Rethinking the procedural in policy instrument ‘Compounds’: a renewable energy policy perspective

Abstract

Contemporary research in the policy sciences places effectiveness as the central goal of policy design. This emphasis permeates both micro-level design considerations for specific policy calibrations, as well as more meso-level policy tool and tool mixes. Effective instrument design, therefore, augments the task of looking at individual tools to considering them as tool ‘compounds’, that comprise of substantive and procedural means interacting through the process of designing tools and subsequent tool calibrations. The academic study of policy tools thus far has proffered several perspectives on how they can individually be distinguished by their different substantive components and categorized based on common governance resources that need to be mobilized to create them. However, it is eventually how well policy tools are able to coordinate the support of common procedural means and how well they are able to align their enactment plans, which determine how effectively they work together as a deliberate toolkit. In line with the growing literature on policy design and multi-component policy means, this paper magnifies policy instrument design as a complex of procedural and substantive means. To illustrate the notion of such design compounds, this paper synopsizes the state of knowledge on the formulation of three classes of energy policies as an illustration of how substantive and procedural components interact during policy instrument design.

Keywords

• policy instruments
• procedural tools
• policy tools
• policy design
• renewable energy