Designing multi-actor implementation: A mechanism-based approach
| Published date | 01 January 2018 |
| Author | Simone Busetti,Bruno Dente |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076716681207 |
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Public Policy and Administration
2018, Vol. 33(1) 46–65
! The Author(s) 2016
Designing multi-actor
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implementation:
DOI: 10.1177/0952076716681207
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A mechanism-based
approach
Simone Busetti and Bruno Dente
Politecnico di Milano, DIG Department of Management,
Economics and Industrial Engineering, Milano, Italy
Abstract
The article offers analytical tools for designing multi-actor implementation processes. It
does so by proposing a design approach centred on causal mechanisms. Such design
strategy requires designers to focus primarily on causal theories explaining why imple-
menters commit overtime to implementing policies. The central proposal is that design
procedures should be reversed, i.e. start by reasoning on the causal mechanisms
explaining implementers’ behaviour and then go looking for design features. Several
advantages of this approach related to designing, reforming, or transferring successful
practices are discussed throughout the article. Finally, the article provides six extended
examples of such mechanisms in different policy fields: actor’s certification, blame avoid-
ance, earning brownie points, repeated interactions, focusing events and attribution of
opportunity or threat.
Keywords
Causal mechanisms, implementation, learning, policy design
Introduction
Policy design was recognised quite early as a primary responsibility of the policy
sciences (Dror, 1971). Notwithstanding promising beginnings (Alexander, 1982;
Linder and Peters, 1984), however, policy design did not fare well in the academic
agenda (Considine et al., 2014; Schneider and Ingram, 1988), and it was almost
equated to the study of policy tools.
Corresponding author:
Simone Busetti, Politecnico di Milano, DIG Department of Management, Economics and Industrial
Engineering, Via Lambruschini 4/b, 20156 Milano, Italy.
Email: simone.busetti@polimi.it
Busetti and Dente
47
Recently, there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest into both ‘design
thinking’ (Dorst, 2011) and policy design in particular (Howlett, 2014; Howlett
et al., 2015). Such contributions have worked on understanding mixes of tools,
their complementarity and interaction effects, and how tools should be calibrated
to the overall governance arrangement and to existing policy programmes.
In both its past and recent developments, the tools literature helped the progress
of design scholarship, but two areas still appear underdeveloped. First, design
scholars have focused almost exclusively on the design of substantive policies,
i.e. how to formulate programmes and arrange tools aimed at solving policy prob-
lems. In this respect, implementation, a fundamental component of policy success,
has been left at the margin of the design debate. Second, the focus on tools con-
centrated scholars’ attention to ‘‘design as a noun,’’ to the detriment of ‘‘design as a
process,’’ i.e. the art and craft of individual designers (Considine et al., 2014).
Consequently, how to design (i.e., the analytical strategies of designers) has received
limited attention. The present article attempts to fill these gaps by discussing the
design of multi-actor implementation and proposing an analytical strategy based
on causal mechanisms.
Designing implementation was a central concern among top-downers in the
implementation literature (Bardach, 1977; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973), it
was part of design scholars’ pleas for ‘framing smarter statutes’ (Ingram and
Schneider, 1990), and it was included as a central task for designers in recent
contributions (Bobrow, 2006; May, 2012). When approaching a policy problem,
in fact, one should certainly design the substantive policy, i.e. arrange a mix of
tools aimed at resolving that problem, but this will not be sufficient for the policy’s
success. The next section argues that most implementation processes are multi-
actor, that those actors have fundamental resources for the success of the policy,
and that they are best considered as autonomous players, often able to resist stat-
utes and to pursue their own independent strategies. Such assumptions should not
discourage designers, but rather be the initial steps of a realistic approach for
designing implementation processes, one that values discretion at the bottom and
does not equate implementation to compliance to statutes.
Concerning the ‘how to’ of the design process, the aim is to develop analytical
tools for helping designers structure implementation. Designers face a limited
‘design space’ (Howlett and Mukherjee, 2014), and policies and programmes
often come out of processes such as log-rolling, conflict, bargaining and so forth.
However, policies (or parts of them) are also consciously designed, with policy-
makers considering how to reach policy goals more effectively and efficiently. In all
such cases, designers will use and need design strategies, i.e. analytical approaches
to design (Dorst, 2011).
To take two notable examples, incrementalism (Braybrooke and Lindblom,
1970) is a design strategy cognizant of both information processing and political
constraints (Bobrow and Dryzek, 1987), while forward and backward mapping
(Elmore, 1985) is one combining top-down and bottom-up implementation
tenets. Bobrow (2006) and Weimer (1992) review several other examples, following
48
Public Policy and Administration 33(1)
the assumption that, though policy design is a game, designers need ways to play
more effectively (Bobrow, 2006). On the same line, the fourth section presents a
design strategy for multi-actor implementation based on causal mechanisms. It
consists of focusing on the causal theories explaining why implementers contribute
to implementation and designing systems that trigger and support those mechan-
isms. This is preceded by a short section reviewing the literature on causal
mechanisms.
Finally, the article proceeds with the fifth section, where six examples of such
mechanisms are proposed through extended examples: actor’s certification, blame
avoidance, earning brownie points, repeated interactions, focusing events, and
attribution of opportunity or threat. The list is by no means complete, but picks
examples from the literature to show the logic and utility of the approach.
The conclusive section discusses directions for future research, such as the
prospects of expanding the number of mechanisms and of providing a classification
of such mechanisms.
Dilemmas of cooperation in implementation processes
The missing link of implementation was recognised more than 40 years ago, and,
since then, the literature in the field has grown continuously (Saetren, 2005). Such
literature is vast and varied, but two common assumptions stand out. The first is
that the formal adoption of a policy does not guarantee achieving its goals. The
second is that in many, if not most, complex policies, successful implementation
requires the continuous cooperation of a plurality of public and private actors,
provided with their own goals, resources and agendas. In other words, good imple-
mentation is not ensured by simple compliance, and actors’ commitment needs to
be extended over time. Such complexity is explained further in the following
paragraphs.
The first point to note is that implementers are a heterogeneous class, made of
both government and non-governmental organisations. Implementation scholars in
the bottom-up tradition (Lipsky, 1983) and network theorists (Kickert et al., 1997),
for instance, focused their analyses on implementing actors (instead of statutes) in
order to account for the prominence of multi-actor interactions. More recently, the
debate on governance in the 1990s (Stoker, 1998) pointed to the retreat of govern-
ments and the increased participation of several actors from different levels of
governments and from the private and voluntary sectors. Typically, in multi-
actor implementation networks, those actors will be relevant decision makers
within public and private organisations, able to administer organisational resources
towards or against policy implementation.
Second, one should not expect cooperative behaviour on the part of imple-
menters. Actors in implementation networks, in fact, will have their own interests
and agendas, not necessarily congruent with those of policy implementation.
Politicians, bureaucrats and social and private actors participating in such
networks will have different goals and preferences, and hence will be sensitive
Busetti and Dente
49
to different kinds of incentives. In this respect, models of policy-makers
(e.g., Mu¨ller and Strøm, 1999) or bureaucrats (e.g., Niskanen, 1974) may provide
examples of the diversity of motives that can characterise implementing actors.
Notwithstanding a possibly high variation of interests, however, one can expect
that all actors in multi-actor implementation networks will strive to preserve their
autonomy and hence resist external interference or changes in their organisational
routines and prerogatives. In this respect, mutual dependency is likely to magnify
the inherent political character of actors’ strategies, enhancing their natural
inclination to develop a centrifugal trajectory and reassert their autonomy. This
inclination can take the form of several ‘implementation games’, based on not
cooperating fully and/or of re-interpreting their role in a way more consistent
with their own agenda than to policy statutes and successful implementation. In
other words, instead of assuming the natural emergence of...
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