Adaptive policies, policy analysis, and policy-making

Public policies must be devised in spite of profound uncertainties about the future. When there are many plausible scenarios for the future, it may well be impossible to construct any single static policy that will perform well in all of them. It is likely, however, that the uncertainties that confront planners will be resolved over the course of time by new information. Thus, policies should be adaptive – devised not to be optimal for a best estimate future, but robust across a range of plausible futures. Such policies should combine actions that are time urgent with those that make important commitments to shape the future and those that preserve needed flexibility for the future. In this paper, we propose an approach to policy formulation and implementation that explicitly confronts the pragmatic reality that policies will be adjusted as the world changes and as new information becomes available. Our suggested ‘adaptive’ approach allows policymakers to cope with the uncertainties that confront them by creating policies that respond to changes over time and that make explicit provision for learning. The approach makes adaptation explicit at the outset of policy formulation. Thus, the inevitable policy changes become part of a larger, recognized process and are not forced to be made repeatedly on an ad hoc basis. This adaptive approach implies fundamental changes in the three major elements of policy-making: the analytical approach, the types of policies considered, and the decision-making process.