Policy change occurs when problem, policy, and politics streams converge at critical moments.
Kingdon's 1984 model. The window opens when all three streams align, and it closes quickly — which is why prepared solutions waiting for a problem outperform good solutions developed after one.
In practice
- A flood-defence scheme costed for six years is enacted in eleven weeks, because the flood, the plan and a new minister arrived together.
- A software team's long-refused refactor is approved the fortnight after an outage, and the proposal was written eighteen months earlier.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works