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Metaphors have much analytical purchase in the policy sciences - none more so than that of the notions of policy stages and multiple streams. Yet there are difficulties, even allowing for necessary parsimony, in applying these individual metaphors to policy processes. This paper attempts to combine metaphors about policy cycles and policy streams in order to provide a more realistic synthesis that can capture diverse factors such as changing governance norms, detailed program interventions and the sheer complexity of policy drivers - ranging from coalition building to 'garbage can' solutions. In doing so it examines the difficulties of mixing these two metaphors and the special difficulty of ascertaining how many streams should be conceptualised. We argue that three-stream models such as Kingdon's may be well suited to understanding one specific stage of policy-making but require augmentation in order to effectively interpret the full set of variables affecting processes and outcomes occurring through multiple stages of policy making. The paper proposes a five stream 'confluence' model which highlights the interactions between and among streams as a more effective metaphorical construction retaining the essence of the Kingdon 'stream' image while also incorporating elements of the 'cycle' or 'stages' one. The confluence model, it is argued, retains the basic thrust and vocabulary developed by Kingdon while offering a more comprehensive and relevant metaphor for capturing the dynamics of public policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses three issues troubling predominant models of paradigmatic policy change and proposes an alternative perspective on the subject. The first issue pertains to the conflation of very specific, but difficult to operationalize, types of policy change in Peter Hall's standard three-order typology for understanding policy development. The second has to do with the view that exogenous phenomena, namely shifts in the locus of decision-making authority, are necessary for 'paradigmatic' change to occur. The third issue stems from Hall's strict adaptation of Thomas Kuhn's ideas concerning the (in)commensurability of succeeding paradigms. All three problems are shown to be derivative of the fact that policy change is more complex than often assumed in existing paradigmatic models. Instead of conceiving of policy change in definite or 'ordered' terms, it is argued that analytical focus should be directed toward the hermeneutic contest that unfolds as agents patch together ideas in the attempt to identify and explain the sources of policy problems. This largely discursive conflict takes place as agents vie to influence the authoritative definitions of problem-solutions in a process of 'policy bricolage'. The paper advances a revised and more actor-centered formula for understanding types of paradigmatic and intra-paradigmatic policy change by developing a more precise understanding of different types or 'orders' of policy anomalies and the role anomaly definition plays in the construction of new paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]