A Modified de Zwart's Framework to Differentiate between Unintended and Unanticipated Consequences of Public Policies

The views of de Zwart (2015) related to the conflation of terms, “unintended consequences” and “unanticipated consequences”, the necessity to maintain their distinction and the need to take into account the “unintended but anticipated” consequences as a separate category are analyzed. The authors, while agreeing with de Zwart, also point out the need to recognize the quantitative aspects of consequences in addition to the qualitative aspects, and propose a modified framework, that can enable policy analysts to distinguish between unintended and unanticipated consequences in qualitative as well as quantitative terms. In view of authors, this modified framework can be a used as tool in policy analysis, particularly in evaluation of existing policies or while analyzing the option of policy continuation or incremental changes in an existing policy.