What bangs for your buck? Assessing the design and impact of Dutch transformative policy

Abstract

After an era of generic support for economic development and innovation, narrowly targeted policy is back on the table. Recent advances in the fields of new industrial policy (NIP) and transition thinking converge on the idea that achieving structural change requires governments, industry and research to collaborate in formulating targeted yet adaptive strategies. The associated emergence of transformative policy, characterized as being selective, process-oriented and multi-instrumental, poses severe challenges to rising standards of public accountability. Evaluation methods for calculating the ‘bang for the buck’ of R&D-leveraging measures are ill-suited when policy mixes are supposed to guide directed transformations. We argue that assessments should gauge policy contributions to building up technological innovation systems (TIS). The TIS-literature provides a concrete but untapped basis for tracking how policy efforts affect conditions favoring the creation and diffusion of new economic activities. This premise leads us to introduce a scheme for structuring analyses concerned with the organization, orientation and aggregate impact of transformative policy. Drawing upon 107 face-to-face interviews, we apply the scheme to the pilot case of the Dutch ‘Topsector approach’. Its policy design specificities explain why achieved impact so far consists mostly of engaging private parties in fortifying existing knowledge networks, rather than transforming them.