The importance of policy design fit for effectiveness: a qualitative comparative analysis of policy integration in regional transport planning

Abstract

Policy design has returned as a central topic in public policy research. An important area of policy design study deals with effectively attaining desired policy outcomes by aligning goals and means to achieve policy design fit. So far, only a few empirical studies have explored the relationship between policy design fit and effectiveness. In this paper, we adopt the multilevel framework for policy design to determine which conditions of policy design fit—i.e., goal coherence, means consistency, and congruence of goals and means across policy levels—are necessary and/or sufficient for policy design effectiveness in the context of policy integration. To this end, we performed a qualitative comparative analysis of Dutch regional transport planning including all twelve provinces. Outcomes show no condition is necessary and two combinations of conditions are sufficient for effectiveness. The first sufficient combination confirms what the literature suggests, namely that policy design fit results in policy design effectiveness. The second indicates that the combination goal incoherence and incongruence of goals and means is sufficient for policy design effectiveness. An in-depth interpretation of this counterintuitive result leads to the conclusion that for achieving policy integration the supportive relationship between policy design fit and policy design effectiveness is less straightforward as theory suggests. Instead, results indicate there are varying degrees of coherence, consistency, and congruence that affect effectiveness in different ways. Furthermore, outcomes reveal that under specific circumstances a policy design may be effective in promoting desired policy integration even if it is incoherent, inconsistent, and/or incongruent.

Pathways to policy integration: a subsystem approach

“…By identifying propositions about how the process of integration unfolds, we have provided scholars with a set of propositions that could guide empirical inquiries about the dynamics of the policy process through which integration takes place. Such empirical analysis could take politicization more seriously in the process of policy integration, which is different from previous analyses that have emphasized design aspects of policy integration (Howlett & Mukherjee, 2018 ; van Geet et al, 2021 ). We anticipate that such empirical research will refine the propositions offered here, pose new questions to those theories, and identify new, complementary pathways related to the politicization of policy integration.…”

Empirical research on policy integration: a review and new directions

“…Second, previous reviews (Tosun & Lang, 2017;Trein et al, 2019) have not focused in depth on the role of theory in empirical articles of policy integration. We can infer from the literature that policy integration research builds on policy design and policy instrumentation (Candel & Biesbroek, 2016;Cejudo & Michel, 2017, 2021Howlett & Rio, 2015;Howlett et al, 2017;Geet et al, 2021) as well as on organizational theory (Catalano et al, 2015;Feiock et al, 2017;Molenveld et al, 2020). Nevertheless the extent to which actorbased theories of the policy process figure in the empirical policy integration research remains understudied (Weible & Sabatier, 2018).…”

Determinantes de la efectividad de la implementación de las políticas públicas:

“…6-7). Van Geet (et al, 2021), siguiendo esta lógica, postulan que su identificación se centra en el estudio de los procesos de política, anteponiendo el diseño del accionar gubernamental como un canalizador entre fuerzas políticas, institucionales y sociales.…”