{"title":"Can policy experiments achieve policy change? The politics of experimentation in Canadian cultural policy","authors":"Kate Mattocks","doi":"10.1007/s11077-025-09575-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the relationship between policy experiments, a form of policy innovation, and policy change. Despite a great deal of scholarship on experiments, little is known about how experiments lead to change. For example, what factors make change more likely? How can experimentation best be governed so as to lead to policy change? These questions are answered using data from a case study of 45 policy experiments in Canadian arts and cultural policy. The article highlight six factors crucial to enabling mainstreaming and scaling in this case: leadership, the scope of experiments, congruence with existing policy priorities, alignment with an existing modernization program, expanded relationships and stakeholder collaboration, and creative space. Each of these factors is linked to one or more of McFadgen’s (Ecol Soc 24:30, 2019) four pathways to policy change via policy experiments. The article’s findings have broader implications for the study and understanding of how to achieve change in risk-averse policy settings.</p>","PeriodicalId":51433,"journal":{"name":"Policy Sciences","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Policy Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09575-8","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between policy experiments, a form of policy innovation, and policy change. Despite a great deal of scholarship on experiments, little is known about how experiments lead to change. For example, what factors make change more likely? How can experimentation best be governed so as to lead to policy change? These questions are answered using data from a case study of 45 policy experiments in Canadian arts and cultural policy. The article highlight six factors crucial to enabling mainstreaming and scaling in this case: leadership, the scope of experiments, congruence with existing policy priorities, alignment with an existing modernization program, expanded relationships and stakeholder collaboration, and creative space. Each of these factors is linked to one or more of McFadgen’s (Ecol Soc 24:30, 2019) four pathways to policy change via policy experiments. The article’s findings have broader implications for the study and understanding of how to achieve change in risk-averse policy settings.
期刊介绍：
The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci
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