New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback

Abstract

To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most notably the environmental crises we face, ambitious policy change is urgently needed to achieve the necessary radical transformation of our industrialised societies. Yet, while there is increasing demand for public policy scholarship to provide guidance on how policy should be designed to achieve such change, existing scholarship struggles to provide ‘forward-looking’ recommendations. Within this context, our article takes a step back to reconsider the underlying logics of policy change. We argue that focusing on policy, its effect and the subsequent politics it triggers is best achieved by combining insights from the policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literatures. This combination allows us to re-evaluate which potential pathways towards policy change exist. The main contribution of our article is its proposition of two distinct pathways towards policy change, building on a systematic understanding of policy design elements. These pathways place greater emphasis on policy change happening (1) ‘bottom-up’ through initial low-level design changes rather than ‘top-down’ through high-level ideational change, as argued in earlier scholarship, (2) through the interplay of several policies in a complex mix. In this way, these pathways provide a useful framework for systematically analysing how policy should be designed to achieve ambitious policy change and thus enable transformative societal change.

Transformational change through Public Policy

“…Regarding the climate change issue, it is telling that the aforementioned exploration of possibilities for degrowth (Buch-Hansen and Carstensen, 2021) sought to grasp transformational change through Peter Hall's (1993) concept of policy paradigms. This is also where Sewerin et al (2022) turn theoretically in this special issue. They shift our focus on the drivers of policy away from the typical set of factors (for example, exogenous shocks) towards previous public policies with rippling effects leading to paradigmatic policy change (and possibly societal transformations).…”

“…3. Transformational change often requires policy changes across sectors and levels of society, from local communities (Boullosa et al, 2022;Levac et al, 2022;Joy and Vogel, 2022) to national or global communities (Nohrstedt, 2022;Tosun et al, 2022;Sewerin et al, 2022). 4.…”

“…5. Studying transformational change from the lens of public policy necessarily involves scholars taking on different roles, from engaged scholarship (Levac et al, 2022) to theory development (Nohrstedt, 2022;Sewerin et al, 2022;Cairney et al, 2022), that each provide unique contributions.…”

“…Of course, the field is replete with descriptions of types of formal policy change (for example, major to minor, punctuated to incremental) and associated politics (Lowi, 1964;1972;Jenkins-Smith et al, 2018;Baumgartner et al, 2018). In this issue, Nohrstedt (2022) and Sewerin et al (2022) represent two examples of articles dealing with formal changes in public policy.…”

Do smart cities perform better in governing the COVID-19 crisis? Empirical evidence from Indonesian cities

“…The theory of policy mix offers more concrete information about efforts made by the government to navigate the health crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy mix is understood as the combination of policy tools or instruments through which governments achieve policy goals ( Sewerin et al, 2022 ). Other labels offered by policy scholars, such as ‘policy bundles’ ( Milkman et al, 2012 ) or ‘policy packages’ ( Givoni et al, 2013 ), also emerge in the literature.…”