Understanding Complex Policy Mixes: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges
A key insight of contemporary studies of public policy is that solving complex policy problems usually requires effective policy mixes, that is, bundles or portfolios of different policy instruments (Howlett and del Rio, 2015) that share a common target or goal (Kern and Howlett, 2009) and that are, ideally, complementary or synergetic (Howlett and Rayner, 2018). The interest in such policy mixes is flourishing (Capano and Howlett, 2020), also in new academic communities such as sustainability transition or environmental governance studies (Kern et al., 2019; Morrison et al., 2020) where it is acknowledged that policy mixes are needed in order to address complex policy challenges related to a combination of market and system failures (Schmidt and Sewerin, 2019). There is, however, a growing disconnect in the literature between the theoretical-conceptual underpinning of policy mix studies and limited success in the development of common empirical approaches to study real-world policy mixes systematically. This disconnect is not entirely surprising given the degree of abstraction of theoretical-conceptual policy mix work and the fundamental challenge in policy analysis to measure the dependent variable – that is, policy or policy change – in a comparable and meaningful way (Howlett and Cashore, 2009; Schaffrin et al., 2015). For applied research into policy mixes, this tension creates practical challenges, namely, how to apply abstract conceptualizations of policy mix characteristics in a way that avoids conceptual stretching and how to assess the constituent parts of a policy mix systematically. Overcoming these challenges is necessary in order to produce generalizable empirical findings that have a relevance beyond a case-specific context. Therefore, this chapter argues for a bottom-up approach for studying policy mixes, which means applying a unified and comparable understanding and assessment of design characteristics of the constituent parts of policy mixes, namely, individual policies. This chapter briefly reviews the state-of-the-art of the burgeoning theoretical and conceptual literature on policy mixes and highlights the persistent empirical challenges researchers and practitioners face when aiming to analyse and understand complex real-world policy mixes.