Social Policy at the Edge of Knowable: Towards a Unified View of Evolutionary Change in Policy Systems

Abstract

In the world of growing diversity, interdependence, and rapid change, making sense of policy evolution, especially in analytical settings, is increasingly challenging, not the least due to the flaws of conventional assumptions or the limits to the availability of evidence. As we consider an alternative worldview embracing the complex and adaptive nature of social reality, we recognize there are further boundaries to what can be known and done about the outcomes in social systems. Yet, this foundation also promises to broaden our horizons with new tools for understanding, comparing, and developing public policy. Inspired by innovation research, this work makes the case for bringing a set of such tools into public policy studies and situates them in an essential theoretical context. Further, through an analysis of social and labour market policy development across two jurisdictions—while reaching to flexicurity as a model and reference—it demonstrates the application of the new approach to the study of welfare state modernization and to policy scholarship more generally.