Explorer Policies , politics and organizational problems

Kingdon's multiple streams approach has recently been applied to study implementation across sectors or levels of government. Building on these contributions, we suggest that two streams are especially important in shaping implementation: organizational problem constructions, and political pressure from the centre. These variables produce a four-way typology of implementation modes. We test the model by analysing implementation of UK targets on asylum, defence and climate change, drawing on 54 semi-structured interviews with policy actors. The analysis shows how organizations can shift between modes of implementation over time, responding to changes in organizational problems and central political commitment to the policy. The multiple streams approach (MSA) developed by John Kingdon (1984) is enjoying something of a renaissance, with a number of recent contributions suggesting new and extended applications of the theory. While MSA was originally developed to explain agenda-setting in US public policy, many authors have suggested that it offers a useful framework for studying two additional aspects of policymaking. Firstly, MSA has been used to explain how policies developed by a central or superordinate authority are applied across sectors or levels of government (Cairney 2009; Ackrill and Kay 2011; Ackrill and Zahariadis 2013; Bache 2013; Bache and Reardon 2013). The second, often overlapping, application of MSA is to explain policy implementation following the initial stage of agenda setting (Lemieux 2002; Zahariadis 2003; Exworthy and Powell 20014; Ridde 2009; Howlett, McConnell and Perl 2014). In line with these contributions, we believe that MSA is well suited to analyse how policies are applied