Today the world is confronted with dual crises: creeping and acute threats unfolding at the same time-for example, the manifestation of extreme weather events such as drought and flooding and the creeping crisis of climate change. To cope with dual crises, this article develops a novel temporal perspective that offers policy actors a repertoire of interrelated strategies for enhancing the robustness of institutional efforts. The repertoire consists of five temporal strategies that policy actors can use to navigate the twin challenges of immediate and latent threats in conjunction: strategic coupling of short-term shocks and creeping crises, crafting time horizons, molding the pace of public problem-solving, mobilizing anticipatory capacity through futuring techniques, and adaptive iteration of policy decisions. We illustrate the practical application of these strategies in an exploratory case study of adaptive water management in the Netherlands.Samenvatting: De wereld wordt geconfronteerd met duale crises: sluipende en acute dreigingen op hetzelfde moment, zoals extreme weersgebeurtenissen als droogte of watersnood tegelijkertijd met de sluipende crisis van klimaatverandering.Om te reageren op duale crises, ontwikkelt dit artikel een nieuw repertoire van vijf temporele strategieën voor beleidsmakers om de robuustheid van overheidssystemen te
This article looks at policy failure in systems that rely on highly autonomous organizations to deliver the services promised in the policy programs. We argue that in order to better understand success and failure in such systems, the existing categories of policy failure and organizational failure do not suffice. Therefore, we look at the ability of agents assigned to that task to effectively act in the relation in-between the system level and the level of individual organizations. This brings to the fore another type of failuregovernance failure-the inability of a policy system to timely detect and asses looming failure in individual parts. It is helpful to apply a lens of interactive complexity to these systems and to look at causal loops rather than causal lines. We apply this perspective to a case of the Inspectorate of Education, to study how it dealt with three cases of looming failure in schools. The perspective of causal loops helped the Inspectorate to understand in hindsight how two schools collapsed, and it was then used proactively to intervene in a third school. The paper helps practitioners to better deal with failure
Policy often has to perform amidst uncertain and rapidly changing conditions. Robustness is the ability to perform and achieve intended effects under unknown conditions. Robust design can benefit from the capacity to anticipate developments early. A system of early warning is a method to anticipate change early and help policy design to be more robust. Early warning can enable moment of 'consecration', moments where reflection on assumptions and biased of policy design can be challenged and changed; this can be an important addition to the robustness of policy design. However, early warning is not unproblematic; it is an organizational practice that inherently invokes issues of habituation, organizational bias, as it challenges the status quo. In this paper, we study how policy makers who 'do' early warning in the context of robust policy engage with these issues and how they managed to improve the robustness of policy design. We do so by studying an empirical case of an early warning system in The Netherlands. We analyze how the system was build, how it worked, how it was further professionalized, and what the system did to the capacity of the organization to design and deliver robust policy.
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