Rethinking the procedural in policy instrument ‘Compounds’: a renewable energy policy perspective

Abstract

Contemporary research in the policy sciences places effectiveness as the central goal of policy design. This emphasis permeates both micro-level design considerations for specific policy calibrations, as well as more meso-level policy tool and tool mixes. Effective instrument design, therefore, augments the task of looking at individual tools to considering them as tool 'compounds', that comprise of substantive and procedural means interacting through the process of designing tools and subsequent tool calibrations. The academic study of policy tools thus far has proffered several perspectives on how they can individually be distinguished by their different substantive components and categorized based on common governance resources that need to be mobilized to create them. However, it is eventually how well policy tools are able to coordinate the support of common procedural means and how well they are able to align their enactment plans, which determine how effectively they work together as a deliberate toolkit. In line with the growing literature on policy design and multi-component policy means, this paper magnifies policy instrument design as a complex of procedural and substantive means. To illustrate the notion of such design compounds, this paper synopsizes the state of knowledge on the formulation of three classes of energy policies as an illustration of how substantive and procedural components interact during policy instrument design.

The many meanings of policy instruments: exploring individual and structural determinants in obesity policy

“…Instruments are an essential infrastructure of governance that allow public policy to be made operational through sets of rules, procedures and tools that provide the means by which specific policy goals are achieved (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2007;Bali and Halpin, 2021). Mukherjee (2021) argues that instruments represent the most concrete manifestation of government intent, affecting policy outcomes through regulatory and/or administrative mechanisms that modify behaviour (Howlett, 2000). As a concept, the role of instruments in public policymaking has been explored across literatures in political science (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2007), policy studies (Béland et al, 2018;Foli et al, 2018) and public administration (Hood and Margetts, 2007), with extensive research on the interaction between different types of instruments and effective policy design (Capano and Howlett, 2020).…”

“…Policy instrument research often differentiates between substantive and procedural categories of tools . The substantive aspects of instruments relate to regulatory and fiscal policymaking and are designed to directly or indirectly affect the production, consumption and distribution of public goods and services (Mukherjee, 2021). Examples of substantive tools include market-based regulation such as emissions trading (Voß and Simons, 2014) and ecolabels, as well as instruments that are designed to modify consumer demand for specific products, such as excise taxes levied on tobacco and regulation of commercial practices including product marketing.…”