New pathways to paradigm change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback

Abstract

To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most notably the environmental crises we face, ambitious policy change is urgently needed to achieve the necessary radical transformation of our industrialised societies. Yet, while there is increasing demand for public policy scholarship to provide guidance on how policy should be designed to achieve such change, existing scholarship struggles to provide ‘forward-looking’ recommendations. Within this context, our article takes a step back to reconsider the underlying logics of policy change. We argue that focusing on policy, its effect and the subsequent politics it triggers is best achieved by combining insights from the policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literatures. This combination allows us to re-evaluate which potential pathways towards policy change exist.
The main contribution of our article is its proposition of two distinct pathways towards policy change, building on a systematic understanding of policy design elements. These pathways place greater emphasis on policy change happening (1) ‘bottom-up’ through initial low-level design changes rather than ‘top-down’ through high-level ideational change, as argued in earlier scholarship, (2) through the interplay of several policies in a complex mix. In this way, these pathways provide a useful framework for systematically analysing how policy should be designed to achieve ambitious policy change and thus enable transformative societal change.

Full text

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Policy & Politics • vol XX • no XX • 118 • © Policy Press 2022
Print ISSN 03055736 • Online ISSN 14708442 • https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16528864819376
Accepted for publication 18 May 2022 • First published online 23 June 2022
article
New pathways to paradigm change in public
policy: combining insights from policy design,
mix and feedback
Sebastian Sewerin1, sebastian.sewerin@gess.ethz.ch
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland
Benjamin Cashore, sppbwc@nus.edu.sg
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Michael Howlett, howlett@sfu.ca
Simon Fraser University, Canada
To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most notably the environmental crises we face,
ambitious policy change is urgently needed to achieve the necessary radical transformation of
our industrialised societies. Yet, while there is increasing demand for public policy scholarship to
provide guidance on how policy should be designed to achieve such change, existing scholarship
struggles to provide ‘forward-looking’ recommendations. Within this context, our article takes a
step back to reconsider the underlying logics of policy change. We argue that focusing on policy,
its effect and the subsequent politics it triggers is best achieved by combining insights from the
policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literatures. This combination allows us to re-evaluate
which potential pathways towards policy change exist.
The main contribution of our article is its proposition of two distinct pathways towards policy
change, building on a systematic understanding of policy design elements. These pathways
place greater emphasis on policy change happening (1) ‘bottom-up’ through initial low-level
design changes rather than ‘top-down’ through high-level ideational change, as argued in earlier
scholarship, (2) through the interplay of several policies in a complex mix. In this way, these pathways
provide a useful framework for systematically analysing how policy should be designed to achieve
ambitious policy change and thus enable transformative societal change.
Key words societal change • environmental policy • bottom-up change • top-down change •
sustainability transitions
To cite this article: Sewerin, S., Cashore, B. and Howlett, M. (2022) New pathways to paradigm
change in public policy: combining insights from policy design, mix and feedback, Policy &
Politics, XX(XX): 118, DOI: 10.1332/030557321X16528864819376
Policy & Politics
0305-5736
1470-8442
10.1332/030557321X16528864819376
07February2022
XX
XX
1
18
© Policy Press 2022
0000
2022
14May2022
18May2022
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
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Introduction
The lack of action in relation to many urgent societal challenges is lamented by the
public, activists, scientists and (some) policymakers alike. Urgent transformative societal
change is needed, yet gridlock or glacial reform seem to be dominant in most policy
elds. One prominent example is climate change mitigation where policy action falls
far short of what is needed to tackle the climate crisis, as highlighted by the Sixth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC,
2022). While climate policy inaction increasingly frustrates scientists and activists
(for example, Thiery et al, 2021), such patterns of inaction do not necessarily come
as a surprise to public policy scholars since a broad range of theoretical approaches
provide the sombre insight that policy stability is much more common than any
form of change.
Of course, theorisations of policy change such as the Punctuated Equilibrium
Theory (PET) (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993), the Advocacy Coalition Framework
(ACF) (Weible et al, 2011), the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) (Kingdon,
1995), or literature on the role of ideas and institutions (Béland and Cox, 2011)
include notions of paradigmatic policy change as stark exceptions from the rule of
policy stability. However, policy change scholarship generally is more comfortable
and successful in providing ex-post explanations of policy change than ex-ante
recommendations for pathways towards it. Despite ongoing renement of dierent
theories of policy change (for example, Oliver and Pemberton, 2004; Mahoney and
Thelen, 2009; Cairney and Weible, 2015; Zohlnhöfer et al, 2015; van der Heijden
and Kuhlmann, 2017; Fernández-i-Marín et al, 2019; Weible et al, 2020; Derwort
et al, 2021; Kamkhaji and Radaelli, 2021), broadly accepted denitions of degrees
of policy change – such as paradigmatic, transformative, major or even incremental
and minor – are missing. In addition, analyses of policy change are not easy to
compare or integrate as they often rely on idiosyncratic or unsystematic empirical
measurement of policy change. Given these limitations, it is not surprising that policy
change scholarship is seldom applied in a ‘forward-looking’ manner that can help
policymakers to devise strategies for reaching a paradigm change in policies’ design
which, in turn, is a prerequisite for subsequent transformative societal change, that
is, change that recongures the existing socioeconomic order. Yet, this impasse also
provides an opportunity for revisiting the concept of paradigmatic policy change and
for creatively thinking about possible pathways towards it.
In this article, we argue that reconsidering the logics of policy change is needed to
answer the fundamental question of how paradigmatic policy change comes about.
These logics can be understood as a (certain design of) policy intervention inherently
dening its future trajectory, that is, either triggering policy stability, minor or
incremental change, or major or paradigmatic change (see Cashore and Howlett,
2007; Levin et al, 2012). These logics thus build on the view that policy choice (that
is, policy output) matters and has societal impact (that is, policy outcome) which is
potentially transformative. To understand these processes and think creatively about
pathways towards paradigmatic change, policy design, policy mix and policy feedback
literatures are essential. First, therefore, taking a step back and tackling the empirical
question of how to measure the ‘dependent variable in the study of policy change’
(Howlett and Cashore, 2009) – that is, what actually changes in a policy – is highly
important for overcoming the lack of coherence in empirical analyses. Policy design
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New pathways to paradigm change in public policy
3
literature can provide a basis for comparable and systematic measurement of policy
change, based on an understanding of policy consisting of a basic set of elements or
design characteristics (Cashore and Howlett, 2007; Scharin et al, 2015; Fernández-
i-Marín et al, 2021) and as being part of a complex policy mix (Howlett and del
Rio 2015; Schmidt and Sewerin 2019). Second, policy feedback thinking enables
policy-induced societal change to be understood as a source of feedback, thus
dierentiating endogenous from truly exogenous drivers of subsequent politics of
policy change (Schmidt and Sewerin, 2017; Schmid et al, 2020a). Integrating these
two perspectives allows the logics of policy change to be reassessed and helps new
pathways to paradigmatic change to be conceived. This reassessment, we argue, can
help contribute to developing a ‘forward-looking’ perspective that aims to provide
ex-ante recommendations for designing pathways towards paradigmatic policy
change that can lead to subsequent transformative societal change. In this sense, it
contributes to realising what Capano and Howlett (2021) termed the ‘prescriptive
commitment’ of the Policy Sciences, namely to provide an understanding of policy
and policy change that allows for giving recommendations on how policy can, over
time, contribute to reaching transformative societal change.
The article is structures as follows: the second section examines in further detail
how policy design and policy feedback thinking can help better understanding the
logics of policy change and thus complement existing theorisations. The third section
then develops alternative pathways to paradigmatic policy change. The fourth section
presents short sketches of empirical cases that resemble these alternative pathways.
We conclude by discussing implications for future research.
Policy design, policy feedback and the logics of policy change
The increasing severity of global crises, foremost the plethora of global environmental
challenges (for example, Steen et al, 2015) or more recently the COVID-19
pandemic, have turned a bright spotlight on the need for radically changing, through
political action, the ways our societies operate (for example, Levin et al, 2012; Sterner
et al, 2019). Public policy scholarships’ mostly agnostic view of policy change – change
per se and how it comes about is interesting, not so much its direction – somewhat
feels out of touch with a growing community of scholars who are motivated by
wanting to contribute to enabling societal change or transformation, as, for example,
in the transitions community (for example, Grin et al, 2010; Markard et al, 2012). In a
sense, therefore, public policy and more specically policy change scholarship faces a
new kind of challenge, namely to communicate clear pathways towards paradigmatic
policy change that enables subsequent societal transformation. This second step,
that paradigmatic policy change should also lead to societal transformation in the
‘right’ direction is not trivial – as Peter Hall’s (1993) classic study of policy change
in the UK’s economic policy demonstrates: certainly, the shift from Keynesianism to
Monetarism as a guiding principle of economic policy can be considered paradigmatic,
but whether this shift contributed positively to societal change seems open to debate.
A clear focus on policies’ real-world impact, that is, their eect on societal change, is
therefore an important element of re-engaging with paradigmatic policy change. We
would argue that the policy design and policy feedback literatures are a good starting
point for such a venture and will, in the remainder of this section, discuss how their
insights can stimulate a debate about pathways toward paradigmatic policy change.
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
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First, as has been prominently argued before (Cashore and Howlett, 2007; Howlett
and Cashore, 2009), the operationalisation and measurement of the dependent variable
in studies of policy change is crucial for understanding what exactly is changing
(or not) over time. Broadly speaking, there is much more awareness today of the
importance of this issue than previously (for example, Capano and Howlett, 2020;
Tosun and Schnepf, 2020; Fernández-i-Marín et al, 2021). However, the measurement
of (changes in) policy output remains a crucial stumbling block. Although most
researchers share a basic understanding of policy being characterised by dierent
‘levels’ or ‘elements’, a unied approach for measuring the (de-)composition and
(re-)aggregation of these levels or elements is still missing, making it dicult to
synthesise empirical ndings. Consequently, the extant literature hardly contributes to
developing a better understanding of dierent pathways to paradigmatic change and,
more broadly, the overall logics of policy change. We would argue that, while more
narrow conceptualisation of policy output like ‘regulatory stringency’ (for example,
Knill et al, 2012) are easier to implement, an encompassing understanding of all relevant
elements of a policy is needed. Cashore and Howlett’s (2007) taxonomy of nested
policy design elements oers a useful tool for disaggregating the dierent constituent
parts of a policy. Their matrix combines Hall’s (1993) distinction between ‘goals’,
‘tools’, and ‘calibrations’ with the distinction between two discrete policy foci, namely
‘aims’ and ‘means’. The former represents what a policy intends to achieve while the
latter denes how to achieve it. These policy foci are embedded across the dierent
abstraction levels of Hall’s, with choices and preferences at higher levels informing
choices and preferences at lower levels. To illustrate this distinction between levels
of abstraction, we follow Haelg et al’s (2020) illustration of Cashore and Howlett’s
(2007) six design elements – goals, objectives, settings, instrument logic, mechanisms
and calibrations – ordered in a funnel of design choices where high-level design
elements to a certain degree constrain lower level choices (see Figure1).2 Such a
disaggregation of policy design elements helps in avoiding a too narrow focus on
one or two individual policy elements and thus allows for a more systematic study of
policy change. Crucially, it also allows for a straightforward denition of paradigmatic
change: if high-level design elements are transformed, policy change can be considered
paradigmatic. Changes to a policy’s high-level goals and instrumental logic radically
shake up the relationship between policymakers and policy-takers (Lascoumes and
Le Gales, 2007), they redene what or who needs to change and how to get there. In this
sense, such an empirically driven denition of paradigmatic policy change is far from
trivial. Obviously, applying this conceptual understanding to real-world instances of
policy change still requires researchers to make qualitative decisions based on their
knowledge of a policy eld, but it obliges them to be transparent.
Equally important, policy design scholarship is beginning to provide a clearer
picture of the eectiveness of individual design choices (for example, Peters et al,
2018; Schmidt and Sewerin, 2019; Steinebach, 2019; Béland et al, 2020; Fernández-
i-Marín et al, 2021), particularly in relation to sociotechnical change (Markard
et al, 2012). Here, breaking long-term lock-in at the system level requires the creation
of new or the empowerment of already existing but marginal actors in a process
of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1942). More generally, policies are eective in
reconguring the existing socioeconomic order when they fundamentally alter actor
constellations (Weible et al, 2009; Schmid et al, 2020a). Thus, if changes to high-level
design elements radically redene what or who needs to change and how to get there
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New pathways to paradigm change in public policy
5
in a way that empowers new actors and limits the inuence of incumbents, the result
can be transformative societal change. In this sense, paradigmatic policy change is a
prerequisite of transformative societal change.
Second, while public policy scholars and scholars interested in the design and
eectiveness of policy responses in relation to complex societal problems have long
been interested in policy mixes – bundles or portfolios of dierent policy instruments
that share a common goal and that are, ideally, complementary or synergetic – and
their development over time (see Sewerin, 2020 for an overview), theoretical and
conceptual contributions to the issue of policy change have retained a narrow focus
on single-policy settings. Interestingly, while policy mix research is very keen to
make sense of what ‘temporal legacies’ – that is, the ‘layering’ or accumulation of
policies over time (Béland, 2007) – mean for the complexity and functionality of
policy mixes (for example, Howlett and Rayner 2013; Howlett and del Rio 2015),
the link to (incremental or paradigmatic) patterns of policy change is not explored
systematically.3 Also, most of the theoretical and conceptual work on policy mixes
focuses on the question of how dierent policies can theoretically interact with
each other in an existing policy mix rather than formulating assumptions when and
how new additions to a policy mix culminate into major or paradigmatic change
to the mix as such. Regarding the issue of measurement of changes to complex
policy mixes, however, an emerging strand of research is beginning to provide
blueprints for systematic assessment (for example, Lesnikowski et al, 2019; Schmidt
and Sewerin, 2019).
Taken together, insights and approaches from the policy design and policy mix
literatures can help to overcome blind spots in the theorisation of paradigmatic
policy change: on the one hand, embracing an encompassing set of policy design
elements instead of a selective focus helps to dene the full spectrum of potential
causal links between (changing) elements. On the other hand, considering the
Figure 1: Policy design elements based on Cashore and Howlett (2007), arranged in a
funnel of design choices following the example of Haelg et al (2020)
Policy aims
Policy tools
High
abstraction
leve
l
Oper
ationalization
level (pr
ogram)
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es level (on-
gr
ound)
Goals
Settings
Objectives
Instrumental logic
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Mechanisms
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
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interplay of policies in a complex mix instead of considering individual policies in
isolation helps to imagine one policy as being the driver of change in another. This
perspective, considering other policies in a mix as potential additional endogenous
drivers of policy change, is not clearly established in the extant literature that remains
predominantly concerned with individual instances of policy change.
Third, while policy feedback research, with a specic focus on actors and their
agency, has experienced a renaissance in policy sciences in recent years (see Béland
and Schlager, 2019; Sewerin et al, 2020), the real-world eects, that is, the societal
impact, of adopted policies are rather implicitly assumed than explicitly discussed in
theorisations of paradigmatic policy change. While this is continuing to change, the
focus of classical policy change literature has often been on exogenous events as drivers
for paradigmatic policy change (for example, Nohrstedt, 2005), with endogenous
factors being considered less prominently (for example, Schmidt and Sewerin, 2017;
Schmid et al, 2020a). Thus, policy eects and how they feed back into subsequent
politics are somewhat black-boxed in the literature. This stands in stark contrast to the
literature that discusses how post-adoption feedback can alter subsequent politics and
thus, over time, contribute to more eective, more innovative and/or more durable
policies and policy mixes (Levin et al, 2012; Jordan and Matt 2014; Schmidt et al,
2018; Rosenbloom et al, 2019; Jordan and Moore, 2020; Schmid et al, 2020b). While
earlier feedback literature stressed self-reinforcing (or positive) feedback leading to
lock-in (Pierson, 1993) and thus only invoke the potential for incremental policy
change (if at all), more recent contributions have argued that stability or change of
a policy depends on a combination of (potentially simultaneous) self-reinforcing (or
positive) and self-undermining (or negative) feedback processes (Jacobs and Weaver,
2015; Skogstad, 2017; Béland and Schlager, 2019). Consequently, feedback processes
are now understood as being capable of triggering paradigmatic policy change as well.
An understanding of feedback loops where (the adoption of a) policy is the starting
point and (the termination, continuation or change of a policy is) the end point of
analysis (Jordan and Matt 2014; Sewerin et al, 2020) thus links very well with an
interest in paradigmatic (or incremental) policy change.
Combining these arguments from policy design, policy mix and policy feedback
literature creates a view of policy change being an integral part of long-term feedback
loops between policy, policy outcomes and subsequent politics. Policy design thinking
contributes an understanding of the policy elements that can change as well as their
eectiveness, policy mix thinking contributes the view that policies are not isolated
but part of a larger complex mix where individual policies can inuence each other,
and policy feedback thinking provides a framework for considering how policies and
their real-world impact aect subsequent politics. Such a perspective provides the
basis for deliberating additional pathways towards paradigmatic policy change, which
we will do in the following section.
Two pathways towards paradigmatic policy change
Based on the arguments from the policy design, policy mix and policy feedback
literatures discussed in the previous section, we want to present two novel pathways
towards paradigmatic policy change. Each pathway builds on a distinct underlying
logic of policy change.
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New pathways to paradigm change in public policy
7
The rst pathway builds on the logic that changes to low-level policy elements
can – if they are eective, that is, if they have real-world impact – induce (more)
positive (than negative) feedback eects that, over time, cumulate to feedback-induced
ideational change at the higher level. Concretely, if change to the level of settings
and calibrations creates sucient resource and ideational eects on targeted actors
(Pierson, 2000; Béland and Schlager, 2019), the dynamics of subsequent politics
can change in that these actors lobby not only for small adjustments to the existing
settings and calibrations but for changes to the level of objectives and instruments.
If these changes are implemented and the changed policy continues to have societal
impact, the political costs of additional policy change can decrease when sucient
momentum for expanding the menu of policy alternatives develops (Jacobs and Weaver,
2015). Crucially, this potentially leads to changes in the high-level policy goals and
the chosen instrumental logic. In other words, if positive policy feedback from low-
level change is strong and persistent enough, momentum for changing higher-level
policy elements can develop as well. This bottom-up pathway to paradigmatic change
through policy feedback – as shown in Figure 2(a) – is somewhat similar to institutionalist
literature on incremental policy change (Streeck and Thelen, 2005; Mahoney and
Thelen, 2009) but, importantly, builds on a systematic and comparable understanding
(and potential empirical measurement) of policy design elements and provides clear
feedback mechanisms behind the escalation of change over time.
What this pathway therefore describes is a ‘virtuous’ policy feedback loop driven by
low-level policy changes having societal impact that accumulates over time. In terms
of potential strategies for achieving such a virtuous feedback loop, policy design
literature has discussed strategies of ‘packaging’ or ‘patching’ (Howlett and Rayner
2013; Howlett and del Rio 2015). If, however, negative feedback eects of low-level
policy changes outweigh positive eects, a policy can remain locked-in to a ‘vicious’
policy feedback loop where the policy is maintained but only low-level tinkering with
very specic design elements (Howlett et al, 2018) occurs as shown in Figure 2(b).
A second pathway to paradigmatic policy change is conceivable when considering
the interplay of various policies in a mix. Here, changes to low-level design elements
of one policy can, if they create sucient resource and ideational eects on targeted
actors, lead to changes in mid-level policy design elements of another policy. This can
happen when actors that prot from (the eects of) one policy assert their newly won
inuence in another policymaking process that revolves around a second policy. If the
combination of the eect of these two (or, indeed, further additional) policies leads to
a shift in actor constellations, the menu of policy alternatives can expand (Jacobs and
Weaver, 2015), opening the opportunity for high-level policy change in a third policy.
This pathway to paradigmatic change through the interplay of feedback eects in a
policy mix is illustrated in Figure3. Note that in this pathway the rst two policies
do not necessarily have to undergo paradigmatic policy change. They can continue
in their original form, undergo continued small changes in the form of tinkering
or even be abolished at a later point. Crucially, this feedback cascade between three (or
more) individual policies can be started by minor, but eective or impactful, changes
to a marginal policy in a complex policy mix and lead to paradigmatic change in a
more important or even cornerstone policy of the mix.
Having developed, by combining policy design, policy mix and policy feedback
thinking with notions of paradigmatic policy change, two additional pathways to
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
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Figure 2: Pathway to paradigmatic policy change through positive feedback processes in one policy is shown in (a) on the left. Here, low-level policy change
creates positive feedback that, over time, can result in high-level, that is, paradigmatic, policy change. This pathway thus describes a ‘virtuous’ policy
feedback loop where policies have their intended effect. On the right in (b) is shown a ‘vicious’ policy feedback loop where low-level policy change does
not induce (enough) positive feedback, leading to occasional tinkering with low-level design elements but no higher-level changes over time.
(a
)(b)
Time
t
0
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Mid-level
(programme)
policy change
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policy change
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(on-ground)
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Negative (or
absence of
positive) feedback
Aims Means
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+
Positive
feedback
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‘Virtuous’ policy feedback loop ‘Vicious’ policy feedback loop
Instrumental logic
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New pathways to paradigm change in public policy
9
Figure 3: Pathway to paradigmatic policy change through cascading feedback effects in a policy mix. Here, low-level changes to policy A produce suf-
ficient positive feedback that triggers mid-level policy change in policy B. Policy B then produces additional positive feedback for triggering high-level
paradigmatic policy change in policy C. The changes to policy A and B at t0 and t1, respectively, do not necessarily lead to subsequent further changes in
them; they can either continue unchanged or even be abolished at t3 or later.
Policy continuity or abolishment
…
Policy A Policy B Policy C
AimsMeans
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Mechanisms
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Policy continuity or abolishment
…
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…
Mid-level
(programme)
policy change
High-level
(paradigmatic)
policy change
Low-level
(on-ground)
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
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paradigmatic policy change, we will present brief empirical sketches to illustrate how
these theoretically conceivable pathways could play out in reality.
Empirical sketches: the reform of the German feed-in tariff and
low-carbon transportation policy in California
The German Renewable Energy Sources Act (Erneuerbare Energien Gesetz) (EEG),
the cornerstone of the country’s renewable energy policy mix, has been in force since
2000. Overall, the policy is considered a success, having induced massive deployment
and cost reductions of renewable energy technologies, primarily solar photovoltaic
(PV) and wind. It has seen several major revisions or re-designs in 2004, 2009, 2012,
2014, 2017, and 2021 that have been extensively documented in the literature (for
example, Lauber and Jacobsson, 2016; Renn and Marshall, 2016; Leiren and Reimer,
2018). Often hailed as key to its success, the EEG innovatively combined several
core design features: a xed long-term remuneration for renewable energy produced,
priority access to the power grid for renewable energy, sharing of extra cost among all
energy users, technology specicity (that is, all types of renewable energy technology
are considered and remuneration is dierentiated by technology and size), as well as
a system for decreasing remuneration based on dynamic market development.
In terms of change over time, we would argue that the policy followed the rst
alternative pathway to paradigmatic change described earlier, namely a ‘virtuous’
cycle driven by policy feedback. As analysed by Schmidt etal (2019), the EEG
created enough positive feedback for the initial opposing centre-right parties
to accept its high-level goals and instrumental logic, thus enabling the policy to
survive changes in the federal government’s partisan composition (particularly
in 2005 and 2009). The main driver of positive feedback in the 2000s and early
2010s were jobs created due to the policy’s successful deployment of renewable
energy technologies: from an estimate of 77k in 2000 the number of direct jobs
in the renewable industry as well as the installation and maintenance of renewable
technologies reached a peak of 328k in 2011 before levelling o to 213k in 2017
(O’Sullivan et al, 2019). Yet, the EEG was not stuck in a cycle of ‘tinkering’ at the
lower levels of design as the revision of 2017 jumped to the mid-level of design
when replacing xed taris with auctioning schemes (after a limited test run
already introduced in the 2014 revision). This constituted a ‘bottom-up’ change
to the core mechanism of the policy without its high-level goals and instrument
logic being fundamentally revised. Finally, in an analysis of the salience of design
elements across the three design levels as expressed in parliamentary debates about
energy policy (Schmid et al, 2020b), there are indications that the salience of
high-level design elements increases again over time. This seems to be driven by
higher salience for equity considerations (that is, essentially who pays and prots
from the EEG), indicated by elements of the latest 2021 revision. Here, greater
emphasis is put on the inclusion of tenants and citizens’ cooperatives to address
the imbalance of (well-to-do) houseowners having proted disproportionally from
previous versions of the EEG.
While this brief sketch does not present new empirical data and certainly more
work is needed to identify the mechanisms behind these policy design changes, we
would argue that the development of the EEG since 2000 clearly resembles the rst
alternative pathway to paradigmatic change as described in the previous section.
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California today is a leader in low-carbon transportation (IEA, 2021). Its policy mix
has a particular focus on plug-in hybrid (PHEV) and battery-electric (BEV) vehicles
and is considered highly successful in terms of deployment of these technologies, with
12.5 per cent of all light-duty vehicles sold in 2021 being PHEV or BEV (California
Energy Commission, 2022). The cornerstone of the state’s policy mix, the Zero
Emissions Vehicle Program (ZEVP) goes back to 1990 when it was introduced to
tackle air pollution. Since 2005, it also covers CO2 emissions, mandating a minimum
(and rising) proportion of ZEV sales that carmakers must comply with. In its current
form, it mandates 22 per cent of car sales in 2025 to be ZEVs. This cornerstone policy
is accompanied by various nancial incentives for vehicle purchases and the installation
of charging infrastructure (for example, through the Clean Transportation Program),
RD&D support (for example, through the California Climate Investments scheme)
as well as single-occupant access for ZEVs to California’s High-occupancy Vehicle
Lane (HOVL) system (for overviews, see Wee et al, 2019; Purdon et al, 2021). Within
this increasingly complex policy development, two major policy changes stand out:
rst, the scope of the desired low-carbon transition in transportation was widened
by including buses and heavy-duty vehicles. Various earlier pilot schemes had already
aimed to support them before they were included in the ZEVP mandate in 2018 and
2020, respectively. Second, California’s governor signed an executive order in 2020 to
ban the sale of fossil fuel-based internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEs) by 2035.
The latter, without a doubt, qualies as a paradigmatic policy change.
Similar to the previously sketched case, the main driver behind these policy
developments in California was positive feedback from technological change
(Schmidt and Sewerin, 2017). As described by Meckling and Nahm (2019), when
ZEV technologies moved, facilitated by early policy action, from niche toward the
mass market, legislative and bureaucratic policymakers in California adopted a strategy
of industrial upgrading as they realised the state had the opportunity to achieve
technology leadership in an emerging key industry. In other words, industrial policy
considerations fuelled positive feedback that could overcome any existing negative
feedback. As California was not traditionally home to large ICE car manufacturers, a
powerful enough local lobby against supporting ZEVs did not materialise.
While transport policy development in California is complex, three key developments
stand out that, in our view, indicate the existence of a pathway to paradigmatic change
through cascading feedback eects in a policy mix, that is, the second alternative
pathway described earlier. First, the stickiness of the ZEVP as a cornerstone policy of
the mix created sucient positive feedback for its own persistence as well as for the
creation of additional policy interventions targeting ZEVs, such as nancial incentives
for the purchase of new ZEVs. Second, positive feedback enabled already existing
policies, such as the HOVL regulations or RD&D programmes to be captured by
ZEVs and their related technologies. This represents change to policy design at the
level of objectives and mechanisms, that is, mid-level policy change. Third, positive
feedback ultimately enabled high-level, ideational policy change: technology bans
or phase-outs represent a clear break from the past, particularly in countries like the
US where market-intervention generally is frowned upon.
Obviously, the reality of cascading feedback eects in California’s transport policy
mix is more complex than the stylised pathway described and shown in Figure3.
Nonetheless, we would argue that the development strongly resembles this alternative
pathway to paradigmatic change. The real-world eects of one (sticky) policy led
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
12
to the adoption of new or the revision of existing policies, representing mid-level
innovation in or changes to the programme-level of Cashore and Howlett’s (2007)
design elements. And, ultimately, positive feedback allowed for the expansion of the
policy menu in that regulatory ban of ICEs – clearly a radical break with the past –
became to be considered a viable option. This regulatory ban changed California’s
transport policy approach fundamentally and, once in force, will radically transform
the transportation system.
In both cases, key to these pathways to paradigmatic policy change is positive
feedback from technological change as postulated by Schmidt and Sewerin (2017)
and further developed by Schmid etal (2020a). Clearly, the precise mechanisms
linking instances of policy change in the two cases sketched here need to be further
substantiated, and the precise feedback eects of policy change need careful unpicking.
Nonetheless, we believe that these sketches illustrate the usefulness of building analyses
of policy change based on a clear and comparable understanding of relevant policy
design elements and their potential eect or societal impact.
Conclusion
To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most strikingly the plethora of environmental
crises we face, ambitious policy action is urgently needed to achieve the necessary
radical transformation of our industrialised societies. In other words, paradigmatic
policy change is needed to achieve transformative societal change. Yet, while there is
increasing demand for public policy scholarship to be able to provide guidance on
how policy should be designed to reach paradigmatic policy change, existing policy
change scholarship struggles to provide ‘forward-looking’ recommendations instead
of ex-ante explanations.
Against this background, we argued for taking a step back to reconsider the
underlying logics of policy change (Levin et al, 2012). Policy has some sort of eect
or societal impact that inherently denes its future trajectory. If a policy is badly
designed, has no or even a converse eect, the likelihood of it being subsequently
abolished is rather high. If a policy is well designed and achieves or even surpasses
its intended eect, the likelihood of it being continued or even improved upon is
high. Taking policy, its eect, and the subsequent politics it triggers seriously is, in
our view, best achieved by combining insights from the policy design, policy mix and
policy feedback literatures. This combination, in turn, allows us to re-evaluate which
potential pathways towards paradigmatic policy change exist.
We proposed two distinct pathways towards paradigmatic policy change building
on a systematic understanding of policy design elements: the rst pathway is based
on low-level but impactful policy changes gradually creating sucient feedback that
creates the conditions for changes in mid- and even high-level policy design elements;
the second pathway explicitly builds on individual policies in a mix impacting each
other so that low-level changes to one policy can create cascading (positive) feedback
eects that create the conditions for changes in mid-level design elements of another
policy which then can trigger high-level policy change, that is, paradigmatic change
to its goals and underlying instrumental logic, in a third policy. These pathways
have in common that they put greater emphasis on paradigmatic policy change
happening ‘bottom-up’ through initial low-level design changes rather than ‘top-down’
through high-level ideational change as prominently argued in the earlier literature
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New pathways to paradigm change in public policy
13
(Hall 1993). In this sense, our approach complements ongoing renement of theories
of policy change. We would argue, more importantly, that our pathways, stylised as
they are, provide a useful framework for systematically thinking about how policy
should be designed to ultimately achieve paradigmatic policy change and thus enable
transformative societal change.
We discussed whether the development of renewable energy policy in Germany
and low-carbon transportation policy in California could be interpreted as having
followed these alternative pathways. While further research is needed to substantiate
the causal links and mechanisms in these cases, we would argue that there are strong
indications that our two proposed pathways meaningfully capture the development
towards paradigmatic change in both cases.
Future research into empirical instances of policy change that could t with these
two pathways to paradigmatic change should be based on a transparent measurement
of policy design elements to meaningfully track whether changes to a policy should
be assigned as belonging to low-, mid- or high-level design elements. Obviously,
relevant policy design elements are also partially eld-specic, but we would argue
that the six elements shown in Figure1 are suciently generalisable that they travel
across policy elds (see, for example Burns et al, 2019; or see Fernández-i-Marín
et al, 2021 for an alternative approach). Further research is also needed in unpicking
the feedback mechanisms driving the pathways. Policy feedback arguments are mostly
clear on an abstract level, but how feedback manifests itself in concrete cases is often
less clear-cut (Béland and Schlager 2019; Daugbjerg and Kay 2019; Sewerin et al,
2020). Additional empirical analyses of how these pathways play out in reality could
provide further insights for scholars interested in developing longer-term strategies
towards paradigmatic policy change that translates into societal transformation.
Notes
1 Corresponding author.
2 Such an understanding of generally applicable basic design elements does not preclude
the addition of further elements of interest, such as a policy’s ‘prescriptiveness’ (for
example, Judge-Lord et al, 2020) or more policy-eld specic ones like ‘specicity’ (for
example, Schmidt and Sewerin, 2019).
3 Potentially, the fact that layering as an empirical phenomenon is not clearly dened in
the literature (for example, Daugbjerg and Swinbank, 2015) is a limiting factor here.
Funding
Sebastian Sewerin wishes to thank the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for funding a research
stay with Benjamin Cashore at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (now
the School of Environment) where rst ideas for this project were developed.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the participants of the workshop on transformative change organised
by the editors of this Special Issue in November 2021 for very helpful comments on
and suggestions for the rst draft of this article. We wish particularly to thank the three
anonymous reviewers for their challenging but constructive comments and the editors
and the editorial oce for helpful guidance, support and patience in the review process.
Sebastian Sewerin wishes to thank his colleagues at the Energy and Technology Policy
Group for valuable suggestions for presenting the empirical sketches.
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Sebastian Sewerin et al
14
Conict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conict of interest.
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