Complex societal problems (CSPs) such as climate change, pandemics, and polarization are persistent, interdependent, and difficult to define, yet they are often reduced to binary labels like "wicked" or "tame" or high-level typologies that oversimplify their underlying complexity. This paper revisits these typologies and proposes a conceptual framework that treats complexity as a layered structure of interacting dimensions rather than discrete categories. Based on an integrative review of 25 typologies from policy science, systems science, and management, the framework organizes problem complexity into two families: system complexity (structure, dynamics, and scope) and stakeholder divergence (values, knowledge, and power). These dimensions can be visualized through multi-level representations such as radar diagrams that reveal a problem's complexity profile. The paper outlines three modes of application: problem diagnosis to support sensemaking; frame comparison to monitor (temporal) problem perception differences; and method and governance alignment to connect salient complexity dimensions to appropriate governance instruments and systems methods. This approach reduces risks of misclassification, improves analytical precision, and provides a shared language that supports interdisciplinary collaboration. The framework offers a more nuanced characterization of CSPs and introduces concrete tools for governance and design.
Abstract Collaborative arrangements have become popular in contemporary public policy and administration, particularly in the domain of social policy. Drawing on five articles spanning four countries, our symposium examines the design and performance of collaborative governance when we move from ideal conditions into specific, often demanding, real-world contexts. This preface introduces three tensions that confront collaborative governance arrangement in social policy. First, when enabling conditions are weak or actively hostile, collaborative governance does not simply fail and instead, persists through other means like ‘street-level partnerships’. Second, when politics enter the picture, it can both undermine and sustain collaboration, depending on the nature of contestations. Third, theories of collaborative governance that are built disproportionately on cases from stable advanced democracies are translatable to Global South and post-socialist environments if they are attendant to the bottom-up processes that permits collaboration to emerge. This symposium sheds light on the relationship between formal institutional design and the everyday relational work through which practitioners in various contexts keep collaborative arrangements alive. It hopes to inspire future research on the costs of failed collaborative governance and the role of civil society beyond the service delivery partner they are traditionally thought to perform.
When citizens evaluate proposed policy packages, do their judgments of acceptability, perceived effectiveness, and willingness to contribute to implementation move together, or do they capture distinct dimensions of public feasibility? Using a pre-registered conjoint survey experiment in the United States (N = 1,506), we examine how citizens evaluate policy packages combining taxes, regulations, subsidies, and information measures across 3 high-difficulty domains: electric-vehicle transition, AI regulation, and population aging. We distinguish push instruments, which impose costs or constraints, from pull instruments, which provide incentives or guidance, and we separate package-level composition from instrument-level marginal evaluations. 3 findings stand out. First, packages weighted toward pull instruments are more likely to be chosen and rated acceptable. Second, this package-level pattern does not produce a clean instrument-level hierarchy: baseline-referenced marginal effects favor subsidies and information, but marginal means show that absolute acceptability differs only modestly across instruments, and reactions to taxes and regulations depend on whether costs fall on individuals or on firms and employers. Third, perceived effectiveness and willingness to co-produce diverge from acceptability and vary systematically by domain and by whether contributions involve time or money. These results highlight that public feasibility is multidimensional and context-dependent: it cannot be inferred from acceptability alone but must be understood as a joint evaluation of whether packages are perceived as acceptable, effective, and implementable. The paper contributes to policy design theory by reframing public feasibility as multidimensional and clarifying how conjoint experiments can distinguish package-level composition from instrument-level evaluations.
The article aims to present a conceptual framework for analyzing the politics of governing crises. This is achieved through the identification of three ideal types: “governing during the crisis,” “governing the crisis,” and “governing by the crisis.” The core of the article’s argument is that the function of political actors in determining the definition of a crisis is paramount. It is demonstrated that crises are not objective phenomena; rather, they are constructed through processes of interpretation, framing, and strategic narration. The different politics of governing crises reflect different actors’ assumptions about threat, urgency, and uncertainty, and lead to different policy trajectories and types of change. These paths range from reversion (a return to a previous state, thus no change) to normalization (marginal change, adaptation—i.e., intermediate changes) and acceleration (major transformation). These governing logics reveal how crises are used to justify political inaction, technocratic management, or sweeping reform. The article’s integration of insights from public policy and crisis management is a significant contribution to ongoing debates on crisis meaning-making, legitimacy, and institutional change. It also introduces the special issue with an analytical lens that offers a comprehensive understanding of how crises reshape policy and politics.
Behavioral public policies (BPPs) often affect individuals unevenly: the same intervention can produce systematically different outcomes across socio-economic groups, genders, or other population characteristics. Such heterogeneity raises a distinctive fairness concern. This article develops a mechanistic account of intervention fairness grounded in the ideal of impartial treatment. I argue that impartiality is violated when policy effects are heterogeneously moderated across a population without adequate justification. Building on a causal-mechanistic framework, I identify moderators as the key drivers of unequal treatment and distinguish three potential justifications for heterogeneous effects: randomness, lack of social salience, and desert. Desert, I argue, is limited in the BPP context to prior contributions to-or prior distributions of-the intervention's target outcome. On this basis, the article proposes a sufficient definition of BPP unfairness: interventions are unfair when they either ignore deserved heterogeneity or produce unjustified moderation by socially salient, non-random factors. Finally, I translate this account into a practical, fast-and-frugal decision tool to help policymakers diagnose unfair behavioral interventions in concrete contexts.
Can simply living through a policy shape how people think about the policy? While existing scholarship often treats personal experience as secondary or contingent, we argue that lived policy experience can exert a direct and independent causal effect on policy attitudes. Drawing on mere exposure theory, we conceptualize personal experience as a distinct mechanism of attitude formation and leverage a natural experiment based on recurring changes in the length of basic schooling in the Czech Republic to identify its causal impact. Because assignment to 8- versus 9-year basic school was determined by birth cohort and policy timing rather than individual choice, we can isolate the effect of lived policy experience from confounding selection processes. We find that individuals who experienced a 9-year basic school policy regime exhibit substantially higher opposition to its abolition than those who attended an 8-year basic school. This treatment effect persists robustly after accounting for political ideology, parental status, educational attainment, and other covariates. Contrary to expectations, the treatment effect does not diminish over time nor vary by political sophistication. These findings suggest that the lived experience with policy can have a robust and lasting impact on policy attitudes, independent of symbolic or ideological factors. We discuss implications for policy theory and call for greater attention to personal experience in both empirical research and theory development.
Despite the growing demand for evidence-based policymaking, integrating research evidence in policy decisions is not granted and depends on the incorporation of this practice in decision-making processes. We contribute to this debate by focusing on the earlier stage of the policy process: how policymakers form attitudes prior to evidence use. When presented with research regarding their policy area, do policymakers demonstrate an interest in using research evidence? Do they believe that using research evidence will improve policymaking? Do the characteristics of the research evidence at hand matter for their interest and expectation that incorporating evidence will improve a policy? The argument is that policymakers use research evidence characteristics as a heuristic to reduce uncertainty and integrate research evidence into their decisions. We empirically test which characteristics trigger these heuristics by presenting results from a survey experiment with senior-level bureaucrats in Brazil. The main findings are that (1) positive attitudes toward evidence-based policymaking are high, and (2) the characteristics of research evidence influence policymakers' level of interest in the study, but not their expectations regarding the research evidence's ability to improve a policy. These results represent a significant contribution to the debate, highlighting the demand-side perspective and how the characteristics of research evidence trigger heuristics and affect attitudes towards evidence use.
Collaborative governance captures the attention of policymakers because it offers alternative pathways for addressing complex problems. However, little is known about how laws operationalize collaborative governance. Based on a content analysis of Oregon state laws, we develop an analytical framework for assessing how laws shape collaborative governance at the regime and platform levels and across multiple policy areas (economic development, education, health, natural resources, and public safety). The framework clusters 12 variables into 4 categories of analysis: general specifications, stakeholder engagement, administrative capacity, and performance management. Overall, our results indicate that laws about collaborative governance are generally vague and more constitutive than regulative in nature. We provide implications for scholarship and practice, along with several new avenues for future research.
Behavioural Public Policy (BPP), which focuses on the psychological micro-mechanisms involved in public policy, has experienced prodigious growth over the last decade. This study examines 2,301 BPP articles from 1980 to 2024 on the Scopus database. Our findings reveal an exponential increase in BPP publications since 2019. As a proportion of all public policy publications, BPP articles have been rising in number and significance. We also observe a thematic shift from environmental and transport issues to global emergencies (e.g., global pandemic), a reflection of how deeply BPP research engages with the real policy world, with its research agenda aligned with policy challenges of the day. We uncovered a greater level of diversity in countries involved in terms of output, collaboration, and funding. As evident from our brief discussion of two case studies and considerations from the "heterogeneity revolution," granular contextual factors do lead to differences in outcomes from similar policy interventions. Taken together, these show the rising importance of BPP, not just as a tool for designing interventions to achieve some public end, but also as a legitimation device in specific contexts. However, the pursuit of contextual heterogeneity without any organizing mechanism leads to a real risk of BPP turning into an atheoretical policy lab, where the intervention effects are so varied and diverse that literature is limited in its ability to inform policy research or design. We argue that embedding BPP within institutional theory can be useful both for theorizing efforts and for understanding the rising importance of the legitimation role of BPP.
Thailand is facing pressing climate change challenges such as forest fires, PM2.5 air pollution, and the resulting impact on people's well-being. Thai policymakers have been seeking to address these issues through traditional forest conservation policies aimed at safeguarding rainforests. However, these policies have unintentionally harmed forest health by adversely affecting the lives of Indigenous forest-dwelling and forest-adjacent communities. Evidence synthesis and primary research on land use and environment management had demonstrated that policymakers can achieve improvements in forest health by working collaboratively with Indigenous communities and with the help of behavioral science considerations and tools. This article mobilizes an embedded case study design to presents three empirical sub-cases from Indigenous communities in northern Thailand to stimulate new and more inclusive policy directions, including food labels to mitigate negative impacts of rural development, measures to support community engagement in forest protection activities, and emotionally powerful environmental heritage practices that connect communities to their local ecosystems. Adopting an exploratory and interpretive approach, we illustrate how social and behavioral research can uncover the systemic dimensions of environmental challenges, and respond with unconventional solutions that help address indirect yet critical effect mechanisms for forest conservation. Cross-sectorial policy supported by behavioral design tools can create an enabling environment for locally driven environment management action. We conclude that, by embracing innovative policy solutions and engaging Indigenous communities as stewards of the land, Thailand can achieve sustainable forest management and reduce air pollution in compliance with its local policy objectives and global climate commitments.
Recent research distinguishing between proactive and reactive policy entrepreneurship has significantly enhanced our understanding of how actors shape policy processes. However, this dichotomy tends to conflate the timing of action with its orientation, obscuring important dynamics of entrepreneurial behavior. This article develops an improved two-dimensional framework that distinguishes between a timing dimension (when actors engage: before or after a focusing event) and its orientation (what aims are pursued: transformative change or the preservation of the status quo). To demonstrate the value of this framework, we examine the positions of the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament in the 2017-2019 negotiation of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism's reform. Drawing on the Multiple Streams Framework, our qualitative analysis of legislative debates and institutional documents shows that entrepreneurial roles are relational and context-dependent, shaped by institutional settings and evolving political opportunities. Ultimately, whether acting out of opportunity or constraint, policy entrepreneurs consistently exhibit opportunity-seeking behavior, responding to perceived openings within changing institutional and political environments.
This article examines the integration of strategic foresight (SF) as a source of evidence for policymaking. As with past-oriented evidence, SF faces challenges related to its reliability and usability; yet, because it addresses uncertainty and long-term change, these issues take distinctive forms that warrant dedicated consideration. To advance this debate, we specify the conditions under which SF can be recognized as a legitimate and effective form of evidence. Through a comparative analysis of two policy-focused cases, the UK Government Office for Science's Net Zero Society: Scenarios and Pathways report and the JRC's Policy Lab and the ESPAS Horizon Scanning exercise, we develop a conceptual framework based on three enablers that enhance SF's evidential value: robustness, appropriateness, and inclusivity. When SF outputs are designed with these factors in mind, they can meaningfully complement other forms of evidence within a broader, pluralistic knowledge ecosystem. We conclude in favor of integrating SF with established evidence practices under clearly articulated enabling conditions and limitations.
Behavioral public policy (BPP) has grown significantly since the rise of nudge, yet it remains conceptually fragile. This article argues that some of its epistemological and ethical challenges arise from persistent vagueness and terminological inflation. Terms like "nudges," "boosts," "sludges," "budges," and variants such as "nudge-plus" or "self-nudges" are often used inconsistently, blurring important distinctions in mechanism, normative intent, and policy impact. Against this backdrop, the article examines examples of the conceptual misuse that pervades BPP literature and argues that clarity should not be a mere academic preference but an ethical, political, and epistemological necessity. Concepts, the article contends, are epistemic tools: they organize knowledge, enable ethical evaluation, and structure scientific inquiry. As in other disciplines, where frameworks like Mendeleev's periodic table or Linnaeus's classification of species helped organize, predict, and discover phenomena, conceptual clarity in BPP would enable more coherent epistemic theorization and ethically sound policy design. To illustrate this, the article offers a novel working ethical taxonomy of behavioral interventions evaluated across six dimensions: mechanism, epistemic foundation, locus of harm, primary normative logic, transparency/consent, and temporality. This framework is presented as one possible innovative model to demonstrate how disciplined conceptualization can support epistemic rigor and normative accountability. Ultimately, the article issues a call to action: for scholars, practitioners, and institutions to enforce a more rigorous conceptual infrastructure. Without such rigor, BPP risks devolving into rhetorical confusion; with it, the field can advance as a scientifically grounded and ethically responsible approach to governance.
Behavioral public policy faces the triple challenge of assembling robust evidence, securing democratic legitimacy, and navigating implementation constraints. We introduce a three-dimensional policy cube that positions interventions along evidence robustness (E), policy contestation (C), and implementation feasibility (F). Linking each axis to the Capability-Opportunity-Motivation (COM-B) model grounds the cube in behavioral theory, while equity-sensitive scoring captures distributional and administrative-burden effects. We use COM-B as a mechanism-first heuristic for anticipating which governance constraint is likely to be most binding for a given intervention, while recognizing that most real policies load onto multiple COM-B components and therefore multiple cube axes. To support reproducible placement, we provide a transparent scoring rubric (with a worked example) for assigning E, C, and F coordinates. To demonstrate its analytic value, we run a Monte Carlo simulation of fifty stylized interventions over five years. True effects are drawn from a bimodal distribution; replication precision tightens with evidence robustness, backlash probability, and severity rise with contestation, and fidelity decays as a function of feasibility. The cube synthesizes behavioral science, implementation research, and political economy in a single diagnostic, yielding governance templates that range from fast-tracking technocratic sweet spots to sandboxing high-risk ("zombie") policies. It provides researchers with a measurement agenda, practitioners with a portfolio tool, and policymakers with an adaptive oversight guide.
Collaborative governance is widely promoted as a way to address complex social challenges, yet collaborative service delivery often operates in environments where enabling conditions are weak, fragmented, or inconsistently institutionalized. How collaboration persists under such constraints remains insufficiently understood. This study examines how frontline actors sustain cross-sector service delivery when formal coordination mechanisms, stable mandates, and institutional supports are limited. Drawing on a qualitative study of five social services for families at risk in Croatia, the analysis is based on interviews, focus groups, and practitioner workshops involving more than 100 professionals across public and third-sector organizations. The study proceeds in two steps. First, it identifies and conceptualizes the mechanism through which collaboration remains workable in an unfavorable setting. This mechanism is termed street-level partnership, defined as a patterned configuration of adaptive practices through which frontline professionals recalibrate routines, maintain cooperative ties, coordinate direct work with clients, and generate embedded learning and informal accountability. Second, a comparative analysis across service-delivery modes assesses the variation and stability of this mechanism. While street-level partnership appears across all five services, its configuration and durability vary with contractual form, operational longevity, and degree of institutionalization. By shifting attention from ideal design conditions to everyday practice, the article offers a grounded account of how collaborative governance is stabilized in constrained environments. Collaboration persists not because enabling conditions are optimal, but because frontline actors actively assemble workable partnerships, although their durability remains shaped by structural context.
Large technology companies (Big Tech) are becoming ever more powerful in modern societies. While concerns have been raised about their political, economic, and social implications, the policy implications of their rise remain underexplored. We utilize Kingdon's concept of the policy entrepreneur, alongside the broader policy entrepreneurship literature, to examine Big Tech's expanding role in the policy process. We conceptualize the super policy entrepreneurs as an ideal type capturing a distinctive configuration of roles across streams, stages, and subsystems, and analyses Big Tech as an empirical approximation of this ideal. We argue that Big Tech displays three distinguishing features: they are prominent entrepreneurs across all streams in the multiple streams framework; they exert influence across all stages of the policy cycle; and they operate across multiple policy subsystems and the broader policy universe, thereby able to influence cross-sectoral and transboundary policies. Together, these features enable Big Tech to emerge as super policy entrepreneurs, commanding unprecedented levels of influence in the policy process. We further highlight that Big Tech as super policy entrepreneurs can reconfigure how policy windows emerge and are exploited, while recognizing that the effects of such entrepreneurship remain contingent and mediated by institutional and political constraints.
What happens when a policy is no longer in effect? How do the partial or total rollback of government interventions, the elimination of policy instruments, or the reduction in the scope or intensity of public programs affect individuals, communities, and bureaucracies? These are relevant questions in both developed and developing nations facing the rollback of social benefits or the weakening of environmental protections for ideological reasons, the cancellation of services or reductions in coverage due to austerity, or the repeal of social programs and the dismantling of institutions by populist or semi-authoritarian governments. Recent scholarly research has explored the causes of policy dismantling and policy termination and the processes through which these changes occur. However, less attention has been devoted to the direct and indirect consequences of both partial dismantling and complete termination. In this article, we focus on those effects. We argue that analyzing policy dismantling or termination as a form of policy change requires accounting for the diverse manifestations of its impact: effects on target populations, outcomes within the bureaucracies that implemented the dismantled policy, reconfigurations of the broader policy mix, and shifts in political behavior. To illustrate how these effects can be observed and analyzed, we examine the termination of Mexico's public health insurance mechanism, Seguro Popular, and the dismantling of the flagship cash transfer program, Prospera-Oportunidades.
It is well established within the public management literature that times of crisis can facilitate collaboration across government sectors and external stakeholders due to factors such as a clear task focus and the relaxation of some organisational and institutional constraints. However, what has been less explored are the mechanisms and conditions for sustaining these collaborations in a post-crisis context. In such contexts there is a need to move institutions and their processes from episodic, urgent networks to enduring governance regimes. This paper uses a case study to explore the challenges and potential solutions discussed at two policy workshops held with stakeholders from the Australian Commonwealth government, statutory agencies and Disability Representative Organisations. The policy workshops explored the experience of collaborative working over the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of contributing to health outcomes of people with disability and desirable institutional changes needed for collaboration to be sustained post-crisis. We outline several practice-based recommendations that combine different governance capacities and mechanisms and seek to address the distinct challenges to collaborative government experienced during the COVID-19 context. Implementing and monitoring the collaboratively-derived solutions for the post-crisis period is likely to assist in sustaining the successes of collaborative gains in the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic to better support people with disability.
Despite their increasing deployment worldwide, behavioral interventions-frequently referred to as nudges-remain ill-defined. Thaler and Sunstein's original definition has been more honored in the breach than the observance, not only by its authors but also by much of the expansive literature that followed. Exasperated by the ongoing proliferation of nudge usages, behavioral public policy (BPP) researchers have offered substitute or complementary terms that have experienced varying degrees of adoption but ultimately only increased BPP's conceptual confusion. So much so, in fact, that one leading scholar has recently advocated abandoning such definitions altogether. The popularity of the nudge terminology is unlikely to abate any time soon, however, and clear definitions are necessary for coherent usage and analysis. Therefore, this paper advances a better definition that detaches nudges from their convoluted libertarian paternalistic origins. This straightforward, descriptive, definition offers conceptual clarity and a more functional basis for the systematic analysis and implementation of actual behavioral interventions. It does so by emphasizing what differentiates nudges from all other interventions-namely, that they appear primarily to use behavioral processes to advance their policy goals. This definition sharply distinguishes nudges from other regulatory interventions, even when the latter are non-coercive (like traditional information disclosures) or behaviorally informed (e.g., "sin" taxes). By delineating nudges based exclusively on their behavioral mechanisms, this definition also highlights what unifies them as a distinct instrument class, irrespective of nudges' diverse policy goals and regardless of whether they comport with or violate any normative standard.
While existing studies acknowledge the political impact of policy termination, research on the dynamic political landscape and the bureaucracy's strategic action in driving such termination remains limited, particularly in morality policies, where diverse values clash across political perspectives. To address this gap, this study examines South Korea's Shutdown Act, a regulation on teenage gaming that epitomizes the tension between values relating to adolescent autonomy and youth protection. This research analyzes government press release texts from 2008 to 2022, covering the period from the policy's adoption to its termination. This article investigates how the government manages policy salience during different stages of the termination process. Findings reveal that policy salience diminishes as policies stabilize over time and intensifies during the termination phase, when it becomes higher compared to earlier stages, including when the policy was first adopted. Ultimately, this study contributes to the policy termination literature by demonstrating that it is a distinct phase of the policy process with defined characteristics. In our case, the observed shifts in policy salience throughout the Shutdown Act's cycle highlight the political nature of termination, especially in the case of a morality policy.
