FROM PILOTING TO POLICY: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF RISK MANAGEMENT EXPERIMENTS IN INDIAN AGRICULTURE

Abstract

Designing policy pilots is an important form of experimentation undertaken by policymakers allowing major government policies and programmes to be pre-tested before launching these fully, and at a wider scale. In theory, policy piloting is suggested as a promising means to innovate and introduce variation in policy responses under conditions of risk and uncertainty in the policy environment. Using a model of policy change this thesis investigates whether “design characteristics of policy pilots can explain variations in their scaling-up and overall policy change”? A case-study approach is followed to compare key design features of fourteen agriculture policy pilots launched to address risks and uncertainties to agriculture production in India. Following a framework of policy mixes set out by Cashore and Howlett (2007), changes brought by pilots to the ends (goals) and means (instruments) of an incumbent policy regime are studied as causal conditions for scaling-up of the pilots.