LIST OF PANELS

The study of policy instruments has offered a new starting point for the study of policy-making, outside of a more traditional focus on policy content or policy actors. As tools of government (Hood, 1986), they allowed to focus on policy styles and policy design, questioning the coherence between policy objectives and the means to achieve them (Howlett, 2001; Rayner & Howlett, 2009). As technologies of government embodying particular ideas about problems and the role of the State, they also offered a different lens to make sense of policy change (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007). For all its shift in perspective, though, the focus on policy instruments inexorably brings research back to the usual suspects, i.e. actors, interests, ideas and broader institutions, as instruments are inherently political. The most salient case in point is the emergence of the concept of “instrument constituencies” in recent literature. Concerned with the “supply side of policy-making” (Simons & Voß, 2018), instrument constituencies are the communities of actors existing for and because of particular policy instruments. Instrument constituencies could provide answers to how solutions are matched to policy problems (Béland & Howlett, 2016).

This panel proposes to question the nexus between policy instruments and policy actors in the policy-making process, including but not limited to instrument constituencies. The puzzle here is that of how the practices of a set of actors influence and are influenced by instruments. This calls for an exploration of, for instance, how sets of actors shape, manipulate, or are constrained by instruments; the debates that occur among sets of actors promoting an instrument; the conflicts between sets of actors promoting different instruments; the resources and power relationships underlying such disputes; the transformations of instruments and their actors across time or along the stages of the policy process; the practices of collaboration between state and private actors working with a particular instrument.

This panel also welcomes international perspectives that could focus on the transnational circulation of policy instruments across countries or policy sectors, via the sets of actors that promote them; on the building or enhancement of global instruments; or on international sets of actors sharing a common interest for certain instruments (Gaidet & Fouilleux, 2018). The nexus between policy instruments and policy actors may be explored from both directions: starting from the sets of actors, communities or constituencies that promote a specific instrument; or starting from a policy instrument moving towards the actors involved.

Panel organizers expect three types of papers: theoretical papers, exploring the concepts underlying the nexus between policy actors and instruments; methodological papers, exploring ways to study interactions between policy actors and instruments; empirical papers, including papers with a socio-historical or long-term approach questioning the effects of time on the interactions between policy actors and instruments. For the last two types of papers, we welcome single case studies, comparative studies, and studies focusing on international instruments or actors.