Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Often, policy analysis recommends a clear policy goal, such as comprehensive market-oriented carbon policy, but political realities preclude implementing it in a single stage. Instead, policy entrepreneurs must seek to approach their goal through a sequence of incremental policy changes. Each incremental policy change must be attractive to an adequate coalition of supporters. The right choice from the menu of incremental changes available to policy entrepreneurs is often far from obvious using the conventional policy analytic toolkit. I identify foreseeable ways that an incremental decision can strengthen or undermine coalitions for future progress. I show how these considerations can help policy makers choose the next incremental step strategically, so that they can both make progress immediately and set up for future steps. A desirable strategy would maximize net present value of the sequence of policies, relative to the other viable sequences of policies.

I present a case study of how incremental change created coalitions for additional action in the climate policy space, present a framework for strategic incremental policy analysis, articulate how strategic incrementalism builds on classic pieces of the public policy analysis toolkit. It adds considerations of coalitions for further action to conventional policy analysis and microeconomics, adds insights about how policy makers can improve policy windows to Kingdon, and complements classic normative discussions of whether incrementalism is desirable by Wildavsky and Lindblom with a discussion that takes incrementalism as often inevitable and offers advice for how to work with this norm.