ABSTRACT
Transforming policy ambitions into practice is a difficult process. Formulation efforts can be done well or poorly, can reflect some wholesale or partial effort to match knowledge about policy goals and means in a sophisticated way linked to improving outcomes, or can be driven by personal interests, crowd dynamics, or legislative and partisan bargains which militate against detailed and rigorous analysis. Several common ways in which designs have emerged and evolved over time have been identified in the literature, which help us understand why policy designs look the way they do. These processes include ‘replacement’, ‘re-calibration’, ‘patching’, ‘stretching’, and ‘layering’ and are discussed in turn here.
