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‘new’ policy design and to differentiate it from the ‘old’. Readers will find this shift consistent with other trends in public policy studies, which chart a weakening attachment to formal models and an increasing concern with more messy processes, marked by complexity, uncertainty, and politics. It is summarised in a series of shifts in context, orientation and process, from: presupposed to explicit consideration of context; stability to instability; a fixed to an agile style and strategy; shortto long-term time frames; and limited to strongly recommended participation (p. 114). This new approach intends to facilitate better adaptation to contemporary complexity bybeing more open and hence more creative. The argument put forward is that governments need not see this as a retreat from a positive view of policy intervention per se, but an opportunity to innovate. Without throwing away all conventional ideas of design, the new design compared with the old is the counterpart analytical orientation accompanying the general shift from government to governance. Peters thus adds a significant overview and categorisation of a major trend in the field of public policy studies. He also deals with some of the objections to the policy design perspective, such as the criticism that it does not sufficiently account for political considerations and has been too focused on the technocratic selection and application of instruments. These refutations add much to the updating of the design concept. Critical approaches are likely to continue to question how design copes with the political and differentiated characteristics of the many actions and actors that make public policy, and the generalizability of statements such as ‘all policymaking is in essence design’ (p. 130). But this volume clearly advances the conceptual basis of policy design as well as setting out the contours of future research. Readers of this journal will certainly find in it plenty that is relevant for their own research, given the challenging complexity of problems faced at this level of government.