7 - Ways Toward Sustainable Policy Accumulation

Summary

In this concluding chapter of the book, we caution against the urge to simply abolish existing policies in order to address the complex challenges created by policy accumulation. Instead, we argue that our common goal should be to enable democratic systems to promote sustainable policy accumulation. Some measures to this effect would be a greater emphasis on vertical policy coordination between policy makers and frontline bureaucrats; stronger investment in the public sector and its employees; more policy-based civic education; and the systematic promotion of statistical literacy. Our book also has several implications for public policy research. First, we suggest that a stronger focus on policy substance should complement the already existing focus on 'framing' that dominates parts of the public policy literature. Secondly, we argue that we need an epidemiological turn in implementation research, which would enable us to investigate implementation challenges resulting from policy accumulation more systematically. Finally, we submit that given the patterns we observe, contextualized policy evaluation has never been more relevant than today.