Public Policy and Administration

Policy design has re-appeared on the scholarly agenda. This special issue investigates the assumptions of the policy design concept, questioning its theoretical coherence and relevance for practitioners. The conventional idea of policy design implies an instrumental-rational theoretical model which is out of place in contemporary governance arrangements. While the concept appeals to academic sensibilities, it has less utility in practice. It can also become caught up in the political aspect of policymaking by being used to generate legitimacy for the actions of public managers via rationalising accounts. Contributors to this issue argue that the design idea should be reconsidered from the ground up. An alternative orientation is put forward, which regards policy design as something that emerges from policymaking practice.

While policy design is a relatively recent term in the social science literature, the concept itself is ancient. The modernist incarnation, from the mid-20th century onwards, is grounded in the applied social sciences: the systematic calculation of problems, values, practices and outcomes. But in many ways, the confidence of the faith in systematic design was not borne out by experience. It became clear that rather than finding expert designers advising authoritative decision-makers and perhaps monitoring the activities of subordinate ‘implementers’, the world of policy was populated by multiple participants in distinct organisational locations, with divergent framings, continuing negotiation on practice, and ambiguity in the understanding of outcomes. There is clearly a tension between the image of policy design and the experience of the activity. The response to this tension in the literature on policy design has largely been aimed at reconciling the experience of practice with the norms of instrumental rationality. It has tended to give little attention to the interpretive significance of ‘design talk’ in the process of governing. This paper argues that ‘policy design’ is an exercise in giving meaning – framing activity in a way that makes practices and outcomes appropriate and valid – and develops a more comprehensive analysis of ‘policy design’ as a concept in use in both policy practice and the analysis of that practice.

This article is an attempt to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners. Informed by both design theory and the reality of policy work, its focus is on ‘problems’. From a practitioners’ perspective, policy design is both an intellectual and political process, an inevitable oscillation between ‘puzzling’ and ‘powering’, in which ‘messy’ or unstructured problems are re-structured from problems as webs of ‘undesirable situations’ to problems as specific, time-and-space bound ‘opportunities for improvement’. This requires a questioning habitus in practitioners of policy design. Using a socio-cognitive theory of problem processing, this paper shows how policy design is an iterative process of problem sensing, problem categorization, problem decomposition and problem definition. For each of these stages, appropriate rules-of-thumb for questioning and answering can be suggested that induce thought habits and styles for responsive and solid policy designs.

In public policy scholarship on policy design, emotions are still treated as opposed to goals, and their presence is assumed to signal that things have gone wrong. We argue, however, that understanding how and for whom emotions matter is vital to the dynamics of policy designs because emotions are central to the capacity building of policy intermediaries and, with that, to the success of public policies. We examine the case of Czech single mothers in their role as intermediaries in ‘alimony policy’. Our interpretive survey provided single mothers an opportunity to express the way they experience the policy emotionally. The analysis reveals that the policy goal of the child’s well-being is produced at the cost of the mother’s emotional tensions and that policy designs defuse these emotional tensions, implicitly. These contradictory emotions expressed by mothers show us a gateway to problematising policy designs in a novel way, which reconsiders construing policy design as a technical, solution-oriented enterprise to one in which emotional tensions intervene in policy design and are essential for succeeding.

Do scientists advising government in scientific advisory committees (SACs) in the UK fit the traditional model of offering substantive scientific advice to improve the quality of policy making, are they forums for policy making and negotiation where ‘the science’ is tempered by broader political concerns, or are they simply bodies that legitimise policies already decided upon? The traditional ‘on tap’ model and its alternatives imply differences in how the agendas of SACs are put together, how committees deliberate and how they influence policy, and these implied differences are explored on the basis of a 2015 survey covering the experiences and attitudes of 338 members from 46 scientific committees. The traditional model holds up rather well against models that see SACs filling broader political roles such as policy deliberation and legitimation. The findings suggest that the organization and procedures of SACs indeed allow scientists to offer advice largely without having to engage with or anticipate wider policy considerations and constraints, and that government ‘steering’ or otherwise leading SAC deliberations toward politically desired conclusions is rare.

It has become increasingly common to use the project as a form of organization when implementing public policies. Previous research has identified political, administrative and organizational motives behind this trend towards more project-based organizations within the public administration. The problem is that project-based organization carries inherent problems and special challenges when these projects are supposed to be implemented in permanent agencies and organizations. The purpose of this paper is to identify problems and challenges that public administrations face when ‘the project organization’ is used as a structural form of organization in implementing different kinds of public policies. The article takes its starting point in the policy implementation research and especially in Matland’s conflict-ambiguity model. This research tradition is complemented by a review of research on temporary organizations, which draws attention to some inherent and significant characteristics of project organizations, that is the concepts of entity, relationship and time. Our analysis shows that the use of project organization puts special demands on the players involved, and if these are not taken into account, there is a high risk that projects designed to bring about social change will not produce the effects that policymakers and citizens expect.