Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy: Lessons from the U.S. Foreign Policy Arena

Abstract

This essay extends John Kingdon's work on predecision policy processes in US domestic policy to the foreign policy domain. While Kingdon's insights have significantly improved our understanding of predecision processes, further development is necessary for extension across both domestic and foreign policy domains. Kingdon's incremental evolutionary metaphor for alternative specification has to be revamped to include both gradualist and nonincremental policy types. Scholars must also make more explicit, elaborate, and thorough use of Cohen, March and Olsen's ‘garbage can’ model of decision making. To these ends, we offer a typology of policy alternatives that incorporates alternative metaphors premised on recent developments in evolutionary theory. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda amenable to pursuit in both national and cross-national contexts.

Ambiguity and choice in European public policy

“…Its tempotemporal movement from glacial to rapid-and mode-substantive content from marginal change to completely new-differ dramatically across issues and networks. Combining the two dimensions yields a matrix with four possibilities (Durant and Diehl 1989). Zahariadis and Allen (1995) elaborate on this process, linking it to network integration ( Figure 2).…”

Kingdon's “Streams” Model at Thirty: Still Relevant in the 21st Century?

“…Durant and Diehl (), who were among the first to apply Kingdon's domestic policy model in the U.S. foreign policy domain, asserted that Kingdon's model has significantly helped in the understanding of predecision processes. Neumann () later contended that Kingdon's model focuses on the formulation phase of policies, which greatly influenced the overall effectiveness of policy and, therefore, is very appropriate for analyzing foreign policy.…”

“…Theories of sociological institutionalism, path dependency and discourse institutionalization are used (see e.g., Buitelaar and De Kam ). Other major works cited, either in conjunction or comparison with Kingdon's model, are Cohen, March, and Olsen's () original garbage can model and Baumgartner and Jones’ () punctuated equilibrium model (Durant and Diehl ; John ; Lindquist ).…”

Forest certification: a policy perspective

“…Third, the literature on policy learning and policy change suggests that rapid policy change (whether incremental or paradigmatic) is often linked to changes in actors in a policy domain, as discussed in Chapter 2, Section 2.3 (Durrant and Diehl 1989;Howlett 1998). This change can occur when a new actor joins the domain or an old actor leaves it.…”

“…However the criticism does raise the useful point that the ACF can be complemented by referring to recent literature on types of policy change. Drawing on the work of Durrant and Diehl (1989) who identified modes of policy change (incremental or paradigmatic) and speed of change (fast or slow), Howlett (1998) has suggested that policy changes can be linked to changes in actors and ideas (Table 2.2). Howlett argues that the mode of policy change will be paradigmatic only if changes have occurred in dominant sets of ideas.…”