Designing policy robustness: outputs and processes

Faced with growing policy complexity and environmental uncertainty, policymakers are increasingly concerned with ensuring that policy processes retain functionality amidst shock and uncertainty. In this paper, we seek to address the ways in which robustness – or the capability of policies to maintain functionality and effectiveness in policy goal attainment – can be designed into policies, institutions or systems. We suggest that robust policy designs can be characterized by diversity, modularity and redundancy, whereas robust policy design processes require the presence of polycentric decisional process, political capacity and technical capacity. In identifying these design elements of policy robustness, we argue that robustness is a property that can be designed to ensure that policies continue to deliver, over time, its intended functions, purposes and objectives, even under negative circumstances.