Adrian Kay

Path dependency and the CAP

Current frameworks for understanding the development of the CAP all suffer from having a static rather than a dynamic perspective. This paper considers whether the concept of path dependency can provide a corrective. However, the large majority of the empirical applications of the concept have been to institutional development at a macro, constitutional level rather than to specific public policies. This paper by defining the CAP as an institution and using the concept of path dependency is an attempt to test the boundary of the existing literature. The advantages and difficulties of the concept with regard to understanding the CAP are critically assessed. The main difficulty is extending explanations of path dependency to accommodate major CAP reforms. However, in certain cases, the mechanisms of feedback loops and cumulative consequences which derive from a path dependency approach can be useful for explaining significant shifts in policy direction. Overall, the conclusion is that the concept can enrich our understanding of the development of the CAP.

Multiple streams in EU policy-making: the case of the 2005 sugar reform

The multiple streams model, developed by Kingdon in the United States (US), is being adapted increasingly to study European Union (EU) policy-making. This, however, is revealing a theoretical underdevelopment in some of its central components. The present paper considers several concerns. It seeks to develop the idea of policy entrepreneurship as a context-specific activity that gives substance to the claim that ‘ideas have their time’; it interprets the key notion of ambiguity, in the EU context, to mean institutional ambiguity; and it allows for spillovers between policy areas to be endogenous as well as exogenous. This affects the nature of the policy windows wherein policy entrepreneurship occurs. The adapted multiple streams model is used to analyse the 2005 EU sugar policy reform. Institutional ambiguity and endogenous spillovers are shown to create the conditions that enabled active policy entrepreneurship to lead, ultimately, to reform of this most resilient of policies.

Ambiguity, multiple streams, and EU policy

The multiple streams framework draws insight from interactions between agency and institutions to explore the impact of context, time and meaning on policy change and to assess the institutional and issue complexities permeating the European Union (EU) policy process. The authors specify the assumptions and structure of the framework and review studies that have adapted it to reflect more fully EU decision-making processes. The nature of policy entrepreneurship and policy windows are assessed to identify areas of improvement. Finally, the authors sketch out a research agenda that refines the logic of political manipulation which permeates the lens and the institutional complexity which frames the EU policy process.

A new generation of trade policy: potential risks to diet-related health from the trans pacific partnership agreement.

Trade poses risks and opportunities to public health nutrition. This paper discusses the potential food-related public health risks of a radical new kind of trade agreement: the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). Under negotiation since 2010, the TPP involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the USA, and Vietnam. Here, we review the international evidence on the relationships between trade agreements and diet-related health and, where available, documents and leaked text from the TPP negotiations. Similar to other recent bilateral or regional trade agreements, we find that the TPP would propose tariffs reductions, foreign investment liberalisation and intellectual property protection that extend beyond provisions in the multilateral World Trade Organization agreements. The TPP is also likely to include strong investor protections, introducing major changes to domestic regulatory regimes to enable greater industry involvement in policy making and new avenues for appeal. Transnational food corporations would be able to sue governments if they try to introduce health policies that food companies claim violate their privileges in the TPP; even the potential threat of litigation could greatly curb governments’ ability to protect public health. Hence, we find that the TPP, emblematic of a new generation of 21st century trade policy, could potentially yield greater risks to health than prior trade agreements. Because the text of the TPP is secret until the countries involved commit to the agreement, it is essential for public health concerns to be articulated during the negotiation process. Unless the potential health consequences of each part of the text are fully examined and taken into account, and binding language is incorporated in the TPP to safeguard regulatory policy space for health, the TPP could be detrimental to public health nutrition. Health advocates and health-related policymakers must be proactive in their engagement with the trade negotiations.

Tense Layering and Synthetic Policy Paradigms: The Politics of Health Insurance in Australia

This paper analyses the substantial financial subsidy, alongside other regulatory changes, introduced to support private health insurance in Australia at the end of the 1990s. The concept of policy layering is developed and refined theoretically in terms of changes in policy paradigms in order to chart a lengthy period of tense layering in Australian health-care politics between private and public health insurance and the bipartisan convergence on a universalism plus choice policy paradigm during the 1990s. This is the key dynamic underlying the Coalitions support of private health insurance after 1996 rather than a neo-liberal ambition to dismantle the health-care state and return to a predominately privately financed health-care system with a residual, public safety net.

Competing agendas in public procurement: An empirical analysis of opportunities and limits in the UK for SMEs

Government procurement policy in the UK is an uneasy mixture of different policy legacies, where the dominant objectives of cost-efficiency and value for money compete with alternatives which emphasise public procurement as central to innovation policy and/or a critical demand-side instrument in local and regional economic development. Quantitative analysis of which types of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit, and how, from different levels of government as a customer is, however, rare in the UK (and indeed more widely across the EU). Utilising data from the Federation of Small Businesses 2008 biannual survey, we address this important task. Results reveal different patterns of procurement depending on the territorial scale of government, in terms of both the innovativeness of SMEs supported through public procurement as well as demand-side contributions to local and regional economic development, allowing us to judge future possible policy directions with regard to the use of public procurement.

Historical-institutionalist perspectives on the development of the EU budget system

Abstract The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a fine-grained approach. This enables us to emphasize the connections that exist between EU budgetary institutions, in both time and space. We show that the initial set of budgetary institutions was unable, over time, to achieve consistently their treaty-based objectives. In response, rather than reform these institutions at potentially high political cost, additional institutions were layered on top of the extant structures. We thus demonstrate how some EU budgetary institutions have remained unchanged, whilst others have been added or changed over time.

Trade and investment liberalization and Asia’s noncommunicable disease epidemic: a synthesis of data and existing literature

BackgroundTrade and investment liberalization (trade liberalization) can promote or harm health. Undoubtedly it has contributed, although unevenly, to Asia’s social and economic development over recent decades with resultant gains in life expectancy and living standards. In the absence of public health protections, however, it is also a significant upstream driver of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) including cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes through facilitating increased consumption of the ‘risk commodities’ tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed foods, and by constraining access to NCD medicines. In this paper we describe the NCD burden in Asian countries, trends in risk commodity consumption and the processes by which trade liberalization has occurred in the region and contributed to these trends. We further establish pressing questions for future research on strengthening regulatory capacity to address trade liberalization impacts on risk commodity consumption and health.MethodsA semi-structured search of scholarly databases, institutional websites and internet sources for academic and grey literature. Data for descriptive statistics were sourced from Euromonitor International, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the World Trade Organization.ResultsConsumption of tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed foods was prevalent in the region and increasing in many countries. We find that trade liberalization can facilitate increased trade in goods, services and investments in ways that can promote risk commodity consumption, as well as constrain the available resources and capacities of governments to enact policies and programmes to mitigate such consumption. Intellectual property provisions of trade agreements may also constrain access to NCD medicines. Successive layers of the evolving global and regional trade regimes including structural adjustment, multilateral trade agreements, and preferential trade agreements have enabled transnational corporations that manufacture, market and distribute risk commodities to increasingly penetrate and promote consumption in Asian markets.ConclusionsTrade liberalization is a significant driver of the NCD epidemic in Asia. Increased participation in trade agreements requires countries to strengthen regulatory capacity to ensure adequate protections for public health. How best to achieve this through multilateral, regional and unilateral actions is a pressing question for ongoing research.

Evaluating Devolution in Wales

Reviews of devolution in Wales have been focussed so far on empirical description and positive analysis; there has been almost no discussion of how it should be judged or evaluated. I redress this imbalance by considering the arguments for devolution and the various normative values that may be used to evaluate the process. The arguments for devolution are of two basic kinds. Some are consequentialist: that devolution is desired on the grounds that it is believed to have good or desirable effects. Others are deontological: that devolution is thought to be intrinsically valuable. Any attempt to justify and evaluate devolution by consequentialist reasoning amounts to post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalisation. The social sciences are a long way from allowing the prediction of the global long-term net equilibrium effects of a major institutional change such as devolution in Wales. I further argue that the nonconsequentialist value of autonomy is the underlying justification for the devolution process. Devolution should be judged according to how it appeals to, supports or embodies this value.

Understanding Policy Change as a Hermeneutic Problem

Abstract Part one sets out the distinctive features of a post-positivist approach in policy studies, what it brings to policy scholarship and its relationship to extant positivist analyses. Post-positivism allows policy change to be stated as a hermeneutic problem that requires an interpretive approach: policy change occurs through the politics of establishing definitions and agreeing the meanings of societal problems over time. Two crucial questions of agency follow from this insight: first, how are agents constituted in the interpretive analysis of policy change? And second, how are the interpretive frames of agents communicated, reproduced and changed? I begin to answer these in the subsequent sections using the practical reason version of rationality.