Past Policy Failures Research Articles

‘Better than Doing Nothing’ – constructing support for biodiversity offsetting in Finland

ABSTRACT Despite widely covered controversies, biodiversity offsetting continues to be introduced in novel places as a solution to counter biodiversity loss. As previous studies have focused on contestation around offsetting, there is a lack of studies analyzing how actors generate consensus while constructing biodiversity offsetting policies. To assess this, we analyze the early phases of policy construction in Finland, a country that until recently did not have policy mechanisms for offsetting in place. Based on document analysis and interviews with experts, we argue that expert stakeholders’ widespread support for biodiversity offsetting is explained by the interplay of three framings in the early phase of policy development. First, expert stakeholders share an understanding of biodiversity offsetting as a necessary policy mechanism to which there are no alternative solutions. Second, divergent views on the mechanism are accommodated through maintaining an interpretatively flexible understanding of the policy mechanism. Third, concerns over past policy failures are refurbished as opportunities to learn from in developing an experimental approach to policy implementation. This designates offsetting primarily as an expert issue for technical deliberation and forecloses other policy options, while placing high expectations on the ability of experimental governance to solve problems.

Beyond automobility? Lock-in of past failures in low-carbon urban mobility innovations

Automobility, including the infrastructures, technologies and institutions that created high dependence on private car use, has led to significant environmental and climate problems and notably high carbon emissions. Now cities are attempting to move beyond this failed regime by experimenting with a range of different mobility innovations. In this paper, we examine whether emergent policy-led experiments and innovation processes in low-carbon mobility are learning from the past, or whether they are reproducing key elements of past policy failures. Through four case studies – Birmingham, Stavanger, Milton Keynes and Melbourne – we assess attempts to break out of high-carbon automobility through three key factors, namely diversification of travel options, a shift from individual to shared forms of mobility, and whether these aspects are implemented at scale. We find that while all cities show potential for diversification and sharing at scale, current modes of innovation exhibit features that may reproduce rather than reduce high-carbon automobility. Our analysis attributes this risk of continued failure to how policy-led experimentation and innovation are structured and themselves become locked in, thereby upholding the obdurate automobility regime.

The EU’s truth by omission: Learning and accountability after the Eurozone crisis

While the literature generally frames crises as catalysts for organisational learning, most theories focus on ‘success’ stories of learning – ex post facto explanations of why certain ideas gained traction after a specific crisis. Less emphasis has been placed on lessons that were likely to be drawn, but were not. In probing this point, we explore the European Union’s selective learning after the recent Eurozone crisis. Reforms were mostly top-down institutional and macroeconomic ones, while good practices developed by individual European states in the domain of accountability were ignored. In particular, we focus on the absence of a truth commission, an independent institutional mechanism mandated to carry out a forensic investigation of crisis management and convert past policy failures into lessons for future institutional reform. Why, despite the direct exposure of EU policymakers to these commissions, did this institutional mechanism not travel to Brussels? Drawing on semi-structured elite interviews and analyses of primary sources, we argue only organisations with an embedded institutional capacity for self-reflection (meta-learning) possess the required institutional skills to put certain issues into the spotlight.

Book Reviews

William Schulze of Dyson School, S. C. Johnson College of Business, Cornell University reviews “Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society,” by W. Kip Viscusi. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines causes of crises, the theories that have led to past policy failures, and the appropriate methods for decision making in the face of extreme risk and deep uncertainty.”

Institutional Economics as Theory of Policy Change: Impact of Past Policy Failures on Present Policy

:Social scientists have developed several theories for understanding or evaluating policy change over time. Since all costs or benefits are not internalized owing to positive transaction costs, policymaking is always implemented under cost underestimation conditions and, therefore, is imperfect. I call this trait policy failure in this article. Furthermore, I show that a new framework combining the social costs approach and the legal/economic approach in institutional economics is suitable and can be applied to evaluating how past policy failures affect present policy, providing as an example the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game?

This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the crisis, Greece and Ireland did so much later. What accounts for ‘early’ versus ‘delayed’ truth seekers? The second concerns variations in learning outcomes. Iceland’s commission paved the way for learning institutional lessons, but truth commissions in Greece and Ireland became overtly politicised. What accounts for these divergences? This article compares truth commissions in Iceland, Greece and Ireland and identifies two types of political learning – institutional and instrumental – related to the establishment of a truth commission. It argues that political elites in countries with higher pre-crisis levels of trust in institutions and public transparency are more likely to establish economic truth commissions quickly; this is the ‘institutional logic’ of learning. The ‘instrumental logic’ of learning, in contrast, leads governments interested in apportioning blame to their predecessors to establish commissions at a later date, usually proximal to critical elections.

The Indonesian Economy from the Colonial Extraction Period until the Post-New Order Period: A Review of Thee Kian Wie’s Major Works

This paper reviews some major works of Thee Kian Wie, one of Indonesia’s most distinguished economic historians, that spans from the Colonial period until the post-New Order period. His works emphasize that economic history can guide future economic policy. Current problems in Indonesia were resulted from past policy failures. Indonesia needs to consistently embark on open economic policies, free itself from "colonial period mentality". Investment should be made in rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, improving the quality of health and education services, and addressing poor law enforcement. If current corruption persists, Indonesia could not hope to become a dynamic and prosperous country.

Modern energy access to all in rural India: An integrated implementation strategy

Expanding energy access to the rural population of India presents a critical challenge for its government. The presence of 364 million people without access to electricity and 726 million who rely on biomass for cooking indicate both the failure of past policies and programs, and the need for a radical redesign of the current system. We propose an integrated implementation framework with recommendations for adopting business principles with innovative institutional, regulatory, financing and delivery mechanisms. The framework entails establishment of rural energy access authorities and energy access funds, both at the national and regional levels, to be empowered with enabling regulatory policies, capital resources and the support of multi-stakeholder partnership. These institutions are expected to design, lead, manage and monitor the rural energy interventions. At the other end, trained entrepreneurs would be expected to establish bioenergy-based micro-enterprises that will produce and distribute energy carriers to rural households at an affordable cost. The ESCOs will function as intermediaries between these enterprises and the international carbon market both in aggregating carbon credits and in trading them under CDM. If implemented, such a program could address the challenges of rural energy empowerment by creating access to modern energy carriers and climate change mitigation.

Changing directions: young people and effective work against racism

This article explores effective approaches against racism in work with young people, and the relevance of new policy agendas in the UK. Since the 2001 disturbances, the UK has controversially prioritised ‘Community Cohesion’, with the accusation that this new direction represents the ‘death of multiculturalism’. Drawing on empirical evidence from a project established to work with the racist views of White children in Leeds, and from youth work in Oldham, it explores how such work positively disrupts the public realm and re-thinks the previous framework of ‘anti-racism’. It is suggested that anti-racist educational policies and practice have created a moral code which young people can either subscribe to or be punished by and that by failing to engage within a framework of inclusion and openness with young people who express racist views, educationalists risk alienating them from a positive recasting of those views. The article argues that the failure of past policies as one form of multiculturalism has promoted the alienation of those most in need of intervention regarding racism, and that ‘Community Cohesion’, as actually practiced at ground level, can offer a productive way forward to engage with racism within more intersectional understandings of youth identity and its formation.

The National Strategic Plan of South Africa: what are the prospects of success after the repeated failure of previous AIDS policy?

Hitherto, the story of HIV/AIDS in South Africa is, to a large extent, one of lost opportunities. Whereas the country has one of the worst epidemics in the world, consecutive national AIDS strategies have been repeatedly marked by failure over almost three decades. Understandably, South Africa's most recent HIV/AIDS policy, the HIV & AIDS and STI Strategic Plan for South Africa, 2007-2011 (NSP), has been greeted with general acclaim. However, what are its real prospects of success against the backdrop of the repeated failures of the past? The first objective of this review is to systematically identify the core reasons for past policy failures. Using a comprehensive analytical framework, this article presents a systematic review of the literature on postapartheid AIDS policy in South Africa. The analysis demonstrates that a complex interplay among the content, context, actors and process of AIDS policy created a gap between policy making and policy implementation, which rendered near-ideal AIDS policies ineffective. Secondly, we evaluate the chances of success of the current NSP by examining both the policy-making phase and the resulting policy document in light of the reasons for past policy failures. Our analysis shows that the NSP contains dynamic and comprehensive policy content, sensitive to the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of HIV/AIDS. However, many of the political actors that hampered treatment implementation in the past, and who deepened the gap between government and civil society, are still in office. Monetary and human resource shortages also create a policy context that is infertile for the implementation of a comprehensive HIV/AIDS strategy, as envisaged in the NSP. Finally, these health system restrictions have a clear negative impact on the process of policy implementation. Without the mobilization of people living with HIV/AIDS and their communities, the NSP will be ineffective in bridging the gap between policy intentions and policy implementation. The strength of this article lies in its systematic analysis of previous policy responses, as a basis for appraising current AIDS policy. Although such an approach tends to simplify the complexities of the actual policy environment, it nonetheless draws to the attention of policy participants the importance of and the complex interrelationships among the different dimensions of AIDS policy.

The distributional impact of economic growth and decline in Egypt

A growing body of evidence for the past two decades suggests that in many developing countries the benefit of economic growth has not been equitably distributed. In reaction to these findings, the main concern in development economics has been the nature of the income distribution and other measures of welfare. While there is some disagreement about the desired degree of overall equality, there is uniform concern about the need to improve the position of the poorest members of society.' As a result, the general feeling is that planners in developing countries ought to worry mainly aboutpoverty and unemployment and that success in dealing with these social problems would result in an adequate overall rate of growth.2 The underlying presumption is that social equity and economic growth are complementary objectives.3 The purpose of this paper is to analyse the experience of a developing country, Egypt, which since the late 1950s has committed itself to a development process aimed primarily at guaranteeing the equal distribution of income and increasing national income. This concern with equality and the social aspects of Egyptian economic development has so far produced too little evidence to evaluate the success or failure of past policies.4 Here I attempt to analyse Egyptian time-series data on the income distribution, beginning in the late 1950s and stretching into the 1970s. During the first part of this period (1958-64) Egypt achieved a substantial rate of growth by the standards of less developed countries, real private consumption increasing by 26 per cent. In the next decade, although real gross domestic product grew by over two per cent per annum, private consumption declined by six per cent. Since the population increased by 21 per cent over this decade, per capita private consumption declined by 27 per cent. In this article I examine the distributional impact of economic growth during the period 1958-74. The analysis centers on the fundamental question: who (as classified by income) received what share of the proceeds of economic growth? In answering this question I follow Fields 5 in adopting an absolute income approach and comparing the results with measures of relative income inequality and Lorenz curves. The methodology used is basically that used by Fields in studying Brazil, including the calculation of the decomposition measures developed by him to show how income growth affects the poor. The present work differs from his analysis in the use of the household rather than individual recipients, the correction of the distribution of income among households for differences in family size, the method used to compute the mean income of the poor and non-poor, and the decomposition of the change in mean income into the parts attributable to

Only the Best and the Brightest?

ings of the national security bureaucracy, and/or the hubris of the Executive Branch, and/or the imperial instincts of the American Presidency. This perspective is now a tacit premise of debate over the proper limits of executive authority in foreign affairs, and it has become a natural point of departure for studies of the sources of United States foreign policy.1 Its easy assimilation into the conventional wisdom of the day can doubtless be accounted for in part by the effect it has of exonerating other major American institutions, such as Congress and the press, of responsibility for past policy failures. As such, it may serve as a functional equivalent of the practice noted by Sir James Frazer in some primitive societies of putting the king to death for his failure to avert a drought or other natural disaster. But though it may be good anthropology, it is certainly bad history. Did American involvement in Vietnam come about as a result of