Dealing with the Likelihood of Failure Over the Long-Term : Adaptive Policy Design Under Uncertainty

Policy failures are in a sense inevitable. That is, if a policy developed to deal with a specific problem or issue is left in place long enough it is highly likely that over time the environment or problem context will shift enough that the policy will become obsolete or irrelevant and like a hulk adrift on the ocean, may do more harm than good simply being left in place. This phenomenon of a necessary linkage between a policy and its context and the need for content to be continually updated to deal with changes in context has been noted in recent work by Baumgartner and Jones and Lejano and Shankar, among others. However these works have not distinguished between types of policy contexts and the extent of the need for updating or, to put it another way, the extent to which it is likely that a policy will become obsolete and the according need to design a policy to be adaptive right at the outset of policy creation. This paper addresses this issue, examining the concepts of ambiguity and ‘deep uncertainty' developed by Walker and his colleagues and applying these to considerations of policy failure and the means to overcome them