Understanding government capacity and its impact on tool choices
and use
The process of selecting policy instruments, as well that of assessing
the effects of the adopted policy design, depends on the resources and
capacities at the disposal of governments. Regarding resources,
Christopher Hood (1983) has shown us that governments can use four main
resources in designing and delivering policy instruments: nodality,
authority, funding and organization. At the same time, we know that
these resources are not sufficient in properly choosing instruments,
because it is necessary to have specific policy capacities—analytical,
organizational and systemic (Wu et al. 2017)—thanks to which the four
resources at governments’ disposal can be used to design new policies or
new instrument-based interventions.
However, for both resources and policy capacities, there are at least
three significant empirical gaps. First, we do not know whether
governments are sufficiently aware of their eventual weakness in the
necessary policy capacities. Second, there is insufficient empirical
evidence on whether and how the characteristics of the actual stock of
resources and capacities at governments’ disposal influences the choice
of policy instruments and eventually their implementation. And third,
most research to date has focussed on state resources and capacities and
has paid less attention to civil society capabilities and competences,
such as those of NGOs, think tanks, pressure groups, lobbysts and others
active in the policy process.