Chapter 39 Public policy: Its many analytical dimensions

Public policy in agriculture and natural resources has proved to be fertile ground for theoretical and empirical analysis. Public policy evaluated by agricultural economists is a complex set of interconnected interventions. These interventions are pervasive throughout developing and developed economies. As a result, it is not possible to investigate descriptive, explanatory, predictive or prescriptive models of agriculture and natural resource systems without accounting for the formation and impact of public policy. Given its complexity, it is understandable that economists have employed a number of analytical frameworks to evaluate the formation and impacts of agricultural policy. It has been represented that these analytical frameworks in terms of four dimensions: incidence, mechanism design, political economic and governance structures. These four analytical dimensions can be distinguished in accordance with their imposed maintained hypotheses, or assumptions, and the type of failures that arise. Much of the literature treats the four dimensions as separable investigative pursuits. From the perspective of communicating with professional colleagues, such separability is unsurprising. However, to fundamentally understand, explain or reform current policies, all four dimensions must be integrated. In the final analysis, the chapter illustrates that only by formally recognizing each of the four dimensions is it possible to design and implement public policies that are sustainable and robust to uncontrollable economic and political forces.