PUBLIC POLICY ADVOCACY ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK

The Public Policy Advocacy Assessment Framework is built around nine conditions viewed by practitioners as essential to a successful policy campaign.

1. Functioning Venue(s) for Adoption: The relevant legislative, legal and regulatory institutions are functioning sufficiently for advocacy to be effective.
2. Open Policy Window: External events or trends support demand for the solution.
3. Flexible Solution: A feasible solution has been developed and shown to produce the intended benefits.
4. Dynamic Master Plan: A pragmatic and flexible advocacy strategy and communications plan is ready for execution.
5. Strong Campaign Leader (s): Central advocates can assemble and the lead the resources to execute the strategy and communications plan.
6. Influential Support Coalition: Allies can sway needed decision-makers and help the campaign leader to pursue the solution.
7. Mobilised Public: Relevant public audiences actively support the solution and its underlying principles.
8. Powerful Inside Champions: Decision-makers who can overcome the opposition support the solution and its underlying principles.
9. Clear Implementation Path: The implementing institution has the commitment and the ability to execute the solution.  

These nine conditions can be used  as a checklist offering decision-makers additional information to aid their deliberations.

Used as a checklist, the framework helps campaign leaders consider the full range of influential factors in creating a successful campaign, not only those most relevant in recent experiences or prominent in the news. Through interviews, research, and discussion, each condition is evaluated for its presence or absence, and planned activities are matched to the conditions. Because campaigns are more likely to be successful when more of the conditions are present, the most important activities will be those that deliver missing conditions or preserve existing but threatened conditions. Once decision-makers have a completed checklist, they also have a snapshot of the campaign’s prospects and critical priorities.

Though crude, the checklist approach is fast and straightforward. It ensures that all the conditions are considered not only those that seem most relevant in the moment.

A Flexible Estimation Approach

Any formula that provides quantitative estimates of uncertain values, such as the likelihood of achieving policy change, is a decision-making aid, not a scientific truth. Its most important function is to apply consistently the decision-makers’ best understanding of how conditions will interact to influence the likelihood of success. The details will vary depending on the advocates’ context and hypotheses. Nonetheless, estimates obtained from a formula have proven valuable in helping advocates make hard choices among their many options for policy campaigns.

Policy change may be divided into three stages: agenda-setting, adoption, and implementation. The first three condition scores in the framework (1-3) are averaged to estimate the likelihood that a new policy solution will find a place on the policymakers’ agenda. The next five condition scores (4-8) are averaged to estimate the likelihood that the solution will be adopted into law. The final condition score (9) is used to estimate the likelihood that the policy will be implemented to deliver potential benefits.

The formula then multiplies the likelihoods of success for each unfinished stage. A campaign to champion a new policy idea will need to pass through all three stages, so all three likelihoods are multiplied. A campaign to take a solution on the agenda through passage and implementation, on the other hand, will use the product of the likelihoods for only the adoption and implementation stages. Rather than simply averaging all of the conditions together, this method acknowledges that strength in one area can’t always counteract weakness in another. For example, the best policy solution is useless when government institutions are too ineffectual to implement it.

To estimate the advocates’ contribution to a campaign’s success, some conditions can be improved through near-term advocacy, whereas others should be accepted as outside advocacy’s influence. Six of the conditions (3-8) are typically designated “campaign conditions” and can often be improved by advocates in the near term. The three remaining conditions (1, 2, and 9) are typically labeled “context conditions” and reflect forces that advocates have little ability to influence via the campaign, especially in the near term. When the context is challenging as a result of gridlocked institutions, lack of attention by decision-makers, or faulty implementation even the most successful advocacy campaign is unlikely to produce the intended benefits. Yet when a policy window opens in a strong institutional environment, the situation is ripe for a strong campaign to deliver policy change.

This framework’s combination of conditions was designed for campaigns that contribute to policy adoption.

Stages of Assessment

The Advocacy Assessment Framework is designed to be useful at every stage of an advocacy campaign. Once the campaign is under way, advocates may use it to monitor progress and make any needed adjustments. At the conclusion of the campaign, the framework offers an objective instrument to assess what worked and what didn’t.

Evaluating Pathways

The first step in the process is to choose a pathway for the campaign. Choosing from among all the possible campaign pathways to advance a programme’s goal is one of the most important, and difficult, steps toward creating a well-developed strategy. Several paths may lead to the same result; each may have different strengths and weaknesses.

The framework may be used to scan and evaluate pathways to see which offers more of the nine conditions, and flesh out a few top alternatives.

The framework may be used to compare current conditions for each pathway to the goals of the advocacy campaign and prioritize opportunities to deliver missing conditions.

Monitoring Progress

The policy environment often shifts as a strategy moves forward. Politicians leave office, the economy takes a sudden plunge, or new issues capture the public imagination. Advocates must be ready to respond quickly, and to do so they must closely monitor the progress of an initiative.

The framework may be used to monitor progress and track the nine conditions over time with a “traffic light” dashboard. If conditions deteriorate unexpectedly or are not improving as expected, consider a change in strategy or a change in pathway.

Assessing Results

Winning significant policy reforms is never easy. Advocates know they must learn the lessons of past projects if they are to succeed in future efforts. The Advocacy Assessment Framework can help by analyzing completed projects for what worked, what didn’t, and why.

The framework may be used to assess results and evaluate the campaign’s final outcome and compare it with the initial expectations about which conditions would persist. Assess what the campaign could have done differently to respond to changing conditions.