To tackle the manifold crises of our times, most notably the environmental crises we face, ambitious policy change is urgently needed to achieve the necessary radical transformation of our industrialised societies. Yet, while there is increasing demand for public policy scholarship to provide guidance on how policy should be designed to achieve such change, existing scholarship struggles to provide ‘forward-looking’ recommendations. Within this context, our article takes a step back to reconsider the underlying logics of policy change. We argue that focusing on policy, its effect and the subsequent politics it triggers is best achieved by combining insights from the policy design, policy mix and policy feedback literatures. This combination allows us to re-evaluate which potential pathways towards policy change exist.The main contribution of our article is its proposition of two distinct pathways towards policy change, building on a systematic understanding of policy design elements. These pathways place greater emphasis on policy change happening (1) ‘bottom-up’ through initial low-level design changes rather than ‘top-down’ through high-level ideational change, as argued in earlier scholarship, (2) through the interplay of several policies in a complex mix. In this way, these pathways provide a useful framework for systematically analysing how policy should be designed to achieve ambitious policy change and thus enable transformative societal change.

Policy feedback research faces a potential pivot point owing to recent theoretical and substantive advances. Concerted attention now spans new scientific communities, such as climate focused socio-technical transitions literature, as well as reinvigorated attention to environmental politics or policy. Rather than being interested in abstractly explaining policy stability and change, this latest turn turns feedback theory in order to help find practical answers to long-term policy challenges. This introduction to our special issue of Policy Sciences aims to take stock of recent developments in policy feedback research and highlight some areas that could be addressed to move the field forward. We argue for taking seriously the original dictum of policy feedback as a loop in which policy is treated as both the start and end point of analysis. This requires integrating advances in policy design scholarship through shared conceptualizations of ‘policy,’ ‘actors’ and ‘agency’. Doing so, we posit, will champion more comprehensive understandings of the effectiveness of policy design choices in general, and long-term oriented policy change in particular.