Sunday, July 3, 2011
What is a Policy Lever?
I'm sure you are asking yourself why your instructor has decided to call her blog "The Policy Lever", "Why not just Contemporary Policy Challenges or PAF340?" "What is a policy lever and what does it mean?" The policy lever is an analogy we use in public policy studies. We like to think that policies are levers we can pull to change the behaviors of individuals and groups. You will often hear people refer to new policy recommendations as policy levers. The story goes something like this. "We have lots of research that attending pre-school improves the life chances of low-income individuals so we pull the universal pre-school policy lever (or the pre-school voucher policy lever). Government provides these services to citizens, more people go to pre-school, and eventually we see a change in society. More generally, we think that doing X will cause Y so government will do something to encourage more people to do X if Y is a good thing, and fewer people to do X if Y is a bad thing. I think it's a really interesting metaphor for what public policy is, does, and should be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Another purpose for policy levers is to (as the name also suggests) create leverage for other related policy frameworks. For example the Quantitative Easing being used in the US is aimed at supporting other aspects of economic policy.
ReplyDeleteIt is possible that to achieve a particular public policy outcome there may need to be a mix of several "levers" in order to create the right circumstances. Balancing the weight, direction and timing of each lever requires great skill....and the skilled practitioners seem to be few and far between in recent times. :)
Your explanation is clear and I know it now.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Your comment is clear
DeleteThanks you very much for this.
ReplyDeleteCan we say that in the case of evidence based public policy research the ultimate goal should be scientific results which support the policy levers towards a better outcome?
Thank you for this! I started working in local government recently and my colleagues use the word 'lever' often without explaining what it means. I had a vague idea from context but this helped me to understand exactly what they are referring to.
ReplyDeleteplease give some insight on the differences when referring to the differences between legislative, administrative, regulatory, or other levers.
ReplyDelete