The goal of this paper is to contribute toward bridging the gap between policy design and implementation by focusing on domains, such as education, healthcare and community services, where policy implementation is largely left to the autonomous decision of public service providers, which are strategic actors themselves. More specifically, we suggest that two characteristics of policy design spaces in which policies are designed, i.e., the level of ideational coherence and the prevailing function of the adopted policy instruments, generate systematic patterns of responses in terms of the extent of compliance with policy goals, the presence of strategic gaming and possible defiance. We illustrate our model through a contrastive case study of the introduction of performance-based funding in the higher education sector in four European countries (France, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom). Our analysis displays that policy designs chosen by governments to steer public systems have different trade-offs in terms of responses of the public organizations involved that are essential to effectively implement governmental policies. The model we are proposing provides therefore a framework to understand how these interactions unfold in specific contexts, what are their effects on the achievement of policy goals and how policymakers could exploit their degrees of freedom in policy design to reduce unwanted effects.

本文的目标是通过重点关注教育、医疗保健和社区服务等领域，为缩小政策设计和实施之间的差距做出贡献，这些领域的政策实施很大程度上取决于公共服务提供者的自主决策，而公共服务提供者是战略参与者他们自己。更具体地说，我们认为，设计政策的政策设计空间的两个特征，即理念的一致性水平和所采用的政策工具的主要功能，在符合政策目标的程度上产生了系统的反应模式，存在战略博弈和可能的反抗。我们通过四个欧洲国家（法国、意大利、挪威和英国）高等教育部门引入基于绩效的资助的对比案例研究来说明我们的模型。我们的分析表明，政府为引导公共系统而选择的政策设计在所涉及的公共组织的反应方面具有不同的权衡，这对于有效实施政府政策至关重要。因此，我们提出的模型提供了一个框架，以了解这些相互作用如何在特定背景下展开，它们对实现政策目标有何影响，以及政策制定者如何利用政策设计的自由度来减少不良影响。