Introduction: Understanding integrated policy strategies and their evolution

Much attention in recent years has been focused on the idea of replacing patchworks of public policies in specific issue areas with more coordinated or ‘integrated’ policy strategies (IS). Such strategies are expected to display a match of coherent policy goals and consistent policy means which can produce policy outcomes optimally matched to specific large-scale problem contexts. Work on such strategies in areas such as Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), National Forest Policies (NFPs), European transportation and energy planning, Mediterranean desertification and others, however, has shown a remarkable resilience of pre-existing policy elements, leading to policy failures and other sub-optimal outcomes. On the basis of a review of this literature, this article argues that the development of IS typically follows one or more of the processes Thelen et al. have characterized as ‘displacement, conversion, layering, drift and exhaustion’. Studies of IS must take this evolutionary perspective into account in developing a better understanding of issues surrounding appropriate IS design.