Constructing Case Narratives: Looking Back

This chapter presents case descriptions of 13 policy pilots that were launched between 1990 and 2015 (the study period). Just as regular policies, pilots can also be viewed as a combination of policy ends or goals and means to achieve these ends. A framework for capturing elements of a policy (Cashore 2020; Cashore and Howlett 2007) is used to tease out specific design features of policy pilots, considered as a time-and-space delimited version of policies. The framework further segregates policy ends to three levels—a high level of abstraction governing the policy orientation (of pilot in this case), operationalization of abstract goals via formal objectives at the programme level and on-the-ground specifications (Table 3.1).The elements of a given policy (or pilot in this case) also comprise policy means or instruments to achieve the specified policy goals or ends. The instruments follow a broad intervention or instrument logic governing its choice, operationalized through the deployment of specific types of instruments and on-ground policy specifications are met through appropriate calibrations of these instruments. These elements thus relate to each other in a nested manner (Rayner, Howlett, and Mukherjee 2014).

A total of 47 semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain information about the pilots (Table 3.2). The key informants included central and state government officials who designed and implemented the pilots, including some who were retired from government service at the time of interview. Interviewees for each pilot were identified via snowball sampling. The total number of interviews per pilot was decided as per the rule of saturation of information about a pilot. The interviewees, where possible, included representatives from non-governmental and research agencies who were involved in the design and implementation of the pilot as well as consultants or officials involved in the internal or external third-party evaluation of the pilots. In some cases, few senior government officials were engaged in more than one of the selected pilots that had been operational during their tenure in their respective government department.

The questionnaire for semi-structured interviews was set to capture the content of the pilot, its key design features, stakeholder arrangements, implementation and diffusion, and evaluation and learning (see details of interviews conducted and Questionnaire in Appendix A).