Post on 04-Jul-2018
Counter-Intentional Policy Outcomes:
Workshop analytics and the diagnosis of ‘foreseeable but unanticipated consequences’1
Michael A. Fotos, III, Ph.D,
Lecturer in Political Science and Ethics, Politics, and Economics
Yale University, New Haven CT
Associate Program Director, Public Policy Graduate Program
Trinity College, Hartford CT
March 17, 2014
1 Working paper prepared for presentation at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics,
and Economics of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, March 24, 2014. Please do not cite without
permission of the author. Copyright reserved by author.
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Introduction
This paper elaborates on claims that theoretical developments and empirical research associated
with the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis meet the
definitional conditions of an alternative scientific paradigm for the study of politics and policy.2
Vincent Ostrom’s theorizing constitutes a paradigm challenge because it directly challenges
widely agreed upon fundamentals of mainstream political science and policy analysis (Fotos
2013). The empirical research of Workshop-affiliated scholars (aka “the Bloomington School”
per Aligica and Boettke 2009) fills out the definitional elements of a developed scientific
paradigm by their congruence on subjects and questions, social philosophy and values, research
exemplars, and methods (Kiser and Ostrom 1982, McGinnis (ed.) 1999a, 199b, Polski and E.
Ostrom 1999, E. Ostrom 2010 [2009], Aligica and Boettke 2011, Fotos 2013, see also Kuhn
1996, Godfrey-Smith 2003). In the following, I refer to the essay, “Public Goods and Public
Choices: The Emergence of Public Economies and Industry Structures” (Ostrom and Ostrom
1994 [1977], hereinafter referred to as “Public Goods and Public Choices”) to derive a method of
inquiry and framework for analysis that directs attention to the terms and conditions of political
experiments.3 The method and framework I propose promise greater scientific efficacy because
they enable the analyst to more objectively evaluate the artisanship of the authors of the subject
policy and they increase the likelihood that analysis will lead to further development of political
and policy theory. I proceed by applying the method of inquiry and framework to the task of
2 Interested readers may wish to consult my 2013 essay, “Vincent Ostrom’s revolutionary science of association”
(accepted by Public Choice: the Journal of the Public Choice Society). 3 “Public Goods and Public Choices” is a seminal contribution to the literature on political economy in several
respects. First, it synthesizes several developments in political and economic theory derived from the studies of
urban services conducted by the Ostroms, their students, and colleagues during the decade-plus prior to its
publication (c.f., E. Ostrom 1971; E. Ostrom and Parks 1973; Bish and V. Ostrom 1973; E. Ostrom, Parks, and
Whitaker 1977). Second, the essay integrates economic and political theory, achieving one of the central purposes
that united the founders of the Public Choice Society (Bish 2013). Third, the essay presents “an empirically testable,
deductive framework for matching the scale and scope of public goods and their effects to preferred organizational
arrangements for service provision and production” (Fotos 2013, 11).
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explaining counter-intentional policy outcomes. The presentation is tentative in places and
imperfectly resolved in others so I respectfully request the reader’s forbearance as well as
suggestions, comments, or questions that may strengthen or productively redirect the paper’s line
of argument.
Conventional policy analysis focuses analytic attention on the pareto improving (or not) effects
of policy (Weimer and Vining 1989, Stokey and Zeckhauser 1978). The successful analyst can
tell whether a policy is “good” or “bad” by its effect on pareto optimality. The analyst must
propose other conjectures or introduce additional evidence or methods of inquiry if he or she
wishes to tell the client why this outcome obtained. In essence, the analyst possesses a single
standard which applies to all cases and all policy problems. The missing methodological
element is recognition of the intentions and materials (i.e., values and social context) of the
artisan making the policy (V. Ostrom 1980, 2011 [1991]). The situation is akin to the art
historian, having decided that the Mona Lisa represents the pinnacle of artistic achievement,
thereupon judges every other work of art by its conformity with da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait of
a lady, whether the work under examination is a Ming vase or a fugue by J. S. Bach. Analysis on
these terms will tell us if the artisan’s vision conforms to ours but it tells us next-to-nothing
about pottery or music-making skill.
V. Ostrom (1980, after Hobbes) reminds us that we cannot evaluate artisanship without knowing
the artisan’s intent. He makes the same point elsewhere in the language of the political
economist. “Producer efficiency in the absence of consumer utility is without economic
meaning” (Ostrom 2008b 54 emphasis in the original). Values inform intent and outcomes
determine utility.
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Overview
The four-cell typology of goods presented in “Public Goods and Public Choices” (Figure 1)
points the way to understanding the essential logic linking the nature of the public good and the
choices of the policy maker to intended outcomes. That logic is embedded in the way rules
address the problems of exclusion and the regulation of consumption uses of the goods that are
the object of policy. Competitive free markets efficiently allocate private goods because defined
property rights solve the producer’s problem of excluding non-payers from using the good and
the price system provides consumers the information they need to “self-regulate” their
consumption of scarce goods. Markets do not efficiently allocate public goods because
producers cannot exclude non-payers from using the goods they produce and the absence of
effective price signals precludes consumer discovery of the true scarcity of the good (Munger
2000). Public policies such as licenses and permits address the problem of exclusion and taxes
and fees address consumers’ information problems.
In a conventional policy analytic study, the analyst takes the stance of the “outside expert” who
uses the tools and techniques of the trade (largely derived from neo-classical microeconomic
theory) to define the client’s policy problem, formulate alternatives, evaluate them, and
recommend alternatives (Munger 2000, Bardach 2009, Weimer and Vining 1989). The analyst is
presumably objective and scientific, or aspires to be, while the client or the public she represents
is presumably subjective, under-informed, or perhaps even irrational in their beliefs and actions.4
This analytic stance places the analyst inexorably in conflict with two essential publics, self-
organizing actors (i.e., the market) and government actors (i.e., state and politics) (Munger
4 Shafqat Hussain (2014) makes the keen observation that biologists working on problems of global biodiversity
perceive the people living among the animals they study as occupants of a “culture” and themselves, the biologists,
as occupants of a realm of science and objectivity that is universal and “outside culture.”
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2000). The people in opposition to the analyst are frequently also prospective or actual clients us
and so the “objective” analyst inexorably encounters the temptation of trimming analytic sails to
please the client or of biting the hand that feeds him.5
“Public Goods and Public Choices” offers an alternative to the prospect of a profession poised
between pandering and poverty. The theoretically derived goal of ‘matching the scale and scope
of public goods and their effects to preferred organizational arrangements’ suggests the
possibility of a policy analytic craft grounded in a process of inquiry that directs analytic
attention to the terms and conditions of the political experiment rather than to the single criterion
of efficiency. The analysis of experiments offers a truly scientific prospect for policy analysis
leading to theory building. In contrast, a policy analytic craft dedicated solely to measuring
departures from pareto optimality verges on scientism and offers little in the way of theory-
building. Moreover, a process of inquiry aiming to match public goods to preferred
arrangements for provision and production offers the prospect of a joint solution to the problems
of scarcity and distribution, normally stated as the inexorable and immutable conflict between
efficiency and equity according to conventional analysis. One might call the joint solution a by-
product, intended or not, of the successful integration of political science and economics (as
noted by Robert Bish 2013).
A Three-Step Process of Inquiry
The new craft of policy analysis requires the analyst to undertake a three-step process of inquiry
aimed at 1) discovering the intentionality of the political artisans making the choices that are the
subject of analysis, 2) specifying the policy problem in terms of the packages of public, private,
and mixed goods that the chosen policy is intended to provide or produce, and 3) diagnosing (or 5 Ariel Rubinstein’s (2006) explanation of why economists earn more than mathematicians makes this point.
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projecting) outcomes by examining the rules as remedies to the problems of exclusion and use
regulation (associated with preferred packages of goods identified in step 2). The reader will
naturally have questions about intentionality, how the analyst discovers it, how one determines
whose intentionality has standing, and how analysts avoid the human tendency to substitute their
own preferences for those of the client or the affected public. I recognize these as questions of
method that must be resolved for the proposed method to move ahead. But, they are questions of
investigative technique only and do not bear on the epistemological basis of the method. It is
impossible to examine the terms and conditions of any rulemaking exercise (i.e., any political
experiment) without knowing the intentionality of the experimenter (Ostrom 2011[1991], 1994,
2008a) and so discovering intentionality is an essential observational element of the social
sciences, especially as they relate to “the art and science of association.”
The reader may also have questions about how one re-specifies policy problems as mixed
packages of public and private goods. I do not resolve this problem in a general sense at present
but liken it to the problems of specification and measurement that the Ostroms and their
colleagues and students faced when they undertook the study of urban services in the 1960’s and
1970’s. I also note that they discovered that the specification and measurement of public goods
and services are problems best resolved by application to particular public service industries with
reference to specifiable production technologies (E. Ostrom 1971; E. Ostrom and Parks 1973; E.
Ostrom, Parks, and Whitaker 1977, Kiser and Ostrom 1982).
The third step, diagnosing outcomes, is the primary objective of this essay and it occupies my
attention for now. Evaluating outcomes is impossible without knowing the artisan’s intent.
Analysts should use intentionality as the evaluative standard for assessing the associational
understanding of the rule writer and policy maker. And, analysts should refer to counter-
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intentional outcomes as experimental anomalies pointing to problems in the design of rules or
inadequate policy theory (V. Ostrom 1980, 2008b, 2011 [1991]). The typology of outcomes
presented in Figure 2 below derives from the policy typology Ostrom and Ostrom present in
“Public Goods and Public Choices” and my expectation is that it contributes to Workshop
epistemology by providing a logical basis for making warrantable diagnoses of the terms and
conditions of policy designs.
Intentionality, counter-intentionality, public goods, and the diagnostic framework
The reader is no doubt familiar with the four-cell typology of goods defined by two dimensions,
jointness-in-use and feasibility of exclusion (See Figure 1). As noted above, the provision of
public goods, where exclusion is difficult and consumption is joint, is problematic because the
producer cannot be compensated for the full value of production and the consumer can withhold
payment yet still enjoy the good. Nearly all public goods are subtractible to some extent and this
attribute requires rules (which may include price signals) that address the problems of congestion
and incompatible use, which if unchecked, erode the value of the public good (Ostrom and
Ostrom 1994 [1977] 166). Public goods provision is a customary justification for governments
using their powers of taxation and regulation to provide for pareto improving public goods
production or corresponding reductions in public bads (Munger 2000). For this reason, analysts
incline to evaluate policies for their effects on social welfare and to pronounce policies “good” if
they are pareto improving or “bad” if they are not. A skilled analyst may even be able to
measure just how good or bad a policy is in terms of net social product, or additional road miles
built, or change in the graduation rate, etc. (Bardach 2009). All these efforts satisfy normative
standards of policy analysis but they do not advance the science of analysis for the simple reason
that they do not explain why particular policies work or do not work as intended. Conventional
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analysis is fundamentally a descriptive art, not an explanatory science. Investigating
intentionality with reference to outcomes and the attributes of the goods (or structures of events)
promises description and explanation.
Ostrom (2008b: 54-5, 2012 [1994]: 334) describes three types of counter-intentional outcomes,
ambiguous (or no) effect at high cost, monopolization of public goods leading to the erosion of
their public value, and unequivocally counter-intentional results. The three types mentioned by
Ostrom omit a fourth which is easily supplied by the successful type, policies that work as
intended. See Figure 2. When intentionality and outcomes match, then the analyst can presume
that the policy adequately addresses the problems of exclusion and the regulation of use. When a
single user, or a single class of users, comes to dominate a public good, then the analyst can
presume that the rules for assuring the compatibility of consumption uses are inadequate.
Single-use dominance indicates that the exclusion problem has been solved but not which actor,
the policy maker or the dominant user, solved it. When the policy appears to work procedurally
but policy outcomes are spurious, i.e., bearing no apparent relation to the level of effort, then the
analyst can presume that the rules for addressing exclusion, or “clearly defined boundaries,” are
inadequate (E. Ostrom 1990 91). And when the policy outcomes are perverse, when the reverse
happens, the analyst can presume that rules for regulating use and setting boundaries are both
inadequate. The following sections illustrate the logic of classification by presenting examples
from each category.
Lobster fishing in the Gulf of Maine: policies that work as intended
As Jim Acheson (2003) explains, lobstermen and Maine state regulators have developed
informal and formal territorial and limited-entry rules (harbor gangs and zone management) to
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solve problems of exclusion and they have agreed to trap limits and size and sex restrictions on
harvested lobsters solving key problems of use regulation. By almost any measure, the Maine
lobster fishery is a policy success story. According to the Maine Lobster Marketing
Collaborative, in 2012, 5,900 licensed lobster fishers landed 126 million pounds of lobster worth
over $338 million at dockside (Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative). In contrast, during the
“lobster bust” of the 1930’s when stocks were so low that biologists worried about the future of
the species, about 2,900 lobstermen harvested between 5 and 6 million pounds of “bugs”
(Acheson 2003 17). Biologists who study the Gulf of Maine worry that lobster populations are
too high for the health of the species (nytimes.com 2011a). Many factors6 explain the boom in
lobster stocks but clearly catching them in accordance with the rules presently in-use has not
overly constrained their abundance.
The successes of the Maine lobster fishery illustrate the case where boundary and use rules are
adequate to the public goods produced. Acheson’s examination of the fishery substantiates this
claim.7 The literature on successful and unsuccessful cases of common property governance is
quite extensive (see E. Ostrom 1990, 2005, Gibson 1999, and Agrawal 1999 for examples).
Acheson’s study is particularly relevant to this exercise because the granular detail of his
analysis enables the reader to see the relationships among the rules-in-use and the boundary and
use regulations they are intended to solve.
The War on Drugs: great effort, spurious outcomes
6 Notable to this author is the collapse of cod stocks (under national fishery management since 1977). Cod are a
primary predator of lobsters. 7 See in particular chapters two through five concerning territoriality (exclusion rules), state laws (use regulation),
and co-management (exclusion and use regulation) (Acheson 2003).
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The War on Drugs exemplifies the second category where despite incurring immense direct costs
to government and unimaginably high indirect costs to society the outcome bears little apparent
relationship to the policy effort.
“We must now candidly recognize that the deliberate procedures embodied in
present measures to control drug abuse are not sufficient in themselves. The
problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency. I intend to take
every step necessary to deal with this emergency…” President Richard M. Nixon,
June 17, 1971 (The New York Times 1971)
When President Nixon defined drug abuse as a national policy problem, his statement was
quickly characterized as a declaration of “war on drugs.” Nixon called for a national effort
lasting three years with the possibility of a two-year further extension (ibid.). He proposed
adding 325 positions and $45 million in additional budgetary authority to national drug
enforcement activities. Nixon opined that this extraordinary effort would be sufficient to solve
the problem. If only the problem of exclusion were so easily solved…
In FY 2011, the Drug Enforcement Agency had an annual budget of $2.2 billion and employed
nearly 10,000 people roughly half of whom are special agents charged with enforcing the
nation’s drug laws (Drug Enforcement Administration 2011). According to the New York
Times, total spending by the national government to prosecute the “war on drugs” runs about $25
billion annually (nytimes.com 2012b). In 2008, 2.3 million Americans were in jail, a quarter of
them for non-violent drug offenses (Schmitt, Warner, and Gupta 2010). Roughly 2% of working
age U.S. males presently resides in prison or jail (ibid.). The direct cost to the national, state, and
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local governments of the United States for incarcerating the non-violent drug offenders alone
was approximately $16.9 billion (ibid.).
Our “war on drugs” has become a literal war in Central and South America, involving the
militaries of the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, and other nations in battles with heavily-armed
traffickers including some reputedly comprised of former military elements. As of June 2012,
the widely-circulated estimate of murders attributed to narco-trafficking in Mexico is 50,000
(telegraph.co.uk 2012).
Yet, the pharmacopeia and the public’s appetite for self-medication seem little diminished.8 Law
enforcement crackdowns on any particular intoxicant or its supply network apparently re-direct
demand to more readily available substances (nytimes.com 2012b). Feasible exclusion remains
an elusive goal; the boundaries between alternative forms of self-medication are porous. Drug
users can switch from scarce or costly drugs to more readily available substances or move back
and forth between regulated and informal drug markets seemingly always several steps ahead of
drug law enforcement efforts (nytimes.com 2013, 2014).
Atlantic Menhaden: the oily fish that everyone loves to death
Shortcomings in oceanic fisheries regulation illustrate the third category, when a single user or a
single class of users monopolizes consumption of the public good eroding its public value.
Under present rules, a single processor Omega Protein in Reedsville, Virginia captures
approximately eighty percent of the entire commercial harvest of the Atlantic menhaden
(nytimes.com 2011, Pew Environment Group 2013, cfn.epubxp.com 2013). The Atlantic
8 The longest running surveys of illicit drug use are several that ask young people about “past month use” of
marijuana. Online resources indicate that after a spike in the late 1970’s and a decline in the 1980’s, usage rates of
this drug among young people have varied little.
http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k10NSDUH/2k10Results.htm#Fig8-3 (July 5, 2012)
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Menhaden occupies an admirable, albeit unenviable position in the oceanic food chain. Many
depend on it because seemingly everything wants to eat it. Ospreys, loons, and other sea birds
fatten themselves and their young on the menhaden’s oily, soft flesh. Bluefish, striped bass, and
blue fin tuna hunt the menhaden along the U.S. Atlantic coast because it is the most nutritious
forage fish in our part of the ocean (Pew Environment Group 2013). Recreational anglers use
live menhaden, known around Long Island Sound as bunker, to troll for blues, stripers, and other
trophy game fish. Commercial fishermen bait lobster traps, crab pots, and long lines with dead
“pogies,” accounting for approximately 20% of the commercial harvest. And finally, Omega
Protein collects 80% of the commercial harvest, 183,085 metric tons of menhaden, for
“reduction” to fertilizer, animal feed, and human dietary supplements (Pew Environment Group
2013, asmfc.org, omegaproteininc.com). Commercial demand is high because menhaden are a
source of Omega-3 fatty acids, a dietary supplement linked to reduced risks of heart disease and
Alzheimer’s (asmfc.org).
We’ve been catching menhaden on the Atlantic coast for a long time at rates faster than the fish
can reproduce. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), a compact of 15
Atlantic coast states, has authority granted by the U.S. Congress (P.L. 539 as amended by P.L.
721, August 19, 1950) to regulate the menhaden fishery (asmfc.org). The ASMFC estimates
that the remaining bunker population comprises about 8% of what an un-fished stock would be.
Commercial fishing for menhaden as bait once occurred in nearly all the Atlantic states. Now
waters off the New Jersey coast and the Chesapeake Bay are the only places where the bait
fishery exists at greater than de minimis levels (asmfc.org). The Pew Environment Group
estimates a dramatic impact on wildlife diets; bunker comprised 75% of the average osprey’s diet
in the 1980’s, now it’s 24%; 77% of the striped bass diet in the 1950’s, now 7%; 42% of the
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weakfish diet in 1991, now 3.3%; and 41% of the bluefish diet in 1991, now 11.6%. The
menhaden fishery is a valuable resource, lots of people and animals want a piece of it, and like
nearly every other ocean fishery; we show every indication of loving it to death.
Notice in the introductory paragraph to this section how the numbers of users and relative shares
of the commercial harvest form an inverted pyramid. Zero percent of the commercial harvest
goes to the countless wild birds, animals, and fish that make no direct commercial use of
menhaden but depend on them for survival. Twenty percent of the commercial harvest goes to
the tens of thousands of recreational anglers and the thousands of commercial fishers for lobster,
cod, crab, and other marketable species. Eighty percent of the commercial harvest goes to a
single processing plant.
A single user dominates other uses, thus eroding the value of the public resource. The dominant
user’s highly efficient capture technology and its concentrated interest in a single point of
consumption effectively exclude out other users from the resource. Reduction of fish to beauty
aids and nutrition supplements is clearly incompatible with feeding birds and catching other fish.
For a mainstream policy analyst, Omega Protein’s catch share offers evidence of regulatory
capture and a sign that national and state fisheries regulators lack the political will to crack down
on a well-connected corporate operator (Fairbrother 2012). My experience with fisheries
regulation and knowledge of this case indicate that while the latter explanation offers emotional
satisfaction, the former explanation offers greater analytic traction.
Unequivocal counter-intentionality: The reverse happened!
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Vincent Ostrom (2012 [1986]) illustrates the fourth category, the unequivocally counter-
intentional result, by recounting the outcomes of Bolshevist-Stalinist political and economic
experiments. He quotes Milovan Djilas,
Everything happened differently in the U.S.S.R. and other Communist countries
from what the leaders—even such prominent ones as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and
Bukharin—anticipated. They expected the state would rapidly wither away, that
democracy would be strengthened. The reverse happened (ibid. 227; emphasis
added by Ostrom).
As I’ve noted elsewhere (Fotos 2013 27)
The unequivocally counter-intentional outcomes of the successful Marxist
revolution include the expansion, not the withering away, of the state, the
replacement of the old oppressor class with a new, more oppressive class of
oppressors, the decline, not the improvement of working class living standards,
and the installation of an unresponsive autocracy when democracy was expected
(ibid. 224-28).
Perverse policy outcomes are not solely Soviet affairs.
Life on the Mississippi: floods are expected; what comes after, not so much.
Floods are a fact of life in all riverside communities. People living on the banks of the
Mississippi River witnessed “great” floods in 1844, 1927, and 1951 that set the pattern and lent a
name to the Great Midwest Flood of 1993. From May through September of 1993, heavy rains
and snow melt in the Mississippi Watershed drove the great river and its tributaries to record
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heights, flooding 15 million acres of farmland, destroying over 10,000 homes, and taking 50
lives (Larson 1996). The Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers delivered a double blow to St.
Charles, Missouri, the floodplain community located where the two streams join. St. Charles
experienced 94 days when the Missouri was at flood stage or higher including a new record high
of 14.5 feet above flood stage on August 1, 1993 (ibid.). Floodwaters forced 2,000 St. Charles
County families from their homes and caused $160 million in property damage in the county
(Sylves 2008).
The people of St. Charles and other flood-stricken locales did not go without help in their time of
need. A generous and provident nation responded by expending over $5.5 billion in recovery
assistance to repair or replace public facilities such as roads, bridges, and levees as well as
private homes, businesses, and other personal property (Sylves 2008 122). Then something
unexpected happened. The grateful beneficiaries of the public’s largesse did not relocate their
homes and businesses on higher ground as federal flood officials recommended. Rather, the
people of St. Charles County and adjacent St. Louis County looked at the stronger, higher levees
(built with the nation’s money) and resettled the flood zone. In the decade after the flood, they
constructed 28,000 new homes and thousands of acres of new commercial space “estimated to be
worth more than $2.2 billion” (nytimes 2007, Hiles 2012).
The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers run high every year. Great floods recur at regular intervals.
Yet, national policies intended to repair and remediate flood damage make the people living
there more, not less, liable to lose property and livelihoods from flooding.i The reader might
well wonder how policies intended to help a community recover from a flood causing $160
million in damages can contribute to conditions that place $2.2 billion worth of property in
similar peril.
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Discussion
Lobster fishing rules have the intended effect of making a high level of fishing effort compatible
with the long term conservation of the species because they effectively address problems of
exclusion (territoriality) and use (size and sex restrictions). The War on Drugs has exacted
enormous financial and social cost with unspecified results because, despite the enormity of the
law enforcement effort, the boundaries between legal and illicit drug markets remain porous to
anyone motivated to cross them. Omega Protein and its fishing fleet dominate the Atlantic
Menhaden catch because the rules regulating the use of the public resource are inadequate to the
capture and processing technology they employ. National flood and disaster policy actually
increases the public’s exposure to harm by effectively reversing the price signal and avoiding
any hint of rules that would exclude development from flood prone areas. One can explain why
each of these examples turns out as they do by relating particular rules to specifiable problems of
exclusion and use. See Table 1.
As the reader well knows, four cases barely demonstrate the concept and they certainly do not
establish empirical validity. I selected these cases for proof of concept not as proof of theory.
One might however construct a fairly long list of policies with counter-intentional outcomes,
schools that don’t teach, urban policies that make cities less desirable places to live and work,
home finance policies intended to make homes more affordable and raise middle class living
standard instead guarantee the reverse, bankrupt cities with unaffordable public pension
promises, a national surface mining law that incentivizes the most destructive forms of mining,
global climate policy initiatives that incentivize strategic increases in greenhouse gas emissions,
world-leading health care spending and mediocre health outcomes, and food and nutrition
policies that assure millions of Americans will suffer from food insecurity and chronic illnesses
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caused by over-eating, often simultaneously. This is not easy to do. Dr. Aaron Shirley, a
Mississippi pediatrician, aptly characterized our health care policies as “spending billions to treat
people for preventable illnesses of which they will never be cured” (nytimes.com 2012c).
Perhaps the most ironic and paradoxical counter-intentional policy outcome involves the
progress of American arms in the 21st century. The nation fields the most lethal and
operationally proficient armed forces the world has ever known. They prevail in nearly every
tactical encounter and yet the United States loses the wars they fight on its behalf.
I am skeptical of conventional explanations of these unintended policy outcomes primarily
because the same political reasoning informs the policy design and the explanation of its failure.
The historical analogy can be made from the partly apocryphal story of the American military
planners who prescribed overwhelming firepower as the cure-all for our problems with
Vietnamese insurgents. When bombing did not produce the desired result (of a pacified
countryside), the remedy was more bombing. Only too late did policy makers acknowledge that
firepower was equally problem and remedy and that an alternative framework of analysis offered
more warrantable understandings of popular insurgencies.
Things I left out and other holes in the argument
The next challenge to my argument is to compare conventional explanations of the longer list of
policy failures to explanations that re-cast them as imperfectly addressed problems of exclusion
and use regulation. My use of two natural resource cases suggests that resource and
environmental goods are readily amenable to the proposed analytic approach. It takes only a bit
of imagination to re-cast budget policy as a problem of use dominance (health care, entitlements,
defense) attributable to inadequate rules related to use regulation (off-budget or mandatory
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spending for privileged constituencies) and runaway deficits as a problem related to infeasible
exclusion.9
A slightly more difficult case involves the re-casting of redistributive policies as public goods
problems. Policies offering private goods to citizens for free or at deep discounts to their true
scarcity (such as food aid or Medicare) in effect suspend the price mechanism, depriving
citizen/consumers of signals of the goods’ true scarcity. The effective policy remedy can be
found in the principle of fiscal equivalence applied to the government jurisdiction providing the
service. Governments of general jurisdiction acting as collective consumption units must bear a
substantial portion of the cost of the good (Ostrom and Ostrom 1994 [1977]). Deficit spending,
off-budget gimmicks, and mandatory expenditure rules deprive Congress and the public of the
information provided by the principle of fiscal equivalence. Mainstream theories of budget
politics may offer more elegant and parsimonious explanations. Nonetheless, I am not giving up
on this one yet because the positive externalities of many redistributive policies, e.g., the
elimination of old age poverty freeing younger people to participate in the workforce, imply a
public goods argument worthy of further consideration and development.
Two conventional explanations of counter-intentional policy outcomes merit consideration, too.
The implementation literature is extensive and replete with plausible (and frequently well-
supported) explanations linking policy outcomes to resource budgets to support implementation,
advocacy coalitions, and production technologies (see Jenkins-Smith and Sabatier 1994, Sabatier
and Pelkey 1987, Sabatier 1988 and those who came after). Policy causal theory of the nature
discussed in this essay has the potential to encompass many theories of implementation but I
9 A slice of pie for everyone, too bad it’s our children’s pie.
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have not yet made the case and I share the reader’s expectation that more work is required to
make this point more plausible.
The second conventional explanation of counter-intentionality that I am reluctant to dismiss may
be labeled as “the problem of problem definition.” Formulating an adequate definition of the
problem is a necessary condition for warrantable policy analysis (Bardach 2009). The real world
of policy and politics always has more solutions than problems and policy entrepreneurs (aka
advocates) prepared to attach their pet solutions to any problem that looks likely to land on the
action agenda (Kingdon 1989). The propensity to mis-specify policy problems occurs among all
governments and so one must presume that the conditions requisite for counter-intentional
outcomes are omnipresent. American national security policy in the post-9/11 era exemplifies
the risks presented by spurious problem definitions and the sheer difficulty of discovering
warrantable formulations (Nagl 2002, Johnson 2011, McCauley 2012, Anderson 2014).
Finally, the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, a signal achievement of
the Bloomington school, offers a number of variables that relate to policy outcomes with
potential to explain counter-intentionality. Successful schools and effective policing are
inseparable from rules and practices that promote co-production of the public good (Ostrom and
Ostrom 1994 [1977]). Opportunities to communicate, so-called cheap talk, have the potential to
stabilize the shared expectations of citizens and public authorities making cooperative outcomes
more feasible in a host of situations (Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner 1992). Mutual monitoring
can make an enormous difference in individuals’ willingness to comply with rules, expanding the
possibilities for beneficial rulemaking and reducing anticipated implementation problems (E.
Ostrom 1990). Leadership and social capital, the presence of public entrepreneurs in an open
Counter-Intentional Policy Outcomes March 20, 2014
20
public realm, create potentials for cooperation and collective action considered unlikely by
conventional analysis and not accounted for in the arguments presented above (V. Ostrom 1994).
In short, this essay is a working paper intended to engage the reader in shared acts of discovery
and contestation leading to a better science of policy analysis.
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25
Table 1: Summary of policies and outcomesCase Public Goods Exclusion Rules Use regulation Outcome Comments
Maine Lobster
Fishery
Natural resource
based economic
growth, biologically
and economically
viable fishing
resources
Territorial rules,
apprenticeship and
licensing rules,
zone management
system
Escape vents,
double gauge rule,
V-notch rule,
conservation ethic
Record harvests,
healthy stocks,
thousands of fishers
making decent
livings
Politically well-
organized fishing
community works
effectively at state
and federal levels.
War on Drugs
Externalities from
drug abuse or
narcotics addictions
Criminal penalties
for drug possession
or trafficking
Prescription limits
and reformulation
for opioids,
treatment for
addiction
Direct costs for
incarceration of
drug users, dealers,
etc. are $16.9bn. 2%
of male workforce is
in jail.
Enormous direct
and indirect costs to
society, little
apparent effect on
the problem or its
causes.
Atlantic
Menhaden
Healthy oceanic
food chain,
recreational and
commercial
fisheries
Permits required to
fish commercially
Limits on
recreational and
commercial
harvest, no
meaningful
restriction on
capture technology
Single processer
accounts for 80% of
the harvest; stocks
decline across the
entire range of the
species.
Omega Protein is
politically well-
connected,
recreational and
bait fishers far
more numerous,
wild predators
don't attend public
hearings.
Flood Recovery
& Relief
Safety from flood
disasters, reduced
property losses
None at the federal
level
Some flood
proofing required,
subsidized flood
insurance available
Building in flood
zones accelerates in
the aftermath of
disasters
Policy effectively
suspends the price
mechanism with
respect to flood
risk.