ABSTRACT
Policy sectors – such as health policy, energy policy, transport policy and many others – constitute distinct policy regimes consisting of the current collectively accepted definition of an issue, the current relevant policies (laws, regulations, fiscal instruments, government programmes and relationships) and the actors and institutions (both inside and outside government) actively engaged in implementing and modifying them (Harris and Milkis 1989; Eisner 1994a,b). These policy regimes are often viewed as examples of a general class of stable ‘homeostatic’ systems which, once put in place, are self-adjusting or self-equilibrating in routine circumstances and often thought of as changing only under the pressure of external shocks or ‘jolts’ which introduce new extraneous elements into the system, throwing them out of equilibrium (Aminzade 1992).
