Chapter 10
Designing Effective Programs
Michael Howlett, Ishani Mukherjee, and Jeremy Rayner
Program design is part of a more general effort on the part of governments to systematically develop or design efficient and effective policies (Bobrow & Dryzek, 1987; Bobrow, 2006). This is typically done through the application of knowledge about policy means gained from experience and reason to the development and adoption of courses of action that are thought to be most likely to succeed in attaining desired goals or aims (Howlett & Rayner, 2013).
Not all policies and programs are designed in this sense, of course, and some emerge from processes such as bargaining or log-rolling in which the quality of the causal or logical linkages between different components of a program may be less significant than other values, such as political or electoral gain or loss avoidance. However many do result from more deliberate efforts of governments to forge a clear relationship between policy goals and the means used, and expected, to address them (Dorst, 2011).
Program design is thus a major theme of contemporary policy research, aimed at improving the understanding of how the processes, methods, and tools of policymaking are employed to better formulate effective policies and programs and to understand the reasons that such designs are not always forthcoming (Howlett & Lejano, 2013; Howlett, Mukherjee, & Woo, forthcoming).
This chapter outlines the nature of the study of policy design in general with a specific focus on policy programs and the lessons derived from this study regarding the general conditions that contribute to effective program design. The main segment distills and presents existing knowledge about effective practice in policy program design. By illustrating policy programs as an intermediary level of policymaking situated between broad policy goals, on one hand, and specific settings of policy instrument combinations, on the other, this section sets out the evolution of modern principles defining effective design. Research findings and evidence about effective practices are then presented identifying the design needs that must be addressed if superior policy programs are to emerge from the design process. In particular, this section derives lessons about maximizing complementarity between policy components, enhancing goodness of fit between program elements and governance contexts, and understanding the design constraints that limit the degrees of freedom available for program design.
Components of Public Policy and Effective Program Design
In one sense of the term, program design is a verb describing the manner in which the policy formulation process creates a program sensitive to context-specific constraints. However, design is also a noun describing the resulting policy product that emerges from the formulation process.
What is it that is designed in policy and program design? Here it is important to recognize (see table 10.1) that policies are composed of several elements, distinguishing between abstract or theoretical and conceptual goals, specific program content or objectives, and operational settings or calibrations (Hall, 1993; Howlett & Cashore, 2009). A policy design consists of specific types of policy tools or instruments that are bundled or combined in a principled manner into policy portfolios or packages in the effort to attain policy goals and aims.
Table 10.1 Components of a Policy Mix and the Position of Policy Programs
| Policy Content | High-Level Abstraction | Program-Level Operationalization | Specific On-the-Ground Measures |
| Policy ends or aims | Policy goals: What general types of ideas govern policy development (e.g., environmental protection, economic development)? | Program objectives: What does policy formally aim to address (e.g., saving wilderness or species habitat, increasing harvesting levels to create processing jobs)? | Operational settings: What are the specific on-the-ground requirements of policy (e.g., considerations about sustainable levels of harvesting)? |
| Policy means or tools | Instrument logic: What general norms guide implementation preferences (e.g., preferences for the use of coercive instruments or moral suasion)? | Program mechanisms: What specific types of instruments are used (e.g., the use of different tools such as tax incentives, or public enterprises)? | Tool calibrations: What are the specific ways in which the instrument is used (e.g., designations of higher levels of subsidies, the use of mandatory versus voluntary regulatory guidelines or standards)? |
Source: Howlett and Rayner (2013).
Each of these elements is conceived and created, or designed, by policymakers in the course of the policymaking process. Some components of a policy are abstract and exist at the level of ideas and concepts, while others are concrete and directly affect administrative practice on the ground. Program design exists between these two levels, operationalizing abstract goals and means and encompassing on-the-ground measures and instrument calibrations.
As presented in table 10.1, the elements occupying these different levels of policy design are related to one another in a nested fashion. Program design therefore warrants an integrated view of different levels of policy goals and means in order to ensure that the elements that compose a program reinforce rather than contradict or conflict with each other (Meijers & Stead, 2004; Briassoulis, 2005).
Seen in this larger context, a policy program is a distinctive part of a policy portfolio comprising a combination of policy instruments or program mechanisms, arranged to meet policy objectives and informing the design and content of on-the-ground measures (Howlett, 2011). Policy programs thus occupy a central position translating high-level goals and instrument logics and aspirations into operational settings and tool calibrations that can be implemented on the ground in specific policy circumstances.
Exactly how different elements should be combined to create effective and efficient programs is the central question and problem facing policy and program designers. To illustrate the above conceptualization further, examples from US land conservation policy and a constituent Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program are presented here. The US government, through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), currently makes payments of about $1.8 billion per year through contracts with almost 700,000 farmers and landowners, who agree to withhold agricultural activity on 26.8 million acres of ecologically sensitive land (US Department of Agriculture, 2013). Instead of farming on sensitive areas of their land, these farmers agree to “remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and plant grassers or trees that will improve water quality and improve waterfowl and wildlife habitat” (US Department of Agriculture, 2013). Table 10.2 displays the policy components of the largest PES program globally, namely, the CRP.
Table 10.2 Components of the US Conservation Reserve Program
| Policy Content | |||
| High-Level Abstraction | Program-Level Operationalization | Specific On-the-Ground Measures | |
| Policy ends or aims | Goals: What general types of ideas govern policy development? Ecosystem services, or the benefits that people derive from natural systems, need to be secured since they are not accounted for and therefore undercut by the economy. |
Objectives: What does policy formally aim to address? Conserving and reestablishing valuable land cover to help improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, and reduce loss of wildlife habitat. |
Settings: What are the specific on-the-ground requirements of policy? Examples are considerations about which land area types are a priority for the program and mechanisms for setting up payment transfers through local agencies. |
| Policy means or tools | Instrument logic: What general norms guide implementation preferences? Using financial instruments or creating markets are effective ways to secure ecosystem services by transforming the conservation of positive externalities into financial benefits for local providers. |
Mechanisms: What specific types of instruments are used? Conditional cash transfers or payment contracts with landowners to conserve instead of develop ecologically sensitive areas. |
Calibrations: What are the specific ways in which the instrument is used? Examples are yearly payments, length (years) that contracts are valid, enrollment eligibility, adjusting for ecological sensitivity land over time. |
Source: Howlett and Rayner (2013).
In implementing the CRP, the main goal of overall land conservation policy in the United States centers on the attempt to correct a perceived market failure. That is, policymakers have recognized that most of the benefits obtained from ecosystem services, such as water quality, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, recreation, nutrient cycling, erosion prevention, and soil creation, occur as positive externalities or benefits are unaccounted for by the economy; hence, they remain essential but invisible or are ignored by key sector actors in making their decisions about, for example, which farming techniques to use or which crops to plant and where. In addition, these services emerge out of the preservation of natural systems, which is a general public good, while their conservation is often conflicting with most extractive economic activities, such as intensive agriculture. The instrument logic that follows is that since the economy will always undermine the provision of these nonmarket positive externalities, the use of a tool such as compensation can be used to alter these relations and better link the interests of the general public and private agricultural actors in order to better conserve local and larger ecosystems (Wunder, 2007).
Within this general high-level framework, the formal objective of the CRP program is the conservation of ecologically vital land areas that ameliorate water quality, mitigate soil erosion, and diminish the depletion of wildlife habitat (US Department of Agriculture, 2013). The mechanisms or the specific types of instruments adopted by the CRP program take the form of conditional cash transfers or payment contracts with landowners to conserve ecologically sensitive acres on their land. Supplementary instruments in the package include cost-sharing schemes organized by the implementing agency—in this case, the Farm Service Agency active in each state. The settings, which embody the specific, on-the-ground needs of the land conservation mix of different instruments, include defining the land-cover categories (such as wetland or riparian buffer zones or wildlife corridors) that are considered in the program and the priority assigned to each. And the specific calibrations of the instruments contained within the CRP include the regular adjustments and fine-tuning of payment amounts, contract lengths, and eligibility criteria based on economic indicators such as national budgets and inflation.
Policy Programs and Policy Design: A Short History
The main emphasis of recent policy and program design research has been on the importance of using the full range of policy components available when putting together a program while avoiding unnecessary duplication and conflicts between policy and program components, which can result in inefficiencies or program failures (Gunningham, Grabosky, & Sinclair, 1998). Contemporary design thinking also recognizes the limitations placed on the adoption of program elements by their situation within an overall policy framework, levels of administrative capacity, budgeting and personnel resources, and the requirements of successful implementation. In setting program-level objectives and mechanisms, effective design pertains to maximizing formulation capacities and opportunities for gaining relevant knowledge of both more abstract government goals, ambitions, and preferences and matching the more technical aspects of government financial and human resource availability and capabilities to these goals in a manner that is realistic and feasible in the design context.
Over time, researchers have articulated a series of principles to help promote better and more effective program designs. Maxims for effective policy and program design developed in the late 1950s focused on efficiency concerns and urged the parsimonious use of policy tools. An oft-cited rule proposed by Jan Tinbergen in 1952, for example, suggested that better designs emerged when the number of policy tools was directly proportional to the number of policy goals a program was expected to achieve, with the optimal ratio being 1:1 (Tinbergen, 1952; del Rio & Howlett, 2013). This research obtained a more dynamic component in the 1970s when scholars began to deal with questions about the proper sequencing or phasing of policy efforts over time (Taeihagh et al., 2013). Studies by G. Bruce Doern and his colleagues, for example, promoted the idea that more effective program design involved the initial use of the least coercive instruments possible to address a problem, with governments “moving up the scale of coercion” to more intrusive instruments only in response to the failure of less coercive tools to achieve policy goals and objectives (Doern & Phidd, 1983; Doern & Wilson, 1974; Woodside, 1986).
In recent years program design thinking has refined and expanded on these initial insights. The articulation of principles of what constitutes a good design has evolved from thinking about relatively simple one goal–one instrument situations to address issues related to the use of more complex policy mixes or bundles of tools that aim to unite multiple interconnected goals and the means to achieve them across multiple levels of government (Howlett & del Rio, forthcoming). The need to devise program objectives and mechanisms by first envisioning a mix of tools and goals has been articulated not just by scholars of policy design, but also by practitioners. Daugbjerg and Sønderskov (2012) in their review of organic food policies in Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for example, noted the observation among practitioners that “significant growth in green markets is most likely to result where a combination of policy instruments directed at the supply side and demand side of the market is simultaneously implemented” (p. 415).
In pursuing these inquiries into the deliberate packaging of policy elements into programs targeted to achieve certain policy goals, current research has focused on balancing two aspects of the policy relationships set out in table 10.1: the policy-program linkages and the program-measures linkages highlighted in that table (see table 10.3).
Table 10.3 Program-Level Needs for Effective Design
| Policy Elements | ||||
| High-Level Abstraction | Program-Level Operationalization | Specific Measures | ||
| Policy goals: What ideas govern policy development? Instrument logic: What norms guide implementation preferences? |
Policy—Program Linkages (I) | Objectives: What does the policy formally aim to address? Mechanisms: What are the specific types of policy instruments or elements, and how are they used? |
Program– Measure Linkages (II) | Settings: What are the specific aims of policy? Calibrations: What are the specific ways for using the instruments? |
Source: Howlett and Rayner (2013).
The first set of concerns, depicted as policy-program linkages (I) in table 10.3, shows the need to establish program objectives and mechanisms that fit overall, broader policy goals and logics of implementation. In the CRP example, the policy-program linkages establish a benchmark for good program design judged by establishing how well the program's objectives of preventing soil erosion, improving water quality, and preserving wildlife habitat uphold the overall policy aim of conserving ecosystem services through the use of financial incentives encouraging conservation.
Second, concerns for program-measure linkages (II) establish the need to fit program mechanisms to specific on-the-ground policy measures. In the CRP case, this involves the conditions that determine how well the payment agreements between the government and landowners reflect the priorities given to the conservation of different land types and how successfully these agreements are implemented in practice, for example, through the fair assessment of yearly payments and contract lengths.
Principles for Designing Programs: Policy-Program Linkages (I)
Studies over the past two decades exploring “smart regulation,” or the development of regulatory frameworks recognizing the potential complementarities and contractions between different forms of regulatory tools and financial incentives and other instruments in environment policy and land use management and planning (Gunningham et al., 1998; Rayner & Howlett, 2009; Ben-Zadok, 2013), have helped underline the significance and effectiveness of program designs that are compatible with existing governance conditions and circumstances. From such studies, several principles have emerged that illustrate and instruct how effective policy-program linkages can be designed.
Goodness of Fit: Matching Governance Mode and Policy Capacities
One such principle is the notion of goodness of fit. Effective policy designs need to reflect and respond to the specific contextual features of the policy sectors they involve. How well a program is aligned with context-dependent realities determines its goodness of fit. These include, for example, existing governance actors and structures operating within various policy regime levels (the international, national, subnational, and local levels of governments) within which the policy is embedded (Howlett, 2011). Different governance arrangements and configurations of institutions (such as the existence of federalism or a significant international treaty framework) influence specific types of governmental and social actor capacities and capabilities, and these limitations and strengths inform the feasibility of potential program-level options and alternative arrangements of objectives and mechanisms (Majone, 1975; Gilabert & Lawford-Smith, 2012).
Studies of governance modes and policy styles, mostly stemming from Europe and North America throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Richardson, Gustafsson, & Jordan, 1982; Freeman, 1985; Kiss & Neij, 2011), for example, have described several common patterns of such governance arrangements that help operationalize this concern. While many possible permutations and combinations of such governance arrangements exist, recent policy and administrative studies have focused on four basic, or “ideal,” types found in many jurisdictions and sectors in liberal democratic states (see table 10.4) that need to be reflected in policy program designs in order for these designs to be effective in these specific contexts.
Table 10.4 Different Governance Modes and Policy Capacity Considerations
| Mode of Governance | Central Focus of Governance Activity | Form of State Control of Governance Relationships | Overall Governance Aim | Prime Preferred Service Delivery Mechanism | Key Procedural Tool for Policy Implementation |
| Legal governance | Legality—promotion of law and order in social relationships | Legislation, law, and rules | Legitimacy—voluntary compliance | Rights—property, civil, human | Courts and litigation |
| Corporate governance | Management—of major organized social actors | Plans | Controlled and balanced rates of socioeconomic development | Targets—operational objectives | Specialized and privileged advisory committees |
| Market governance | Competition—promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises | Contracts and regulations | Resource and cost efficiency and control | Prices—controlling for externalities, supply, and demand | Regulatory boards, tribunals, and commissions |
| Network governance | Promotion of interactor organizational activity | Collaboration | Co-optation of dissent and self-organization of social actors | Networks of governmental and nongovernment organizations | Subsidies and expenditures on network brokerage activities |
Source: Considine and Lewis (2003).
Each mode of governance listed in table 10.4 has a different focus, form of control, aim, and preferred service delivery mechanism, and procedural policy orientation. Government actions through legal and network governance, for example, can change many aspects of policy behavior but do so indirectly through the alteration of the relationships between different kinds of social actors. This is unlike corporate and market governance, each of which involves a preference for more overt state direction. The program elements of policy designs must incorporate this contextual knowledge if they are to be feasible or effective in practice
Although the level of concern for matching governance context and program elements is always high, the task becomes more complex when the policy or program area extends beyond the jurisdiction of a single level of government to incorporate multilevel governance considerations. Designing programs that efficiently and effectively address policy aims often involves thinking about and coordinating aspects of policy arrangements that occur over multiple levels of policy activity (Howlett & del Rio, forthcoming). All of these elements, along with the details of implementation discussed in the following section, must be coordinated and integrated if optimal results are to be attained.
This is well illustrated by the case of environmental policymaking and program design across the nations of the European Union (EU) after 1960. In many of these countries, a previous penchant for the use of regulatory and command-and-control instruments aligned with more active forms of state governance has given way to more market-based tools as governance arrangements in general have shifted in this direction under the influence of the EU. However within this general tendency, a great variety still exists today in the type of market or economic-based tools preferred in each European country. For example, the Nordic nations have governance conditions and capacities that allow a better fit with second-generation market-based instruments [MBIs] (such as emissions trading), whereas less wealthy European countries “are still employing first-generation MBIs such as simple effluent taxes and user charges” (Jordan, Wurzel, & Zito, 2005, p. 486).
Goodness of fit with overall governance arrangements is key in designing effective programs. Evaluations of the European environmental policy program arrangements cited above, for example, have highlighted that moves toward planning and steering in such contexts involve indirect coordination of key actors by governments, requiring “a high level of government policy capacity to identify and utilize specific policy tools capable of successful moving policy targets in a required direction” (Howlett & Rayner, 2013; Arts & van Tatenhove, 2006). Better program designs ensure that program content matches their prerequisite governance contexts. Ones that do not are prone to failure.
Degrees of Freedom: The Impact of Layering
Even when this match of context and content exists, not all possible program options may be available to designers. A second design consideration that has surfaced for policy and program design at this level is one surrounding the relative ease or difficulty with which policy designers can change the status quo given the embeddedness or tractability of past policy and program choices. Conceptually, if unlimited degrees of freedom are available to policymakers, then any combination of policy tools and program objectives might be possible in any circumstance (Howlett & Rayner, 2013). However, practical experience with large-scale institutional changes has suggested the existence of this amount of elbow room for mixing or designing policy elements is uncommon, and most program design contexts are rather heavily path dependent (Pierson, 2000; David, 2005).
That is, other than in completely new areas of policy, or in cases where a full rethinking or overhaul of old policy might be possible given dramatic political change or policy crisis, most program designers typically work with very restricted degrees of freedom or within constraints created by layers of existing policy mixes that cannot be easily altered (Thelen, 2003; van der Heijden, 2011). As corroborated by evidence from studies of the evolution of sectors such as welfare policy and natural resource sectors over long periods of time, most existing policy combinations have developed incrementally through a gradual historical process of the piecemeal addition or alteration of elements of policies and programs in successive rounds of design and partial redesign (Lindblom, 1959; Howlett & Migone, 2011). Such mixes may be disorganized (Bode, 2006) but are nevertheless difficult to change (Hacker, 2005).
The temporality of policy development processes in such context and the constraints placed on contemporary designers by past designs and decisions are, like the governance contexts cited above, key issues in program design that necessitate the examination of the preexisting historical organization of policy components in order to gauge the feasibility of moving specific design options forward (Christensen, Laegreid, & Wise, 2002).
Many pension, health, and sustainability strategies, for example, have suffered from incremental adjustment through layering, or the process whereby new elements are simply added to an existing regime without abandoning previous ones (van der Heijden, 2011; Thelen, 2003). Many efforts at the integration of various resource management regimes, such as the development of national forest strategies or integrated coastal zone management, for instance, have failed when powerful interests are able to keep favorable goals, instruments, and settings in place, such as unsustainable fishing or timber-cutting quotas that support an industry, and thus limit the extent and impact of new policy initiatives (Rayner & Howlett, 2009). In addition to the governance context, then, effective program design must also take these temporal contexts into account in proposing new remedies, often leading to an emphasis on patching programs rather than repackaging them altogether (Howlett et al., 2014; Howlett & Rayner, 2013).
Principles for Designing Programs: Program-Measure Linkages (II)
Effective program design must address policy-program linkages, but understanding the program-measure level of interactions among program elements (see table 10.3) is equally critical in promoting the chances of any particular program attaining its goals once put into practice. On-the-ground program elements involve the articulation and designation of aspects of what Elinor Ostrom (2011; Ostrom & Basurto, 2010) designated as the “rules of institutional design and analysis.” These include designing program components that cover various rules and standards developed by government to implement its programs. These include (Ostrom, 2011):
- Boundary rules: Who is covered by this program? Is participation and coverage automatic, or is a new participant allowed to join by paying some kind of entry charge, fee, or tax?
- Position rules: How does an actor move from being a target of a program activities to one with a specialized task in program implementation, such as the chair of a management committee?
- Scope rules: What activities are covered by the program?
- Choice rules: What choices do various types of actors have in relation to the actions they can or are expected to take in the program?
- Aggregation rules: What understandings exist concerning how actors can affect or alter the rules affecting their actions. Do certain actions require prior permission from, or agreement of, others?
- Information rules: What information about the program or relevant to it is held secret, and what information is made public?
- Payoff rules: How large are the sanctions that can be imposed for breaking any of the rules identified above? How is conformance to rules monitored? Who is responsible for sanctioning nonconformers? How reliably are sanctions imposed? Are any positive rewards offered?
Achieving effectiveness with respect to deploying program mechanisms at this level relies on ensuring that the mechanisms and calibrations enacted by these rules match the objectives and settings set out at the program level. This means establishing program rules and content that display coherence, consistency, and congruence with each other and with program objectives and contexts (Howlett & Rayner, 2007). Within this general rubric, however, several specific principles of effective program design exist to help guide program designers. Two of these principles are maximizing complementary effects and the need to balance the attainment of equity, efficiency, economy, and environmental concerns in developing on-the-ground measures and rules.
Maximizing Complementary Effects
One key principle at this level of analysis and practice in program design is to maximize “complementary relationships” while mitigating incompatibility between policy elements in the formulation of policy portfolios and program elements (Gunningham et al., 1998).
Policy design studies have pointed out that many existing policy mixes are not composed exclusively of tools or elements that complement and enhance each other (Grabosky, 1995). Evidence from the drive for renewable energy and energy efficiency as a consequence of climate change and energy security concerns in the last two decade has also shown that internally conflicting elements of policy mixes often elicit contradictory responses from those who are the targets of a program (Del Rio, Silvosa, & Gomez, 2011; Boonekamp, 2006). Scholars investigating policy combinations in these sectors throughout the latter half of the 1990s, for example, noted that policy packages and programs combining command-and-control regulation with modes of voluntary compliance were usually internally contradictory and offset each other. This finding is common in many other sectors where both regulation and voluntary compliance measures are used in the same program at the same time and these kinds of internal contradictions should be avoided in effective program design.
Duplication is another issue that is usually warned against, going back to Tinbergen's early analysis. While some programs, like endangered species legislation or criminal law, contain duplicative elements whose redundancy enhances the resiliency inherent in them and can help to ensure that stated policy goals are achieved, this is not the result in most cases (Grabosky, 1995; Braathen & Croci, 2005; Braathen, 2007). As Hou and Brewer (2010) have noted, the real issue is not to simply eliminate all duplication on a priori grounds but rather to design programs composed of tools that complement or supplement each other and are effective within given contexts and goal states. Combinations such as the use of command-and-control regulation to prevent undesirable behavior while simultaneously providing financial incentives to encourage desirable behavior, for example, will achieve more effective policy responses than single tool selections in most circumstances.
Balancing Equity, Efficiency, Economy, and Environmental Concerns
A second concern here centers less on policy tools and their calibrations and more on program settings, or the operationalization of specific program objectives. Numerous case studies of programs, including social policy experience in many countries, have suggested that attaining four general principles in program design at the program-measure interface is critical for program effectiveness: that is, attaining “equity, efficiency, economy and environment” goals in on-the-ground program design (Stanton & Herscovitch, 2013).
Addressing efficiency as part of a policy program has been addressed above. Considerations of the need for redundancy in the light of policy goals are critical here.
The principle of economy relates to matching the cost of program initiatives and elements to budgetary and personnel resources and balancing these two aspects. In the context of programs such as those involving progressive taxation, social security benefits, health insurance, and retirement incomes, for example, equity is understood to have both proportional (based on different resource endowments of policy targets) and equal (equal treatment of targets with similar endowments) components, and a superior program design takes both aspects into account. For example, proposals for national disability insurance programs in Australia involved a setting of proportionality, or unequal treatment of policy targets based on different degrees of disabilities. However, it also included an equity component in fostering equal treatment of the same disability across the nation (Stanton & Herscovitch, 2013).
But as Justen et al. (Justen, Fearnley, Givoni, & Macmillen, 2014; Justen, Schippl, Lenz, & Fleischer, 2014) note, equity is also a key consideration and participation is a key component of superior program design, not just for legitimation purposes but because it can bring new information to the design process that formal analyses can miss. This is especially the case in programs pertaining to the deployment of new technologies such as genomics or nanotechnology, for example, which require the coordinated participation of producers and consumers if new product development is to result in desirable commodities. Encouraging collaborative ties between different types of policy actors can make programs more effective by strengthening knowledge linkages and fostering innovation. While making decisions regarding policy mechanisms or about the type of instruments and their use, effective program design should consider not only needs related to operation and evaluation but also communication.
The environment is a fourth area of concern or criterion of superior program design evaluation that has joined the other three in recent decades. This often takes the shape of designing to meet larger economic goals while also attaining environmental goals such as sustained growth (Barnett & Shore, 2009). Returning to the CRP example, one of the main critiques of the scheme was that once the contracts were signed, farmers were locked into contracts without any scope for regular inflation adjustments. Designing inflation adjustment mechanisms into the CRP could address this shortcoming in the program's efficiency and enhance its environmental effectiveness at the same time.
Several design techniques can help promote effective program designs in meeting these goals and their combination. Program pilots and experiments, for example, can help develop mutually supportive combinations of program elements while limiting the risk of failure in working out the details and modalities of such efforts. That is, as Benjamin Sovacool (2012) noted in his assessment of ten renewable energy programs in developing countries, for example, “Effective programs typically begin with pilot programs or with feasibility assessments before installing systems and scaling up to larger production or distribution volumes” (p. 9159). Such pilot programs need to be carefully protected from political pressure to evaluate them prematurely, causing adoption of program elements that subsequently prove problematic or rejection of those with latent value, a problem that has been recognized in the literature of program evaluation for some time (Weiss, 1970) and that effective program design processes must surmount.
Summary
Policy design is an activity conducted by a range of policy actors at different levels of action in the hope of improving policymaking and policy outcomes through the accurate anticipation of the consequences of government actions and the articulation of specific courses of action to be followed to achieve different levels of policy goals and ambitions.
This chapter has located program design within the context of designing complete policy packages. At the program level, from this design perspective, better programs will result from improving assessments of the theoretical effectiveness and the feasibility of policy alternatives at both the policy-program level and the program-measures interfaces.
In this perspective, the central concerns in the design of program are related to answering questions about how mixes of policy components are constructed, which methods yield superior results in developing these mixes, and what the likely result is of their (re)design. As has been set out above, each policy and program is a complex arrangement of ends and means-related goals, objectives, instruments, and calibrations that exists in a specific governance and temporal setting, and these contexts must be taken into account if effective program design is to result from design efforts
Contemporary design discussions at the policy-program level, however, also complement and advance earlier notions of superior design aimed at the program-mechanism level that argued for parsimony in tool use and the need for coherence, consistency, and congruence in design relationships and components. At this level, efforts have been made to articulate various methods through which designs of on-the-ground program measures can meet concerns for equity, efficiency, economy, and environmental quality while maximizing complementary interactive effects and minimizing negative or counter-productive ones.
Table 10.5 summarizes the design principles set out in this chapter, which can help ensure better policy and program integration through improved linkages between different policy components at the two levels cited above.
Table 10.5 Balancing Policy Elements for Effective Program Design
| Policy Content | ||||
| High-Level Abstraction | Program-Policy Linkages | Program-Level Operationalization | Program Implementation Linkages | Specific Measures |
| Goals: What ideas govern policy development? Logic: What norms guide implementation preferences? |
Goodness of fit: With governance styles (legal, corporate, market, or network) Existing state capacities and social capabilities Multilevel policymaking Degrees of freedom: Working within constraints and existing layers of policy component mixes Accounting for temporality and historical arrangements of policies |
Objectives: What does the policy formally aim to address? Mechanisms: What are the specific types of policy instruments or elements, and how are they used? |
Maximizing complementary effects: Assessing interactions between multiple policy components Reducing internally conflicting elements and attaining coherence, consistency, and congruence between program elements and measures Balancing the 4 Es in policy settings: Equity (both proportionality and equality) Efficiency (alignment with economic goals such as employment and growth) Economy (managing budgetary costs) Environmental Concerns (maintaining sustainability of programs) |
Settings: What are the specific aims of policy? Calibrations: What are the specific ways for using the instrument? |
Source: Howlett and Rayner (2013).
The realization of the dual need, confirmed by policy practice, to match policy context and program content is helping contemporary program designers in their efforts to deal with policy problems that increasingly demand ever more complex governmental responses.
Understanding governance arrangements and how past policy processes have created and modified the elements of existing programs is critical to evaluating the chance of success of policy rules and measures on-the-ground and establishes the basic parameters within which designers of specific on-the-ground measures work. By understanding the basic nesting of effective program design at two levels of policy-program and program-measures, policy designers can improve or even optimize program designs in given historical and institutional contexts.