Policy Instruments and Design for Sustainable Transition

Understanding policy instruments and how they can be combined is essential for making policy for sustainable transition, but it is also essential to understand the political and institutional context within which the instrument choices take place. In liberal democracies, policy making is most often characterised by political contestation and compromise as various actors have stakes in the specific design of policy. While economic rationality may feed into the process, it is just one factor in the decision-making process. Political and institutional conditions must be factored in to understand instrument choices.

Complexity is a feature of most green transition challenges. Therefore, there is a growing recognition in the policy sciences that policy mixes consisting of a combination of instruments can be a strategy to help bringing about the desired transition. Policy mixes already exist in many policy sectors, but often they have evolved over time by gradual ad hoc layering of new instruments on to the existing policy. Hence, the course will delve into the way in which policy mixes evolve over time with an emphasis on the political and institutional drivers of instrument choice.  An important political factor relates to the social construction of target groups and how this influences instrument choice and calibration. Target groups can be socially constructed on the basis of whether they are deserving or undeserving and whether they are politically strong or weak. Further, the institutional context is crucial in understanding instrument choices. For instance, who are granted access to the instrument design process and which concerns are paid attention and which are ignored. 

While policy instruments and mixes will be at the centre of the course it is important also to consider the policy paradigms within which instruments are embedded. Instrument choices for transition rarely start from a blank sheet but rather from a situation in which there are already sectoral policies in place. Hence, to anticipate policy design challenges, it is important to understand the nature of the policy paradigm dominating a sector and how they influence design spaces.

The course will introduce key concepts for understanding the nature policy instruments, how they are selected and combined. Cases will be used illustrate the utility of the concepts and to engage in critical reflection on their application to actual policy situations. This will enable the participant to explain and make sense of policy instruments and design in different national and sectoral settings. It will deepen their knowledge of policy making and develop competencies to design public policies for sustainable transition.