Although policy capacity is among the most fundamental concepts in public policy, there is considerable disagreement over its definition and very few systematic efforts try to operationalize and measure it. This article presents a conceptual framework for analysing and measuring policy capacity under which policy capacity refers to the competencies and capabilities important to policy-making. Competences are categorized into three general types of skills essential for policy success—analytical, operational and political—while policy capabilities are assessed at the individual, organizational and system resource levels. Policy failures often result from imbalanced attention to these nine different components of policy capacity and the conceptual framework presented in the paper provides a diagnostic tool to identify such capacity gaps. It offers critical insights into strategies able to overcome such gaps in professional behaviour, organizational and managerial activities, and the policy systems involved in policy-making.

New Governance Arrangements (NGAs) have emerged as a lively topic in comparative policy studies and are often proposed as solutions to complex policy problems like environmental or health protection. However, assessing the merits and demerits of particular arrangements or instrument mixes is difficult. The paper proposes a variety of tools to tackle the often-overlooked problem of identifying and inventorying the instruments found in instrument mixes and assessing their likelihood to produce optimal results. A framework is developed for evaluating the likelihood of successful implementation of NGA's that exploits the fact that new policy development is almost always constrained by previous policy choices which have become institutionalized. The degree to which this institutionalization has occurred is seen as variable and the implementation to depend on a number of well-understood processes such as increasing returns and other kinds of positive feedback; sunk costs; and incremental policy learning. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated in the context of NGAs found in the forestry sector.