European Policy Analysis
higher costs rather than the need to reap more benefits ” ( Zahariadis 2003 , 72 ). This echoes Pierson ’ s ( 2000 , 252 ) conceptualization of increasing returns : “ the relative benefits of the current activity compared with other possible options increase over time ” ( Pierson 2000 , 252 ). The bricoleur ’ s choice is to avoid the costs of exiting initiatives already developed in the field and , therefore , policy ideas with increasing returns are always bound to the case under consideration . The costefficiency analysis performed by the bricoleur is thus not only about the cost it represents for herself but also about the cost for the policy community .
Ideas represent a cost for the policy community when policies exist as initiatives . They thus do not bare any cost when ideas are “ on the shelf ”: they have been simply exposed , most of the time in written form and bare virtually no cost but the time the author spent on shaping and communicating the idea . Ideas represent a cost and , therefore , produce increasing returns in two cases : The applicability of the idea has been successfully accepted within the policy community and developed as a turn-key solution . It involves efforts of research and policy design . These initiatives exist only on paper but the policy community has bared the cost of developing , designing , and preparing a policy solution directly exploitable by decision makers . The idea has been partially or fully translated into the real world and as such bares financial costs and / or mobilizes part of the policy community . It thus has a structuring value for the policy community , mobilizes resources and may be seen as a structure that inhibits organization members from seeing a need for change ( Kelman 2005 ,
27 );
The criterion of increasing returns tells us that the bricoleur avoids the costs of exiting initiatives and even capitalizes on projects that have been developed by the policy community . Therefore , the bricoleur is likely to use ideas in which the policy community has invested time and efforts . As such it is also a matter of action contingency ( Rüb 2016 ) in the sense that it arises from the interaction of different individuals or groups within the policy community .
As developed in the Introduction section , the criteria for idea selection in bricolage are distinct from the criteria of survival of ideas . Nevertheless , I ought to contrast this distinction : while the two processes are a matter of emergence of policy ideas , the survival of ideas is an incremental process , whereas bricolage is an immediate selection . The two processes are not antithetic , rather the policy ideas that a bricoleur will take under consideration are at her disposal because these ideas survived in the primeval soup . The survival of ideas is a matter of contingency , while the two criteria of bricolage are a matter of agency and explains the judgement of the bricoleur when she considers different ideas .
Looking at each of the criteria , they add a new layer to the survival criteria . Ripeness of policymakers is about how much policymaker are receptive to the idea , while this receptiveness might depend on the value acceptability and technical feasibility of the idea , the focus remains on the relationship between an idea and the policymakers . Increasing returns is not a measure of how much an idea is accepted in the policy community
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