Understanding the volatility of tools and mixes – predicting
risks of failure and perverse outcomes
Policy design studies to date have focussed almost exclusively on the
“good” side of policy formulation, that is, dealing with concerns
around ensuring that knowledge is marshalled towards developing the best
feasible policy in any given context under the assumption of
well-intentioned governments and accommodating policy targets. This work
has looked at issues around how policies evolve over time and focused
upon understanding how such policies can be made more robust and
resilient but without carefully examining or allowing for the
possibility that government intentions may not be solely oriented
towards the creation of public value, or that policy targets may indulge
in various forms of ‘misconduct’ from fraud to gamesmanship, undermining
government intentions of whatever kind.
While self-interested, corrupt or clientelistic policy-making has been
the subject of many studies in administrative and regulatory law, even
the best of policy intentions can be perverted in implementation and the
need to design policies to be resilient against conscious and determined
efforts on the part of policy targets to undermine them is pressing.
Although the question of intentional efforts to undermine or pervert
policies and programmes in less than benign ways on the part of policy
targets has only now become a source of interest among policy scholars
some lessons can be learned from these other studies of policy tools and
instruments about improving policy designs to deal with malicious
behaviour.
These aspects of policy-making and policy design constitute the degree
of ‘volatility ’, found in a policy area, that is, the likelihood
or propensity of certain instruments and certain design situations to
lead to unstable policy mixes. While linked to design, this is due to
the deployment of instruments and tools which by their nature inherently
involve a high risk of failure. This can be contrasted with more stable
tools and mixes in which designs are likely to approximate the image
often set out in the literature on the subject.