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Experimentation in policy design: insights from the building sector

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Abstract

The current article questions how experimentation in policy design plays out in practice. In particular, it is interested in understanding how the content and process of policy-design experiments affect their outcomes. The article does so by building on an original study into 31 real-world examples of experimentation in policy design in the building sector in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. All examples aim to improve the environmental sustainability of the building sector. The article finds that these 31 examples have attracted moderate to substantial numbers of participants (policy outcome HO.i), but have not achieved substantial numbers of buildings built or retrofitted with high levels of sustainability (policy outcome HO.ii). By carefully unpacking these policy designs into a number of key characteristics, it finds that this mismatch between the two outcomes may partly be explained by flawed policy-design processes. The article concludes with the main lessons learnt and provides some suggestions on how to improve experimentation in policy design.

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Notes

  1. The relatively small size of the Netherlands is promising in attracting participants from various backgrounds and from all over the country to a mini-symposium.

  2. The author applies QCA methodology, logic, and tools mainly to gain an insight into potential relevant patterns in the data collected that are difficult, if not impossible, to trace otherwise. These patterns are then used as a starting point for a more descriptive analysis of the data collected. The author is critical of too strong a reliance on QCA tools as it, eventually, forces researchers to break down their rich qualitative data into quantifiable units, which may work well for some qualitative studies or criteria, but surely not for all (Van der Heijden, 2009).

  3. For the fsQCA analysis, these scores were translated as: “++” equals “1;” “+” equals “0.66;” “−”equals “0.33;” and “−−”equals “0” (cf. Ragin et al. 2006).

  4. In line with the custom of qualitative social science, research interviewees provided me with their insights in confidence. As such, the identities of the interviewees (nor the cases studied) cannot be provided. To give the reader insight into the variance of the interviews, voice is given to them by referring to individual interviewees with a number (e.g., “int50”). Please note that some interviewees are referred to with numbers higher than 99 (the number of interviews used for this article). Please note that this article reports on a study that sits in a larger study, which addresses over 50 cases based on over 200 interviews—brief descriptions of all the cases in this larger study can be obtained from www.EnviroVoluntarism.info.

  5. Even more, in many of the cases studied, interviewees were not aware of the other cases included in this study—even those that were implemented in, for instance, the same city.

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Acknowledgments

The research presented in this paper is funded through a VENI early career researchers grant by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (451-11-05). I wish to thank my colleagues at RegNet, the participants of the Policy Design Workshop (NUS, February 28 and March 1, 2013, Singapore), and the six anonymous reviewers of this journal for helpful comments to earlier drafts of this article. Finally, I wish to thank all participants for giving me some of their time for our meetings and for sharing valuable insights into their experiences with experimentation in policy design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet), Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Room 2.08, Coombs Extension Building #8, Canberra, ACT, 0200, Australia

    Jeroen van der Heijden

  2. Netherlands China Law Centre, Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jeroen van der Heijden

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  1. Jeroen van der Heijden
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Correspondence to Jeroen van der Heijden.

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van der Heijden, J. Experimentation in policy design: insights from the building sector. Policy Sci 47, 249–266 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-013-9184-z

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