8. Revamping Incrementalism to Incentivize the Land and Housing Policy Agendas in Hong Kong

This chapter explores the concepts of incrementalism and incentivization in the context of land and housing policy agendas. Given ongoing challenges in land and housing shortages and a rapidly changing environment, status quo orientation of government will lead to success or otherwise failure of new people-based and result-oriented strategies. On one hand, incremental land and housing policies seemingly fail to “muddle through” the status quo. On the other hand, public administrators are exposed to more uncertainties in increasingly complex policy mixes and a fragmented sociopolitical and economic context, without properly incentivized, they will eventually lose their job satisfaction. As such, there is a pressing need to develop a model to improve applicability of the theory of incrementalism as a commonplace accounting of recent effort in changing policymaking process. The chapter addresses three main questions: why are virtues of incrementalism remaining valuable, how can incremental policy changes and unfavourable policy outcomes be explained, and what can be done to reduce vices of incrementalism? First, the chapter argues that incrementalism, as a “branch method” of decision-making, offers a more realistic and effective approach to land and housing policymaking compared to classic bounded rationality model. This “branch method” describes power of small, marginal, momentous and accommodated steps to achieve policy goals. The virtues of incrementalism, such as its resourcefulness in overcoming cognitive limitations, diverging interests, and changing policy goals, make it a valuable tool in complex policy situations. Second, the chapter acknowledges that accumulative incrementalism recognizes the long periods of policymaking stasis without theorizing the co-existence of very seldom events of drastic policy changes. The empirically predominant form of accumulative incrementalism comes at certain cost in its explanatory power. This proposition guides this study to draw on Atkinson’s intellectual inquiries of institutionalism and behavioural economics to analyze the dynamic of incremental policy changes and unfavourable policy outcomes and view punctuated equilibria as part of policy continuity. Third, incentivization is identified as one of the crucial factor in the effectiveness of incrementalism in a rapid changing environment. The chapter proposes a framework that incorporates normative, affective and calculative incentives. Overall, the chapter presents a conceptual model that analyses the dynamic of incrementalism, intellectual inquiry and incentivization in the context of land and housing policy agendas.