Dear Daniel,

I do not know for what purpose you need those categories but for instance I have used to use Staronova´s typology of public policy instruments/tools for didactic purposes: http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00001841/01/Staronova.pdf (look at the last page, please).

Best regards,

Daniel

Best will be to look at the text book titled Studying Public Policy written by Howlett and Ramesh. They not only elucidate Theodore Lowi's famous work which classifies policy instruments into Distributive, redistributive, regulative and constitutive types, but also expands Christopher Hood's famous book called Tools of Government.

If you aren't already familiar with it, see the collection of articles in Videc et al. for a good discussion of policy instrument typology and theory with representative case examinations:

Bemelmans-Videc, M. L, R. C Rist, and E. Vedung. Carrots, Sticks, and Sermons: Policy Instruments and Their Evaluation. Transaction Pub, 2003.

I second Sony's recommendation of Howlett & Ramesh and suggest it be considered in conjunction with Howlett's work with Cashore which provides interesting insights into our understanding of policy dynamics and the importance of recognizing the cumulative directionality of policy changes:

Howlett, Michael, and Benjamin Cashore. ‘The Dependent Variable Problem in the Study of Policy Change: Understanding Policy Change as a Methodological Problem’. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 11, no. 1 (2009): 33. doi:10.1080/13876980802648144.

Finally, from a more meta-theoretical perspective, there is an interesting recent article presenting a series of alternative paradigms of collective action. Though focused on the field of conservation biology, these paradigms are, I think, a useful corrective to our typically rather narrow approaches to understanding social control:

Mermet, Laurent, Katherine Homewood, Andrew Dobson, and Raphaël Billé. ‘Five Paradigms of Collective Action Underlying the Human Dimension of Conservation’. In Key Topics in Conservation Biology 2, edited by David W.cdonald and Katherine J. Willis, 42–58. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Ok, thank you very much for your indications. Extremely useful. I´ll try to locate the material that you suggested. 

Daniel, I am still trying to understand this field of public policy instruments, which is fairly new for me. I am from Brazil and we have and umbrella environmental education public policy which defines that all 5000 municipalities design and implement local EE policies. The challenge is enormous and one of the obstacles is exactly the fact that nor environmental educators neither public managers know exactly what to do. In the middle of if are the instruments and the problem is that we normally create EE policies for both formal (schools) and non-formal (out of the curriculum) education systems. These are two very distant universes which will, from my point of view, demand very different instruments of implementation. Some local policies have been already designed but from my point of view again they mix these two universes and as a result I am not sure about the aplicability of the instruments that they are using.

Millions of questions emerge from that and as I haven´t found many papers or books that make this theoretical analysis of public policies specifically to educational public policies, I am really lost.  Normally the focus is given to other fields and the instruments in the educational field is either left out is get only small attention.  

Daniel - this is a bit of a 'shot in the dark', but, from this description, it strikes me that your challenge at this point is more one of policy and program development than of instrument choice per se.  You might want to have a look at the Canadian International Development Research Centre's(IDRC) work on Outcome Mapping (http://www.idrc.ca/EN/Resources/Publications/Pages/IDRCBookDetails.aspx?PublicationID=121 ) which can help with conceptualizing and organizing complex, multi-party programs.  It will provide a more useful and concrete starting point that the theoretical material I suggested above.

Sounds like a fascinating initiative.  Best of luck!

John

Ok John, thank you very much. I have downloaded the file and will have a look at it. Thank you.