What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze
What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze
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DOI：
10.1177/0952076714565416
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发表时间：
2015-07-01
影响因子：
3.1
通讯作者：
McConnell, Allan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
McConnell, Allan
公共政策学科一直在努力接受我们如何看待“政策失败”。它倾向于假设失败是不言而喻的，或者可以通过检查政府目标和结果之间的差距来评估失败。通常，有多种警告似乎很难解决，尤其是观念的作用，而观念的作用往往取决于政策是否得到支持。这篇开创性的文章建立在现有文献的基础上并加以完善。它颠覆了围绕什么构成政策失败的多重方法论挑战（例如相互竞争的目标和随时间的变化），并表明这些看似难以理解的挑战实际上有助于阐明我们的理解。在此过程中，它认为，一旦我们将政策失败视为“艺术和工艺”来研究，我们就能更好地驾驭失败类型和程度的混乱现实政治，以及它们之间的模糊性和紧张关系。这样做的基础是基于对失败的有效定义，即一项政策如果没有从根本上实现支持者设定的目标，并且反对意见很大和/或支持几乎不存在，即使它在某些最低限度的方面取得了成功，也是失败的。
The discipline of public policy has struggled to come to terms with how we may conceive of 'policy failure'. It tends to assume either that failure is self-evident or that it can be assessed by means of examining the gap between government goals and outcomes. Often, there are multiple caveats that seem too difficult to address particularly the role of perceptions, which in turn are often dependent on whether or not the policy is supported. This ground-breaking article builds on and refines existing literature. It turns on its head the multiple methodological challenges surrounding what constitutes policy failure (such as competing goals and variance over time) and suggests that such seemingly impenetrable challenges actually help illuminate our understanding. In doing so, it argues that once we conceive of studying policy failure as 'art and craft', we are better placed to navigate the messy realpolitik of types and degrees of failure, as well as ambiguities and tensions between them. The groundwork for doing so is based on a working definition of failure, namely that a policy fails, even if it is successful in some minimal respects, if it does not fundamentally achieve the goals that proponents set out to achieve, and opposition is great and/or support is virtually non-existent.