Designing policies that could work: understanding the interaction between policy design spaces and organizational responses in public sector

Abstract The goal of this paper is to contribute toward bridging the gap between policy design and implementation by focusing on domains, such as education, healthcare and community services, where policy implementation is largely left to the autonomous decision of public service providers, which are strategic actors themselves. More specifically, we suggest that two characteristics of policy design spaces in which policies are designed, i.e., the level of ideational coherence and the prevailing function of the adopted policy instruments, generate systematic patterns of responses in terms of the extent of compliance with policy goals, the presence of strategic gaming and possible defiance. We illustrate our model through a contrastive case study of the introduction of performance-based funding in the higher education sector in four European countries (France, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom). Our analysis displays that policy designs chosen by governments to steer public systems have different trade-offs in terms of responses of the public organizations involved that are essential to effectively implement governmental policies. The model we are proposing provides therefore a framework to understand how these interactions unfold in specific contexts, what are their effects on the achievement of policy goals and how policymakers could exploit their degrees of freedom in policy design to reduce unwanted effects.