Why does policy inaction occur in public affairs?

In democratic states, there are strong expectations that the government’s public organisations, when faced with imperfect, problematic, and undesirable social conditions will take immediate action. Policymakers are often confronted with such expressions of the public: Why doesn’t the government do something about dealing with or removing the social problems?
The case in point is ‘policy inaction’. Policy inaction refers to an instance/pattern of non-intervention by policymakers, public organisations, governments, or policy networks about an issue within their jurisdiction and where other potential policy interventions did not take place. In public policy, inaction is just as real a phenomenon as action—at least to those prepared to acknowledge its existence. The stance finds ground when the stalwart of public policy Thomas R. Dye (1972) says, “Public policy is whatever a government chooses to do or even not to do”.
Classical, neo-classical, and new public administration schools of thought used to characterise policy inactions due to bureaucratic dysfunctions, ineptness, incompetence, conflict of interest, the influence of pressure groups, and so on. However, the new generation of policy scientists tends to argue policy inactions from different viewpoints. They describe governance as a skillful art of managing public affairs through maintaining a careful and calculative balance among prevailing interests in society.
To them, ‘doing nothing’ can be considered a good policy in particular circumstances. For example, in dealing with intractable controversies, policymakers are advised to wait for the conflict to become ‘mature’ before attempting to resolve it, and in dealing with crises, they are told to avoid ‘knee-jerk’ responses. In such a situation, policymakers, and government organisations are inclined to select which issues are potentially relevant to them and marginalise or exclude those to which they do not wish to devote their attention or resources.
McConnell and Hart (2019) have argued for five types of policy inaction that modern-day governance is experiencing, which are analysed below:
a) Calculated inaction: In this type, inaction is viewed as a product of conscious, strategic, or tactical decisions not to act, or not to act now, waiting for the issue to ‘ripen’ until it can be addressed. Doing nothing to avoid compromising other goals because the costs of acting might exceed perceived benefits.
b) Ideological inaction: Here, inaction is steered by convictions, i.e., not acknowledging moral, social, or political imperatives to address a particular issue, but relying on markets, community sector, or citizens’ self-organisation to address the problems. Ideological positions about the role of the state versus other mechanisms of public problem-solving may play a significant role in curbing the scope of and sympathy for governmental and public intervention.
c) Imposed inaction: Here inaction is a pragmatic acceptance that requisite support will not be obtained from powerful actors or pivotal institutions— for example, de facto veto powers and agenda denial strategies exercised by political or societal actors. Inaction may stem from the realisation that political powers, institutional realities, and checks and balances are such that ‘taking action’ is not feasible.
d) Reluctant inaction: Inaction through reluctant acceptance that appropriate tools and resources are not available or not capable of being put into practice. For example, there is an absolute or relative lack of financial resources to funde ffective policies and an absence of adequate policy instruments that are demonstrably effective in ameliorating the problem at hand.
e) Inadvertent inaction: Inaction is perceived as a product of bounded rationality constraints and institutional blind spots; for example, agency hierarchy watering down unpleasant realities for senior policymakers’ failures of boundary scanning, horizon scanning, and early warning routines. Inaction can originate from policymakers’ cognitive limits in coping with the manifold, voluminous, and ambiguous data and information they are routinely exposed to.
Despite the fallout of policy inaction in public affairs, policymakers need to pay due attention to examining how in the policy processes avenues of problem inquiry get closed off, and the range of policy options that are considered gets narrowed, and soft and critical voices in public policy conversations are heard to reduce citizens’ plights. Policymakers should be inclined to formulate evidence-based policies and adopt ‘collaborative innovation’ and ‘pro-public governance’ so that inaction cannot happen very often, which might create confusion and doubt about the government’s sincerity. The less the policy inaction occurs in governance, the greater the citizen satisfaction would be.

Nasim Ahmed (PhD in Public Policy, Ulster, UK), Associate Professor Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management (BIGM)
[email protected]