Public Policy

Frameworks for defining policy problems, analysing failures, and matching tools to objectives.

Frameworks in this section help with the foundational moves of policy analysis — how to frame a problem, choose between instruments, and tell whether an intervention is working.

If you are new here, start with Wicked Problems (to understand why some problems resist easy fixes), then All Things Governments Do (to see what interventions are even available), and One Instrument, One Target (to learn why trying to do everything at once usually ends badly). From there, follow whichever thread pulls — problem diagnosis, instrument selection, or implementation failure.

A COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment Strategy for India
What it says What should India’s approach be to deploying a COVID-19 vaccine? Once a vaccine candidate passes all clinical trial stages, the sequencing problem is non-trivial for a country of India’s size and income levels.

All Things Governments Do
What it says A working taxonomy of state functions, beyond the textbook list.

Anticipating Unintended Policy Consequences
What it says Distinguishing the policy outcomes that could have been foreseen from those that genuinely could not.

Complexity and Public Policy
What it says How to think about policy in systems where outcomes do not follow linearly from inputs.

Eight Things to Unlearn Before Learning Public Policy
What it says Common misconceptions that have to be cleared before frameworks become useful.

Errors of Omission and Commission
What it says The symmetric mistakes a policy can make: doing the wrong thing, and failing to do the right thing.

Four Components of an Economic Strategy
What it says The essential elements that make an economic strategy coherent rather than a list of wishes.

Good Policy Problem Definition
What it says Criteria that separate a usable problem statement from a hidden solution.

Hyper Multi-Objective Optimisation
What it says Why pursuing many policy goals at once is the structural cause of policy failure.

India’s Three Dimensions of Decentralisation
What it says Anatomising decentralisation in Indian governance along functional, fiscal, and political dimensions.

Nine Competing Visions of Equality
What it says Distinct, often incompatible, conceptions of what equality means in policy debate.

No More COP-outs
What it says . One of these eight steps involves coming up with evaluation criteria to compare and judge possible solutions.

One Instrument, One Target
What it says Each policy goal needs its own dedicated tool. Stacking many goals onto one instrument is how policies fail at all of them.

Opportunity Cost Neglect
What it says Why policy debates systematically forget what could have been done with the same resources.

Outlays, Outputs, Outcomes
What it says Money spent is not the same as work done, and work done is not the same as lives changed. Track all three.

Policies vs Programmes vs Practices
What it says Why the distinction between intent, scheme design, and on-ground implementation matters for analysis.

Prisoner’s Dilemma in Policy Engineering
What it says Game theory as a working tool for designing institutions, not just describing them.

Public Policy Solutionism
What it says A critique of the instinct to reach for clean solutions in domains where they do not exist.

Public Sector Reform
What it says Strategies for making large public organisations work better.

Seven Stages of the Policy Pipeline
What it says From a fact about the world to a working law on the ground, every policy passes through seven distinct stages — each requiring its own kind of state capacity.

Sunset Clauses
What it says Sunset rules essentially require that programs and/or regulations need to be reauthorised periodically. The default is that the sun sets on them after a period of time; they die.

Taxonomy of Policy Failures and Successes
What it says A typology that separates kinds of policy outcomes — design failures, implementation failures, and so on.

Two is Better Than One
What it says The 2x2 matrix is not exactly a public policy framework. But it is an incredibly useful tool for scenario-planning in any field or work, including public policy. These matrices are quite commonplace — you’ll find them in many consultancy reports and impact assessments.

Understanding Corruption
What it says A structured way to examine corruption beyond the moralising frame.

What Makes a Policy Chance Stick?
What it says A section of Punjab and Western Uttar Pradesh agricultural land owners is threatening another protest. This group is a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price (MSP), debt waivers, pensions for fa…

When Conditions Become Policy Problems
What it says The process by which a fact about the world acquires the status of a policy problem requiring action.

Wicked Problems
What it says Some policy problems resist clean definition and have no single right answer — only better and worse responses.
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