The Challenge of Long-Term Policy (LoPo)
Will the European countries be able to pursue long-term policies? The
debates on managing climate change, pension plans, public health
insurance plans, and public sector debt spring to mind. Many of these
problems share the characteristics that they will impact large segments of
society, and cumulative changes will not allow a reversal to the present state
if changes are substantially delayed.
Long-term policy (LoPo) issues are likely to fall prey to the
intergenerational fallacy: Governments are interested in re-election, but this
may create the danger of repeatedly deferring substantive policy change until
a later point in time. Fortunately, select countries have been able to
demonstrate that they attempt to address select long-term policy challenges.
Are governments able to manage long-term policy issues? The LoPo
project will contribute to chart the way to provide answers – both in terms of
the advancement of knowledge as well as by informing about feasible options
for public policy. LoPo will undertake three interrelated tasks
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develop evaluative tools to diagnose long-term problems,
explore institutional design options, as well as
apply methods that evaluate the feasibility of such changes.
First, long-term policy problems have to be evaluated in a comparable
way. Generic measures of effectiveness (problem-solving) have been
pioneered at the Potsdam Institute in collaboration with the University of
Oslo. The measurement methodology will be adapted to the class of LoPo
issues to permit valid comparison.
Second, LoPo will break new ground in deriving a useful typology of
institutional design options for long-term policy problems which are
applicable across a wide spectrum. It will both build on existing design
options as well as propose new options to contribute to a public debate
about managing long-term policy challenges.
Third, the feasibility of changing institutional designs in present-day
political systems will be systematically explored. LoPo will harness the tools
developed over the past decade in political “forecasting” to probe the
usefulness of the findings from the second step. As a consequence, we will
arrive at ex ante evaluations of potential changes in problem-solving.
In combination, the analysis of long-term policy comprises the
evaluation of long-term political challenges, the options for institutional
change, and the analysis of the feasibility of such changes. As a result, the
institutions of the EU, its Member States, media, and interested segments of
the mass public will be better informed how to cope with long-term policy
challenges.
Contact:
Detlef Sprinz, Ph.D.
Potsdam Institute (PIK) & University of Potsdam
Phone: +49 (331) 288-2555/-2532 (secr.)
dsprinz@pik-potsdam.de
http://www.sprinz.org