This chapter takes up the considerations initiated in the second part of Chapter 2. It describes the approach developed in the basic textbook while supplementing it with the help of a ‘resource-based’ approach in line with various studies on institutional resource regimes (IRR) carried out simultaneously by my associates and me (for an overview of the concept and methods, see, for example, de Buren, 2015; see also Knoepfel et al, 2001, 2003; Gerber et al, 2009). I begin by presenting the advantages of this approach for public policy analysis and then demonstrate its potential for the relevant analysis of questions relating to the governance of information-based public action resources.

Advantages of the resource-based approach for public policy analysis

According to traditional resource economics, a resource is defined as a group of basic interacting elements (stock) that produce flows of particular goods and services. For each good and/or service there is a group of interested actors that consider them as assets, which they set out to appropriate more or less permanently and exclusively through the acquisition of rights of use. In the case of a public action resource, the basic elements may be things (Property), armed persons (Force), competences/rights to produce or change (or instigate the changing of) public decisions (Law) or units of time such as minutes, hours and years (Time).

However, these basic interacting elements do not in themselves form the action resource or the power. The latter may be defined as the holding of a bundle of goods and/or services arising from the specific interaction between these basic elements. Depending on the established social mechanisms (conditions of the production of public action resources), these goods and/or services differ from each other and thus enable the actor-holders to distinguish themselves from other actors. This distinction concerns not only the level of the different groups of goods and services originating from different resources, but also that originating from one and the same resource. Money in the hands of a king is not the same as money in the hands of one of his subjects. In effect, given that the king has the monopoly on paper and ink, it can have a lower value in the hands of the king.