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Public Policy summary
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This is my extensive summary for Public Policy, including notes from the lectures and a summary of the book "Public Policy in Action". Exam grade: 8.6.
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Public PolicyLecture 1 – Policy and Society
Agenda setting: identification and selection of problems that need serious attention
Policy development: development of a proposed course of action for dealing with a public
problem
Policy decision-making: deciding politics on the possible courses of actions by accepting the
most appropriate proposal
Policy implementation: application of the policy by one or more government organizations
Policy evaluation: determining if the efforts that were made by the government were
effective, and why and why not
Politics: the way in which societies deal with the balancing and allocation of values that is
necessary to deal with challenges that a society as a political community is confronted with.
, - Three allocation arrangements: the state (authority), the market (price mechanism)
and the community (trust in each other)
- Struggle, competition, persuasion, bargaining, negotiation and persuasion
- A political decision can be seen as a codification of the balance between specific
values that can be considered to be, as much as possible, an appropriate way of
dealing with a specific societal challenge.
Policies: structured set of means and resources that are used to influence specific societal
developments and to solve problems in a desired or planned way.
- Result of multiple decisions taken by sets of actors
Governance:
- Government is not an entity but a conglomerate of actors
- Government is not the only actor which tries to influence societal problems
- Government interventions generate continuing interactions between all kinds of
public, semi-public and private actors within several societal domains and at
different levels that try to influence the shaping of political processes
- The governance capacity of each actor refers to the problem solving capacity of each
actor, which depends on his ability to mobilize and combine relevant resources in a
structured way to achieve specific policy goals or to address specific societal
challenges
Policymaking is about constrained actors attempting to match policy goals with policy
means in a process that can be characterized as ‘applied problem-solving’.
- Technical dimension: seeks to identify the optimal relationship between goals and
tools
- Political dimension: not all actors typically agree on what constitutes a policy
problem or an appropriate ‘solution’
Public policy problem:
- Discrepancy between the actual situation and the norm of how the situation should
be in society
What is public policy? (Dye vs. Jenkins in Howlett, 2009)
- Dye: anything a government chooses to do or not to do
o Primary agent of public policy-making is a government
o Fundamental choice, this decision is made by elected politicians and other
government officials
o Public policy is a conscious choice of a government
- Jenkins: a set of interrelated decisions taken by a political actor or group of actors
concerning the selection of goals and the means of achieving them within a specified
situation where those decisions should be within the power of those actors to
achieve
o Most policies involve a series of decisions that cumulatively contribute to an
outcome
o Government’s capacity to implement its decisions is also significant
- Gives direction how to achieve public goals with a selection of means and
instruments
, o Examples of public goals: security, equality, health, development, social
integration, etc.
- Intentional collective action (by, with or without government)
- An institution in the sociological sense (very broadly, not only politics but also
society): constraining as well as enabling social behaviour
Policy universe: all actors involved in a stage in the policy cycle
Policy subsystem: only those actors with sufficient knowledge of a problem area, or a
resource at stake, to allow them to participate in the stage of the policy cycle
Government decision makers: elected officials, judges, or bureaucrats
What types of public policy are there?
- Constitutional policies: setting up new or reorganizing existing institutional
arrangements or establishing new organizations with special tasks
o Example: new ministries (e.g., ministry of migration and integration)
- Regulatory policies: policies that define government control/rules in specific cases
o Example: policies during pandemic (e.g., vaccinations)
- (Re-)distributive policies: distributing/allocating resources among actors
o Example: taxation, higher income means higher taxes
- Provisional policies: policies aimed at creating specific facilities or provisions
o Example: education, government provides education, dikes, sewerage
Stimulating policies: the creation of incentives that motivate actors to take specific
decisions which are in line with the goals that policy makers had in mind
o Example: use of subsidies to get industrial firms to improve the quality of their
waste water or recycle their waste water
Societal perspectives on public policy (Bekkers, Fenger, and Scholten H1-2)
- Policies are situated in a societal context
, o Societal transformations like globalization, technological development, aging
put new demands on public policy
o Failure to adapt leads to policy failure
- Four key transformations: Risk Society, Network Society, Liquid Society and Hollow
State
Risk society (by Ulrich Beck)
- Modern societies are characterized by new risks: manufactured, calculated vs. old
risks
o Manufactured risks: risks that are produced by the modernization process,
particularly by innovative developments in science and technology
o Calculated risks: due to the use of advanced calculation models, risks can be
forecast and controlled
o Examples: Chornobyl or Fukushima nuclear plant disaster
- New risks
o Risks do not stop at borders ‘world risk society’
o Chain reactions
o Who is responsible for what? (network of decision-makers and
responsibilities)
o Impossible to compensate for involved costs
o Complex and uncertain
o Irreversible (e.g., GMO: Genetic Modified Organism: when they are invented,
it is very difficult to stop it)
- Citizens have high expectations regarding the effectiveness of the policies that they
ask government to make, while governments suggest that by taking these measures
these risks are under control (creation of a safety utopia or a safety illusion)
- Important to democratize the process of risk definition in societies
- Public policy: politics at the level of policy subsystems to promote reflexivity
Network society (by Manuel Castells)
- Increasing importance of technology (ICT, transport)
- Information technology as a revolutionary force: vital role for information and
communication in modern society and the importance of information and knowledge
in our economic life (production and distribution of goods and serviczes)
- Digitalization: transporting information and knowledge in a speedy way and on a
global level
- Globalization
o Outsourcing
o Interdependency (network; in terms of countries being dependent on other
countries to produce certain products) and complexity (organizations are
autonomous but dependent on other organizations)
o Exchange/coordination relationships: the material organization of time-
sharing practices that works through flows
o Nodes: the concentration of sophisticated knowledge and expertise that is
necessary to operate and coordinate these flows
o Specialization in the production of goods and services on a global scale
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