‘MyCountry’ has decided to try to contain emissions from household electricity consumption but three local politicians are championing rather different instruments.
- Ms Preacher wants an education, awareness-raising and persuasion campaign to prompt voluntary effort (including installing electronic, instantaneous electricity meters in houses to provide instant feedback on the GHG impact of using appliances).
- Mr Incentive wants a carbon tax (which would raise electricity bills)
- Ms Rule wants to enact regulations requiring high energy efficiency for all household electric appliances.
How good do these policy instruments look according to some of the criteria we saw in Tuesday's lecture?
- Efficiency
- Ease of evaluation (was labeled as 'visibility', but this may not be a great name)
- Political feasibility
- Coerciveness
- Targeting
- Equity
- Ease of implementation
- Complexity
- Legitimacy
4 comments:
There's a great deal of confusion over the definitions and categories used here.
My group made the following assumptions:
Political feasibility is defined as support from politicians/elite/people with authority, while Legitimacy refers to support from the population at large. It's entirely possible for something to be politically feasible yet illegitimate, and vice versa.
For Ease of Implementation, I would like to think of it as technical issues - how difficult would it be to install the equipment required. As for Complexity, maybe we could interpret it as the role of the bureaucracy in the policy.
As it stands right now, we only more confused!
Certainly the list of criteria is not an authoritative list. And they are not mutually exclusive. There is some overlap. They were drawn from several sources and were intended to get you thinking about the various possible ways to judge policies and policy instruments.
Please don't take them as a final list. The lecture and Thursday exercise was aimed at getting you thinking critically about the issue, not to provide you with some final list of criteria that you can use in your PAEs.
As you go through various readings during your careers you will come across various lists of criteria. The problem is that they are often different from each other. You need to be able to think critically about them and choose a wise set of criteria for your purposes.
After assessing each option by the different criteria, my group members and I were able to conclude that Mr Incentive's approach scored the highest points, followed by Miss Preacher, and finally Miss Rule.
However, it was also clear that although Mr Incentive's approach ranked highest on several criteria (efficiency; coerciveness; targetting and ease of implementation), the fact that it also scored the lowest in political feasibility and equity highlighted an important lesson - there is no perfect public policy. Instead, which policy is suitable or appropriate depends on the particular circumstances at hand.
For example, Mr Incentive's approach may work in a country with a dominant political party who has the people's confidence, but probably not so in a country where the government is formed by a coalition of parties.
There is no perfect solution for anything, even in science. It always boils down to context. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
I understand the purpose behind the exercises so far, and it's interesting to see where our possible blind spots are. And as in all policy making, I'm very wary of the Law of Unintended Consequences. And obviously, if the results can already be predicted, then it wouldn't be unintended anyway!
There is something to be said about feedback systems. The system which receives the new data/information about the results of a policy, and adjusts quicker in tuning the variables, should stand a better chance of eventually crafting a suitable policy that works.
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