Integrating design thinking into policymaking processes offers great value for citizens and government

Design thinking offers a powerful way to narrow the gap between what governments do and what citizens expect from government. Michael Mintrom and Joannah Luetjens explain how elements of design thinking, having already been successfully applied in social sciences research, are now being combined to produce powerful insights into citizen actions and their interactions with governments, and improve policymaking processes

Design Thinking in Policymaking Processes: Opportunities and Challenges

Design thinking has the potential to improve problem definition and mechanism design in policymaking processes. By promoting greater understanding of how citizens experience government services, design thinking can support public managers who desire to enhance public value. In Australia, as elsewhere, design thinking currently remains separated from mainstream policymaking efforts. This article clarifies the essence of design thinking and its applicability to policy development. Five design thinking strategies are discussed, all of which have lengthy histories as social science methodologies. They are (1) environmental scanning, (2) participant observation, (3) open-to-learning conversations, (4) mapping, and (5) sensemaking. Recent examples from Australia and New Zealand are used to illustrate how these strategies have been incorporated into policymaking efforts. The article concludes by considering how design thinking might be more broadly applied in policymaking, and the training and resourcing requirements that would entail

Reforms that Stick: The Politics of Preservation

To not only legislate for but to credibly sustain reforms is a central challenge facing reforming governments around the world. Well-thought out, well-intentioned, and otherwise well-designed reforms can fail or fall short as contexts change, new actors emerge, or political priorities transform. Prior studies of policy reform have driven home the point that in the world of politics, there are few guarantees and nothing is a sure thing. How is it, then, that some major reforms come to endure politically, while others dwindle and disappear? Bringing together insights from policy studies, policy feedback, and government performance, this study employs a multimethod approach examining the causes and contents of education and environmental reform endurance in parliamentary democracies over time. Reforms that Stick introduces and interrogates the twin imperatives of reform preservation and adaptation in an unstable, contingent, and politically contested world, resulting in a nuanced understanding of the processes and conditions contributing to a reform’s endurance. This study reveals that there are different ways that reforms can endure and different ways they can fail to endure. Of the reforms that I examine, the extent to which they proved viable varied at different points in time. Some reforms initially appeared to gain traction in implementation, only to dwindle and lose their focus or strength over time. Other reforms evolved more incrementally and became more strongly institutionalised with the passage of time. Durable reforms preserve and reinforce their high-level ambitions and narratives amid the inevitable vagaries of politics. In practice, this could mean the removal, addition, or adjustment of policy instruments, their recalibration, or the further concretisation of programme-level objectives. To understand endurance, it is important to consider the seemingly innocuous but potentially transformative adjustments of a reform’s architecture that occur over time

Reforms that Stick: The Politics of Preservation

To not only legislate for but to credibly sustain reforms is a central challenge facing reforming governments around the world. Well-thought out, well-intentioned, and otherwise well-designed reforms can fail or fall short as contexts change, new actors emerge, or political priorities transform. Prior studies of policy reform have driven home the point that in the world of politics, there are few guarantees and nothing is a sure thing. How is it, then, that some major reforms come to endure politically, while others dwindle and disappear? Bringing together insights from policy studies, policy feedback, and government performance, this study employs a multimethod approach examining the causes and contents of education and environmental reform endurance in parliamentary democracies over time. Reforms that Stick introduces and interrogates the twin imperatives of reform preservation and adaptation in an unstable, contingent, and politically contested world, resulting in a nuanced understanding of the processes and conditions contributing to a reform’s endurance. This study reveals that there are different ways that reforms can endure and different ways they can fail to endure. Of the reforms that I examine, the extent to which they proved viable varied at different points in time. Some reforms initially appeared to gain traction in implementation, only to dwindle and lose their focus or strength over time. Other reforms evolved more incrementally and became more strongly institutionalised with the passage of time. Durable reforms preserve and reinforce their high-level ambitions and narratives amid the inevitable vagaries of politics. In practice, this could mean the removal, addition, or adjustment of policy instruments, their recalibration, or the further concretisation of programme-level objectives. To understand endurance, it is important to consider the seemingly innocuous but potentially transformative adjustments of a reform’s architecture that occur over time

Successful Public Policy

In Australia and New Zealand, many public projects, programs and services perform well. But these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied. We cannot properly ‘see’—let alone recognise and explain—variations in government performance when media, political and academic discourses are saturated with accounts of their shortcomings and failures, but are next to silent on their achievements. Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand helps to turn that tide. It aims to reset the agenda for teaching, research and dialogue on public policy performance. This is done through a series of close-up, in-depth and carefully chosen case study accounts of the genesis and evolution of stand-out public policy achievements, across a range of sectors within Australia and New Zealand. Through these accounts, written by experts from both countries, we engage with the conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges that have plagued extant research seeking to evaluate, explain and design successful public policy. Studies of public policy successes are rare—not just in Australia and New Zealand, but the world over. This book is embedded in a broader project exploring policy successes globally; its companion volume, Great Policy Successes (edited by Paul ‘t Hart and Mallory Compton), is published by Oxford University Press (2019)

New development: Walk on the bright side—what might we learn about public governance by studying its achievements?

IMPACT: The goal of this article is to identify evidence-based building blocks for smart and sensible practices of policy design, public leadership and management, while recognizing that universal templates for success are not the right approach. It is critical that strategies to improve governance show appropriate sensitivity to context. The authors offer an alternative for high-level assessments of institutional qualities of ‘good government’. The article presents a practical toolkit to identify, assess, interpret, compare, and learn from concrete instances of public policy successes, highly successful public organizations, and collaborative, networked governance