Patching vs Packaging : Complementary Effects, Goodness of Fit, Degrees of Freedom and Intentionality in Policy Portfolio Design

Thinking about policy mixes is at the forefront of current research work in the policy sciences and raises many significant questions with respect to policy tools and instruments, processes of policy formulation, and the evolution of tool choices over time. Not least among these is the potential for multiple policy tools to achieve policy goals in an efficient and effective way. Previous work on policy mixes has highlighted evaluative criteria such as "consistency" (the ability of multiple policy tools to reinforce rather than undermine each other in the pursuit of individual policy goals), "coherence" (or the ability of multiple policy goals to co-exist with each other in a logical fashion), and 'congruence" (or the ability of multiple goals and instruments to work together in a uni-directional or mutually supportive fashion) as important design principles and measures of optimality in policy mixes. And previous work on the evolution of policy mixes has highlighted how these three criteria are often lacking in mixes which have evolved over time as well as those which have otherwise been consciously designed. This paper revisits work in this latter tradition in order to more clearly assess the reasons why many policy mixes are sub-optimal and the consequences this has for thinking about, and practices of policy design. Adding the dimensions of 'Intentionality', ‘Context', 'Goodness of Fit' and ‘Degrees of Freedom' to earlier thinking about processes such as policy layering, conversion, and drift, it is argued, helps to make sense out of these different processes and how they relate to 'design'. More precise specification of the nature of policy change reveals the need to distinguish different design processes such as 'policy patching' from the usual assumptions made about wholesale policy replacement, the conditions under which they are likely to emerge and the practical activities required to enhance policy consistency, coherence and congruence