Introduction

One of the most important advances in the study of public policy – occurring over the lifetime of the Policy & Politics journal – is the categorisation of the tools of government into a small number of discrete types. Salamon and Lund (1989, 4) sum up what underlies the concept: ‘the notion that the multitude of government programmes actually embody a limited array of mechanisms or arrangements that define how the programmes work’. Analysts should not be dazzled by the variety of different labels governments use, as they usually reduce to a much smaller set of categories based on distinct causal claims. Seminal is the work of Hood (1986; 2007), and of Hood and Margetts (2007), who developed the NATO classification system: Nodality, Authority, Treasure and Organisation. Hood's influential acronym has been complemented by Salamon's more complex and differentiated 14-point scheme (Salamon and Elliott, 2002; Salamon and Lund, 1989); Howlett's classification of continua (Howlett, 2005; Howlett, Ramesh and Perl, 2009; Howlett, 2011); and John's addition of institutions and networks into the mix (John, 2011). Then there is conceptual work on the different dimensions of tools, which seeks to understand the processes of instrumentation and maps out guiding principles behind the tools, what are called meta-tools (Peters and Nispen, 1998; Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004; 2007; Kassim and Le Galès, 2010).

Nothing in this chapter should detract from the value of such schemes, as they assist an understanding of how the capacity of government may be enhanced or weakened by the resources at its disposal. But such accounts need a second step. As well as an elaboration of the tools of government, it is important to consider the communication between the instrument and those who are intended to receive such commands or encouragements once the tool has been applied. There is, for example, the publication of a law, and then the ways in which the targets of the law get information about the change; or there can be an adjustment in the level of taxation and then citizen or company compliance based on awareness of the new rate. Once this distinction is conceded, there may be less difference between instruments of government as each is mediated and processed by the means of communication, whether encouraging, manipulating, commanding, or conveying norms, which themselves can be customised and shaped by the very same institutions of the state that control the instruments.