A Policy A Day: An
Introduction
In the lead-up to the
election, we’re publishing A Policy A Day – a look at some of the issues that
face New Zealand and how we think they could be addressed (or even solved).
This time it really is going to be every day, including the weekends, so we’ve
lined up over 30 young writers from a diverse range of backgrounds to write
about topics that they’re really passionate about. We’ll be looking at a
combination of existing policies from the political parties, as well as
policies that we think deserve a lot more attention and really should be talked
about more.
But before we can get too deeply
into the policies, we need to answer a question:
What does policy actually mean?
There’s a lot of political science theory out there on this
topic, but I’ll try to keep this simple with my interpretation. Given that a
particular issue has been identified, policy
is a statement of intent about the actions that a government takes to address
that issue. Policies should be action or
solution-oriented, but at the end of the day,
it’s just a statement of intent or a plan. The actual implementation is still
left up to the government and, as happens all too often, can still be stuffed
up in any one of a million ways. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a
bad policy (although sometimes that contributes), so it’s important to separate
the policy ideas from the implementation. We can divide this flow into three
parts:
Issue -> Policy
-> Implementation
Of course, the reason we have politics is that at every
stage of this process we can have differences in opinion. We may disagree on
what is actually an issue or what the most important issues are, we often don’t
know what the “best” policy solution is (or what best even means), and
different implementations of the same policy can lead to very different end outcomes for the public. Policy cannot be
entirely divorced from politics, so we always have to keep political realities
in the back of our minds when we discuss policy.
Governments actually have a lot of different options for how
to address particular issues – even if we have found a “good” policy option,
chances are there are other good policy options also available. There are many issues
to solve and many good solutions, but we are also fundamentally limited by
budgetary and logistical constraints. Decision makers in government and cabinet
have to make choices about where to allocate funding (and humans) based on
their priorities, so we can’t solve all issues or implement all policy
solutions.
One way of thinking about the different policy options is by
taking a loose interpretation of Lawrence Lessig’s pathetic dot theory,
so called because the user (in this case, the general public) is often treated
as a passive object that regulation (or incentivisation) happens to. The theory
suggests that everyone’s behaviour is constrained by four types of regulation:
legal, social norms, market, and architectural. For example, we might identify
that smoking is harmful to people’s health with wider social and economic
harms, so the government wants to do something about it. We could say that the
government has designated that smoking is an issue that needs to be addressed (and we should consider that even
at this fundamental level people may disagree with this assertion). To address
this issue, the government might have several options:
Legal: The
government could pass laws that regulate smoking based on age (e.g. you must be
at least 18), where you can smoke (e.g. you cannot smoke public indoor spaces),
or with other restrictions.
Social norms: Through public education campaigns, the government can influence behaviour by discouraging people from smoking from a young age, thus moulding the social norms around smoking. You’ve probably seen plenty of anti-smoking advertisements as billboards or on TV, funded by government agencies.
Market: The government can levy tobacco taxes that make cigarettes less affordable, interfering with the supply and demand equation to modify the public’s ability to choose to smoke or not smoke.
Architectural: The government can change the process or product itself, such as by limiting the amount of nicotine allowed in cigarettes or encouraging the adoption of e-cigarettes that are less harmful.
Social norms: Through public education campaigns, the government can influence behaviour by discouraging people from smoking from a young age, thus moulding the social norms around smoking. You’ve probably seen plenty of anti-smoking advertisements as billboards or on TV, funded by government agencies.
Market: The government can levy tobacco taxes that make cigarettes less affordable, interfering with the supply and demand equation to modify the public’s ability to choose to smoke or not smoke.
Architectural: The government can change the process or product itself, such as by limiting the amount of nicotine allowed in cigarettes or encouraging the adoption of e-cigarettes that are less harmful.
As evidenced by this example, the government doesn’t have to
just choose one option – while sometimes the options are mutually exclusive
(pick one or the other), often they are complementary and reflect a desire to
move in a particular direction (in this case, towards reducing smoking). For
each policy option, we have to consider the pros and cons, who it helps and who
it harms, and how much it costs and what we won’t be able to do instead if we
do this.
Let’s look a different example where we want to move in the
opposite direction, where the government thinks that renewable energy is a good
thing and wants to encourage the adoption of solar panels. We could say that
the government has identified the lack of solar panel adoption as an issue, and
so we have many different policy solution options:
Legal: The
government could pass laws that require the use of solar panels on all new
buildings above a certain size, with a certain percentage of each new building’s
energy needs met by solar.
Social norms: The government could launch an advertising campaign to tell people fighting climate change and being environmentally friendly is important and so they should put solar panels on their houses.
Market: The government could provide subsidies for solar panels, encouraging adoption by paying for a certain percentage of the solar panels to make them cheaper for the end user.
Architectural: The government could fund research and development towards making solar panels more useful in harsh environments such as in colder parts of the South Island, or introduce standards that require solar panels to meet minimum efficiency requirements so that fewer sub-standard low-quality solar panels are installed.
Social norms: The government could launch an advertising campaign to tell people fighting climate change and being environmentally friendly is important and so they should put solar panels on their houses.
Market: The government could provide subsidies for solar panels, encouraging adoption by paying for a certain percentage of the solar panels to make them cheaper for the end user.
Architectural: The government could fund research and development towards making solar panels more useful in harsh environments such as in colder parts of the South Island, or introduce standards that require solar panels to meet minimum efficiency requirements so that fewer sub-standard low-quality solar panels are installed.
As suggested before, this isn’t the only way to think about
public policy. Something missing from this model is the element of consultation
with the public and participation of the public through submissions, petitions,
protests, and more. That element lifts the “dot” (i.e. us) from being passive
to being more active participants in policy development. Working with experts
outside government, other government agencies, and with the public generally is
an important element of policy development in the public sector. Some theorists
describe policymaking as a “dynamic, complex, and interactive” process, and we
should also consider policy responses at different levels of government (local,
national, and international). Considering the implementation from an early
stage is also really important – policies that cannot be effectively
implemented should be thrown out pretty quickly. Verification and program
evaluation are also needed so that we can keep tabs on implementation and check
that things have actually been done properly once policies have been adopted.
Hopefully, this serves as a brief introduction to how we
might think about the different options that a government has, how we might consider
if they’re good or bad, and why people might agree or disagree about different issues,
policy solutions, and implementations. It’s intended to help you think about
why politics is difficult, and why different people with good intentions can
come up with wildly different positions. Throughout the next month, we’re going
to hear (read) from a lot of different perspectives on a range of issues that
need government responses – knowing what our policy options are (and what they
entail) is key to picking the best option(s) for implementation so that we can
achieve good outcomes for New Zealand.
We’re organising this series of posts because we want to
inform as many people as possible about the range and scope of the issues that
the government has to deal with, and to encourage readers to think about their
own policy ideas for addressing those issues. Maybe it’ll help you decide who
you want to vote for, but voting is actually only one way to influence
government. We hope to inspire readers to actively participate in democratic
processes more long-term, to get the issues that matter to them in front of
their elected representatives, and to not just find problems but to propose
workable, tenable policy solutions.
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