Incrementalism

Public Policy making is more than is often perceived a measure of trial and error. Policy administration is often a rocky road from initiation to implementation. As a policy comes to the agenda through whichever means, be it public opinion, environmental disasters such as earthquakes or extrenuous pressures such as that from the EU, the government will find that it needs to filer issues prioritise. This is often a tricky business for a government that is juggling an incredibly versatile and wide ranging degree of actors and supporters.

The present government did a recent U-turn on terminating the rights for free milk to children under 5, something which Thatcher never lived down, forever enshrined with the title of 'Thatcher Thatcher milk snatcher'. Thus policy U-turns aren't always the most efficient and can often be very dangerous.

The best way to avoid controversial policies could be through a means of incrementalism. This is a theoretical policy of rationality developed by Lindbolm as a middle way between the rational actor model and bounded rationality. It is a means of step by step implementation indulging in costant analysis and reevaluation at each step along the way, thus fortuitously paving the way for the next steps. Thus it is a reactive model which most people engage in via daily lessons alone in how to make a good cup of tea.

A critique of this problem is that it is an approach which takes time to implement and may not address the overriding issues immediately. Furthermore the implementation is usually left to civil servants. Civil servants are well know for expropriating their own ideas and politics when dispensing government policy. Thus with time lags aswell as more engagement over a prolonged period of time, civil servants may infact determine the outcomes of the incrementalist policy rather than the government. Thus a degree of skill is required in managing and dare I say taming these autonomous groups. Another problem is that radical policies can actually slowly be implemented this way forming change which people didn't actually want. I am certain that Hitler's nazi Germany was a believer in incrementalism to entice the masses in the early days. A more relevant problem today is that incrementalism may only tackle the immediate problems without having an overall strategic solution and therefore it may find itself stagnating.

The pros of this policy are that change can be implemented slowly avoiding outright failure in a large policy structural adjustment policy (as an example) which if it were to fail would waste huge amounts of time, resources and of course involve a heavy bill courtesy of the tax payers purse. For me the overriding benefit of incrementalism is that no delusional beliefs are attached to an all compassing overall solution. Lindbolm understood that in an ever changing and unpredictable world policies need to be structurally able to adjust and to not have an idealist approach. Incrementalism involves bargaining and compromising as I find is just as important in daily life. Incrementalism also achieves a solution in navigating through very muddled deep seated problems by addressing each exponent of the issue as it rears its ugly head instead of trying to address a seven headed monster. This is a descriptive model as it works within the confines of the real world instead of a misplaced abstract faith in perfect administration which we know doesn't exist just like perfect competition will never exist either. In business bargaining and negotiating is what does exist and I think here a dose of Historic Isomorphism to understand the policy administration game would be well placed too.