by Katherine E. Smith
In this article, author Katherine E. Smith revisits Scotland’s landmark smokefree public places legislation to ask not only how policy change occurred, but how it was actively made. Drawing on a 2024 witness seminar with ministers, civil servants, advocates and researchers, the article builds a collectively constructed, retrospective account of how this major reform was developed, designed and implemented.
Existing analyses, particularly those based on Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, are broadly supported. As Smith shows, a policy window opened as problem, policy and political streams aligned, while wider shifts in policy image and venue helped enable a significant punctuation in tobacco policy. However, the article’s central contribution lies in demonstrating that these theories under-specify the policy work through which such conditions are produced and translated into outcomes.
Foregrounding participants’ accounts, Smith highlights how ministers and civil servants did not simply respond to favourable conditions, but actively shaped them. Policymakers constructed supportive environments through strategically designed consultations, curated and mobilised evidence, and deployed multi-faceted framing to resonate with different audiences. They also coordinated political authority across government and treated implementation as integral to policy formulation—carefully designing enforcement, communication strategies and even the timing of implementation to maximise compliance.
To capture this, the article extends Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (adapted by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones from evolutionary biology to explain punctuated patterns of policy change) by incorporating insights from a more recent contribution to evolutionary biology: Niche Construction Theory argues that organisms do not merely adapt to environments, they also actively modify environments to their advantage. Smith argues that extending Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to incorporate Niche Construction Theory helps foreground how policymakers can actively reshape institutional, informational and political environments, generating feedback dynamics that influence both the trajectory and durability of policy change. In this account, policy change is not simply a matter of responding to policy windows, but of actively constructing and sustaining them through coordinated political and administrative effort.
Empirically, the article offers a rare qualitative, historically reflective account of policy development, design and implementation. Theoretically, it pushes beyond agenda-setting explanations to show how the often less visible craft of policy work—what Smith terms statecraft—is central to understanding policy success. In doing so, it raises important questions about the blurred boundary between political and technocratic work, and invites further research into how far these insights travel beyond the Scottish case.
You can read the original research in Policy & Politics at
Smith, K. E. (2026). Smokefree public places policy in Scotland: rethinking policy work in multiple streams and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2026) from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2026D000000099
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van den Dool, A., & Qiu, T. (2025). Policy processes in China: a systematic review of the multiple streams framework. Policy & Politics, 53(3), 506-528 from https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000038
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