Beyond Good and Evil in Policy Implementation: Instrument Mixes, Implementation Styles, and Second Generation Theories of Policy Instrument Choice

Abstract Dichotomous sets of policy alternatives – like market vs state – and metaphors – like carrots vs sticks – lend themselves to blunt thinking about instruments and their modalities. Administrators and politicians need to expand the menu of government choice to include both substantive and procedural instruments and a wider range of options of each, and to understand the important context-based nature of instrument choices. The paper illustrates the origins of the deficiencies of simple models of instrument choice and suggests that, ultimately, both scholars and practitioners are interested in the same thing: designing and adopting optimal “mixes” of instruments in complex decision-making and implementation contexts.