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Governments create advisory committees and arm's-length agencies and then delegate responsibilities and powers, sometimes merely to provide policy advice but sometimes to implement regulation. Interest groups, and especially groups representing private businesses, are often appointed to such committees. As a result, they proactively seek appointment to policy advisory committees and boards established by government, believing that this offers one route amongst several to promote their interests to government and to influence public policy. But little is known about whether they are then successful in influencing policy outcomes. This paper addresses that gap – specifically by reviewing interest groups' perceptions of their effectiveness, given the challenges of assessing actual effectiveness, in policy advisory committees in Kenya. Whilst it is possible that the policy outcomes simply reflect the policy preferences of the interest groups, these groups believe that they exert some influence on the committees on which they sit – through the provision of research evidence, clearly articulated opinion, and reasoned argument – and they further believe that the committees exert some influence on government policy.

Britain's efforts to promote nuclear power represent successful failures. A successful failure is a policy program that achieves some progress or delivers short-term success but ultimately fails to deliver upon its original objectives. Britain's various nuclear power programs did deliver some limited success but often fell short of key objectives overall and incurred massive cost overruns. It is shown that government interventions often prevented outright failure, but these interventions were made necessary due to the unintended consequences of prior decisions. It is concluded that government creates the conditions that increase the risk of policy failure but through intervention, government can forestall outright failure to create a successful failure.

The Multiple Streams Framework has been criticised for failing to recognise the strong institutional drivers of policymaking in Westminster-type jurisdictions, thereby limiting its relevance for explaining policymaking in such jurisdictions. There has been much recent scholarship exploring its relevance for such jurisdictions. However, a new method has been developed to analyse the application of this popular Framework to case studies of policymaking episodes, using a set of hypotheses to test the Framework's predictive power. This provides an opportunity to further address two key questions: the applicability of the Multiple Streams Framework to Westminster systems, and the more general question of the relationship between institutions and the Multiple Streams Framework. The research reported here has applied the new method to two episodes of health policymaking in two centralised Westminster jurisdictions with closely aligned political, policymaking and health systems, England and New Zealand. The process and outcomes of each policymaking episode, and the relevance of the Multiple Streams Framework for explaining them using the new method, are presented. While the hypotheses are found to be valid for the policymaking process and outcomes in the English policymaking episode, this is not the case for the New Zealand episode. The findings show that there is a need for greater recognition of the strong influence of institutional factors in the Multiple Streams Framework, particularly in the decision-making stages of the policy processes, especially with regard to policymaking in centralised Westminster jurisdictions.