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.