Changing policies can be challenging, but it’s usually the fastest route to meaningful community change. When the policies of governments, funders, or corporations stand in the way of beneficial interventions and necessary fundamental community change, it’s time to try and influence them. Changing policies also exposes and challenges people’s basic assumptions, which can then change their attitudes about other issues.
Legal Mandates and Judicial Decisions
Landmark court decisions or new interpretations of existing law can lead to policy changes. Other societal events and decisions can have similar impacts, such as global treaties or international crises.
Interests (actors, power)
Existing research on policy changes has generally distilled into three key factors that help explain why and when policies change: institutions, interests and ideas. The latter two refer to the content, evidence and values that inform policies, the actors that shape them, and their relationships with each other. The most influential of these factors are the institutions that shape policymaking, the process by which a new policy emerges and the network of connections among actors.
It’s important to take the pulse of the community in order to understand what citizens can support and what they will resist. Choosing tactics that put the positive spin on policy change is often easier than arguing against people’s core assumptions. For example, incentives for doing the right thing can be far more effective than punishing them for doing the wrong thing. And, of course, the old adage that “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” is as relevant to policy change as it is to other aspects of life.