Governments are constantly looking for ways to change the lives of their residents and communities. They try to harness ideas and resources that will effectively address society’s problems, whether those are economic issues like lowering inequality or environmental ones such as reducing pollution levels. Government policy takes many forms, from regulations to taxes, subsidies and spending plans. It can also influence immigration patterns by encouraging or discouraging migration through visas and quotas and it can even affect population growth with family planning policies.
A standard approach to policy development involves identifying the underlying causes of the problem, assessing their relevance and urgency as well as the costs and benefits of potential solutions. This is a difficult task because it requires considering every possible outcome of a specific event. It is almost impossible to achieve in complex systems where it can be hard to predict how an emergent phenomenon will unfold over time and it may take years for it to reach a stable or regular state.
The next step is creating incentives and constraints that will influence the choices and behaviors of both policy makers and the public in order to reach the desired outcomes. This is an important part of policy design and academics have developed a number of tools that aim to reduce the time and effort needed for this. However, even the best designed policy can still fail. This can be due to a variety of reasons such as unforeseen consequences, the inability to mobilize enough actors or simply a failure to reach a consensus on what should be done.