ABSTRACT
There are many types of policy instruments that are based not on the organizational resources of government but on their authority. These are often central features of many policy designs in which governments wish to set various standards of conduct and then exercise ‘legitimate coercion’ in attaining them. All these kinds of tools involve and rely primarily upon the ability of governments to direct or steer targets in the directions they would prefer them to go through the use of the real or perceived threat of state-enforced sanctions. While treasure resources, discussed in Chapter 11, are often used to encourage ‘positive’ behaviour – that is, behaviour which is aligned with government goals – and authoritative actions can be used for this purpose, the latter are more often used in a ‘negative’ sense, that is, to prevent or discourage types of behaviour which are incongruent with government expectations.
