Introduction

Policy failure can broadly be characterised as the failure of policy efforts to attain policy objectives, the occurrence of outcomes that have adverse impacts on target populations, or ones which have negative political outcomes for policy makers (McConnell, 2010; Newman and Head). This chapter focuses on one reason why such failures are a common phenomenon in policy making: the problems and limitations that policy makers encounter dealing with imperfect knowledge and their resulting inability to often accurately predict the future.

Of course, the fact that policy makers and policy making is ‘boundedly rational’ in the sense that some limits always apply to knowledge of future events and consequences is well known (Lindblom and Cohen, 1979; Simon, 1991). As Simon (1955) noted, many of the limits on rational policy making have to do with information limits which prevent consideration of possibly superior alternative courses of action, limits which in many cases cannot be overcome through better data collection and analysis as they are imposed simply by the fact that they relate to future events and activities which are difficult to model or predict.

The exact nature and impact of these boundaries on knowledge and cognition are, however, less well known. Some behaviour, such as the willingness of automobile drivers to stop at red lights, is in normal conditions quite predictable as is also, for example, the willingness of a certain percentage of the population to take up tax incentives aimed at having them voluntarily contribute more funds to their pension plans, or for bankers to respond to interest rate hikes by withdrawing funds from circulation and thus help dampen inflation. Policies which fail in such circumstances may do so for other reasons than knowledge limits; for example, due to poor implementation practices, malfeasance or many other similar less cognitive causes (May, 2014).

The fundamental problem of an uncertain future, however, as Lindblom (1959; 1979) noted, is of a different order. This source of failure can be termed ‘policy myopia’ or the difficulty of seeing far enough into the future to discern its general shape and contour in enough detail to be able to properly anticipate and plan in the present.