The Politics of Policy Robustness

Abstract

Policy robustness, that is, the capacity of policies to sustain performance across diverse and uncertain futures, is increasingly considered a core objective of public policymaking. Although adaptive policymaking is widely promoted as an approach to achieving policy robustness, it suffers from a central paradox highlighted by theories of the policy process: mechanisms intended to enable ongoing adjustment can generate entrenchment and opportunistic behavior through coalition stabilization, self-reinforcing feedback, institutional friction, and strategic agenda setting. While present in all policy systems, this paradox is likely more pronounced in the Global South, where high uncertainty and constrained administrative capacity intensify the political mechanisms that undermine adaptive policymaking. Despite rapid growth in the literature on policy robustness, it remains unclear to what extent this scholarship engages with the political processes through which policy adaptation unfolds over time. This study addresses that gap through a computational review of more than 300 publications on policy robustness and adaptive policymaking. The findings show that research in this area is dominated by domain-specific applications and methodological innovation, with limited attention to political dynamics. Governance perspectives are comparatively marginal, and explicit engagement with theories of the policy process is virtually absent. As a result, policy adaptation is largely conceptualized as a design problem rather than as a contested political process. The article concludes by explaining why this omission matters for theory and practice and by identifying avenues for integrating political analysis into future research on policy robustness.