ABSTRACT
A significant part of policy-making activity involves matching policy goals with the ideas formulators hold about feasible and desirable mixes of policy means. Fields interested in studying public policy, such as political science and political sociology, have traditionally been concerned with studying policy “inputs” or the dynamics of public policy formation. Assessing and answering Salomon’s questions required scholars interested in policy design to engage in a lengthy process of social scientific analysis and model building related to the study of implementation tools. A government regulation requiring a licence in order to use a particular pesticide, for example, is a policy tool expected to give effect to a set of policy objectives within a set of aims and implementation preferences. Classifying procedural instruments just as Hood had done for their substantive counterparts, that is, in accordance with the type of “governing resource” on which they primarily rely for their effectiveness, generates a useful preliminary taxonomy of procedural tools.
