This rejoinder challenges and refutes the alarming decline thesis posited by Howlett and Lejano in their Disputatio article in this journal in 2012. Using their own data Source - JSTOR - updated to 2009 and search term “policy design” as well as the more comprehensive Social Science Citation Index in terms of journal coverage and supplementary search terms ‘policy instrument’s and ‘policy tool’s we clearly demonstrate that policy design research instead of languishing has continued to flourish in all academic fields during the late 2000’ and early 2010’s at an exponential rate never observed before.
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