LIST OF PANELS

Policy design has gained renewed interest among policy scholars in recent years(Howlett and Lejano 2013; Howlett 2014). The new policy design orientation has abandoned the rationalistic perspective of the old orientation and is more interested in the dynamics through which policy design is generated but still retains many elements of older approaches and orientations (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015). Many of these elements remain as pre-suppositions within the new orientation although often without empirical proof or due attention having been paid to their conceptual origins. This is true of several pillars of the field, including the concepts of design modes, the empirics of design spaces, and the general subject of policy calibrations (Capano and Howlett 2020).This panel is constructed to help fill these gaps in the literature and understanding of the subject. This panel will examine three ongoing issues in the contemporary policy design thinking, that are also three fundamental elements of policy design: Design Modes, Design Spaces,  and Calibrations.

Policy design can be defined as an activity – based on deliberate attempts to pursue policy goals through gathering and applying knowledge – that occurs in specific spaces, depends on contextual conditions, and is constrained by the previous design, which structurally limits the possibility of a radically new designs and often limits changes to alterations in the calibrations of existing tool components (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015; Capano and Mukherjee 2020).

From this point of view, the new orientation of policy design studies opens the door to an interesting perspective from which to analyse the efforts of governments inn terms of their actual governance mode. These Design Modes range from the classic expert-driven technocratic paradigm espoused by early students of the policy process (Dryzek 1983) to Foucault-inspired pawns to citizen-driven participatory efforts (Ganuza, and Francés 2012);  from  co-design (Blomkamp 2018; Bason 2014)  to “authoritative instrumentalism”  Colebatch (2018). Furthermore very often, despite the specific adopted mode, policy design looks to be restricted to an ongoing “layering” (Capano 2019). Simply classifying these different modes, however, tells us very little about which is appropriate for which circumstances, a subject which it is urged policy design thinkers now take up, rather than simply pushing forward their preferred, normative, type.

Design Spaces describe the contexts affecting the process through which eligible solution are searched. They include  the “sets of the locations where a series of choices are taken” with the expectation that the configuration of such spaces affect the designs which emerge from them (Linder and Peters 1989). To date, however, here have been  few attempts to conceptualizing  these spaces, however. Various criteria of conceptual treatment have been adopted in the literature and compete there, including the government’s ability to alter the status quo (or its “capacity”) and that government’s intention to design (Howlett, Mukherjee and Woo 2015); government’s political capacity/government’s technical capacity (Capano 2018); government’s capacities/accumulation of anomalies (Capano and Mukherjee 2020). These  typological efforts delimit specific design spaces that allow to different ways to design policies (labelled in different ways like optimal, adaptive, neutral layering, tense layering, patching, packaging, stretching). Furthermore these spaces could be also conceptualized as specific arenas of power where the characteristics of policy design determines whose actors are prominent and what kind of instruments should be preferred. More and better research, however, is needed on this subject. 

Calibrations are those contextual actions and decisions through which policymakers adjust the actual setting of policy instruments with respect to the target of interest. These calibrations involve key actions in policy delivery such as increasing the number of policemen if there is a risk of a riot, increasing the number of beds in hospitals if there is an unexpected disease in the population, or altering some rules of subsidy distributions against poverty when earlier ones fail. Calibrations thus represent a huge set of instrument-based decisions that are put into place when policy-makers consider precisely how a policy will be implemented. We know  these kind of calibrations are the order of the day in policymaking, especially in the implementation stage when policies need to be delivered in an effective way (Hall 1993, Ostrom 2003) but exactly how they should be understood and what is their relationship to policy tools, governance modes and policy change, is poorly understood. There is a wealth of empirical evidence about various kinds of calibrations, some of which involve routine adjustments of ongoing policies, but little of it helps us understand what kinds of regularities or patterns exists when policymakers calibrate policies.

References

Bason, Christian. Design for Policy. New edition edition. Farnham, Surrey ; Burlington, VT: Gower Pub Co, 2014.

Blomkamp, Emma. “The Promise of Co-Design for Public Policy.” Australian Journal of Public Administration 77, no. 4 (2018): 729–43.

Capano, Giliberto and Mukherjee, Ishani. “Policy design and non-design: discerning the content of policy packaging, patching, stretching and layering”. In G.Capano and M. Howlett (eds), Modern Guide to  Public Policy (pp. 203-220), Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2020

Capano, Giliberto, and Michael Howlett. “The Knowns and Unknowns of Policy Instrument Analysis: Policy Tools and the Current Research Agenda on Policy Mixes.” SAGE Open 10, no. 1 (January 2020)

Capano, Giliberto. “Reconceptualizing Layering—From Mode of Institutional Change to Mode of Institutional Design: Types and Outputs.” Public Administration 97, no. 3 (September 2019): 590–604.

Colebatch, Hk. “The Idea of Policy Design: Intention, Process, Outcome, Meaning and Validity.” Public Policy and Administration 33, no. 4 (October 2018): 365–83.

Dryzek, John. “Don’t Toss Coins in Garbage Cans: A Prologue to Policy Design.” Journal Of Public Policy 3, no. 4 (1983): 345–67.

Ganuza, Ernesto, and Francisco Francés. “The Deliberative Turn in Participation: The Problem of Inclusion and Deliberative Opportunities in Participatory Budgeting.” European Political Science Review 4, no. 02 (2012): 283–302.

Hall, P. A. “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning and the State: The Case of Economic Policy Making in Britain.” Comparative Politics 25, no. 3 (1993): 275–96.

Howlett, Michael, and Raul Lejano. “Tales from the Crypt: The Rise and Fall (and Re-Birth?) Of Policy Design Studies.” Administration & Society 45, no. 3 (2013): 356–80.

Howlett, Michael, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jun Jie Woo. “From Tools to Toolkits in Policy Design Studies: The New Design Orientation towards Policy Formulation Research.” Policy & Politics 43, no. 2 (2015): 292–311.

Howlett, Michael. “From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Policy Design: Design Thinking beyond Markets and Collaborative Governance.” Policy Sciences 47, no. 3 (September 1, 2014): 187–207.

Linder, S. H., and B. G. Peters. “Instruments of Government: Perceptions and Contexts.” Journal of Public Policy 9, no. 1 (1989): 35–58.

Ostrom, E. “How Types of Goods and Property Rights Jointly Affect Collective Action.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 15, no. 3 (2003): 239–70.

This panel will examine three ongoing issues in the contemporary policy design thinking: Design Modes, Design Spaces and Calibrations. We expect  to receive proposal capable to show the theoretical and the empirical relevance of these three concepts.

Regarding Design modes, we expect theoretical  and empirical papers enlightening the nature or, and the interactions among, different dimensions of design modes. Actors, institutions, legacies, instruments, logic of actions should be better linked each other to understand the different ways through which they affect how policies are designed.  Furthermore there is the relevant issue of the effectiveness of  design modes that needs to be better understood in terms of political and policy trade-offs, among other subjects.

Regarding Design spaces,  we invite conceptual, empirical and methodological papers capable of operationalizing the various conceptual dimensions offered in the literature to classify these spaces. How do we measure governmental political capability, intention to change, capacity to alter the status quo, for example? How do we measure the extent of the accumulation of anomalies with respect to the status quo?  From the empirical point of view we welcome papers that, possibly in comparative perspective, show how Design  Spaces: allow actors to adopt only specific modes of design; favour or disfavour the choice of specific policy instruments; include or exclude some actors respect to others;  favour or disfavour change or stability. Finally, we especially welcome papers that, either from a theoretical or empirical point of view, focus on the possibility that actors can choose in which space a design is processed.

Regarding Calibrations, we warmly welcome theoretical and empirical papers that offer new conceptualization of the topic and thus allow it to overcome the  actual generic conceptualization that reduces changes in them to the level of only (and always) minor adjustments.  From this point of view we  think that the main dimension to work on are: the content of calibrations (what is calibrated: the previously adopted instruments or the way of deliver it?);  the goals of calibrations (stability or change?); the way to design calibrations; and who are the actors in charge of calibrations. From the empirical point of view we would encourage cross-national and cross-sectional comparative papers showing how and why policies ae calibrated and what kind of calibrations are more effective than others, and why.