Conceptualising reform endurance: where preservation meets adaptation

For a reform to endure, not only does it need to survive over a reasonable period of time, but it also needs to navigate various challenges to its existence. In this chapter, I introduce some of these challenges. I begin first with the politics of implementation, of what happens when the rubber hits the road. I then turn my attention to the constraining effects of previous policy choices, as well as ‘legacy effects’ on future policy choices. To conceptualise reform endurance, I argue that it is important to understand both stability and change. To do this, I draw on recent advances in policy studies in order to unpack its moving parts. Here, I introduce an analytical framework capable of pinpointing precisely what a reform is and what endurance means. The next challenge involves detecting how reform endurance happens. While a focus on endurance is relatively novel, an interest in policymaking and governance over the long term is not. Scholars from various political science disciplines have considered different factors which influence how reform unfolds over time. Treating endurance as a political phenomenon means paying close attention to the conflicts involving collective actors within the political domain. With this in mind, I present four conditions who I surmise to be relevant herein and whose (singular and combined) contribution to the achievement of endurance I later examine.