3. Studying policy tools: Knowns and unknowns
Because of the recent moves towards the enhanced study of policy mixes and policy design, the lacunas of the instrument literature today are more pronounced than ever before. This new focus on policy instrument mixes underlines the need to pay more attention to the actual way in which policies achieve expected results as well as the nature of the interactions of tools within mixes. More research is needed to order the complex world of designing policy mixes and above all to disentangle how different factors drive the designing of good or bad policy mixes.
In general, policy instruments have been the topic of continuous research and analysis to understand the following, and some progress has been made on most of these issues:
  1. Why and how policymakers choose, recurrently, particular instruments with respect to others, and whether and how they change previous choices (Salamon 2002; Hood 1983; Linder and Peters 1989, 1998 Capano and Lippi 2017);
  2. Why and how governance modes change over time and instrument choices with them (Le Galés 2011; Capano et al 2015);
  3. How policy actors aggregate around specific policy instruments to form ‘instrument constituencies’ promoting certain kinds of tools, often regardless of the nature of the problem to which they might be applied (Beland and Howlett 2016);
  4. How and why policymakers can utilize knowledge and power to design policy mixes rather than simply reacting to the political-administrative context and issues at stake (Howlett and Rayner 2013, 2017; Schmidt and Sewerin 2018);
  5. What political and policy effects can be achieved by adopting specific policy instruments (Bressers and Klok 1988; Campbell et al 2004; May et al. 2005; Jordan and Matt 2014; Borras and Edquist, 2013; Edler et al., 2016; Rogge and Reichardt, 2016);
  6. Whether and how policy instruments can be considered as institutions and thus as bearer of social and political values, identities, and worldviews which in turn affect support and conflict regarding their choice (Lascoumes and Le Galés 2004; 2007).
  7. What are the basic kinds of tools and whether, for example, distinctions such as those mooted between ‘procedural’ and ‘substantive’ tools or between ‘implementation’ and ‘non-implementation’ oriented tools serve a useful purpose (Howlett 2000)
  8. How well tools work alone and/or whether they work better, or worse, in combination (Taeihagh et al. 2013).
Knowledge generated in this research has created the basis for an improved understanding of the nature of policy instrument choice and enhanced the notion that it is possible to design public policy in a sophisticated way.
However, the pattern of research on policy instruments has developed in a very un-coordinated way, and is uneven. Despite the richness of the literature there are still many analytical “black holes”, theoretical lacunas and an excess of descriptivism. This is necessary to address if the policy instruments approach is to proceed towards an effective process of scientific cumulation. In particular, there is a need to deepen knowledge of many relevant dimensions of the policy instrument approach in order to address unresolved questions such as why policymakers choose some instruments over others, whether policy instruments directly impact policy performance, how to study the characteristics and the effects of policy mixes, and how policy instruments truly work when delivering their outcomes. In answering these questions, a clearer understanding of policy tools, mixes and design is required. However, these are lacking at present.
Table 1 below outlines a list of 14 issues based on the most recent reviews of the literature (Acciai and Capano 2018; Vargas and Restrepo 2019; Howlett 2019), and divides them into four clusters. As these four clusters show, while much is known about policy tools, much remains to be understood. These clusters are defined by the following : (1) problems with understanding instrument and mix dynamics (2) under-examined behavioural issues, (3) measurement and methodological issues, and (4) a variety of issues related to policy implementation affecting tool deployment and use.