Public Policy Resources

Knoepfel, Peter

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781447345077
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building on Knoepfel's previous book, Public policy analysis, this book offers a conceptually coherent view of ten public policy resources: force, law, personal, money, property rights, information, organisation, consensus, time and political support. The book demonstrates the interplay of the different resources in a conceptually coherent framework and presents numerous illustrations of ways of mobilising the resources and managing them in a sustainable way, resource exchanges and the role of institutions governing the interrelationships between actors and resources. The book will be valuable to postgraduate students as well as those working in policy programming and implementation across both public and private sectors and in non-governmental organisations.

Part I

Foundations and analytical dimensions¹

1

The foundations of public policy analysis²

Public policies

Definitions: Substantive and institutional policies (in particular, ‘resource-based’)

The definition of a substantive public policy adopted here is one that I have used since 2001 and formalized in our basic textbook that was published in 2006 [2011]. According to this text, a public policy is:

… a series of intentionally coherent decisions or activities taken or carried out by different public – and sometimes – private actors, whose resources, institutional links and interests vary, with a view to resolving in a targeted manner a problem that is politically defined as collective in nature. This group of decisions and activities gives rise to formalised actions of a more or less restrictive nature that are often aimed at modifying the behaviour of social groups presumed to be at the root of, or able to solve, the collective problem to be resolved (target groups) in the interest of the social groups who suffer the negative effects of the problem in question (final beneficiaries). (Knoepfel et al, 2006: 29 [2011: 24])

The same definition is adopted for institutional policies, which aim to tackle public problems involving the internal functioning of the state apparatus and whose target groups and beneficiaries are public actors in principle. These types of policies include institutional policies dealing with the allocation of action resources to the policy actors involved (‘resource-based’ institutional policies; see Knoepfel and Varone, 2009: 97ff). In contrast to the basic textbook, this publication also deals with these.

Distinction between the concept of a ‘public policy’ and the – analytically less relevant – concept of ‘public action’

Our definition of public policies differs from the definitions of the ‘public action’ and ‘collective action’ type that tend to be used in France in particular (see, for example, Lascoume and Le Galès, 2012). In my view, these definitions are too vague; they include decisions, actors and resources without distinguishing clearly between them, and neglect the empirical fact that all public activity can be characterized very accurately based on its association with one of the six products that constitute a public policy cycle: the problem definition (PD), the political-administrative programme (PAP), the political-administrative arrangement for the implementation of the policy (PAA), the action plan (AP), the outputs and the evaluative statement (ES) (see later in this chapter). Moreover, these definitions do not differentiate sufficiently between the actors, the resources they mobilize throughout the policy process and the public decisions themselves. As I see it, public decisions are the result of the actors’ activities that consist precisely in the mobilization of resources in accordance with a number of rules. The result must on no account be confused with the action that leads to it. The – intermediate or final – decision is a voluntary act that expresses the resolution reached by the actors and cannot, therefore, logically encompass them. This does not prevent this decision from having actors that participated in its production as its targets. Similarly a decision itself have [[has?]] as its object the allocation, redistribution and so on of public action resources (decisions of an institutional nature) for a subsequent stage of the cycle.

The programming decisions (problem definition, causality models and legislative programmes) place action instruments at the disposal of the actors, in particular, public actors, the content of which is often standardized for a given state on the basis of one of its preferred modes of action (regulatory, incentive-based, persuasive or constitutive). These instruments define the modalities of use of the different categories of resources at the disposal of the actors. They vary according to the ‘intervention hypotheses’ underlying a given public policy, which summarize the response shared by the majority of the actor-producers of a public policy to the following question: how can and should the authority succeed in changing the behaviour of the target groups believed to be responsible for the existence of the collective problem?

In contrast to the standard definitions of public action, the definition of a public policy as a cyclical set of decisions makes it possible to approach each of the decisions that constitute a policy while differentiating between its ‘before’ and ‘after’. This distinction, which is important for different reasons (for example, rule of law, predictability, governability of complexity), will have a major consequence in my analysis of public action resources: in effect, it enables us to distinguish between the mobilization of resources prior to the decision-making (at the level of policy programming) and their mobilization after the decision (in particular, at the level of implementation). This decision can itself result in the redistribution of resources at a subsequent stage in the policy cycle to the advantage or disadvantage of specific actors in the target group (in the form of economic incentives), thereby facilitating or preventing a change in their behaviour.

Take, for example, the legislative process in relation to the conservation of soil and biodiversity in agriculture (agro-environmental programmes). In this case, prior to the enactment of the legislation, the definition of the actual problem (threat posed to natural resources by agricultural activity) and the causality model are still very general. This model includes what I refer to as the ‘causal hypothesis’: the need – or not – to intervene with farmers in the interests of other users of the natural resource in question. It also refers to the intervention hypothesis: whether the behaviour of farmers should be changed through regulatory-type instruments or conversely, through incentive-based ones. Once defined, these formulations define – in still rather vague terms – the constellation of actors that will dominate the process of legislative production by virtue of their belonging to the triangle of actors of the policy in question (target groups: farmers; beneficiaries: protectors of the resources in question; political-administrative actors; parliament, and the administration in charge of agricultural policy). This definition of the problem to be resolved by the policy, the first product of the agro-environmental policy cycle, essentially concerns the designation of actors ‘legitimized’ to produce the next product: the general and abstract agro-environmental legislation. Moreover, depending on the urgency of the problem, the level of media attention it receives and its political priority, this definition will influence the public action resources made available to these actors in the future. A declaration of urgency will reduce considerably the amount of ‘Time’ available to the farmers and the agricultural administration; the allocation of a high political priority will increase the availability of ‘Political Support’ available to the political-administrative actors and policy beneficiaries and the actors interested in ensuring the fast and effective protection of the natural resources in question.

Staying with the same example, the three actor groups will mobilize their own portfolios of resources, which will be modified in part based on the decision made in relation to the problem definition (see above), with a view to obtaining legislative decisions that reflect their interests and values. During this process, it is possible to observe multiple exchanges of resources between these actors that materialize in the form of cooperative or conflictive negotiations. These exchanges concern in particular the resources ‘Information’ (expert opinions, second opinions etc), ‘Organization’ (provision or blocking of access to development procedures and consultations for members of farming organizations, political-administrative actors outside of agricultural policy and non-governmental organizations [NGOs]), ‘Time’ (eventual modification of the duration of the official consultation period for the proposed legislation), ‘Property’ (use of identical computer programs by the three actor groups or conversely, of intentionally different programs) and ‘Force’ (organization of public demonstrations with tractors at the seat of parliament, for example, la Place fédérale in Bern).

Following the battle surrounding the legislation, the political-administrative programme enters into force. This product contains provisions for, among other things, the payment of subsidies to farmers who meet the minimum ecological requirements. Of course the aim of these subsidies is not to make farmers happy, otherwise it would be possible to award similarly large volumes of subsidies to other professions! The aim of these subsidies is to prompt the farmers to change their behaviour in the interests of maintaining the natural state of soil and its biodiversity. Once again, an exchange of resources occurs during this stage ‘after’ the legislative decision; moreover, this stage corresponds to the moment of the implementation arising ‘before’ the production of the next policy products: the action plan and outputs.

Thanks to the law, the exchanges of resources that arise during this first stage of the implementation process (development of action plans) are better structured and the ‘quantities’ being exchanged are more accurately defined. By way of example here we can take an action plan, a mechanism involving specific measures for the protection of waters in a given location, according to Article 62, para 4, letter a of the Federal Act on the Protection of Waters of 24 January 1991. These plans usually concern several farms – their implementation is triggered by a proposal originating from a group of farmers from a single location. The final decision regarding the acceptance or rejection of such a plan proposed by the cantonal administration with responsibility for agriculture and/or actor-users of the natural resource in question (for example, industrial services for the distribution of drinking water) falls to the farmers. They must accept losses in yields on the plots involved as a result of the limitations placed on their right of ownership (Property). In exchange, based on the relevant law (product of the preceding stage in the policy cycle), they receive subsidies from public actors that the latter can mobilize with the consent of the beneficiaries (Consensus: absence of open opposition on the part of the environmental protection groups).

This distinction between the mobilization of policy action resources ‘before’ (production process for a policy programming product) and ‘after’ (implementation) proves useful given that the actors’ games can change considerably from one stage in the cycle to the next.

This distinction between policy decisions and actors applies, finally, to the third product of the programming process, that is, the political-administrative arrangement (PAA). This arrangement defines the structure of the administrative procedures and the public resources available for the implementation of the policy in question. Experience shows that the establishment of these arrangements is often as conflictive a process as that of creating legislation, as the corresponding decisions constitute eminently political public choices. There is a good reason why the task of implementing agro-environmental policies is assigned to the administration responsible for the environment, public health, spatial planning and construction or agriculture. As is the case with the process for the production of the PAP, in the course of setting up the PAA the actors mobilize and exchange their action resources. Again, the final decision not only concerns the actors involved in the decision-making; it establishes a structure enabling such actors (who may or not be identical to those involved in the production of the PAA) to position themselves in relation to the other actors. The same applies to the resources made available for these arrangements that are also the object of the decision-making despite not being an integral part of the administrative structure in question; the latter has an existence of its own that is not basically dependent on a specific endowment with resources. Neither does the decision itself create new resources. It merely allocates them or, possibly, establishes the organizational basis for their creation (in the form of taxes and fees).

Ultimately, therefore, a policy (set of decision) exists thanks to the actor-producers and their resources. In this sense it has an ‘existence in itself’, as each of its products is the result of the mobilization of resources by each of the three groups of actors involved. Without actors, there are no policies, and without resources, there are no actors. Furthermore, the content and scope of each of the six products of public policies depends on actors that are politically willing and capable of mobilizing their resources in the context of processes of cooperation or confrontation. This also applies to the processes of resource mobilization in the stage after the decision about the outputs. The change in behaviour on the part of the target groups is, by definition, a process of mobilization of public action resources (in many cases, the renunciation of Property in exchange for Money, Law, Force and Consensus). It should be noted that the provision for changing behaviour and subsequently, the fact of effectively changing behaviour, does not form part of a policy but is its result. The state cannot create impacts but only produce outputs. The output itself is the object of negotiations (sometimes with politically important stakes) other than the decisions regarding the political-administrative programmes; however, the changing of actual behaviour remains the consequence of the mobilization of resources in the stage ‘after’ the decision regarding the output (which the target groups may comply with or not). Thus the key resources are Law (right of opposition), Property and sometimes Force.

Causality models, actor triangles and resources

In accordance with the basic analytical model, as proposed, I suggest that every policy embodies a more or less explicit and concrete causality model in relation to each of its products that is composed of two types of hypotheses shared by the dominant actors: the causal hypothesis or hypotheses and the intervention hypothesis or hypotheses (see Knoepfel et al, 2001, 2006, 2011, updated in Knoepfel et al, 2010: 34). This model enables us, among other things, to identify a specific constellation of public and private actors for each policy, which we refer to as the ‘basic triangle’ of this policy.

In this section I suggest, moreover, that this causality model, in particular, that accompanying the first product (definition of the public problem), has significant impacts on the distribution of the public action resources and, above all, on the modalities of the exchange of resources between the actors. Causality models that differ considerably in time and space can exist for public problems that are defined in politically similar or identical terms. This is primarily due to causal hypotheses regarding the causes of a public problem that can prove very different, depending on the actors that they identify as ‘target groups’, that is, the social actors that are supposed to be at the root of the problem or at least capable of contributing to its resolution.

Hence the first-generation environmental policies defined the problem of pollution as a local problem associated with densely populated urban agglomerations and, as a result, designated the emitters of the pollution in these areas (households, trade, industry) as target groups (Knoepfel et al, 2011: 287ff). Similarly the first social policies designated all workers who pay social contributions and employers as the group ‘responsible’ for the poverty of particularly vulnerable people (principle of insurance based on t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Foundations and analytical dimensions
• Part II: New conceptual developments: Resource-based approach and analytical dimensions
• Part III: The 10 public action resources
• Part IV: Outlook and advice for practical application
• Conclusion: Strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach
• References