Policy design involves the effort to more or less systematically develop efficient and effective policies through the application of knowledge about policy means gained from experience, and reason, to the development and adoption of courses of action that are likely to succeed in attaining their desired goals or aims within specific policy contexts. The desire to husband resources involved in goal attainment involves governments of all types and persuasions in processes of more or less conscious and rational efforts at design. However, the object of design—what is actually designed—who designs it, how they do so, and why they make the design decisions they do, are all questions which require clarification if the study of policy design is to move forward. Each of these issues is addressed in turn in what follows and the strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature on these subjects assessed.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.