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Understanding policy instrument choices and the range of possibilities present in any implementation situation is key for both policy advisors and decision makers. These choices are a concern in policy formulation, which requires an understanding of what kinds of instrument options exist, which subset of tools is generally considered feasible or possible in a given context, and which among that smaller subset of all possible tools is deemed by policy experts, politicians, and the public to be the most appropriate to use at a given time. And, once plans have been adopted, questions of how they can best be implemented and how implementation can be done by governments raise another key set of instrument-related issues important to both policymaking and public administration.

How can we know if policies succeed or fail, and what are the causes of such outcomes? Understanding the nature of these phenomena is riddled with complex methodological challenges, including differing political perspectives, persistent mixed results, ambiguous outcomes, and the issue of success/failure “for whom”? Ironically, the key to understanding policy success and failure lies not in downplaying or ignoring such challenges, but in accepting politicization and complexity as reflective of the messy world of public policy. Gaining insight from such messiness allows a better understanding of phenomena like “good politics but bad policy,” the persistence of some failures over time, and widely differing perspectives on who or what should claim credit for policy success and who or what should be blamed for policy failure.

The concept of inclusive education and the way it is considered within the educational policy frameworks of European countries have changed and are still changing. Inclusive education is increasingly being understood as a systemic approach to education for all learners of any age; the goal is to provide all learners with meaningful, high-quality educational opportunities in their local community, alongside their friends and peers. There is a need to examine the policy of inclusive education, both its recent changes and its future direction, that European countries are undertaking, highlighting implications for both practitioners and academic researchers. Such an examination should not focus on practice—that is, the actual implementation of country policy—or on academic research into policy or practice for inclusive education in countries. Rather, it should focus on recent policy developments that are shaping practice in European schools, as well as potential future developments. The key messages emerging from a consideration of the European experience are highly applicable to other global regions.

Policy advice is a core function of modern bureaucracies. It can be distinguished from closely related concepts such as policy design, policy analysis and policy work – all of which are also conducted by the civil service. Civil servants remain critical advisory actors in the policy advisory system despite the fact that it latter has become more crowded and competitive. The bureaucracy is well placed to provide political executives with both long term and short-term policy advice. And bureaucrats often garner, even broker, input from other advisers in the advisory system. The academic community has shown concerns over an alleged decline of the capacity for policy advice because of growing advice competition and a trend towards politicization. While such worries have legitimate grounds, they are also marked by a Westminster bias. After all, advice competition and politicization are nothing new in consensus style polities with a traditional reliance on advisory input from societal actors and political advisers. This is not to say that bureaucratic advisory capacity does not have its difficulties. New Public Management reforms, cutbacks, and the focus on policy delivery instead of policy formulation have certainly had their impact. Yet recurrent meta-policies have also aimed to strengthen policy advisory capacities of bureaucrats. The evidence-based movement swept across the globe and left its mark, for instance, as have government-wide programs, such as policy skills frameworks and guidelines on standards for policy advice. The latter are particularly useful when considering that bureaucratic policy advisers are not the Sir Humphrey Abbleby’s at the apex of the bureaucracies, but include, as evidenced by research, a great number of often invisible and incidental advisers lower down in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith introduced the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in the late 1980s to refine the theoretical and methodological tools available for the study of the policy process. Since the late 1990s, the use of the framework has grown in use outside the United States and it is now applied to study a broad range of policy arenas in all continents. ACF scholars have created a core community that regularly synthetizes findings from applications of the framework, giving the ACF the form of a true research program. The ACF has three principal theoretical domains: advocacy coalitions, policy subsystems, and policy change. The ACF posits that advocacy coalitions and policy subsystems are the most efficient ways to organize actors interested in the policy process for empirical research. The policy subsystem is the main unit of analysis in the ACF, and there are four paths leading to policy change. Expectations about the interactions between and within the three theoretical domains are contained in 15 main hypotheses which have received different degrees of confirmation since the late 1980s. The aspect that has received more attention in existing applications is the effect that external events have on policy change. The development of the ACF is supported by an active community of scholars that constantly reviews venerable as well as emerging criticisms, introducing adjustments that expand the heuristic power of the ACF in a controlled way. However, some areas in need of further refinement relate to: policy-oriented learning, interactions across subsystems, the theoretical foundations to identification of belief systems, and how the interactions between beliefs and interests affect coalition behavior.

New policy instruments have come onto the policy agenda since the 1970s, but there is a real question about whether the ideas behind the design of such tools are actually all that “new” when you assess the role of the policy instrument in its particular institutional and policy context. Taking Hood’s 1983 categorization of instruments as tools that manipulate society to achieve public goals via nodality (information), authority, treasure (finance), or organization, we can find instances where innovations in these areas predate the 1970s. Nevertheless, the mention of these instruments in international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and national institutions and debates as the means for both improving governance and protecting economic efficiency has increased in light of a number of interacting trends, including the rise of neoliberal and new management ideologies, the increasing perception of a number of wicked problems (e.g., climate change) and nested, politically sensitive problems (e.g., health and welfare policy), and a rethinking of the role of the state. A typology is offered for differentiating changes and innovation in policy instruments. Some very notable and complex policy instruments have reshaped politics and public policy in a particular policy sector; a notable example of this is emissions trading systems, which create market conditions to reduce emissions of climate change gases and other by-products. Information and financial instruments have become more prominent as tools used to achieve policy aims by the state, but equally significant is the fact that, in some cases, the societal actors themselves are organizing and supporting the management of an instrument voluntarily. However, this obscures the fact that a much more significant evolution of policy instruments has come in the area that is associated with traditional governing, namely regulation. The reality of this “command and control” instrument is that many historical situations have witnessed a more flexible relationship between the regulator and the regulated than the term suggests. Nevertheless, many OECD political systems have seen a move toward “smart” or flexible regulation. It is increasingly important that those who promote this new understanding of regulation see regulation as being supplemented and supported by and sometimes reinforcing new policy instruments. The integration of these “newer” policy instruments into the regulatory framework represents perhaps the most significant change. Nevertheless, there is some reason to question the real impact that new policy instruments have in terms of effectiveness and democratic legitimacy.

An improved understanding of foreign policy learning necessitates a clarification of what foreign policy learning is, who learns, and how such learning occurs. Cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists situated in a variety of subfields have contributed to the understanding of foreign policy learning, a multidisciplinary area of inquiry. Learning theorists seek to show how a change in an actor’s beliefs due to experience or observation can lead to changes at other units, such as organizations and within the government. This cognitive dimension is important because actors may pursue a new course of action for politically expedient reasons rather than having genuinely “learned”—a distinction referred to as “complex” vs. “simple” learning. Foreign policy learning can be internal or external. The former type of learning entails what individuals, governments, or organizations learn from their prior experience. Learning theorists who focus on the individual level of analysis borrow insights from political psychology in an effort to shed light on the personal characteristics, the belief structures, and the cognitive psychological mechanisms of political actors that can better inform policymaking. Leaders whose cognitive structures are described as relatively open and complex—like Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose learning brought about the dramatic changes that ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet Union—are more likely to alter their beliefs than their cognitively closed and simple counterparts. Yet external learning occurs as well. Policy diffusion studies show that learning can result from demonstration effects. Foreign policy learning via diffusion is not instrumental, but instead occurs through osmosis. Privatization in the former communist states, China’s Foreign Direct Investment liberalization, and the diffusion of environmental norms in the European Union are examples of learning that is contagious, not chosen. A more conscious mode of learning than diffusion is policy transfer, which entails policymakers’ transferring ideas from one country and implementing them in another. Technological innovations, unlike lessons that involve political ideology, are generally easier lessons to transfer—for example, Japan’s success in applying lessons from the West to modernize its army in the second half of the 19th century. The constraints to foreign policy learning are formidable. Decision makers are not always open to reconsidering views that challenge their beliefs. Leaders tend to resort to, and misuse, analogies that prevent learning. Even a change in a decision maker’s beliefs may not lead to foreign policy change, given the myriad political pressures, bureaucratic hurdles, and economic realities that often get in the way of implementing new ideas. Indeed, foreign policy learning and foreign policy change are not synonymous. Scholars face significant obstacles in studying foreign policy learning. There is no consensus on the definition of learning, on what constitutes learning, on how actors learn, when they learn, or on how to assess whether learning has taken place. Despite attempts to make sense of the confusion, scholars face the daunting challenge of improving understanding of how learning is shaped and funneled through the interaction of agents and the structures in which they are situated, as well as the relationship between learning and foreign policy change.

Donald Everard Chambers (1929–2023) was an influential proponent of the systematic analysis of social policies and social programs. His personal life experiences and professional practice and education shaped his work. For example, he was born at the beginning of the Great Depression. Throughout childhood, he was mainly in the care of his mother, Ruth Swenson. Her work in human services led them to live in several Midwestern states in early childhood. She obtained a master’s in social work at New York University around 1938. Her subsequent work for United Service Organizations brought them to several other midwestern and western states, including California. During this period, Chambers gained experience living with people of various social classes impacted by economic hardship and World War II. He also learned to be flexible and adaptable to changing life circumstances and to challenge health and mental health inequities and injustices in social policies. Chambers obtained a BA degree at Stanford University in biology and psychology in 1950 and an MSW at the University of Nebraska in 1952. He was a social work practitioner for about 15 years in the fields of rural social work, mental health, and health in Nebraska, Idaho, and Iowa. Chambers attended Washington University’s Doctor of Social Work program, obtaining his degree in 1967. He was on the faculty of the University of Kansas from 1967 to 1996, where he taught graduate courses on social policy and program analysis. His research and service focused on issues of poverty, child welfare, and analysis of social programs and policies. In 1977–1978, he studied the British Workman’s Compensation system and social policy at the British Library in London. In 1990–1991, he studied child welfare and adoption in Central America as a Fulbright scholar. His most influential book was Social Policy and Social Programs: A Method for the Practical Public Policy Analyst.

For most of the 20th century, telecommunications was a matter of national governance and thus of peripheral interest to the European Union. Then from the mid- to late-1980s, the EU began to develop an intensified policy package for the telecommunications sector. Telecommunications has now grown to become one of the most prominent and extensive policy areas addressed by the EU. But what accounts for such a remarkable Europeanization of telecommunications governance? In polar contrast to its origins, telecommunications has become a key focus in neoliberal economics and policy in effecting sectoral change. This development went hand in hand with arguments around propounding the benefits of economic globalization, which sustained a move to internationalize the organization of telecommunications to the European level along neoliberal lines. However, notwithstanding the remarkable growth of the EU governance framework for telecommunications, there are nuances in the analysis of the constant resistance to the wholesale Europeanization of telecommunications policy that provide evidence of a residual tension between national- and EU-level interests. This tension has been evident in policy proposals, decision-making, and implementation at key junctures for more since the late 1980s The policy has played key roles at different times, in particular, on the national level, involving governmental, regulatory, and commercial actors. Telecommunications thus provides a classic illustration of the balance that needs to be struck in the development of communications policies in the EU between supranational and intergovernmental interests. Now part of a converging electronic communications sector, this feature of telecommunications governance is as prominent today as it was in the very early days of EU telecommunications policy development in the mid- to late-1980s.

We contribute to the debate surrounding comparative public policy (CPP) analysis as a method and an area of policy studies, based on the following questions: What is CPP? What is it for? How can it be conducted? We begin with a presentation of the historical evolution of the field, its conceptual heterogeneity, and the recent attempts to bridge the gap between basic and applied research through the policy design framework. We proceed with a discussion of the logics operating in CPP, their approaches to causality and causation, and their contribution to middle-range theory. Next, we explain the fundamental problems of the comparative method, starting with a revision of the main protocols in use, then presenting their main methodological pitfalls. The article concludes with a reflection about the contribution of CPP to policy studies through design.

Bureaucracy is one of the oldest institutions of a government system. Its role and importance have grown immensely in modern government systems. Bureaucrats or public administrators are indispensable in the policy decision making process in the 21st century. From the early conception as a branch of government responsible for the implementation of policy decisions and everyday functioning, bureaucracy has assumed a more active role in the policymaking process. It has gone through many reforms; however, these reforms have been largely incremental and static. While the external environment or the problems faced by bureaucracy is continuously evolving, the change in bureaucracy has not been in the same proportion. In the 21st century, many issues confronting bureaucracy are not only wicked but also global in nature. Moreover, challenges posed by technological disruptions and long-term processes such as climate change put bureaucracy at all levels of a government in a far trickier position than their earlier envisaged basic functions. In dealing with such challenges, the policy capacity of bureaucracy cannot be taken for granted. There are often significant gaps in capacity to anticipate a policy problem, to ensure coordination and preserve legitimacy, to translate global issues at local levels, and to learn from the past. It is crucial to strengthen analytical capacity at the individual and organizational level, operational capacity at the organizational level, and political capacity at the systems level to address these gaps. Tackling capacity gaps systematically would enable bureaucracy to design and implement policy and administrative reforms with a long-term vision of adaptation and evolution instead of merely in reactive mode. The policy capacity framework presented in this article is useful in identifying the capacity gaps that inhibit bureaucracy from evolving and the remedies to address these gaps.

Although most public sector governance depends upon specialized organizations, there is also a need to create greater coordination and policy integration. Improving coordination can overcome problems of duplication, waste, and turf-fighting. Producing coordination is not easy, but there are a number of mechanisms available to would-be coordinators to make governments more coherent. Most of these mechanisms depend on hierarchy, but others depend more on ideas or networks. Although coordination is important for governance, it is not a panacea, and coordination may produce problems as well as solving them. Therefore, the choice between higher levels of specialization and coordination depends upon numerous political and administrative variables.

How do courts affect social policy? Answering this question is deceptively complex. Part of the challenge stems from the sheer scope of contemporary judicial policymaking, particularly in the United States, where litigation reaches into nearly every nook and cranny of the American welfare state and casts a shadow on policy issues ranging from marriage equality to healthcare reform. Another obstacle is that scholars remain deeply divided on fundamental questions about the nature of judicial decisions and how their policy effects should be studied. These disagreements, in turn, have engendered three very different approaches to studying the role of courts in social policy that often talk past each other. The dominant approach views judicial decisions as prescriptive rules—legal commands from the bench—and asks: To what extent do judicial decisions change policy? This view implies that judicial decisions are “treatments” whose efficacy should be tested by measuring shifts in policy outcomes from the pre- to post-treatment period or across treatment and control groups. An alternative tradition envisages judicial decisions as a potential resource, which can be used by activists as leverage in building movements and pursuing agendas in multiple forums. Here, the core question is not whether court decisions produce abrupt policy shifts, but how activists use these decisions to challenge the status quo, mobilize interests, and generate pressure for policy change. A third approach sees legal precedent as a constitutive framework that shapes and constrains policymaking and its politics over time. The test for whether law matters under this approach centers on the degree to which judicial decisions influence the developmental trajectories of policy and politics, which includes consideration of paths not taken in the policymaking process. That is not to say that the literature is wholly discordant. Despite their significant conceptual differences, these approaches tend to converge on the general idea that judicial policymaking shares many attributes with other policymaking processes: the implementation of judicial decisions, like statues and regulations, is contested and subject to capture by sophisticated interests; litigation, like lobbying, is a form of mobilization that seeks to translate policy grievances into effective political demands; judicial precedents, like other policies, generate policy feedback. Identifying similarities between judicial policymaking and its counterparts is a signature achievement in the study of courts and social policy, which has largely dispelled the “myth of rights” and simplistic notions that the law is somehow removed from politics. Yet it arguably has had an unintended effect. Normalizing judicial policymaking—making it seem like other types of policymaking—threatens to render it less interesting as a distinct topic for research. This article suggests the time has come for all of the various research traditions in the field to return to foundational questions about what makes judicial policymaking distinctive, and systematically study how these particular tilts and tendencies influence the continuing colloquy that drives the policymaking process.

While traditional economic literature often sees nominal variables as irrelevant for the real economy, there is a vast body of analytical and empirical economic work that recognizes that, to the extent they exert a critical influence on the macroeconomic environment through a multiplicity of channels, exchange rate policies (ERP) have important consequences for development. ERP influences economic development in various ways: through its incidence on real variables such as investment and growth (and growth volatility) and on nominal aspects such relative prices or financial depth that, in turn, affect output growth or income distribution, among other development goals. Additionally, ERP, through the expected distribution of the real exchange rate indirectly, influences dimensions such as trade or financial fragility and explains, at least partially, the adoption of the euro—an extreme case of a fixed exchange rate arrangement—or the preference for floating exchange rates in the absence of financial dollarization. Importantly, exchange rate pegs have been (and, in many countries, still are) widely used as a nominal anchor to contain inflation in economies where nominal volatility induces agents to use the exchange rate as an implicit unit of account. All of these channels have been reflected to varying degrees in the choice of exchange rate regimes in recent history. The empirical literature on the consequences of ERP has been plagued by definitional and measurement problems. Whereas few economists would contest the textbook definition of canonical exchange rate regimes (fixed regimes involve a commitment to keep the nominal exchange rate at a given level; floating regimes imply no market intervention by the monetary authorities), reality is more nuanced: Pure floats are hard to find, and the empirical distinction between alternative flexible regimes is not always clear. Moreover, there are many different degrees of exchange rate commitments as well as many alternative anchors, sometimes undisclosed. Finally, it is not unusual that a country that officially declares to peg its currency realigns its parity if it finds the constraints on monetary policy or economic activity too taxing. By the same token, a country that commits to a float may choose to intervene in the foreign exchange market to dampen exchange rate fluctuations. The regime of choice depends critically on the situation of each country at a given point in time as much as on the evolution of the global environment. Because both the ERP debate and real-life choices incorporate national and time-specific aspects that tend to evolve over time, so does the changing focus of the debate. In the post-World War II years, under the Bretton Woods agreement, most countries pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar, which in turn was kept convertible to gold. In the post-Bretton Woods years, after August 1971 when the United States abandoned unilaterally the convertibility of the dollar, thus bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end, the individual choices of ERP were intimately related to the global and local historical contexts, according to whether policy prioritized the use of the exchange rate as a nominal anchor (in favor of pegged or superfixed exchange rates, with dollarization or the launch of the euro as two extreme examples), as a tool to enhance price competitiveness (as in export-oriented developing countries like China in the 2000s) or as a countercyclical buffer (in favor of floating regimes with limited intervention, the prevalent view in the developed world). Similarly, the declining degree of financial dollarization, combined with the improved quality of monetary institutions, explain the growing popularity of inflation targeting with floating exchange rates in emerging economies. Finally, a prudential leaning-against-the-wind intervention to counter mean reverting global financial cycles and exchange rate swings motivates a more active—and increasingly mainstream—ERP in the late 2000s. The fact that most medium and large developing economies (and virtually all industrial ones) revealed in the 2000s a preference for exchange rate flexibility simply reflects this evolution. Is the combination of inflation targeting (IT) and countercyclical exchange rate intervention a new paradigm? It is still too early to judge. On the one hand, pegs still represent more than half of the IMF reporting countries—particularly, small ones—indicating that exchange rate anchors are still favored by small open economies that give priority to the trade dividend of stable exchange rates and find the conduct of an autonomous monetary policy too costly, due to lack of human capital, scale, or an important non-tradable sector. On the other hand, the work and the empirical evidence on the subject, particularly after the recession of 2008–2009, highlight a number of developments in the way advanced and emerging economies think of the impossible trinity that, in a context of deepening financial integration, casts doubt on the IT paradigm, places the dilemma between nominal and real stability back on the forefront, and postulates an IT 2.0, which includes selective exchange rate interventions as a workable compromise. At any rate, the exchange rate debate is still alive and open.

The role of think tanks as policy actors has developed over time and created significant global scholarship. Widely understood as non-state policy actors, think tanks established either with or without the support of government have evolved in various political contexts with varied characteristics. They are avenues for the discussion of new policy ideas as well as used for the consolidation of existing understandings of global and national political issues. As ideational actors think tanks interact with policy frameworks at different levels, either in the framing stage or at the stage of consensus building towards certain policies. Intellectual elites at think tanks allow for the introduction of think tank ideas into the policy frames as well as the creation of public opinion towards foreign policy decisions. Think tank deliberations involve an interaction with policymakers, academic experts, business and social actors, as well as the media to disseminate ideas. Institutionally, think tanks in a wide variety of political contexts play a critical role in the making of foreign policy and bring closer attention to processes of state–society interactions in different political environments.

Argentina is a federal country that has 24 jurisdictions with relative autonomy to define their own policies and manage schools inside their territories; it is the responsibility of the federal government to establish national policies and coordinate and monitor their implementation in the national territory. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there have been national policies promoted by governments of different political natures: On the one side, the Kirchnerist governments from 2003 to 2015, within the framework of the so-called post-neoliberalism in Latin America. On the other side, the government of the Alianza Cambiemos 2015–2019 was an exponent of the conservative restorations in the area. The education policies implemented by these governments are rooted in divergent conceptions about the meaning of education, about rights, and about the responsibility of the nation to create the conditions within which rights can be actualized. Policies based on a conception of education as a social right are confronted with those old and new trends towards privatization and mercantilization of education, whose goal is to have education satisfy market demands.

The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was developed to explain policy processes where contentious coalitions of actors seek to translate competing belief systems into public policy. Advocacy coalitions may include interest groups, members of the media, scientists and academics, and government officials that share beliefs about a public issue and coordinate their behavior. These advocacy coalitions engage in various strategies using resources to influence policy change or stasis. As part of this process, advocacy coalition members may learn within and/or across coalitions. This framework is one of the most prominent and widely applied approaches to explain public policy. While it has been applied hundreds of times, in over 50 different countries, the vast majority of ACF applications have sought to explain domestic policy processes. A reason for the paucity of applications to foreign policy is that some ACF assumptions may not seem congruent to foreign policy issues. For example, the ACF uses a policy subsystem as the unit of analysis that may include a territorial dimension. Yet, the purpose of the territorial dimension is to limit the scope of the study. Therefore, this dimension can be substituted for a government body that has the authority or potential authority to make and implement foreign policy. In addition, the ACF assumes a central role for technical and scientific information in the policy process. Such information makes learning across coalitions more conducive, but the ACF can and should also be applied to normative issues, such as those more common among foreign policy research. This article introduces the ACF; provides an overview of the framework, including assumptions, key concepts and theories, and transferability of the ACF to foreign policy analysis; and discusses four exemplary applications. In addition, it proposes future research that scholars should explore as part of the nexus of the ACF and foreign policy analysis. In the final analysis, the authors suggest the ACF can and should be applied to foreign policy analysis to better understand the development of advocacy coalitions and how they influence changes and stasis in foreign policy.