by Sofia Wickberg

Are anti-corruption instruments adopted to tackle existing problems or do they contribute to making new corruption risks visible? Policy sciences originally conceived of public policies as means to solve pressing public problems, such as corruption. However, scholars have demonstrated that policymaking is far more messy and complex, with policy problems and solutions often existing autonomously. In my article recently published in Policy & Politics entitled “Can policy instruments shape the policy problems they aim to solve? How interest registers redefined conflicts of interest”, I investigate this question by examining how policy solutions (here interest registers for parliamentarians) contribute to (re-)defining public problems (conflict of interest). Research has pointed to numerous actors and factors that contribute to the construction and definition of public problems. Examples of these include social movements, interest groups, political parties, experts or news organisations. But, I argue, policies themselves also contribute to the construction of policy problems.

Transnational policymaking is an interesting context in which to study the impact of policy instruments on problem definition. Policymakers often import policy ideas from abroad – for many reasons, as Umut Aydin wrote in a previous post of this blog. And policy instruments are not always (and even rarely) transferred into a new country because the latter faces the same well-defined problem as the source country. The pathways that policies take before reaching new jurisdictions can be complex. With the rapid transnationalisation of policymaking, it is important to better understand the impact of policy transfer on problem representations in ‘importing’ countries.

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