ABSTRACT
A significant part of policy design activity, as we have seen, involves matching policy goals with the ideas formulators hold about policy means or tools. Understanding policy instrument choices and the range of possibilities present in any design situation requires both an understanding of what kinds of instrument options exist, which subset of those is generally considered feasible or possible in a given context, and which among that smaller subset of all possible tools is deemed by policy experts to be the most appropriate to use at a given time. In the effort to help deal with these questions, students of policy formation and policy instruments in a variety of academic disciplines have over the years developed several models or conceptual schemes which help to explain how policy designers go about their tasks.
