Unintended Consequences: A Typology and Examples

Abstract

This paper addresses the question: what is an unintended consequence? It presents a classification which enables us to understand different types of unintended consequences. The classification refers to several questions: whether or not the effects are social, whether they are desirable, whether they fulfil the initial intention, whether they are unanticipated, and whether they occur later than the initial action. The classification is used to deal with the phenomenon of unintended-but-anticipated consequences and is exemplified by the cases of sub-optimality, counter-finality and structuration.

Unintended Consequences: History of the Concept

“…As pointed out by Patrick Baert (1991), this path dependence was linked to the broader functionalist framework hosting the unintended debate, and to the fact that sociologists drew their empirical cases from policy-relevant areas, in which the initial intentions became frustrated. Despite this broad compass, they focused sociology on the subjective processes determining the foresight of consequences and, contrary to Merton's intention, reinterpreted the unintended consequences as unexpected and undesirable.…”

“…Their works advanced the articulation of other dimensions which should be taken into account, in addition to the one of intentionality, when analyzing the unintended consequences of actionsee Jon Elster's (1990) discussion of the issue of recognition and functionality, and Baert's (1991) dimensions and modes of unintended consequences. The perspective is also common to rational choice sociology, analytical Marxism, and economic sociology.…”

Government Transparency

“…Structuration as a type of unintended consequence also touches upon the adoption of international policy discourses, such as transparency, as the actors at the national level tend to produce culturally shaped variants of policy ideas (see Baert 1991). This is often unintended, and may lead to actors remobilizing old institutions for new purposes without appreciating the changes that are at hand.…”

“…The power to master the results of such disruptions is not in the hands of any single actor, but is rather the prize in a game involving many players. In institutional analysis, the concept of unintended consequences refers to the fact that the actions that actors take are often compromises, limited by contextual path-dependencies (Thelen 2004;Streeck and Thelen 2005;Hood and Peters 2004;Hood et al 1996;Baert 1991;Elster 1978), and that governments rather seldom make 'everyone better off' (see Stiglitz 1998).…”

“…Even if influence in the international community, international security concerns, or development goals such as a 'just world' could not be measured easily, these are still perhaps the most important goals for the Foreign Service of a country. Should this be agreed upon, one might also accept that the outcomes that the organization was now setting for itself were emphasizing alternative goals, pointing to a slight counter-finality (Baert 1991), the unintended consequence of this activity. Already earlier, the openness of the activities of the organization had been necessary for its strategic aim of maintaining its budget, but due to the performance management and the mandate to quantify activities this now counted even more than before.…”