An Analysis of Policy Change from “Social Enterprise” Action Plan to “Social Innovation” Action Plan: The Multiple Streams Model Perspective
Min-Hsiu Chiang, Hao-Jung Chang
Abstract
Demands for public services have increased and diversified rapidly due to continuous social development, and the gap between government, enterprises and non-profit organizations (NPOs) for providing public services has become more significant. To solve social problems arising from the above facts, the concept of “social enterprise” has created a new path. Social Enterprise has multiple characteristics to solve both social and economic problems: it is more financially independent compared to NPOs, and its operators are more aware of social responsibility than leaders of profit-oriented enterprises.
With the advent of the 21st century, the government of Taiwan has developed policies regarding social enterprise. Most of them were not formulated and had been scattered in political projects written by various ministries until the approval of “Social Enterprise Action Plan” by the Executive Yuan in 2014. In a short period of time, this plan has been further changed into “Social Innovation Action Plan” by the Executive Yuan in 2018.
Based on the materials collected from policies, monographs, academic journals, public government information and after reviewing theories relating to social enterprise, social innovation as well as policy change, this paper is concerned with the following questions: How does policy change from “Social Enterprises Action Plan” to “Social Innovation Action Plan”? What form of policy change does it demonstrate? Does the change from “Social Enterprises Action Plan” to “Social Innovation Action Plan” meet the requirements of policy target groups?
This paper constructs its research framework based on Multiple Streams Model. The main research methods used in this paper are secondary document analysis and in-depth interviews with government sectors and policy target groups. The result of the research shows that the latter policy is incrementally policy succession of the former policy. Because the executive agencies and policy targets groups remained the same, the main factors to such policy change are the interactions between political stream and policy stream, and the impacts of change in policy goals resulting from political ruling party alternation and the actions made by executive agencies brought about changes in policy alternatives. This paper also finds that, while the action plans do have policy outputs, such policy does not have significant impact on the policy target groups; most entities rather focus on its own commercial operation.
Keywords: social enterprise, social innovation, policy change