Abstract
The policy feedback literature was initially concerned with explaining how positive feedback could lead to self-reinforcing policy trajectories. More recently, policy scholars have devoted more attention to negative feedbacks which can result in self-undermining policy trajectories. This article moves beyond these two well-known pathways to policy endurance and change by conceptually outlining two additional pathways to endurance and change. We argue that positive and negative feedback may be observed simultaneously within the same policy trajectory. The existing literature fails to distinguish adequately between policy feedback processes operating at the ideational and instrument levels of policy. We outline a pathway to endurance in which negative feedbacks at the policy instrument level result in instrument change which can be a necessary condition for sustained positive feedback processes at the ideational level of policy. Somewhat counterintuitively, we argue a policy pathway in which positive instrument feedbacks undermine the ideational foundation of policy. With positive instrument feedback overshadowing negative feedbacks, misalignment between policy and the broader context, eventually undermining the policy, is likely to occur at some point. These new insights are important for policy planning with longer time horizons.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is the outcome of a ‘slow-cooking’ process in which three quite different versions have been presented at three different IPPA events from 2015 to 2018. We thank the audience at these three events, particularly Frode Veggeland, the three reviewers and the guest editors of this special issue for constructive suggestions on how to move the paper out of the impasse.
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Daugbjerg, C., Kay, A. Policy feedback and pathways: when change leads to endurance and continuity to change. Policy Sci 53, 253–268 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-019-09366-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-019-09366-y