As the name suggests this model measures as to how well the policy has been able to attain the goals it set out to achieve and whether these can indeed be directly attributed to the policy intervention. This means that the model places a high importance on how well the goal(s) has/ have been articulated, whether these are measurable and if not these need to be turned into measurable objectives by the evaluator. The next step is to understand how well the intervention itself has influenced realization of the goal(s). The goal-attainment model has representative democracy at its core by recognizing the “democratic aspect of public sector goals”. Representative democracy is made of several ‘principal- agent relationships’, for example the citizens elect their political representatives who further form their governments, and who further depend on civil servants for policy-making. There are however some drawbacks of this model. When goals are vague or ‘hazy’ or multiple goals are envisaged (‘goal catalogs’), these no longer remain an adequate criteria of merit for evaluating the policy intervention. Additionally, these hazy goals and goal catalogs are not categorized into measurable objectives, leaving this task to the evaluator and thus making it difficult for the evaluator to make a ‘value-neutral evaluation’. Another drawback of this model emanates from ‘unintended side-effects’ that may not have been anticipated during policy formulation and implementation. If the evaluators limit their assessment to criteria based on anticipated goals and impacts they risk leaving out potentially important effects of the policy intervention that were not foreseen beforehand. These effects may be positive or negative and inability to capture these effects would present a biased evaluation.

Once a fairly exhaustive inventory has been created, the next major step in theory construction is to move towards taxonomy. That is, examining the list of the phenomena under consideration and attempting to classify or categorize the subject matter into a smaller number of mutually exclusive categories which, together, retain the exhaustive character of the original lists. Many such schemes were developed in the policy instruments literature of the 1960s to 1980s.
Kirschen and his fellow authors (1964), for example, utilized a resource based taxonomy of governing instruments to group instruments into five general ‘families’ according to the ‘governing resource’ they used: public finance, money and credit, exchange rates, direct control, and changes in the institutional framework (16–17). However, this scheme was very sectorally specific and focused on the specific problem of achieving economic development goals. More generic schemes were developed such as that put forward by Theodore Lowi (1966; 1972), which heavily influenced later thinking on the subject. Lowi developed the insight first put forward by students of public administration in the USA like Cushman (see Figure 1), that governments had only a small number of alternative choices in any given regulatory situation, depending on the amount of coercion they wished to employ in that situation – in Cushman’s case, choosing either to regulate or not and, if so, to regulate either by the use of public enterprises or regulatory commissions. This analysis, among other things, introduced the idea that instrument choices were multi-level and nested, an insight which would be further developed in the years to come.
Figure 1: Cushman’s three types of policy tools (Cushman, 1941)

In his own work, however, Lowi argued that a four-cell matrix based on the specificity of [...]

As Linder and Peters (1990: 307) noted, once the tools of government have been inventoried and classified, ‘the need to do something more becomes irresistible’. The next logical step was ‘to explore functional connections’ involving ‘matching instruments to goals, policy problems, social impact and organizations’. Taking this next step towards the idea of policy design, as we have seen, requires clarifying the nature of the criteria by which experts assess policy tools and the nature of the contexts in which they can reasonably be anticipated to perform as expected.
Kirschen et al., in their early 1964 work, had already gone some distance towards that goal by arguing that the key determinants of policy choice in the case of the economic instruments they had identified were the economic objective or goal pursued and the structural and conjunctural context of the choice. The economic objectives, they argued, were determined by the interaction of political parties and their representatives in government, administrators, and interest groups (1964: 224–36), while the structural and conjunctural context, in turn, was affected by the influence of long-term economic processes and structures, and current economic conditions (236–38). They argued that the actual choice of instrument from within the set that fit these epistemic and contextual constraints should be made on essentially technical grounds, according to efficiency and cost criteria; although the political preferences of interest groups and governments – including sociological and ideological constraints – and the institutional limitations of the political system itself had to be taken into account as factors influencing key decision-makers (238–44).
This was a prescient analysis of the overall set of factors affecting instrument choices (Majone 1976; 1989), combining as it did both technical and political factors. However, [...]

In the case of procedural instruments, several works dealing with aspects of the subject provided a broad sense of which direction to pursue in attempting to elevate this area of instrument studies to the level that substantive implementation instrument research had attained through taxonomy construction and model-building (Walker 1983; 1991; Qualter 1985). In their 1988 work, for example, Bressers and Klok (1988) had noted the ways in which ‘subjective rational actors’ can be influenced by manipulation of the alternatives placed before them and that different instruments can affect the number of policy options developed in the policy process, or the calculations of costs and benefits of alternative courses of action made by policy actors. While some of the instruments they examined were ‘substantive’ (for example, the use of licences to affect the cost of certain activities), most of the instruments captured by their scheme were procedural; especially those dealing with the selective creation, provision and diffusion of information to policy actors.

Taken together, the works of Bressers and Klok, along with that of Schneider and Ingram, and others in the U.S. and Europe, identified a large number of procedural instruments, their inventory, like that in the case of substantive tools, being accompanied by several ideas about how to classify them (Chapman 1973; Weiss and Tschirhart 1994). These authors identified, among others, tools involved in education, training, institution creation, the selective provision of information, formal evaluations, hearings, and institutional reform (Wraith and Lamb 1971; Chapman 1973; Kernaghan 1985; Peters 1992; Weiss and Tschirhart 1994; Bellehumeur 1997). Research into the tools and mechanisms used in intergovernmental regulatory design also identified several other such instruments, including intergovernmental ‘treaties’ and a variety of ‘political agreements’ that can affect target-group [...]

In the late 1990s, work on instrument selection began to assess the question of the potential to develop optimal policy mixes and move away from a focus on single instrument choices (Grabosky 1994; Gunningham and Young 1997). Studies such as Gunningham, Grabosky and Young’s work on ‘smart regulation’ led to the development of efforts to identify complementarities and conflicts within instrument mixes or tool ‘portfolios’ involved in more complex and sophisticated policy designs (Barnett et al. 2008; Shore 2009; Buckman and Diesendorf 2010). For them, the key question was no longer ‘why do policy-makers utilize a certain instrument?’ as it was for earlier generations of students of policy instrument choice, but rather ‘why is a particular combination of procedural and substantive instruments utilized in a specific sector?’ (Dunsire 1993; Howlett 2000; Salamon 2002; Cubbage et al. 2007; Gleirscher 2008; Gipperth 2008; Taylor 2008; Clark and Russell 2009; McGoldrick and Boonn 2010).
This new generation of design scholars began to develop what may be described as a ‘scalpel’ – as opposed to the more blunt ‘hammer’ – approach to instrument use; one that emphasizes the importance of designing policies that employ a mix of policy instruments carefully chosen to create positive interactions with each other (Sinclair 1997). Proponents of ‘smarter’ regulation, for example, proposed the development of sophisticated policy instrument mixes in which government’s combined a range of market solutions and public and private orderings in order to overcome societal resistance and effectively attain their policy goals is an expeditious and efficient manner (Gunningham et al. 1998; Gossum, Arts and Verheyen 2010). In their 1990 study of policy targets and their behaviour, Schneider and Ingram also began to systematically pursue Doern’s insight that the extent [...]