seemingly impenetrable challenges actually help illuminate our understanding. In doing so, it argues that once we conceive of studying policy failure as ‘art and craft’, we are better placed to navigate the messy realpolitik of types and degrees of failure, as well as ambiguities and tensions between them. The groundwork for doing so is based on a working definition of failure, namely that a policy fails, even if it is successful in some minimal respects, if it does not fundamentally achieve the goals that proponents set out to achieve, and opposition is great and/or support is virtually non-existent.

The purpose of this article is to focus on policy failure as a concept that stakeholders use. Our article will first address how researchers define failure to explore some different dimensions of the concept. Second, we will highlight the political and subjective dimension relative to how policymakers use the concept of failure as critical judgement. Last, we will show that while failure is a critical judgement, it should not be overlooked by researchers seeking to understand the policy process. In this article, we argue that stakeholders’ production and use of critical judgement play a fundamental role in policymaking.

There is some tendency to lump together policy failures arising from different sources and having different fundamental characteristics. This is a problem conceptually, as well as for building effective theory about policy failure, but it can also be a practical difficulty for policymakers if they fail to differentiate these various possible roots of failure. This paper explores the linkages among these types of failure within the public sector.

The cataloging of failures when putting policies in place has been the hallmark of implementation studies since the 1970s. The numerous lessons from this research can be distilled into guidance about improving policy design to enhance implementation prospects and other suggestions for overcoming administrative obstacles. This contribution extends these lessons by addressing how the governing arrangements for addressing policy problems—the policy regimes that are put in place—either work to reinforce or undermine political commitments enshrined within policies. Regimes mediate feedback effects of policies in affecting policy legitimacy, coherence, and durability. These notions about policy regimes are contrasted with traditional perspectives about implementation failures. The value of a regime perspective in studying policy implementation and governing is illustrated for the case of the Affordable Care Act in the United States of America (USA).

India’s first health policy document in 1946 envisaged an ambitious health system comprising delivery of public health programs by the national governments and primary and secondary care by the state governments. Nearly seven decades later, neither of the ambitions have been realised. The delivery of public health programs is limited and uncoordinated, whilst primary and especially secondary care is of poor quality and unaffordable to the bulk of the population. This article assesses India’s health policy reforms and argues that at each juncture the policy instruments it utilised were inconsistent with the goals it was trying to achieve. The health care sector required more intervention than the central and state governments offered. The meagre funds allocated to public health programs and the unwillingness and inability of state governments to shoulder responsibility for primary and secondary care led to the dominance of the private sector in delivery, out-of-pocket financing, and fee-for-service payment to providers. Recent reforms have made some progress in addressing the lacunae but are handicapped by the pervasive dominance of the private sector which severely limits the choice of policy tools available to the government.

This article looks at policy failure in systems that rely on highly autonomous organizations to deliver the services promised in the policy programs. We argue that in order to better understand success and failure in such systems, the existing categories of policy failure and organizational failure do not suffice. Therefore, we look at the ability of agents assigned to that task to effectively act in the relation in-between the system level and the level of individual organizations. This brings to the fore another type of failure – governance failure – the inability of a policy system to timely detect and asses looming failure in individual parts. It is helpful to apply a lens of interactive complexity to these systems and to look at causal loops rather than causal lines. We apply this perspective to a case of the Inspectorate of Education, to study how it dealt with three cases of looming failure in schools. The perspective of causal loops helped the Inspectorate to understand in hindsight how two schools collapsed, and it was then used proactively to intervene in a third school. The paper helps practitioners to better deal with failure in layered policy and sets an agenda for further research into the use of circular dynamics for policy analysis and intervention.

Discussions of failure in public policy have been hampered by a lack of consensus on a definition of the term ‘failure’. It can be shown that arguments relating to policy failure tend to conflate forms of failure that are actually discrete, such as failure to meet objectives, claims of negative distributional outcomes and negative electoral outcomes attributed to specific policy decisions. This article attempts to unify and clarify the discourse on policy failure by presenting a multi-dimensional approach that can identify separate aspects of failure within a single policy or program. This multi-dimensional approach to policy failure is then be applied to climate change policy in Australia, in order to demonstrate how some aspects of a policy can be interpreted as failed while others can simultaneously be interpreted as successful, even by the same observer. As this example illustrates, global pronouncements of a public policy as a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ should be avoided in favour of more precise evaluations of what kind of failure occurred, and who was affected and in what ways.