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01-11-2009

Designing long-term policy: rethinking transition management

Authors: Jan-Peter Voß, Adrian Smith, John Grin

Published in: Policy Sciences | Issue 4/2009

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Abstract

Long-term policy is enjoying something of a come-back in connection with sustainable development. The current revival tries to avoid the pitfalls of an earlier generation of positivistic long-range planning and control approaches. Instead, this new generation of policy design emphasises reflexive governance concepts. These aim at inducing and navigating complex processes of socio-technical change by means of deliberation, probing and learning. A practical expression of this move that is attracting growing international attention amongst researchers and practitioners is the policy of ‘Transition Management’ (TM) in the Netherlands. This article takes stock of TM implementation experience to date and discusses the critical issues it raises for long-term policy design. The article provides a framework and synthesis for this Special Issue, which comprises articles that address a range of those issues in more depth. We highlight three critical issues: the politics of societal learning, contextual embedding of policy design and dynamics of the design process itself. This leads us to propose a view on policy design as a contested process of social innovation. Our conclusion considers implications for continued work on designing transition management in practice as well as the reflexive capacities of democratic politics.

next article Transitioning policy: co-production of a new strategic framework for energy innovation policy in the Netherlands

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This special issue is part of a larger cluster of activities in the context of an emerging research programme on sustainability transitions. All papers have been presented in the context of a workshop series on System Innovations for Sustainable Development which has been co-funded through the conCISEnet project by the German Federal Minstry of Research and Education’s programme on Social-ecological Research (www.sozial-oekologische-forschung.org) and through the Knowlewdge Network for System Innovations and Transitions (www.ksinetwork.nl) by the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment.

There is also a literature on long-term policy design in economics. This is not so much about empirically observable dynamics of the policy process, but more about optimality conditions and the modeling of incentives for long-term investments. Recurrent themes are questions about how to discount (uncertain) pay offs in the future to calculate present investments and questions about overcoming uneven distributions of costs and benefits of political measures across generations.

We are not talking about political decisions with a temporal delay until they become effective (a law that comes into force in 5 years time). We also exclude the setting of long-term objectives, if they are put up as guiding posts without an accompanying programme for realisation (e.g. emission reduction targets).

This arose out of an ideological clash, theoretical contestation, plus evidence from implementation research. While planning theory originally developed in context of the New Deal as “fourth power of government” (Rexford Tugwell) and a necessary basis of open and free societies (Karl Mannheim), it was soon contested as the arch-enemy of a free society (Hayek). Arguably of more importance than ideological clashes, especially for the policy studies community, were detailed empirical analyses of policy implementation difficulties which challenged the feasibility of political planning in the sense of societal blueprinting (Murphy 1971; Derthick 1972; Pressman and Wildavsky 1973; Mayntz 1977; Mazmanian and Sabatier 1989/1983; Hofferbert 1986). The primacy of planning suffered in the wake of the economic turbulence, welfare state crises and apparent failure of planning in the 1970s, and compounded by globalisation of the economy.

Prominent examples are Lasswell’s policy sciences (Lasswell 1951), Lindbloms’s incrementalism (Lindblom 1969/1959, 1979), and Wildavsky’s ‘bottom-up politics’ (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973; Majone and Wildavsky 1978).

Long-term policy design in the tradition of a revised planning theory has great relevance and affinity with environmental and technology policy. There it goes under different labels such as ‘foresight’ (Renn 2002; Weber 2006; Voß et al. 2006a), ‘adaptive management’ (Johnson et al., 1993; Lee 1994; Holling et al. 1995; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Sendzimir et al. 2006), ‘learning’ (Grin and Van de Graaf 1996; Wals and van der Ley 2007) or ‘directed incrementalism’ (Grunwald 2000). By the beginning of the 1990s sustainable development supported these developments as a new political ‘Leitbild’and brings with it a re-legitimization and re-vitalization of long-term transformative policy and new ideas about planning (Kenny and Meadowcroft 1999).

This literature was inspired by a recognition of the combined implications of the limits of central planning (Hayek 1960; Lindblom 1965) and the limits of classical understandings of knowledge as were articulated through notions as the ‘crisis of expertise’ (Schön 1983), the ‘politics of expertise’ (Fischer 1990), the decreasing trust in modern ‘abstract systems’ of expertise (Giddens 1991) and critiques of instrumental rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno 1988/1969).

The other way around, structural changes may also help to overcome conflicts of interests. For instance, the 2008 financial crisis may prompt a reconsideration of the role of government regulations in relation to business interests, and thereby make issues like planning for sustainable development more palatable. It is not simply a re-positioning of actors’ relative interests that can be prompted by wider change, but a re-conceptualisation of what those interests are, and how they are best met.

To be sure, part of the response to the challenge of sustainable development have been planning approaches which simply try to get back to first generation planning ideas as they try to overcome short terminism by increasing planning capacities to force societal trajectories into a sustainable corridor. One kind of such approaches focuses on the fixation of durable policy frameworks and on achieving political commitment beyond the horizon of rationality that is in current institutions of political systems (Hovi et al. 2007). Another approach, partly inspired by new public management, calls for a clear definition of sustainable development as a policy goal and articulation of indicators, monitoring and control (Steurer 2004; Jänicke and Jörgens 2005).

Aspects of this dilemma have been articulated in many shades, e.g. as exploration and exploitation (March 1991), as a conflict between engineering and ecological resilience (Holling 1996), as requirements of long-term planning and short-term acceptance (Grunwald 2000), or as the efficacy paradox of governance under conditions of complexity (Voß et al. 2006b).

‘Away from fossil-fuels towards renewable sources’ in the energy sector, ‘away from exploitation and degradation towards recycling and protection’ in the use of natural resources, ‘away from intensive farming towards precision farming’ in the agricultural sector and ‘away from car-based transport towards customised services’ in the mobility sector.

Kemp and Rotmans (2009) propose to understand the interpretive flexibility of transition management by framing the notion of ‘transition’ as a ‘boundary object’ which is a common reference point for differing perspectives and thus is able to bundle and align actor strategies (Star and Griesemer 1989).

This notion is in line with the reflective practice paradigm in general design theory (Kroes 2002, p. 289). In this view of the design process ‘the problem space and the solution space co-evolve together, with interchange of information between the two spaces’ (Dorst and Cross 2001, p. 434).

However, there is a political dilemma here. Fictional certainties have their political uses (Rip 2006). In not presenting transition management as a theory of governance that has all the answers, but as something more modest, might it lack an ability to galvanize and mobilize support?

Consider transition management more as a process of phronèsis than techne, i.e. a process of pragmatically synthesizing the resolution of situated and contextualised problems, with considerations pertaining to the feasibility and acceptability of visions (Grin 2000; Flyvbjerg 2001).

While transition management discourse started from persistent problems, it has developed into a very broad and general framework of evolutionary political steering. The precise character of transitions moves into the background and with it the substantive challenges which it sought to deal with in the first place (Meadowcroft 2009; Heiskanen et al. 2009). This makes the governance approach susceptible to abuse, as well as difficult to keep on course at the same time as allowing for probing and adaptation in the design process.

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Title: Designing long-term policy: rethinking transition management
Authors: Jan-Peter Voß
Adrian Smith
John Grin
Publication date: 01-11-2009
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Policy Sciences / Issue 4/2009
Print ISSN: 0032-2687
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0891
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-009-9103-5

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