How can one evaluate if policy is successful ?

Global Environment Outlook – GEO-6: Healthy Planet, Healthy People, 2019

management. Policy objectives are to be achieved via policy measures or instruments -structured activities targeted at changing other activities in society towards achieving environmental goals. Not all effective policy instruments are for environmental policy alone, other instruments (e.g. in energy and transport policy) may include environmental policy goals, often as secondary goals to the prime nonenvironmental goal (e.g. reducing congestion). This is the usual case now in most integrated policies (as discussed in Chapter 11). Accordingly, environmental governance extends well beyond environmental ministries. Governments are often thought of as the primary domain for development and implementation of policies. While governments are often the most important actors in formulating, implementing and enforcing policy instruments, they do not act alone, and various governance arrangements are needed. Effective policies usually involve a wide range of stakeholder inputs throughout the policy cycle. Governments at all levels are active in policy formulation and implementation, as are private sector and civil society actors. Roles and responsibilities are spread not only between governmental and non-governmental institutions, but also across all levels vof governance. Politicians, policy think tanks, education and research institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), lobbyists, communities and companies all have roles to play in influencing policy outcomes in different contexts. At the regional and global levels, policy instruments are created and implemented by global, regional or national institutions in multilayered governance arrangements. There is also a growing number of 'public-private partnerships' and 'corporate sustainability initiatives', including the emergence of 'business-NGO interactions' aimed at stimulating responsible and sustainable behaviour in specific sectors . Such partnerships (e.g. UN Environment's Clean Seas Initiative) emerged in the design and production of goods, risk assessments, due diligence, training, monitoring, reporting and mediation, transparency in supply chains and more. In many countries, citizens and communities are also contributing to the realization of collective environmental goals. These are often framed as 'citizen co-production' and/or 'communitybased initiatives' (Mees, Crabbé and Driessen 2017). The challenge is for all these actors, layers and levels to mesh together and provide a coherent mix of policies appropriate for the scale and period of application and consistent with the national social, cultural, historical and political context (European Environment Agency [EEA] 2001a; EEA 2001b; European Commission [EC] 2012; Niles and Lubell 2012; EEA 2017). Polycentric governance is a source of innovation and by enabling the competition of ideas, collaboration and alignment, it creates momentum for environmental policies (Jordan and Huitema 2014). However, dispersion of responsibility may lead to fragmented policies, poorly defined roles and responsibilities, weak follow-up and monitoring mechanisms, lack of accountability for results or a stalemate in decision-making.

Working for Policy, 2011

This book focuses on how we account for the work of policy, recognizing that there is more than one type of account, and that different accounts may 'make sense' in different contexts. In this perspective, we need to recognize that 'policy' is itself an account of government, a construct mobilized, both by academic observers and by practitioners, to make sense of the activity of governing. It presents government as a process of instrumental decision making, in which actors called governments address problems and identify goals; the practice of governing is then explained by referring back to these decisions, seeing it as the 'implementation' of the choices made by governments. Dye described public policy 'whatever government decides to do or not to do' (Dye 1985). The basic assumptions underlying this description are seldom examined because it seems like ' common sense,' but this is precisely why we need to examine these (and other accounts): in how (and why) they 'make sense' of the process? This account of government as a pattern of official problem solving is not the only version available. A much older interpretation (e.g., from Hobbes to Oakeshott) believes that government is concerned with order or the maintenance of stable relationships and practices as well as dealing with disturbances. The dominant paradigm in welfare economics considers government to be a mechanism that deals with market failure, while the processes of choice are simply devices that enforce calculated solutions to problems of collective action. A third interpretation sees government as a struggle for partisan benefit: 'who gets what, when and how,' as Lasswell (1936) described it. Linked to this, but also distinguished from it, is a perception of government as a competitive struggle for dominance among leaders, with statements about goals, choices or benefits being largely tokens in this continuing struggle. More recently, the term governance has been used to suggest that governing is the outcome of a complex interweaving of both official and non-official organizational forms, that often mobilizes different frameworks of meaning and rationales of ac

Working for Policy

2000

Educate, 2014

Administration

Some policies fail to achieve their goals and some succeed. More often than not, it is unclear whether a policy has been a success or a failure, sometimes because the goal was not clear, or because there were a multitude of goals. In this introduction to this special issue we discuss what we mean by policy success and failure, and assume that policy success or failure is ultimately the result of the decision-making process: policy success results from good policies, which tend to come from good decisions, which are in turn the result of a good decision-making process. We then set out a framework for understanding the conditions under which good and bad decisions are made. Built upon factors highlighted in a broad literature, we argue that a potential interaction of institutions, interests and ideology creates incentives for certain outcomes, and leads to certain information being gathered or prioritised when it is being processed. This can bias decision-makers to choose a certain co...

uuism.net

2022

Different scholars have different definitions of the term but all definitions are in agreement with it being a government initiative. This paper will examine the policy-making process involved in government and the public sector in general.

2009

An investigation into the usage of the term "policy" suggests that the term is elusive owing to the very many ways it is used to refer to a highly diverse set of phenomena. This paper reviews conceptions explicated in education policy literature to provide conceptual insights into the meaning of the term and an understanding of the dynamics of the policy process. The traditional problem-solving definition views policy fundamentally as a thing, a guide and a document of some sort, containing a page or flips of pages indicating policy choices reached by policy makers and which policy implementers or actors are to follow in dealing with a recognised problem of concern, and is thus criticised for two main reasons. Firstly, the view is criticised for neglecting the socio-cultural dynamism of policy processes. Secondly, it is criticised for its implicit over-determinism. The process model pays attention to the social agency of the policy process and is thus criticised for not focusing on policymaking, but on understanding actor interactions within the process. Based on these explorations, and in gauging a working definition of policy, the paper adopts a theoretical eclecticism approach whereby education policy is conceptualised as neither the product of policy making nor a process, but both. Significantly, policy in this context is conceptualised as referring fundamentally to the exercise of power and the language that is used to legitimate the process.