Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis
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Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis Allan McConnell1 · Liam Grealy2 · Tess Lea2 Accepted: 11 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This article develops a heuristic framework to help analysts navigate an important but under-researched issue: ‘policy success for whom?’ It identifies different forms of policy success across the policy making, program, political and temporal realms, to assess how a specific policy can differentially benefit a variety of stakeholders, including governments, lobbyists, not-for-profits, community groups and individuals. The article identifies a threestep process to aid researchers in examining any policy initiative in order to understand the forms and extent of success experienced by any actor/stakeholder. Central to these steps is the examination of plausible assessments and counter assessments to help interrogate issues of ‘success for whom.’ The article demonstrates a practical application of the framework to a case study focused on the Fixing Houses for Better Health (FHBH) program in Australia—a time-limited Commonwealth government-funded program aimed at improving Indigenous health outcomes by fixing housing. Keywords Policy success · Policy evaluation · Power relations · Australia · Indigenous housing
Introduction The issue of whether a policy is ‘successful’ has been the subject of particular debate over the past two decades (Baggott 2012; Bovens et al. 2001; Marsh and McConnell 2010; McConnell 2010, 2017a; Newman 2014). Recent work on the topic reminds us that governments can frequently succeed and so provides a counterweight to research which focuses predominantly on failure, fiascos, and policy disasters (Compton and ’t Hart 2019; Luetjens et al. 2019). This paper is sympathetic to such approaches and seeks to build on * Liam Grealy [email protected] Allan McConnell [email protected] Tess Lea [email protected] 1
Department of Government and International Relations, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
2
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
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Policy Sciences
them, but it also offers some important nuance. It is not commonplace to directly address the idea that a routine focus on formal policy success (based largely on stated government goals) can mask the significantly different ‘success’ experiences of various stakeholders. Such issues are an undercurrent in policy success research but are rarely upfront. Consideration of the uneven distribution of success moves us beyond thinking of policy success in relation only to government goals and toward a focus specifically on ‘policy success for whom?’. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to develop a basic framework—a heuristic—that will allow researchers to approach the issue of ‘success for whom?’ and apply it to a particular policy. Its contribution constitutes what Ostrom (2007) refers to as a framework that aids our understanding via the d
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