A Changing Mix of Government Tools?

Abstract

In this brief final chapter we switch from thinking about how to appraise government’s use of its instruments to looking at those instruments in a wider perspective. The chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section explores ways in which the overall mix of government’s instruments can change. Looking mainly at writing about developed Western countries and at pieces of British evidence, it considers whether there has been any discernable direction of change in the broad mix of government tools in the recent past. One of the themes of earlier chapters was the way government can ring the changes, using different instruments to address this or that subject over time. But we have not so far considered changes in the tools used by government as a whole.

By now we should have learned to ask not only what government can promise but what in fact it can do.

(Wildavsky, 1980, p. 45)