Welfare state reform is understood to be risky, difficult and still ongoing. As such, there is a need for analytic tools that can aid understanding of how governments are able to overcome the various barriers they face in seeking change, and the challenges of managing complex and hybridised welfare arrangements. This article argues that the policy tools literature provides several promising avenues for doing so. Specifically, it suggests that procedural policy tools – increasingly recognised in policy studies – are often critical for mitigating risk of blame, sustaining coalitions and supporting the ongoing adaptation of social policy systems to changing conditions and information. This is especially critical where policy innovations entail new substantive relationships between states, citizens and markets, as initial assumptions about individual and group behaviour are likely to be flawed. Procedural tools can enable learning and recalibration in the pursuit of public legitimacy for changing arrangements. To demonstrate the argument, this article engages closely with a case study of public pension reform in Sweden in the 1990s. The case study finds that, initially, reformers made use of a politically insulated parliamentary working group to design a new system, one which attempted to automate elements of policymaking and transfer risk from the state to the individual. However, this goal has proved more difficult to realise than imagined, and in the longer-term, the government used procedural tools for the purposes of learning and recalibration, and in doing so has gone some way to re-establishing modified forms of state accountability.

中文翻译：

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长期的程序工具和养老金改革：瑞典的案例

福利国家改革被认为是有风险的、困难的并且仍在进行中。因此，需要分析工具来帮助理解政府如何能够克服他们在寻求变革时面临的各种障碍，以及管理复杂和混合福利安排的挑战。本文认为，政策工具文献为此提供了几种有希望的途径。具体来说，它表明程序性政策工具——在政策研究中越来越得到认可——通常对于减轻责任风险、维持联盟和支持社会政策体系不断适应不断变化的条件和信息至关重要。当政策创新需要在国家、公民和市场之间建立新的实质性关系时，这一点尤其重要，因为关于个人和群体行为的初步假设可能是有缺陷的。程序工具可以促进学习和重新校准，以寻求改变安排的公共合法性。为了证明这一论点，本文密切关注 1990 年代瑞典公共养老金改革的案例研究。案例研究发现，改革者最初利用政治上孤立的议会工作组来设计一个新系统，该系统试图自动化决策要素并将风险从国家转移到个人。然而，事实证明，这个目标比想象的更难实现，从长远来看，政府使用程序工具来学习和重新校准，这样做在某种程度上重新建立了修改后的国家问责制形式.