Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The Procedure for Institutional Compatibility Assessment (PICA)
Policy analysis has to be linked to a thoughtful examination of the institutional
conditions in which the policies will be implemented, i.e., the institutional contexts
in which individuals and groups are seeking to act on their preferences and shared
understandings (Bickers and Williams
2001
: 234). PICA is based on the assumption
that the effectiveness of a policy and the cost-effectiveness of its implementation
depend to a large extent on the degree of compatibility between concrete policy
instrument(s) and the respective institutional context in a country or region.
Following Aligica
(2005)
, an adequate and correct understanding of the institutional
configuration and of the situational logic of the environment in which a policy is to
be implemented has to be produced as a necessary precondition for assessing the
balance between the intended and unintended consequences of that policy. To minimise
unexpected and possibly disastrous outcomes, it is important that those who craft
and modify rules do understand how particular combinations of rules affect actions
and outcomes in a particular ecological and cultural environment (Ostrom
2005
: 3).
This is
particularly
important for policy makers at higher administrative levels who
often have no direct relation to the problems on the ground.
According to Boettke and Coyne
(2005)
, models of human interaction based on
economic theory often have their problems and limitations in real social settings.
Similarly, although aware of the oversimplification, most agri-environmental models
used for policy analysis assume that with the implementation of a new policy the
institutional arrangements conducive for that policy will be perfectly in place, or that a
sub-optimal institutional arrangement will change automatically towards 'perfection' at
once and with no costs. In addition, it is often assumed that the actors will comply with
the policy. PICA as an innovative approach provides a method that relaxes or 'corrects'
these assumptions to narrow the gap between theory and the 'real-world'. The approach
combines both an explorative procedure to identify those institutional incompatibili-
ties that are likely to hamper or foster policy implementation, and an analytical frame-
work that enables to reveal the causes underlying the incompatibility of policies and
institutions, thus, providing the background for institutional innovations to overcome
such problems. The current design of PICA comprises four distinct working steps:
-
Step one: The policy options are clustered according to (a) type of intervention
(regulatory, economic, and advisory), (b) area of intervention (hierarchy/bureau-
cracy, market, and self-organised network), (c) possibly induced property rights
changes, and (d) the attributes of the natural resource(s) addressed (Hagedorn
et al.
2002)
. This classification allows identifying the generic structure of a
policy option.
Step two: Each policy type is characterised by a specific set of crucial institutional
-
aspects (CIA).
5
5
An initial list of 40 crucial institutional aspects linked to common policy types in agriculture,
environment, and rural development has been compiled in the frame of the SEAMLESS project.
In this chapter only selected crucial institutional aspects will be introduced. The complete list can
be found in Schleyer et al.
(2007a)
.
