Chapter One

Conceptual Overview of Policy and Policy Making

Introduction

 This section focuses on:

 the conceptual definitions of policy and the origin of policy studies,
 the different uses of the word policy,
 the policy document and policy impacts and
 public versus private policy
 Upon the successful completion of this section, you will be able to:
 define the term policy;
 distinguish the different uses of the term policy;
 explain the origin of policy studies;
 identify the difference between a policy, a Procedure, a strategy and a plan;
 identify intended or unintended impacts of a policy; and
 explain the reasons for the failure of some policy to meet its objectives

1.1. Conceptual overview of Policy

Question:

 What does policy mean? How the term is used? Why policy studies originated as the subject
matter?
There are various definitions provided by different scholars:
A policy is:
 A principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome(s).
 A projected programme of goals, values and practices.
 Considered along with series of more or less related activities and their consequences for
those concerned rather than as discrete decision.
 Is a course of pattern of activity and not simply a decision to do something.
 A proposed course of action of a person, group or government within a given environment
providing obstacles and opportunities which the policy was proposed. According to this
definition, policy has a goal, objective or purpose.
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  A course of action, the requirement that policy is directed towards the accomplishment of
some purpose or goal.
 A set of interrelated decisions taken by a political actor or group of actors concerning the
selection of goals and the means of achieving them within a specified situation where
these decisions should, in principle, be within the power of these actors to achieve.
 A ‗standing decision’ characterized by behavioral consistency and repetitiveness on the
part of both those who make it and those who abide by it.
 ‗action or inaction in response to demands.‘ Here, policy behavior includes involuntary
failure to act and deliberate decisions not to act.
 Such ‗non-decisions‘ include circumstances in which a person or group, consciously or
unconsciously, creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of public conflicts.
 In its most general sense, policy is the pattern of action that resolves conflicting claims or
provides incentives for cooperation.
 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, policy is ‗a course or principle of action
adopted or proposed by a government, party, business, or individual‘.
 Like strategies, programmes, plans and similar concepts, policies provide general
directives rather than detailed instructions for action.
 The specific function of policies is to provide normative orientation – guiding values and
ends – for the elaboration of strategies, programmes and plans, which are more
concerned with the selection of appropriate means for achieving those ends.
More definitions of the term policy
 A policy is a plan or course of action in directing affairs, as chosen by a political party,
government, and business company.
 a definite course or method of action selected by a government, institution, or individual
from among alternatives and in the light of given conditions to guide and usually
determine present and future decisions.
 An aggregation of people‘s hopes, aspirations and values which may be contained in official
documents or merely taken as being the current stand on given problems.
 In practical terms, it consists of a course of actions and measures deliberately taken to direct
the affairs of society towards the realization of predetermined goals or objectives.

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 "Stated most simply, policy is the sum of government activities, whether acting directly or
through agents, as it has an influence on the life of citizens―.
 Presidential executive orders, corporate privacy policies, and parliamentary rules of order are
all examples of policy.
 the process of making important organizational decisions, including the identification of
different alternatives such as programs or spending priorities, and choosing among them on
the basis of the impact they will have.
 Political, management, financial, and administrative mechanisms arranged to reach
explicit goals.

1.2. Varieties of ways in which the Word ‘Policy’ is used

A) Policy as a Label for a Field of Activity
 This usage is in the context of broad statements about the government‘s economic policy,
social policy, foreign policy, industrial policy, law and order policy, etc.
 Within these broad labels there may be more specific references to the government‘s policy
towards nationalized industry, or housing policy.
 What is being described here appears to be ‗fields‘ of governmental activity and
involvement.
 While the use of policy as a label for a governmental activity and involvement is both a
common and an apparently common-sense one, it can only be a starting-point.
 For example, it covers past, current and potential activities- it makes no distinction between
policy as aspiration and policy as achievement- and it does not readily distinguish between
policy as action and policy as inaction.
 On a more practical level, it will quickly become evident that the everyday language of
policy ‗fields‘ and ‗areas‘ suggests a degree of boundary definition and self-containment
which simply does not hold up when we attempt, for example, to draw sharp dividing lines
between economic, foreign, and defense policies.
B) Policy as an Expression of General Purpose or Desired State of Affairs
 For better understanding of this policy usage, let us see the statements passed by a
parliament on inflation as stated below: ‘In the next parliament, we shall endeavor to
bring inflation lower still. Our ultimate goal should be a society with stable prices.’

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  This a fairly typical statement of ‘policy’ in that it expresses the broad purposes (or
‘ends’) of governmental activity in one field and also describes the state of affairs
which would prevail on achievements of those purposes.
 Another example includes policy to generate as many jobs as possible, to promote
democratization through decentralization, to attack the roots of poverty, etc.
C) Policy as a Specific Proposals
 Those perusing newspapers for usages of the term ‗policy‘ will often find statements of
specific actions which political organizations (interest groups, parties, the cabinet itself)
would like to see undertaken by government.
 Here is an example of a party manifesto; ‗We shall give union members the right to hold
ballot for the election of governing bodies of trade unions; decide periodically whether their
unions should have partly political funds. We shall also curb the legal immunity of unions to
\call strikes without the prior approval of those concerned through a fair and secret ballot.‘
 Such proposals may be ad hoc, or may have to be related to other proposals, or may represent
the ‗means‘ of achieving the larger ‗ends‘ or purposes. Another example includes policy to
limit agricultural holdings to 10 hectares, to devalue the currency by 10 percent, to provide
free primary education, etc.

D) Policy as Decisions of Government

 A Policy decisions as announced in the national assembly by a Prime Minister or by a

President is a good example. Once policy choice is made by government, the probability of a
‗decision‘ by government becoming embodied in legislation or otherwise receiving formal
authorization will vary according to the political structure: majority party governments like in
Britain can normally count on more -or-less automatic ratification by parliament, where as
the president of the United States, whatever his party or the composition of congress, has to
fight to mobilize support for his decisions.

E) Policy as Formal Authorization

 This includes acts of parliament or other statutory instruments. When it is said of government
that it ‗has a policy‘ on a particular topic, the reference is sometimes to the specific act of
parliament or statutory instrument which permits or requires an activity to take place.

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 Or it may be said when legislation is enacted that the policy has been carried out or
implemented. Funds have to be spent and, perhaps, staff hired before any of the activities
envisaged in the act can take place. The passage of legislation is an important legitimizing
stage in the policy process. However, it is meaningless if it is not implemented.

F) Policy as a Programme
 A programme is a defined and a relatively specific sphere of government activity involving a
particular package of legislation, organization and resources. Thus we can talk of a school
meals programme, which involves a specific piece of legislation, various resources, and the
man power to deliver the programme.
 Government housing policy can be said to consist of a number of programmes such as the
provision of subsidized council houses, a housing improvement programme, an option
mortgage programme, and so on.

 Programmes are usually seen as being the means by which government pursue their broader
purposes or ends. This may often be so, but there are other cases where programmes,
especially poorly defined programmes, develop objectives of their own. Examples can also
include government activities such as land reform programme or a women‘s health
programme.

G) Policy as Outputs
 Here policy is seen as what government actually delivers as opposed to what it has promised
or has authorized through legislation.
 Such outputs can take many forms- the payment of cash benefits, the delivery of goods or
services, the enforcement of rules, and the invocation of symbols or the collection of taxes,
the amount of land redistributed in a reform programme and the number of tenants affected,
etc.
 The form of outputs varies between policy areas.
It is sometimes difficult to decide what the final ‗output‘ of government policy is in a
particular area.
In the health service, for example, there is a tendency to describe such items as more funds,
more trained staff, and more beds as the outputs of a policy intended to improve the quality

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 of medical care. In fact, these are necessary but not sufficient conditions of improved medical
care: they should be regarded as important contributory factors to the desired output, but not
the output itself. They could perhaps be considered as ‗intermediate outputs‘ rather than the
final or ‗ultimate‘ output. Outputs in practice may not conform to stated intentions because of
the unintended impacts of the policy.
H) Policy as Outcome
 Policy in terms of its outcome, that is, refers to what is actually achieved.
 For example, the policy effect on the farmer‘s income and living standards and of
agricultural output of a land reform programmes.
 This distinction between outputs (the activities of government at the point of delivery) and
outcomes (the impact of these activities) is often slurred over, and is sometimes difficult to
make in practice, but it is an important one.
 Thinking of policy in terms of outcomes may enable us to make some assessment of whether
the stated purpose of a policy appears to be what the policy is actually achieving. For
example, if it was found that the effect of policies labeled as regional polices was to
subsidize declining firms, then one might feel entitled to describe the policy as ‗a social
policy‘ rather than a ‗resource- mobilizing‘ or ‗economic‘ policy.
 Policy outcomes may not necessarily reflect the sum of the purposes of the original decision-
maker.
 Some aspects of the policy impact may be entirely unintended. However, policy outcomes
enable us to draw attention to the need to re-evaluate policy so as to know where the fault
was done.

 For example, is the problem is related to the stated objectives, the process by which decisions
are made, the arrangement of policy instruments and funds in to particular programmes, or
the way in which delivery policies is allocated among different organizations?

I) Policy as a Theory or Model

 All policies involve assumptions about what governments can do and what the consequences
of their actions will be.
 These assumptions are rarely spelt out, but policies nevertheless do imply a theory (or model)
of cause and effect.

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 At its simplest, this theory takes the form ‗if X, the Y will follow;‘ if we increase incentives
to manufacturers, then industrial output will grow; if more opportunities are provided in rural
areas, the migration to cities will slow down. An example of policy as theory where the
assumptions were to some extent spelt out comes from the following speech of a leader of a
state; ‗by reducing the burden of direct taxation and restricting the claims of the public sector
on the nation‘s resources they will start to restore incentives, encourage efficiency and create
a climate in which commerce and industry can flourish. In this way they will lay a secure
basis for investment, productivity and increased employment in all parts of the country.‘
 If think of policy in terms of the simple ‗if X, then Y‘ theory, we can see that failure of a
policy can raise either from the government‘s failure to do X in full or X fails to have the
consequences expected according to the theory. In practice, the causal chains involved in
policy as theory are normally much more complex.
 One of the tasks of the policy analyst is to try to tease out the theories underlying policies and
examine the internal consistency of the resulting model and the apparent validity of its
assumptions.
J) Policy as a Process
 Policy involves a process over much longer period of time and there are a number of stages
through which a policy issue may pass. As a long-term matter starting with the issues and
moving through objective setting, decision-making to implementation and evaluation. Policy
as a process is also known as policy cycle, i.e., is a tool used for analyzing of the
development of a policy item. It can also be referred to as a "stagist approach".
 An eight step policy cycle developed by Peter Bridgman and Glyn Davis for example
include: issue identification, policy analysis, policy instrument development, consultation
(which permeates the entire process), coordination, decision, implementation, and evaluation.
K) Policy as Arguments
 Juma and Clarke (1995) describe this approach as one in which policy reforms are presented
as reasoned arguments. Policy is developed through debate between state and societal actors.
 Participants present claims and justifications which others review critically. Language not
only depicts reality in such arguments, but also shapes the issues at hand in these debates. It
is a means of communication of ideas, but also serves to reflect certain political stances,
molding social reality according to outlook and ideology.

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 L) Policy as Social Experiment
 This sees social change as a process of trial and error, which involves successive hypotheses
being tested against reality in an experimental manner. It is based in the experimental
approach of the natural sciences.
M) Policy as Interactive Learning
 This approach is rooted in a criticism of development policy as being ‗top-down‘, not
generated from the communities in which polices are implemented. It argues for an ‗actor-
perspective‘, emphasizing the need to take into account the opinions of individuals, agencies
and social groups that have a stake in how a system evolves. The approach promotes an
interaction and sharing of ideas between those who make policy and those who are
influenced most directly by the outcome.
 The advocacy of participatory rural appraisal methods by Chambers (1983) is an example of
this usage of the term policy.

1.3. Policy and other Related Concepts

A) Policy Vs. a Procedure
 A policy is different from a procedure, a strategy and a plan.
 A policy is a set of guiding principles or rules intended to influence decisions and actions that
reflect agreed practice about how a government uses its powers.
 The term is not normally used to denote what is actually done; this is normally referred to
as either procedure or protocol.
 A policy, on the other hand, will contain the 'what' and the 'why', procedures or protocols
contain the 'what', the 'how', the 'where', and the 'when'.
 Policies are generally adopted by a board or senior government body within an
organization whereas procedures or protocols would be developed and adopted by senior
executive officers.
A procedure:
 A procedure can variously be defined as a series of steps followed in a regular order to direct
the reader through a task; a particular way of doing something; steps taken to implement
policy and operations.

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 Procedures generally have a narrow application (as they usually refer to a single process, are
\prone to change, are stated in sufficient detail to enable the reader to know exactly what to
do, and are usually statements of ‗how‘, ‗when‘ and sometimes ‗who‘.
 Procedures are sometimes confused with policies, because the ‗purpose statement‘ with
which the procedure should begin and which describes why the procedure is necessary, is
frequently called a ‗policy statement‘.
 However, the difference between policies and procedures is perfectly clear.
 Expressed in simple terms, policies are statements of what is required in broad terms and
relate to major operational issues; procedures are more detailed, step by step descriptions of
required actions, relating to how particular processes ‗should be carried out.
B) Policy Vs. Strategy
 A strategy is a high-level approach to an issue that is designed to deliver change by
implementing policy. For a particular subject, it will set out where a given Council is now,
where it is aiming to be in a given period of time, how it plans to get there, and how it will
know that it has achieved its goals.
 But, producing the strategy is not the same as getting it implemented Strategy is not
planning, but is what enables people to develop action plans that are consistent with the
achievement of the future possibility and act in the areas where most advantage can be won.
 This is where one final step is needed – the production of a plan.

C) Policy vs. Plan

 A plan is an operational programme or guide that sets out current and projected performance,
planned activities and planned achievements and outcomes over a given period of time.
 Plans give direction to actions and ensure that all actions are moving the Council towards its
stated goals.
 Plans are also used to co-ordinate activities across service boundaries, and to inform elected
members and, in some cases, the public about the Council‘s services, how they are
performing and how they compare over time and against benchmarks.

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 For better understands of the differences between a policy, a procedure, a strategy and a
plan carefully consider the following example:
Imagine that a Municipal Council is considering restricting speed on certain roads:
 The policy is that there will be selective restrictions on speed on certain roads.
 The strategy sets out the intended means to implement the policy, the basis upon which it
will be implemented, how people who speed will be dealt with, and how the effectiveness
of the policy will be measured and monitored.
 The plan ensures that the various elements of the strategy are achieved. That the right speed
limits are imposed on the right roads, purchases are made, signs erected, staff recruited and
trained, publicity material issued, and that the appropriate levels of penalty and means of
enforcement are in place.
D) Policy VS Law
 The main difference between policy and law is regarding who has the authority to create it
and how it can be enforced. While law can compel or prohibit behaviors (e.g. a law requiring
the payment of taxes on income), policy merely guides actions toward those that are most
likely to achieve a desired outcome.
 Public policies can be regulatory, distributive, or redistributive, material or symbolic,
substantive (what government intends to do) or procedural (how something will be done and
who will do it).
 They can provide collective goods or private goods and can be liberal or conservative.
 Public policies are not limited to public life.
 However, it has to be noted that public policies must be formulated and implemented within
a nation‘s legal framework.
 Generally speaking, laws from six sources govern our daily lives: constitutional laws, laws
made by legislatures, executive orders, interpretations of laws by the judicial branch, agency
rules, and public referenda.
 In a democratic system where there is strong checks and balances (like the
 USA), laws passed by legislatures, executive orders, referenda, and agency rules can all be
declared null and void by the courts.‖

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 However, public policies can be created, revised, or deleted by the organization involved in
the administration of the policy. Public policy is a policy or set of policies which forms the
foundation of public law.
 Public policy is expressed in the body of laws, regulations, decisions and actions of
government. Policy analysis may be used to formulate public policy and to assess its
effectiveness.
E) Policy Vs. Decision
 Policy is larger than decision. A policy usually involves a series of more specific decisions,
sometimes in a ‗rational‘ sequence (e.g. deciding there is problem; deciding to do something
about it; deciding the best way of proceeding; deciding to legislate; etc.) even when the
sequence is more erratic, a policy is typically generated by interactions among many, more or
less consciously related, decisions.
 While one decision in the sequence may be seen as crucial, an understanding of the larger
policy requires some study of decisions both preceding and following the so called ‗crucial‘
episode.
 For example, how (and by whom) were the options defined in the first place? When the
preferred option had been defined and set in motion, did unforeseen problems at the
implementation stage produce significant change?
 The concept of decision is often associated with that of the decision maker. The latter may be
seen as an individual or a group or a particular organization.
 However, again, the study of a ‗policy‘ usually involves tracing multiple interactions among
many individuals, many groups, and many organizations. The whole concept of ‗decision-
makers‘ may occasionally be challenged, when it seems that events and the larger
environment have forced a particular policy direction upon the agencies of government.
1.4. An Overview of the Origins of Policy Studies
 A policy study is thought to have originated with Lasswell and his conception of the policy
sciences.
 Lasswell (1965) famously defined the policy sciences approach as analysis that effectively
mobilizes intellectual resources to meet the challenge of great and continuing problems of the
age.

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 The policy sciences model is not only the use of rigorous scientific tools, but also the
rigorous analysis of a specific issue within its larger context.
 To take a policy sciences approach is essentially to take a contextual approach to the problem
in question. ―It examines the interplay of values and institutions, and the several phases of
policy; it makes use of all techniques of data gathering and processing and adopts various
methods...to its needs; it contributes to the strategies available to the achieving of such
overriding goals as the realization of human dignity such as, for instance, the strategy of
individual initiative.
 The policy sciences also use policy for knowledge and knowledge for policy.
 As Lasswell (1951) put it: ―the policy sciences are advanced whenever the methods are
sharpened by which authentic information and responsible interpretation can be integrated
with judgment.” Therefore, a policy sciences approach is more interested in reconstructing
the practice of society, which might also imply an interest in the assembling and evaluation
of knowledge from whatever source in addition to simply knowledge about the policymaking
process.
 According to Michael Marien (1992), Lasswell‘s vision of the policy sciences was notably
broad in scope. For him, the emerging policy orientation was twofold: the first part was to be
directed toward the policy process, and the other was to be directed toward the intelligence
needs of the policy.
 Lasswell took the view that the policy scientist was to be problem oriented and would be able
to clarify goals.
 Building on that Yehzkel Dror (1971) defined the policy sciences enterprise as a new supra-
discipline with the main concern of understanding and improving societal direction, focused
on the macro-level.
 The policy analyst should not be a narrow minded technician, but a new type of professional,
an ―expert in generalism‖, who deals in a broad, innovative, and open-minded way with
problems.
 Policy sciences involve breaking down traditional boundaries between disciplines, especially
between behavioral and management sciences.
 Knowledge must be integrated from a variety of branches of knowledge into a supra
discipline that focuses on policymaking.

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 In this vein, the policy sciences bridge the usual dichotomy between pure and applied
research.
 For Dror (1983:8), developing the policy sciences is about significantly improving the
quality of policymaking.
 To that end, he describes it as the discipline which searches for policy knowledge ―that seeks
general policy-issue knowledge and policymaking knowledge, and integrates them into a
distinct study.‖
 A major component involved with the improvement of the policymaking system is how to
increase the role of policy-issue knowledge in policymaking on concrete issues.
 As much as this was supposed to be the ideal, policy studies, as they have evolved, and the
type of policy studies published, have fallen short of this ideal.
 According to Marien (1992), despite the remarkable growth in the scope of policy studies,
Lasswell‘s idealistic vision for policy studies has not been realized.
 Lasswell had actually stipulated that policy studies ought to be global in perspective, but
most policy studies devoted to domestic problems.
 Among the more glaring omissions in contemporary policy sciences is the lack of attempts at
outreach.
 Lasswell advocated continuous general participation. As Marien puts it: ―The academic core
of policy studies generally lacks a systematic view, a sense of social change, an appreciation
of the full range of alternative perspectives and options, a global perspective, an interest in
technology change, an acknowledgment of environmental problems, and an interest and/or
capability in outreach to a broader public‖.
 On the contrary, much of policy studies have tended to follow a more traditional path of
analysis grounded in the social sciences, and most studies are what Marien refers to as
―rewarmed social science.‖ As Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram (1997) noted the unifying
theme among the various approaches within the policy sciences framework is that
policymakers will be able to solve problems on the basis of information obtained from policy
analysis done on the basis of scientific procedure and according to scientific standards.
 By appropriate scientific standards is often meant the principle of instrumental rationality,
which tends to be characteristic of the traditional model.

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 And yet, that these scientific standards should be situated within context implies that policy
study encompasses much more than the traditional model.

1.5. Comparative Policy Studies

 What is a comparative policy study?
 It is the study of why different governments pursue or do not pursue a particular course
of action.
 Policy studies tell us something about the character of a political system and how that
system addresses its problems and prioritizes its values.
 It also tells us much about that system‘s culture. This is because policy must incorporate
values.
 This would then suggest that a very important dimension to policy studies is indeed the
comparative one.
 We have already noted that a policy sciences approach acknowledges cultural
differences to the extent that it incorporates a society‘s underlying philosophy into the
policy process.
 A comparison of policies of different political systems (different countries) an actually
tell us much about differences between political systems.
 Studying comparative policy gives special attention to the effects of government‘s
actions on people‘s lives.

Some of the advantages of comparative policy studies

 Howard Leichter (1977) suggests that there are several obvious advantages to
comparative policy studies.
1) First and foremost, it may yield an important political dimension upon which to compare and
evaluate political systems.
2) The introduction of actual policy output and input data can provide a more complete and
accurate basis for comparison and might even lead to some altered evaluation of the
performance of these political systems.
3) Comparative analyses can further enable us to generalize about the selection, content and
consequences of public policy.

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4) Therefore, comparative policy analysis allows us to engage in quasi-experimental research.
It enlarges the basis for comparison and the evaluation of political systems by allowing for a
more conclusive testing of the relationship between public policy and various independent
variables.
5) And it also provides an opportunity to compare and evaluate the experience of different
nations in attempting to find policy solutions to public problems.
6) Moreover, it provides a deeper understanding of how government institutions and political
processes operate as they deal with concrete problems. Policy strategies adopted in one
country do often have important impacts on policy making in other countries, which only
underscores the interdependent nature of the world
Some problems associated with comparative policy studies
 At the same time there are also problems associated with comparative policy studies.
1) The extension of the range of political, social, and economic factors encountered in cross-
national studies involves too many variables which might make it difficult to isolate those
variables responsible for the selected policy.
2) By comparing national level public policies there is the danger that significant intra-national
variation will be concealed, thereby weakening the validity of cross-national comparisons
and evaluations.
3) Another problem lies in the tendency to assume as a given certain universal values which
may not be cross-culturally acceptable to all societies.
4) There is the issue of the quality and commensurability of data (Leichter, 1977). The
successes and failures of other nations may not necessarily transcend national boundaries
(DeSario, 1989).
 Dror (1983), for instance, suggests that the main difference between policy making in
democratic countries and dictatorial ones is that in the former private individuals and elected
legislatures play a bigger role while in the latter legislatures tend to contribute almost nothing
to the process.
 Policymaking in developing states tend to be characterized by what he calls a model of
―pure‖ developing states or ―avant-garde developing states,‖ which contain the following
elements:
a) They have very low technological development;

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 b) they have a strong initial or communal structure that is slowly disintegrating;
c) there is a mass leader and a small political elite that aspires towards rapid and radical
socioeconomic transformation; there is practically no middle class;
d) they have a long history of colonial rule, which ended after a period of militant
nationalism;
e) policymaking is wide in scope and tends to cover most economic activities.
 The basic characteristic of the policy making process, however, is that it is often shaped by
pattern that predates independence. Developing states do little conscious determining of
policy strategies.
 On the other hand, the policy making structure in developing countries is much simpler than
in modern countries, as Government bureaucracy in developing countries tends to be weak.
But most do have special planning units (Dror 1983).

1.6. Impact of a Policy

►What do you think the differences b/n intended & unintended impacts of a policy?
 Sometime a policy may have intended or unintended impacts.
 That is expected and/or unexpected outcome may occur during the process of policy making
and its implementation, which could be an issue in the next policy cycle.
Intended Effects
 The intended effects of a policy vary widely according to the organization and the context in
which they are made.
 Broadly, policies are typically instituted to avoid some negative effect that has been noticed
in the organization, or to seek some positive benefit.
 Corporate purchasing policies provide an example of how organizations attempt to avoid
negative effects.
 Many large companies have policies that all purchases above a certain value must be
performed through a purchasing process.
 By requiring this standard purchasing process through policy, the organization can limit
waste and standardize the way purchasing is done.

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 Unintended Effects
 Policies frequently have side effects or unintended consequences.
 Because the environments that policies seek to influence or manipulate are typically complex
adaptive systems (e.g. governments, societies, large companies), making a policy change can
have counterintuitive results. For example, a government may make a policy decision to raise
taxes, in hopes of increasing overall tax revenue. Depending on the size of the tax increase,
this may have the overall effect of reducing tax revenue by causing capital flight or by
creating a rate so high that citizens are deterred from earning the money that is taxed.
 The policy formulation process typically includes an attempt to assess as many areas of
potential policy impact as possible, to lessen the chances that a given policy will have
unexpected or unintended consequences. Because of the nature of some complex adaptive
systems such as societies and governments, it may not be possible to assess all possible
impacts of a given policy.
1.7. A Policy Document
►What is a policy documents? What are the main contents of policy document?
 Policies are typically promulgated through official written documents. Policy documents
often come with the endorsement or signature of the executive powers within an organization
to legitimize the policy and demonstrate that it is considered in force. Such documents often
have standard formats that are particular to the organization issuing the policy. While such
formats differ in form, policy documents usually contain certain standard components
including:
1) A purpose statement: outlining why the organization is issuing the policy, and what its
desired effect or outcome of the policy should be.
2) An applicability and scope statement: describing who the policy affects and which
actions are impacted by the policy.
 The applicability and scope may expressly exclude certain people, organizations, or actions
from the policy requirements.
 Applicability and scope is used to focus the policy on only the desired targets, and avoid
unintended consequences where possible.
3) An effective date: which indicates when the policy comes into force? Retroactive
policies are rare, but can be found.

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 4) A responsibilities section: indicating which parties and organizations are responsible for
carrying out individual policy statements. Many policies may require the establishment of
some ongoing function or action. For example, a purchasing policy might specify that a
purchasing office be created to process purchase requests, and that this office would be
responsible for ongoing actions. Responsibilities often include identification of any
relevant oversight and/or governance structures.
5) Policy statements: indicating the specific regulations, requirements, or modifications to
organizational behavior that the policy is creating. Policy statements are extremely
diverse depending on the organization and intent, and may take almost any form.
6) Background: indicating any reasons, history, and intent that led to the creation of the
policy, which may be listed as motivating factors. This information is often quite
valuable when policies must be evaluated or used in ambiguous situations, just as the
intent of a law can be useful to a court when deciding a case that involves that law.
7) Definitions: providing clear and unambiguous definitions for terms and concepts found
in the policy document.

1.8. Public VS Private Policies

 What is the difference and similarities between public and private policies?
 So far we have highlighted that policies are closely associated with strategies, principle,
plans, programmes, methods, decisions, procedures, etc of individuals, families, public or
private organizations.
 In this regard, private policies are those individual/family/ jurisdictions which can follow
their own principles to guide their private life without direct state intervention.
 There are also private organizations/firms/associations which have their own policies to
guide their work force to the desired end. For example, families may have their own family
planning methods, income saving plans or social relation principles. Private organizations
may also have their own pay policy, motivation policy, social outreach policy, production
and sales policy, etc which may partly or entirely different from the trend followed in public
organizations.
 Public policies, on the other hand, are more general and inclusive of all the community of
the state.

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 As such, its consequences are on the life of all citizens of the state directly or indirectly.
 Even it has a direct reflection on individual‘s private life, especially in developing countries
where the domain for private life is much restricted. However, all government policies have
not the same impact on the people at all walks of life. For example, urban development
policy has more relevance for those living in towns and cities than those in the rural areas;
livestock development policy have less impact on those engages in farming sector.
 In general, whatever the differences in its impact across regions/countries, public policies
stipulate the general direction and framework of action of the government of a given country,
which is also used as a guide line for action in private sector.
 This implies that any private individuals‘/sectors‘ policy should give reference to the overall
policy framework of the government and also required to supplement for the successful
achievement of public policy objectives.

 How Policies affect the distribution of resources?

 There are policies sometimes regarded as public or private associated with the aim of
policy making.
 The degree of private versus public regarded policy is not easy to grasp by the untrained
eye.
 For example, reductions in corporate taxes are usually regarded by the media as a benefit to
firms and stockholders, and therefore can be viewed as a private regarded policy aimed to
the rich.
 However, others could argue that the reduction of those taxes would increase welfare in the
country by increasing the rate of investment and consequently, the growth of the economy.
 Under this scenario, a reduction in corporate taxes would be viewed as a public regarded
policy.
 There are other policy areas that could provide additional evidence, like trade policy. In
this case, looking to whether tariffs are flat or whether they differ for narrowly defined
categories of products could provide additional evidence on the public or private
regardedness of the policy.
 It could also be helpful to assert the views of the population regarding the direction of
policy- making.

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  For example, those questions that ask entrepreneurs if the government spending in the
country provides necessary good and services or it is wasteful, if the subsidies of the
government improve the productivity of industries or they are designed to benefit some
uncompetitive industries, if the transfers by the government go to the poor people or to the
rich people, and so on.

Section Two: An Over View of Policy Making

This section deals with an overview of policy making. Here, you will learn about the meaning
and characteristics of good policy making, the basic policy making activities and limits to policy-
making.
Upon the successful completion of this section, you will be able to:
 Explain the conceptual definitions of policy making;
 Discuss the fundamental characteristics of good policy making;
 Identify and discuss the basic activities in policy making and
 Distinguish the basic limits to policy making; and

1.2.1. Conceptual overview of Policy Making

 What does 'policy-making' mean?
 Policy-making has been defined as the process by which governments translate their political
vision into programmes and actions to deliver 'outcomes' – desired change in the real world.
It is the process of generating a set of plausible policy alternatives for addressing problems
on the formal policy agenda. Policy can take a range of different forms, including non-
intervention; regulation, for instance by licensing; or the encouragement of voluntary change,
including by grant aid; as well as direct public service provision. Policy-making can be
viewed as involving two types of activities.
1) Deciding generally what should be done, if anything, concerning a particular problem.
Example, what kind of national health insurance system shall we have? , what kind of foreign
aid program shall we have? Or what should be the minimum wage level and who should be
covered by it? Answers to these questions take the form of general principles.
2) Actual drafting of legislation (the writing of administrative rules), which, when adopted, will
carry the general principles in to effect. This is a technical and rather mundane (routine), but

20
 nonetheless highly important, task. The way a bill is written, the specific provisions it
contains, can have substantial effect on its administration and the actual content of public
policy.

 What issues needs to be understood while making, especially this day?

The world for which policies have to be developed is becoming increasingly complex, uncertain
and unpredictable. Citizens are better informed, have rising expectations and are making growing
demands for services tailored to their individual needs. Key policy issues, such as social need,
low educational achievement and poor health, are connected and cannot be tackled effectively by
departments or agencies acting individually. In addition, devolution introduces a system of
government which is designed to be more joined-up and responsive than in the past, and better
able to judge country's needs because of the shorter lines of accountability to the public. At the
same time, the world is increasingly inter-connected and inter-dependent. National and global
events and trends can very quickly become major issues for a regional administration – for
example, rapid adoption of new information and communications technology and a wide range
of interests need to be co-ordinated and harnessed. In parallel with these external pressures,
governments expect a focus on solutions that work across existing organizational boundaries and
on bringing about real change. Civil servants must adapt to this new, fast-moving, challenging
environment if public policy is to remain credible and effective.
1.2.2. Characteristics of Good Policy-Making
 What are the characteristics of good policy making?
 The ten features of good policy-making includes policy-making needs to be:
a) forward looking
b) outward looking;
c) innovative,
d) flexible and creative;
e) evidence-based;
f) inclusive;
g) joined up;
h) to learn lessons from experience;
i) to be communicated effectively; and

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 j) to incorporate ongoing evaluation and review.
 These features need to be displayed if it is to respond effectively to challenges of policy
making and its implementation. However, these features are overlapping and need to be
considered collectively. Taken together they reflect the type of analysis which needs to be
applied in any given area. Alongside this, it is helpful to consider the stages of the process.
 It is possible to illustrate the policy process in an easily understood form as a cycle,
recognizing that this approach is designed to assist in understanding the key concepts which
underpin policy-making.
 The key point which is highlighted by depicting policy-making as a cycle is that policy-
makers rarely, if ever, start from a clean sheet. In any policy area it should be possible to
define the administration's existing policy, which in many cases will be not to intervene. The
need to review or develop a new policy should be identified through monitoring and
evaluation of existing policy. For policy making to be fully effective, civil servants involved
in policy development need to know the traditions; have to have the knowledge of relevant
law and practice, understanding of key stakeholders' views, ability to design implementation
systems; understand the context within which they have to work.
 In other words, civil servants involved in policy development have to have the understanding
of the way organizations‘ structures, processes and culture can influence policy-making, and
understanding governments' priorities and the way policies will work out in practice.
Therefore, fuller understanding of the broad context within which policy works should help
policy-makers both when thinking about possible approaches to tackling a given problem and
when they come to consider putting a particular solution into effect.
1.2.3. The key policies making activities
 Policy making involves the various activities. In general, the key policy-making activities
include:
A) Creating a Community Vision: A vision captures the dreams, aspirations, and hopes of the
community. It is a choice of one future out of many possibilities. Important community
values shape this vision. Does your community see itself as a trader in a global village? A
place where diversity is cherished? A place where there is peace and harmony between the
built and the natural environment? A "vision statement" could provide a benchmark against
which all other local government actions are measured. If you don‘t know where you are

22
 going, any path will do. Communities with vision know who they are and where they are
going. Some communities also develop value statements and strategic plans to help
implement their vision statements. Those without vision spend considerable energy on wrong
or irrelevant issues, bouncing reactively from one topic to another. In short, they cannot see
where they are going.
B) Community Goals and Objective: Community goals identify components of the community
vision and provide direction for implementation. A goal statement may grow out of a
difficult community problem, for example, a high crime rate. The goal is to find a
satisfactory resolution to this problem by implementing policies designed to reduce crime. A
goal may also be born of a desire to instill some quality that is not currently part of the
community, such as economic growth. Or, a goal may grow from a desire to preserve a
valued characteristic or quality that already exists, such as the preservation of small town
qualities while accommodating growth. Goals are qualitative statements; objectives are
quantitative and measurable.
C) Comprehensive plan: The comprehensive plan represents the community‘s policy for future
growth. The plan assists in the management of the city or county by providing policies to
guide decision-making. Comprehensive planning usually starts with an inventory and
analysis of land, followed by an analysis of population and demographics, economic
conditions, amenities, physical conditions, and infrastructure to determine future needs and
alternatives. Based upon an agreed amount of growth, the land-use element of the plan maps
the locations for future development. Zoning and development regulations limit the permitted
size of these developments, and govern how various users must relate to their neighbors.
Transportation and public facilities elements of the plan address service levels, locations, and
financing of infrastructure needed to support community development. These plans are
powerful policy tools that address major pieces of your community‘s vision.
D) Local service: Some local services are mandated by state statute. Other services, while not
mandated by statute, are prudent to provide, while others are discretionary. General-purpose
local governments make key decisions about which services to provide to residents, at what
service level, the manner in which these services will be provided. For example, counties
provide a broad range of services, many of which are mandated by the state as its agent.
Many regional services are provided by policy choice. Not all counties, for example, provide

23
 regional transit service. For cities, the statutes require the appointment of a chief law
enforcement officer. Once such an officer is appointed, there is no further guidance as to the
level of police services that must be provided.

Whatever level is selected is a question of policy to be deliberated and determined by the city
council. Some cities contract with the county to provide police services rather than provide
their own. This is a matter of policy choice, based upon desired levels of service and the
costs of providing that service.
E) Budgets and capital facilities plan: These address the allocation of scarce financial
resources to achieve the community‘s vision, accomplish goals and objectives, implement the
comprehensive plan, and provide services. The budget is considered one of the strongest
policy- making tools. It defines the spending and service priorities for numerous other policy
decisions. There is rarely enough money to do all the things that a community desires. Thus,
budgets and capital facilities plans must prioritize. What gets funded? In what order? What
does not get funded? How much will be spent to provide desired services? Long-term
financial plan projections (5 to 6 years ahead) often help reveal some of the costs or
consequences of seemingly "inexpensive" short-term policy decisions. The allocation of
resources to competing needs is an important exercise of setting local policy. Deciding what
not to do is also an important part of policy-making.
1.2.4. Limits to Policy-Making
What are some of the limitations of policy making?
 No one said that effective policy-making is easy. It is easier to second guess how something
might have been done, than to determine what needs to be done. There are many challenges
and hazards along the way. Public policy-making involves multiple interests, complex
analysis, conflicting information, and human personalities.
Listed below are some factors that make public policy a fascinating, sometimes frustrating,
but absolutely essential exercise. These are listed to alert the students about circumstances
where extra care is necessary.
a) Legitimate community interests have multiple and often conflicting goals. This is the
essence of the policy-making challenge. For example, the business community may be
motivated primarily by a profit goal in presenting its position on the comprehensive plan.

24
 Other community interests may place a higher priority on a goal of preserving as much of
the natural environment as possible. These goals may conflict.
b) With multiple interest groups and centers of power, there is a tendency to "take a
step in the right direction" rather than commit to significant change. Some
participants are frustrated because they believe that the policy-making process should
produce more dramatic changes than it usually does. On the other hand, seemingly minor
changes in the short-term can have enormous long-term impacts.
c) Failure to have the right information can impede decision-making. Elected officials
are often faced with information overload. Too much information can create uncertainty
and weaken decisiveness. When this occurs, all information becomes diluted in its
persuasiveness. Decision-makers may then resort to less rationally defensive but more
personally satisfying methods of decision-making. Concise, well-organized data and
analyses can facilitate the decision-making process.
d) Some interest groups may use analysis to rationalize choices they have already
made. Research can be politicized. Some people are skilled in using statistics to prove
anything. Close inspection of their analysis, however, may reveal serious flaws.
e) Many forces that impact local communities are beyond local control. Local
governments are subject to federal and state mandates. Income levels of individual
jurisdictions depend upon job creation and retention throughout the region. Traffic
congestion and air pollution transcend local community borders. Local decision-makers
may have limited ability to influence an important community issue.
f) It is not always clear or obvious how to implement good policy, even when there is a
high level of agreement about a desired direction.
g) Resources to implement policy may be limited and mediation may be required to
resolve issues where communities are polarized.

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 Chapter Two
General Understanding of Public Policy
Introduction
In the previous chapter you have been introduced with the general gamut of what a policy and
policy-making means. Policy may be general or specific, broad or narrow, simple or complex,
public or private, written or unwritten, explicit or implicit, discretionary or detailed, qualitative
or quantitative. Generally, the term policy is used to designate the behavior of some actor
(example; an official, a group, a government agency), or a set of actors in a given area of
activity. Hence, we hope that the lessons in the introductory chapter would provide you good
foundations to comprehend the lessons in the subsequent chapters. Under this chapter, the
emphasis is on ‗public policy‘ which is what a government chooses as guidance for action.
Public policy may seem abstract, but in reality it is not so. It is true that all of us profoundly
affected by numerous public policies in our daily lives. Hence this chapter takes us to the
discussion of the concept of public policy more precisely. Accordingly, the chapter was divided
in to five different sections.
1) The first section is on the conceptual definition and rationale of public policy;
2) The second is discussion on the nature, emergence and scope of public policy;
3) the third is about inter-disciplinary nature of public policy;
4) The fourth one is on the determinants of public policy making and
5) the last section tries to assess on the types of public policy and methods policy analysis.

Objectives
At the successful completion of the lessons in this chapter, learners will be able to:
o Briefly explain the concept of public policy;
o Elaborate the aims/purposes of public policy;
o Justify the nature and scope of public policy;
o Understand the disciplinary nature of policy studies;
o Identify the different factors affecting public policy-making;
o Describe the various types of public policy and realize their difference;
o Depict what policy analysis means and the methods to be used for policy analysis.

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 Section I: Definitions and Rationale for Public Policy
Overview
This is the first section of the second chapter. In this section, we will elaborate the conceptual
definitions of public policy and the rationale/reasons for the study of public policy. We hope that
your good understanding of the lessons in the previous chapter is very important to deal with the
lessons in this and the subsequent sections. We will also see and distinguish between Mega,
Meta and Micro-policies.
Section Objectives
Upon the successful completion of the lessons in this section, you will be able to:
 Define public policy;
 Recognize the need for the study of public policy;
 Explain the emergence and nature of public policy;
 Identify the inter-disciplinary nature of public policy; and
 Distinguish the common elements of the various definitions of public policy.
2.1.1. Conceptual Definitions of Public Policy
 What is public policy? Can you define it?
 There is no one general definition of the term public policy which is universally acceptable to
peoples/scholars. As a result, different scholars conceptualize the term in many different
ways. Let us consider the following definitions of public policy from the view point of
different scholars.
For Clarke E. Cochran, et al the term public policy always refers to the actions of
government and the intentions that determine those actions. They also understood that it
is the outcome of the struggle in government over who gets what.
According to Thomas Dye public policy is "Whatever governments choose to do or not
do".
There is a rough accuracy to the definition that public policy is whatever the governments
choose to do or not to do. But this definition does not adequately recognize that there may be
a divergence between what governments decide to do and what they actually do.
Charles L. Cochran and Eloise F. Malone argue that "Public policy consists of political
decisions for implementing programs to achieve societal goals".

27
 On the other hand, B. Guy Peters simply stated that public policy is the sum of government
activities, whether acting directly or through agents, as it has an influence on the life of
citizens.
 David Easton defines public policy as the authoritative allocation of values for the whole
society. But it turns out that only the government can authoritatively act on the whole society
and everything the government chooses to do or not to do results in the allocation of values.
 Another definition of public policy holds that, it is the relationship of a government unit
to its environment.
 What are the common elements to the above definitions of public policy?
 Birkland indicates that the elements common to all definitions of public policy are:
 The policy is made in the name of the "public".
 Policy is generally made or initiated by government.
 Policy is interpreted and implemented by public and private actors.
 Policy is what the government intends to do and
 Policy is what the government chooses not to do.

Mega, Meta and Micro policy concepts

 Mega policy is the general guidelines to be followed by all specific policies. Mega policies
form a kind of master policy as distinct from concrete discrete policies, and involve the
establishment of overall goals or objectives in more implicit or explicit terms. Mega policies,
therefore, are the broad outline of the shape of policies to be followed in later years. It is a
blue print or a framework of the future course of action of the government. It involves
determination of the postures, assumptions and main guidelines to be followed by specific
policies.
 Meta policy is the framework of policy formulation. Mega policy is of limited use unless it is
supplemented by the framework within which the specific policies would be formulated.
Thus, Meta policy is ‗a policy on how to make a policy’, and unless this policy making
system is reformed, very little can be done to improve policies.
 Micro policy is a development plan prepared by the government to meet the needs of local
communities or remote areas. It aims at facilitating convergence of resources and improving
the use of existing delivery systems.

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 Rationale for the Study of Public Policy
 Why we engage in public policy studies?
 Public policy can be studied for scientific, professional or political reasons.

Explanations on the various justifications for studying public policy

A. Scientific Reasons
 What are the scientific reasons for the study of policy?

Public policy can be studied in order to gain greater knowledge about its origins, the processes
by which it is developed and its consequences for the society. Policy may be regarded as either a
dependent or an independent variable for the purposes of this kind of analysis. When it is viewed
as a dependent variable, our attention is placed on the political and environmental factors that
help determine the concept of policy. For example, how is policy affected by the distribution of
power among pressure groups and governmental agencies? How do urbanization and national
income help shape the content of policy? , etc. When public policy is viewed as an independent
variable, our focus shifts to the impact of policy. How it affects support for the political system
of future policy choices? What effect does policy have on social wellbeing?

B. Professional Reasons
 What are the professional reasons for the study of public policy?

Don K. Prince makes a distinction between a scientific estates which seeks only to discover
knowledge, and the professional estate which strives to apply scientific knowledge to the
solutions of practical social problems. Political scientists should help prescribe the goals of
public policy. Professional input is useful concerning how individuals, groups or government can
act to attain their policy goals. Such advice can be directed towards indicating either what policy
can be used to achieve particular goals or what political and environmental factors are conducive
to the development of a given policy. It puts us in the position of saying, for example, if you
want to prevent economic monopoly, then what should you do and such questions of this sort are
factual knowledge and a pre-requisite for prescribing on, and dealing with the problem of the
society.

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 C. Political Reasons
 What are the political reasons for the study of public policy?

At least some political scientists do not believe that political scientists should refrain from
helping to prescribe policy goals. Rather they say that the study of public policy should be
directed ensuring that governments adopt appropriate policies to attain the right goals. They
reject the notion that policy analysis should strive to be value free, contending that political
science cannot be silent or impotent on current political and social problems. They want to
improve the quality of public policy in ways they deem decibel not withstanding that substantial
disagreement exists in society over what constitute correct policies or the right goals of policy.

Section 2: Nature, emergence and Scope of Public Policy

2.2.1. The Nature of Public Policy

 Policy demands: are those demands or claims made upon public officials by other actors;
private or official, in the political system for action inaction on some perceived problems.
Such demands range from a general insistence that government ought to do something to a
proposal for specific action on the matter. The demands that help give rise to public policy,
and which it is designed to satisfy, at least in part, are important items for consideration in
the study of public policy information.
 Policy decisions: are decisions made by public officials that authorize or give direction and
content to the public policy action. Included are decisions to enact statues, issue executive
orders, formulate administrative rules, or made important judicial interpretations of laws. A
number of important decisions may be taken in shaping the course of action related to a
policy. Such decisions may be taken with a large number of relatively routine decisions made
by officials in the day to day application of public policy.
 Policy statements: are the formal expressions or articulations of public policy. Included are
legislative statutes, executive orders and decrees, administrative rules and regulations, court
opinions as well as statements and speeches by public officials including the intentions and
goals of government and what will be done to realize them. Policy statements are sometimes
ambiguous. For example, different levels, branches or units of government may issue
conflicting policy statements; conflicts may also arise over the meaning of statutory

30
 provisions or judicial holdings, or the time and effort in analyzing and trying to define the
meaning of policy statements made by national political leaders.
 Policy outputs: are the tangible manifestations of public policies, the things actually done in
pursuance of policy decisions and statements. Simply stated, policy outputs are what a
government does, as distinguished from what it say is going to do. Here, our attention is
focused on such matters as tax collected, highways built, welfare benefits paid, restraints of
trade eliminated, and foreign aids project undertaken. An examination of policy outputs may
indicate that the policy is actually somewhat or greatly different from what policy statements
indicate it should be. Many laws go entirely unenforced and thus policy is clearly not what
the law states in certain circumstances.
 Policy outcomes: are the consequences for the society, intended or unintended, the flow
from action or inaction of the government. For example, it is fairly easy to measure welfare
policy out-puts; amount of benefits paid, average level of benefits, number of people aided,
and the like. But what are the outcomes (or consequences of these actions? Do they increase
personal security and contentment? Do they reduce individual initiative? Such questions may
be somewhat difficult to answer, but they direct our attention to the impact of public policies,
an item that should be of central concern to policy analysts.
2.2.2. The Emergence of Public Policy
 How public policy could emerge? What is the source of the concept of public policy?
 From the view point of public policy, activities of government can be put in to three
categories:
1. Activities that are attached to specific policy;
2. Activities which are general in nature;
3. Activities which are based on vague and in consistent policies.
 A public policy may cover a major portion of its activities which are consistent with the
development policy.
 Public policy may be narrow, covering specific activity, such as family planning.
 A public policy may also be applied to all people in a country or it may be limited to a
section of its people.
 Besides, each level of government- central, regional and local- may have specific or general
policies

31
 Policy issues can be divided into two categories: those already on the public policy agenda,
and those that are not. If an issue is already on the public-policy agenda, it has a sufficiently
high profile, and a formal process is likely to be in place. If an issue is not on the public-
policy agenda, the job of the stakeholders/community is to provide information and
education, and to take other steps to raise awareness and get it on the agenda.
 Gerston (1997) suggests that an issue will appear and remain on the public policy agenda
when it meets one or more of three criteria. It must have sufficient scope (a significant
number of people or communities are affected), intensity (the magnitude of the impact is
high) and/or time (it has been an issue over a long period).

The need or trigger for public policy development may come from a number of sources. It is
helpful to think of a policy response to these sources as being reactive or proactive. Policy
development is said to be reactive, when it responds to issues and factors that emerge, sometimes
with little warning, from the internal or external environments by:

 Resolving problems and issues;

 Meeting stakeholder/public concerns;
 Reacting to decisions by other governments, other levels of government, or other
departments with intersecting or interrelated mandates;
 Allocating fiscal resources, natural resources… etc;
 Reacting to media attention (generally adverse) and
 Reacting to crises or emergencies.
 When could we say policy development is preactive? Policy development is preactive when
it responds to triggers that are recognized because we are scanning the operating
environment, identifying potential issues and factors that could affect us, and predicting and
preparing for mitigation and/or contingency through planning, strategic choice, risk
management, criteria determination, priority setting, and establishing partnerships.

 We attempt to identify potential risk in advance, mitigate where we can and implement
contingency plans where we cannot. We look for potential unanticipated consequences.

It is very rare that formal policy development is genuinely proactive. In practice, the nature of
policy development is such that the vast majority of policy decisions reflect only minor changes

32
to the status quo. It emphasizes in developing and pursuing a vision; leading from values and
principles.

The complexity of the horizontal issues and challenges associated with developing integrated
policy requires a big picture. A whole-system perspective that can identify and address root
causes as well as symptoms. This may offer the best opportunity for proactive policy
development, which can move organizations, governments and society in a truly new direction.
At this point, however, truly proactive policy seems more vision than reality. Policy can be
driven by political leaders, departments, intersectoral bureaucratic committees, a very powerful
stakeholder such as an industrial lobby group, or by the community.

2.2.3. Scope of Public Policy

 What issues/areas are addressed by public policy?
 The scope and sheer size of the public sector had grown enormously in all the developing
countries in response to the increasing complexities of technology, social organization,
industrialization and urbanization. At present, the functions of governments, especially
of the developing countries, have significantly increased. They are now concerned
with the more complex functions of nation-building and socio-economic progress.
Today, the government is:
 the keeper of peace,
 the arbiter of disputes, and
 the provider of common goods and day-to-day services,
 the principal innovator,
 the major determiner of socio-economic programmes and
 the main financer as well as the main guarantor of large-scale enterprises.

These show that the range of public policies is vast; from the vital to the trivial (minor). Today,
public policies may deal with such substantive areas as defense, environment protection,
medical care and health, education, housing, taxation, science and technology, and so on.

Section III: An inter-disciplinary nature of public policy

An Overview

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This section is about inter-disciplinary nature of public policy. Policy science constitutes an
interdisciplinary approach which is concerned mainly with improving the policy process through
the use of systematic knowledge, structural rationality and organized activity. Policy science ‗is
not directly concerned with the substantive contents of discrete policy problems but rather with
improved methods of knowledge, and systems for better policy- making.‘ While most authors on
the subject seems to agree on the basic aim of policy science, they generally do not provide an
operational definition of the concept due to the cross- disciplinary nature of knowledge involved
in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policy issues. Its boundaries are not
delineated. One can readily perceive that the study of governmental policy problems is clearly an
inter-disciplinary activity, since many disciplines have something to contribute. Policy studies or
policy analysis can be broadly defined as the study of the nature, causes and effects of alternative
public policies. All fields of scientific knowledge, especially the social sciences, are relevant to
the study of the causes and effects of governmental policy. Policy science is an inter-disciplinary
component that involves all fields of knowledge especially the social sciences.

2.3.1. Public Policy and Political Science

Public policy is not a new concern of political science. The actions of public officials in fostering
certain kinds of policies and its implications on other aspects of the political process were
considered from earlier times. However, the mid-twenties witnessed a change in most parts of
the world and this situation caused and need for improvement in the social sciences methods,
especially in the development of policy science. Here, the basic emphasis of the policy approach
is up on the fundamental problems of a man in society and development of knowledge pertinent
to the full realization of human dignity. The policy science orientations are directed towards
providing the knowledge needed to improve the practice of democracy. Hence, political
scientists are intensely concerned with policy making from the perspectives of what Harold Less
well termed ―who gets what, when and how?‖ Much of political science is above collective
decisions- making or the making of public policies for an entire society. Furthermore, public
policies are regarded as the secrete art of politics. Policies build the image of the government. As
Y. Dror observed ‘public policies provide choices of clothes and suggest to the government
to choose the suitable and fashionable dress.’

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Currently, political scientists are giving increased attention to the study of public policy i.e., to
the description, analysis, and explanations of the causes and effects of governmental activity. As
Thomas Dye aptly states; This involves a description of the content of public policy, an
assessment of the impact of environmental forces on the content of public policy, and analysis of
the effect of various institutional arrangements and political processes on public policy, an
inquiry in to the consequences of various public policies for the political system and an
evaluation of the impact of public policies on society, both in terms of expected and unexpected
consequences.

2.3.2. Public Policy and Public Administration

Public administration has often been defined as a part of the total concern of political science. As
an academic discipline, it is defined as the process of achieving intended goals in accordance
with given policies through public organizations. Public administration and public policy are
interconnected with each other. That is why J.M. Pfeiffer and R. Prestos referred public
administration to the co-ordination of individual and group efforts to carry out public policy.

Policy is laid down by the legislature or the political authorities and implemented by public
administrators. In order to give more precise expression to acts and laws of the government, the
administrative arm of the government plays an important role in policy making also. Although
the maim responsibilities of the administrative branch of the government lies in the sphere of
policy implementation and rendering assistance to the political officials in policy making, its role
in policy making has grown in importance in recent times. Therefore, it seems strange that the
policy- making as well as implementation have come into the hands of the administrators.

Ass seen above, while the traditional definition of public administration comprised of all those
activities involved in carrying out the policies and programmes of government, in modern times,
the term is used in a broader sense to include all aspects of policy making and execution.

According to Dimock, public administration refers to the fulfillment and enforcement of public
policy as declared by competent authority. It deals with the problems and powers of the
organizations and techniques of management involved in carrying out the laws and policy
formulated by the policy making sciences. F.A. Negro holds that public administration covers all
the three branches of the government (executive, legislature and judiciary) and their inter-

35
relationships and that it has an important role in the formulation of public policy and is
thus a part of the political process. Thus seen, public policy and public administration are
primarily concerned with the execution of public policy and a study of the activities and
operations of the executive branch of the government.

2.3.3. Public Policy and Sociology

Sociology, for example, has developed a substantial amount of factual knowledge and theory in
broad fields such as social control, socialization and social change that can be helpful in
understanding the effects of alternative policies and the behavior of policy makers and appliers.
Sociology is also concerned with why certain social practices are considered social problems and
how society seeks to cope with them. In addition, it has also attempted to cover the specific
policy problems of race relations, family problems, and criminology.

2.3.4. Public Policy and Economics

Of all the social sciences, the field of economics has clearly developed the most sophisticated
mathematical models for synthesizing normative and empirical premises in order to deduce the
means and ends of policy recommendations. These mathematical models related to the optimum
allocation of scarce resources, the optimum level at which to pursue a given policy, where doing
too much or too little is undesirable, and the optimum strategy to follow when the net benefits
are dependent on the occurrence of a contingent event. Economic reasoning, which assumes
people attempt to maximize their perceived benefits minus costs, can often leads to deductive
models that enable one to predict the effects of some policies before they are adopted. The work
of institutional economists has been especially relevant to providing discussions of the role of
economic class structures, ownership systems, and technology in determining policy choices.

Economists have also concerned themselves with the specific policy problems of union-
management relations, consumer problems, unemployment and inflation.

2.3.5. Public Policy and Psychology

Unlike econometricians, psychologists do not deal with monetarily measurable variables. Instead
they are more interested in developing techniques of statistical inference, cross-tabulation,
survey research, and multivariate analysis, especially with regard to imprecise variables. In

36
recent years, psychologists have been particularly active in applying variations on their
experimental methodologies to evaluate the effects of alternative public policies. Using the
methodologies of evaluative research and quasi-experimentation, they compare places having
one policy with places having another policy when policy adoption is not randomized.

Psychology also provides an important focus on the dynamics of individual or small- group
behavior especially with regard to attitudes, perceptions, and motivations. It has also special
relevance to social problems dealing with alcoholism, suicide, drug addiction, and related
mental health problems.

2.3.6. Public Policy and Anthropology, Geography and History

Anthropology, geography and history provide a broader perspective over space ad time than the
other social sciences. That kind of cross cultural and historical perspective can help to make
policy analysis less culture bound and less time bound and make the theoretical and practical
findings of policy studies more meaningful. Anthropology also has a special relevance to policy
problems that affect present or former preliterate people. Geographers are becoming increasingly
concerned with the optimum location of various facilities or districts. Historians, by
extrapolating (estimating) trends or analogizing to the past, can add a futuristic element to policy
studies.

2.3.7. Policy Studies and Philosophy

Without philosophy, especially normative social philosophy, policy studies might tend to lack
direction with regard to what they are seeking to achieve. Philosophy is the leading discipline for
what is socially desirable on a high level of abstraction. It also provides a high level of
abstraction with regard to discussing ultimate causes as to why societies make certain basic
policy choices. In addition to its normative and causal components, philosophy provides the most
developed principles of logical and semantic analysis on which the more narrow social sciences
can build.

2.3.8. Policy Studies and Law

The legal field is close to the heart of policy studies because virtually all policy problems are
capable of at least attempted resolution by legislatures, courts, or law making administrative

37
agencies. Legal literature can be helpful in generating policy hypotheses, providing a better
understanding of the societal rules that relate to the problems of such institutions as the family,
the economy, and the criminal justice system.

2.3.9. Policy Studies and Other Disciplines

Without quantitative and computer science tools that are ultimately associated with
mathematics, policy studies might tend to overemphasize evaluative gut ructions, armchair
speculation, and isolated historical anecdotes. Mathematics provides the basis for both an
empirical statistical approach to policy studies and a deductive, syllogistic approach. Through the
mathematics of algebra and calculus, syllogistic premises can have greater precision than is
provided by the dichotomous reasoning normally associated with symbolic logic. Physical and
biological sciences provide models to emulate in the development of mathematically scientific
laws, provided one always considers the differences in the behavioral instability of people as
compared to physical and biological objects. Natural science is also substantively relevant to
specific policy problems such as environmental protection, energy development, and
population control.

One can conclude from this analysis that the field of policy studies scores well on a lot of
dimensions. It has a long-term philosophical foundation, originally, an important component that
involves all fields of social sciences, especially political science, and even acquires knowledge
and expertise from the fields of natural sciences. Since many disciplines have contributing
something, it can be perceived that the study of public policy is clearly inter-disciplinary.

Section IV: Determinants of Public Policy

An Overview

This section examines the different factors affecting public policy. It is believed that Policy
making cannot be adequately understood apart from the environment in which it takes place.

Demands for policy actions are generated in the environment and transmitted to the political
system. At the same time, the environment places limits and constraints up on what can be done
by policy makers. These policy environments include geographical characteristics and natural

38
resources, climate and topography, demographical variables (like population size, age and
sex ratio distribution and spatial location); political culture; social structure; and the
economic system.

For our purpose here, we will focus on the three of these factors to which policy makers usually
give much emphasis as determinants of public policy. These are:

1) the economy,
2) political culture and
3) leadership

In addition, we will also see other factors that we need to consider in public policy making.

2.4.1. Economy as a Determinant of Public Policy

The role of economy as a determinant of policy has been highlighted by many prominent writers
and policy analysts. The relationship between economic growth and political development is
often of a complex nature. As on writer observes, ‘any political system that fail to
systematically deal with the problems of poverty and deprivations as pressing political
problems cannot be said to have achieved validity and stability.‘ This indicates the need of
giving strong emphasis to economic issues by policy makers.

The influence of economic conditions can be seen on the policies of the local and the regional
governments. Dye observed that the level of economic development (measured by per capita
personal income, urbanization, industrialization and education) exercises a prevailing influence
over the nature of regional and local government policies. Additional research has shown that
economic development is most powerful in its effect on local governments than its impact on the
policy decisions of regional and national officials. Dye further provides an explanation of the
economic-policy linkage. He compares the influence of two different kinds of economic
phenomenon: the total level of resources and the distribution of these resources among the
various groups of the society. While the total resources are more important for public policies,
the distribution of resources is more important for political conditions. To the extent that policies
depend on economic characteristics, they seem to get their support from the sheer level of
resources available.

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The primary task of the government is to harness the country‘s available natural and human
resources to improve economic development; eradication of poverty, reduction of economic and
social inequalities and improving productivity, etc. This demands a proper policy setting in this
direction. In developing states, whose actual economic strength is necessarily low, the rate of
economic growth largely determines the power potential, defined in material terms. Generally,
population, natural resources and technology are considered to the most important variables in
the process of economic development. Thus, policy makers should give due concern to these
factors to bring a positive impact on the economy of a given state.

2.4.2. Political Culture as Determinant of Public Policy

Culture has been defined as the entire pattern of social life, the inherited modes of living and
conduct that the individual acquires from his community or environment. Most social scientists
agree that culture is one of the many factors that shapes or influences social actions. The relevant
part culture in here is what is called political culture, i.e., the widely held values, beliefs, and
attitudes concerning governmental policies and actions and some of the implications and
significance of this culture for policy formulation.

Differences in public policy and policy making in various countries can be explained, at least
partly, in terms of political culture variation. Social welfare programmes are older and more
widely covered in western European countries than in the USA because there has been greater
public demand and approval of such programmes in those countries. Again government
ownership in business and industry is more prevalent in Britain than in the USA where public
opinion is more in its favor. Karl Deutsch suggests that the time orientation of people- their
view of the relative importance of the past, the present, and the future- has implications for
policy formulation. A political culture oriented more to the past than to the future (to the sanctity
of age-old traditions, customs and social moves) in Ethiopia or India more than perhaps in the
USA, a country whose culture may be more future oriented, adaptable and innovative.

Almond and Verba have differentiated between parochial, subject and participant political
cultures.

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 In a parochial culture, citizens have little awareness of or orientation towards, either the
political system as a whole, or the citizen as a political participant. It is suggested that some
tribal societies and clan leaders are illustrative of parochial political cultures.
 In a subject political culture, many developing countries like, S. Africa, Malaysia, Brazil,
etc, the citizens are oriented towards the political system, yet they have little awareness of
themselves as participants. They are aware of governmental authority, they may have
political views, but they are essentially passive.
 In the participant political culture, which Almond and Verba found in the USA, citizens
have a high level of political awareness and information and have explicit orientations
towards the political system as a whole, and a notion of meaningful citizen participation in
politics. Included in this orientation is an understanding of how individuals and groups can
influence decision making. The implications of these differences in political culture for
policy formulation seem readily apparent.
 Citizen participation in the policy formulation in a parochial political culture is going to be
essentially non-existent, and the government will be of little concern for most citizens.
 The individual in a subject political culture may believe that he can do little to influence
public policy which may lead to his passive acceptance of governmental action that may be
rather authoritarian in style. In these cultures chances of popular unrest culminating in
violence is very high.
 In the participant political culture, individuals may organize in to groups and otherwise
seek to influence government action to rectify (correct) their grievances. Government and
public policy is viewed as controllable by citizens. One can also assume that more demands
will be made in a government in participant political culture than in the other two types.
 A study of political culture is important because values, beliefs and attitudes inform, guide
and constrain the actions of both decision makers and citizens. Political culture helps shape
political behavior; it is related to the way for recurring modes of behavior in a society.

2.4.3. Leadership as a Determinant of Public Policy

Koontz and Donnel defined leaders as the activity of influencing people to strive willingly for
mutual objectives. For James D. Money leadership is the form that authority assumes when it
enters in to process. Plato considered the recruitment and training of leaders as the principal

41
concern of the state. The job of the ruler, he said, is not only to maintain the organization of the
society, but also to perfect their moral character of the citizens. The making of policies and the
successful implementation of thousands of programmes, and policies depend on good leadership.

It is often said; get the right man in the leadership job, and all your problems will be solved.
According to ancient traditions, history is made by the personalities and deeds of great men.
Historians and biographers continue of searching assiduously for those crucial decisions by
crucial persons that have presumably altered the entire course of human affairs. Democracy, on
the other hand, is a type of decision-making situation in which leaders interact with followers
under conditions in which the followers elect the leaders. Leaders must talk the language of the
followers, deal in evaluative judgment, and work within the context of the followers and hope
favorably to change the minds of a number of those who are not followers (or opponents).
Hierarchy is a decision situation characterized by interaction between leaders and non-leaders in
which non-leaders do not elect the leaders. In a bureaucratic organization, appointment,
promotion and tenure require leaders in situation of hierarchy not by election. Under such
conditions, leaders tend to be task oriented, i.e., particularly, concerned with the relationship
between current activities and the achievement of certain stated goals. In hierarchy too, people
tend to be sensitive to superior-subordinate relationships, often attempting either to circumvent,
modify, or preserve these relations. In other words, in hierarchy, leaders and followers tend to
focus their activities upon modification of the hierarchy relationship itself as against upon the
performance of group tasks.

Just as there are dynamic leaders at central level who can play an important role in policy
making, there are also state leaders who can exert pressure on the center when the central
policies are found inconsistent with the realities of the states. This situation is basically evident
in federal states such as USA and India, like in areas of land reform policies and taxation of
agriculture. Dear learner, it is important to note that, two conclusions can be fairly drawn from
the above discussions. One is that to understand how policy decisions are made and why some
decisions are made rather than others, we must consider social and economic as well as political
factors. The second is that whether socio-economic factors are more important than political
factors in shaping public policy is still an open question.

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 2.4.4. Other Factors to be considered in Public Policy Development

A number of factors and considerations must be kept in mind during policy development. These
factors will be used by others (and ourselves) to judge whether the policy, and the process of
developing the policy, is or has been sound. The following are some of factors and
considerations which must be kept in mind during policy making in addition to the above
determinants.

a) Public Interest: What is in the best interest of society as a whole? How is the common good
balanced against any private or special interests? Is the process fully inclusive, especially of
those who are often overlooked or unable to participate?
b) Effectiveness: How well a policy achieves its stated goals?
c) Efficiency: How well resources are utilized in achieving goals and implementing policy.
d) Consistency: Degree of alignment with broader goals and strategies of government, with
constitutional, legislative and regulatory regime.
e) Fairness and Equity: Degree to which the policy increases equity of all members and
sectors of society. This may link directly to consideration of public interest.
f) Reflective: Of other values of society and/or the community, such as freedom, security,
diversity, communality, choice, and privacy. Good public policy must be:
g) Socially Acceptable: Citizens and interest groups feel that the policy reflects their important
values, e.g., fairness and equity, consistency, justice.
h) Politically Viable: The policy has sufficient scope, depth, and consensus support that elected
officials are comfortable with the decision and
i) Technically Correct: The policy meets any scientific or technical criteria that have been
established to guide or support the decision.

Section V: Types of Public Policy and Public Policy Analysis

An Overview

This section examines the different types of public policy. Whether they are formally written or
not, most organizations have identified policies. Policies may be classified in many different
ways. In this section, we will discuss public policy as vertical and horizontal. Policies are also
classified as distributive, regulatory, redistributive and constituent policies based on their

43
effect on members of the organization. We will also extend our discussions by examining public
policy analyses at the end of the section.

2.5.1. Types of Public Policy

A) Vertical Policy: Vertical policy is what we think of as the normal or traditional way in
which policy decisions are made. Vertical policy is developed within a single organizational
structure and generally starts with broad overarching policy, sometimes called ‗corporate’
or ‘framework’ policy. Such decisions are made at head office and guide subsequent
decisions throughout the organization. At the regional level we might develop regional or
‗strategic’ policy, which translates the national decisions to the regional level, taking into
consideration the specific context. Finally, the regional policy is made specific enough to
guide operational decision making.

With vertical policy, then, each level should take the broader one as its starting point, and
maintain consistency with it. The flow from broad policy to specific policy can provide
consistency. In reality, however, a great deal of operational policy either does not connect to the
overarching policy framework, or else is visibly inconsistent with it. The challenge for many
organizations today is thus to maintain enough central policy direction to ensure consistency and
equity, while at the same time giving ‗field staff‘ enough autonomy to ensure that operational
policy is responsive to local needs and reflective of local values.

B) Horizontal Policy: often referred to as integrated policy, is developed between parts of an

organization, or among organizational components that are in similar hierarchical positions.

There is a great deal of discussion today about horizontal policy issues (sometimes referred to as
crosscutting issues) and the challenges that organizations face in dealing effectively with them.

Horizontal issues do not ‗fit in a box‘- they do not respect turf (territory), they do not fit within
the jurisdiction of departments, they do not respect boundaries. They do not fit within the
constitutional definition of what level of government does what- or even which country does
what. Horizontal issues are challenging because so many players control one tool, one ‗key,‘ and
all of the keys need to be aligned at the same time to bring a suitable result (Bourgon, 1996).

44
Here we treat horizontal policy as policy developed between or among organizational
components or sectors within government or the policy community. Horizontal policy can itself e
divided into three categories.

1) Policy developed within a sector is referred to as sectoral policy.

2) When more than one sector is involved, the policy becomes multi- sectoral.
3) When the groups developing the policy are able to determine a shared, super-ordinate
goal and to work collaboratively to achieve policy that addresses root causes as well as
symptoms, the policy is said to be integrated. As we go from sectoral to integrated, the
complexities of policies are getting increasing.

Good horizontal policy development requires competent and committed individuals with strong
values, good judgment and sound knowledge and understanding; a collegial policy community
with strong networks and cooperative, mutually respectful and collaborative leadership.

The following are also sample of several different types of policies broken down by their effect
on members of the organization:

A) Distributive Policies: extend goods and services to members of an organization, as well as

distributing the costs of the goods/services amongst the members of the organization. The
popular term for this is subsidy. The agricultural and petroleum support programme is
frequently cited as example of subsidy. Another example includes government policies that
impact spending for welfare, public education, highways, and public safety, or a professional
organizations. Distributive policy making is characterized by high cooperation among those
involved, low visibility to the outside world, and short-run, disaggregated decisions that
result in no obvious losers.
B) Regulatory Policies: regulatory policies, or mandates, limit the discretion of individuals and
agencies, or otherwise compel certain types of behavior. They are policies in which
government imposes control over specific behavior of individuals or groups. These policies
are generally thought to be best applied when good behavior can be easily defined and bad
behavior can be easily regulated and punished through fines or sanctions. An example of a
fairly successful public regulatory policy includes speed limit, environmental protection and
occupational safety and health.

45
C) Constituent Policies: constituent policies create executive power entities, or deal with laws.
Constituent policies also deal with Fiscal Policy in some circumstances.
D) Redistributive Policies: is one in which government attempts to effect changes in the way
wealth is allocated among broad groups in the society. Most ant-poverty efforts involve
redistributive policies. Since redistributive policies involve resource transfers from one
broad segment of society to another (from rich and the middle class to the poor), they are
bound to be controversial. Thus they are too explosive for control by any sub-government.
Final decisions of such policies are typically made at the highest levels of government.

2.5.2. Public Policy Analysis

Policy analysis is a field of professional practice that is concerned with the scientific analysis of
the contents and consequences of policies, particularly in public sector management and
planning. The field emerged after World War II from the confluence of four parent disciplines:

(1) management science and systems engineering;

(2) welfare economics;
(3) the political and administrative sciences; and
(4) the empirical social sciences.

Lerner and Lasswell (1951) are generally considered as the fathers of the field, although its
major concepts and tools were actually developed in the subsequent decades.

The label ‗public policy analysis‘ is not sharply distinguished from a number of related fields
such as ‗policy science‘, ‗policy evaluation‘, ‗scientific advice of politics‘, and others. It is a
general term for the use of research and expertise in the process of public policy-making,
whereby practical concerns of policy advising prevail over theoretical concerns of explaining the
policy process (the subject of the political and administrative sciences).

 Which stage of public policy making is subject to policy analysis?

The object-domain of public policy analysis comprehends all stages of public policymaking,
from policy formulation to policy implementation and to policy review. It is obvious that this
broad scope requires an equally broad theoretical and methodological basis. Policy analysis

46
clearly needs to be an interdisciplinary field. Drawing on its four mentioned parent disciplines,
some of its major tools are:

1) decision analysis, sensitivity analysis and systems analysis;

2) cost-benefit analysis;
3) implementation research, financial auditing and reporting tools; and
4) evaluation research, environmental and social impact assessment.

Additional tools include project management; social indicators; management information and
reporting systems; total quality management; technology assessment; forecasting; scenario
writing; creativity techniques; idealized design; and many others.

 What are the methods used in public policy analyses?

A major methodological development in the 1960 was the Planning-Programming Budgeting

System (PPBS). PPBS aimed to integrate the formulation of policy objectives with the processes
of budgeting, in an effort to ensure a systematic allocation of financial resources to political
priorities. The approach was hailed as a breakthrough in rational policy-making; policy analysis
for a while became almost synonymous with PPBS. In the US, PPBS was declared mandatory
for all federal agencies under the Johnson Administration in 1965; but it never fulfilled its
promises. Its conceptual framework relied all too one-sidedly on a utilitarian economic concept
of rationality, and consequently could not deal satisfactorily with the core problem of public
policy-making, of how to integrate differing views and conflicting interests into a meaningful
concept of ‗rational‘ action.

Subsequent major developments were, in the 1970s, the rise of policy and program evaluation to
a major field of policy analysis, and more recently, in the 1990s, the development of the so-
called ‗New Public Management’, which once again tries to achieve an integrated approach to
policy planning, programming, and budgeting.

The current state of public policy analysis is characterized by an increasing variety of tools.
These range from financial controlling approaches such as benchmarking (performance
comparison with best practices) and output- oriented performance indicator systems for public

47
services (e.g. for hospitals) to new forms of participatory inquiry and design such as citizen
surveys, citizen reports, search conferences and others.

Despite its impressive development, the field‘s methodological foundations still appear deficient
regarding the role of conflicting views and value judgments, power, civil society and democracy
in ‗rational‘ policy-making. More than other applied disciplines such as action research,
community or management consulting, policy analysis have remained tied to its origin in ‗hard‘
conceptions of systems analysis. It has hardly begun to incorporate the principles of soft and
critical systems methodologies, yet their concern for interpretive, critical and emancipatory
issues, for dialogue, discursive rationality and boundary critique, appears relevant indeed. It
would seem that public policy analysis has much to gain from a systematic revision of its
conceptual foundations along these lines.

CHAPTER THREE

Models/Approaches and Institutions of Public Policy-Making and the Policy Processes in

Developing Countries

This chapter contains three basic sections. The first section is about the various models of
public policy-making. Here, public policy can be examined from the perspectives of system
theory, elite theory, group theory, rational decision-making theory, institutionalism and
functional process theory. Each of the models offers a separate way of thinking about policy
and even suggests some of the general causes and consequences of public policy. However, none
of these models was derived especially to study public policy.

Policy making activities requires the participation of various actors to achieve its desired goals
successfully. Hence, the second section is about institutions to be involved in public policy
making. Here, the different institutions (both official and unofficial) like the legislature, the
executive, the judiciary, the media, pressure groups, the individual citizens, etc will be discussed.

Under the third section of the chapter, you will be introduced with the policy process in
developing countries where you can realize the dynamics of policy making in developing
countries, macro-policy making in developing countries in general and Africa in particular.

48
The emphasis here is to make clear for the learners about the different dimensions of policy
formulation in developing countries and issues to be considered by policy actors so as to respond
to the need of their society as well as that of the global situation.

Objectives

Up on the successful completion of this chapter, learners will be able to;

 Simplify and clarify their thinking about models of public policy,

 Identify the various institutions involved in public policy making,
 Explain the policy making process in developing country in general and Africa in
particular.
Pre-test questions:
1. What are the models of public policy?
2. Who are the actors to be involved in public policy making?
3. What is the contribution of public policy in developing countries?
4. How do you evaluate public policy making in Africa?

Section I: Models/approaches of public policy making

An Overview

This section focuses on the models of public policy enumerated above. These models are not
competitive, in the sense that any of them could be judged best. Each one provides a separate
focus on political life, and each can help us to understand different things about public policy.
While some policies appear at first glance to lend explanation by one particular model, most
policies are a combination of rational planning, instrumentalism, interest group activity, elite
preferences, systemic forces and institutional influences. In general, these models address how
public policy is made. Let us see some of these below

3.1.1. Institutional model: policy as institutional output

 What are the justifications of institutional model of public policy making?

Government institutions have long been a central focus of political science. Focuses on the
traditional organization of government, this model describes the duties and arrangements of

49
bureaus and departments. It also considers constitutional provisions, administrative and
common law, and judicial decisions. It focuses on formal arrangements such as federalism,
executive reorganizations, presidential commission, etc. Traditionally, political science has
studied government institutions- parliaments, presidency, courts, political parties, etc.—that
authoritatively determine, implement, and enforce public policy. Strictly speaking, a policy is
not a public policy until it is adopted, implemented and enforced by some governmental
institution.

 How government institutions affect public policy making?

Government institutions give public policy three distinctive characteristics:

1) First, government lends legitimacy to policies. Government policies are generally

regarded as legal obligations that command the loyalty of citizens.
2) Second, government policies involve universality. Only government policies extend to all
people in a society; the policies of other groups or organizations reach only a part of the
society.
3) Finally, government monopolizes coercion in society; only government can legitimately
imprison violators of its policies.

The impact of institutional arrangements on public policy is an empirical question that deserves
investigation. Federalism recognizes that both the national government and the state
governments derive independent legal authority from their own citizens. Traditional studies
using the institutional approach focused on institutional structures, organization, duties and
function, without investigating their impact on public policy.

3.1.2. Elite-mass model: policy as elite preference

 What is the position of elite-mass model of public policy-making?

According to this model, policy flows downward from the elite to the mass; they do not arise
from mass demands. Society is divided into those who have power and those who do not. Elites
share values that differentiate them from the mass. The prevailing public policies reflect elite
values, which generally preserve the status quo. Elites have higher income, more education, and
higher status than the mass. Public policy may be viewed as the values and preferences of

50
governing elite. The elites shape mass opinion more than vice versa. Public officials and
administrators merely carry out policies decided on by the elite, which flows 'down' to the mass.

It assumes that:

 Society is divided into the powerful few and the powerless many; only the few allocate
values (the mass do not decide public policy).
 The few are not typical of the mass; elites are drawn disproportionately from the upper strata.
 There must be slow and continuous movement of non-elites into elite positions, but only after
they accept elite values, in order to maintain stability and avoid revolution.
 All elites agree on basic social system and preservation values, i.e., private property, limited
government, and individual liberty.
 Changes in public policy will be incremental rather than revolutionary, reflecting changes in
elite values (not mass demands).
 Active elites are subject to little influence from apathetic masses. Elites influence masses
more than masses influence elites.
 Only non-elites who have accepted the basic elite consensus can be admitted to governing
circles.
 Public policy does not reflect the demands of masses but rather the prevailing values of the
elite.
 What is the role of the masses in public policy making according to this model?

The implication is that the responsibility for the state of things rests with the elites, including the
welfare of the mass. The mass is apathetic and ill-informed about public policy; that elites
actually shape mass opinion on policy questions more than masses shape elite opinion; mass
sentiments are manipulated by the elite; the mass has only an indirect influence on decisions and
policy. As communication flows only downward, democratic popular elections are symbolic in
that they tie the mass to the system through a political party and occasional voting. Policies may
change incrementally but the elites are conservative and won't change the basic system. Only
policy alternatives that fall within the range of elite value consensus will be given serious
consideration. Competition centers around a narrow range of issues, and elites agree more than
they disagree; there is always agreement on constitutional government, democratic procedures,
majority rule, and freedom of speech and of the press, freedom to form political parties and run

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for office, equality of opportunity, private property, individual initiative and reward, and the
legitimacy of free enterprise and capitalism. The masses cannot be relied on to support these
values consistently, thus the elite must support them.

3.1.3. Group model: policy as group equilibrium

 Are public policies reflecting the interest of all groups?

Politics is really the struggle among groups to influence public policy. Public policy results from
a system of forces and pressures acting on and reacting to one another. Usually focuses on the
legislature, but the executive is also pressured by interest groups. Agencies may be captured by
the groups they are meant to regulate, and administrators become increasingly unable to
distinguish between policies that will benefit the general public and policies that will benefit the
groups being regulated. Interaction among groups is the central fact of politics. Individuals with
common interests are bind together to press their demands (formally or informally) on
government.

Individuals are important in politics only when they act as part of or on behalf of group interests.
The group is the bridge between the individual and the government. The task of the political
system is to:

1. Establish the rules of the game

2. Arrange compromises and balance interests
3. Enact compromises in public policy
4. Enforce these compromises
 What is group equilibrium? How one group is more influential than others?

It is also called equilibrium theory, as in physics. This equilibrium is determined by the relative
influence of any interest groups. Influence is determined by numbers, wealth, and organizational
strength, leadership, access to decision makers and internal cohesion. Policy makers are viewed
as constantly responding to group pressures by bargaining, negotiating, and compromising
among competing demands of influential groups. Executives, legislators, and agency heads all
put together coalitions from their consistencies to push programs through. Political parties are
coalitions of groups. Overlapping group membership helps to maintain the equilibrium by
preventing anyone group from moving too far from prevailing values. Individuals who belong to

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anyone group also belong to other groups, and this fact moderates the demands of groups who
must avoid offending their members who have other group affiliations.

The entire system assumes:

 A 'latent' group supports the rules of the game

 There is overlapping group membership which keeps groups from moving too far
out of the political mainstream
 There are checks and balances on group‘s competition

3.1.4. Systems model

This model is more associated with David Easton. The model relies on information theory
concepts such as input, output, and feedback. It sees the policy process as cyclical. It asks
questions like "What are the significant variables and patterns in the public policy-making
system?" What goes on within the 'black box' of conversion of demands into public policy? What
are the inputs and outputs?

 What is an environment according to this model? What is a political system?

Public policy is viewed as the response of the political system to forces brought to bear on it
from the outside environment. According to David Easton, the political system is composed of
those identifiable and interrelated institutions and activities in a society that make authoritative
decision (or allocation of values) that are binding on the society. The environment surrounds the
political system. In this model, "environment" means physical: natural resources, climate,
topography; demographic: population size, age, and distribution, and location; political:
ideology, culture, social structure, economy, and technology.

 Distinguish between inputs, outputs and feedback?

Forces (inputs) enter the political system from the environment either as demands or as
support. Demands or claims are brought to it by persons or groups in response to real or
perceived environmental conditions, for government action. Support is given wherever citizens
obey laws, votes, pay taxes, etc., and conforms to public policies. The concept of feedback
indicates that public policies (or outputs) may subsequently enter the environment and the

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demands generated therein, as well as the character of the political system itself. Policy outputs
may produce new demands which lead to further policy outputs, and so on in a continuing and
never ending flow of public policy. The political system is a group of interrelated structures and
processes that can authoritatively allocate resources for a society. The actors are the legislature,
the executive, the administrative agencies, the courts, interest groups, political parties, and
citizens.

Outputs are decisions and actions and public policy. The political system is an identifiable
system of institutions and processes that transform inputs into outputs for the whole society. The
elements with the system are interrelated and it can respond to forces in the environment, and it
seeks to preserve itself in balance with the environment. The system preserves itself by
producing reasonably satisfactory outputs (compromises are arranged, enacted and enforced). It
relies on deep rooted support for the system itself and its use, or threat of use, of force.

It asks questions such as:

 What are the significant characteristics of the environment that generate demands?
 What are the significant characteristics of the political system that enable it to endure over
time and turn demands into output?
 How do environmental inputs affect the political system?
 How do characteristics of the political system affect public policy?
 How do environmental characteristics affect public policy?
 How does public policy through feedback, affect the environment and the political system
itself?
3.1.5. Streams and windows model
 This model posits three streams which are always simultaneously ongoing. When the three
streams converge, a policy window opens, and a new policy may emerge. The problem
stream focuses the public's and policy-makers' attention on a particular problem, defines the
problem, and calls for a new policy approach (or else the problem fades). Attention comes
through monitoring data, the occurrence of focusing events, and feedback on existing polices,
though oversight studies of program evaluation. Categorization of the problem is important
in determining how the problem is approached and/or resolved: values, comparisons, and
categories.

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 Identify the difference between problem stream, political stream and policy stream?
a) The political stream is where the government agenda is formed: the list of issues or
problems to be resolved by government. This occurs as the result of the interaction of major
forces such as the national mood, organized interests, and dynamics of public administration
(jurisdictional disputes among agencies, the makeup of government personnel, etc). The
players are often quite visible, as members of the administration, appointees and staff, the
legislature, media, interest groups, those associated with elections, parties and campaigns,
and public opinion. A consensus is achieved among those groups and a bandwagon effect or
title effect occurs as everyone wants to be in on the policy resolution and not excluded.
b) The policy stream is where alternatives are considered and decisions are made. Here the
major focus is on intellectuals and personal; a list of alternatives is generated from which
policy makers can select one. Policy entrepreneurs and other play a role, such as academics,
researchers, consultants, career public administrators, parliament/congress staffers, and
interest groups. Trial balloons are sent up to gauge (measure) the political feasibility of
various alternatives, either publicly or privately. They must be acceptable in terms of value
constraints, technical constraints, and budgetary constraints. Consensus is developed though
rational argument and persuasion (not bargaining). Tilt occurs when a plausible solution
begins to emerge.

When these three streams converge, a policy window may open, because of a shift in public
opinion, a change in legislative membership, or a change in administration, or when a pressing
problem emerges. Any one stream may change on its own, but all three must converge for a
policy decision to emerge.

3.1.6. Incremental model: policy as variations on the past

 How could you justify incremental policy making model?
 This model relies on the concepts of incremental decision-making such as satisficing,
organizational drift, bounded rationality, and limited cognition, among others. It is can be
basically called "muddling through." It represents a conservative tendency: new policies are
only slightly different from old policies. Policy-makers are too short of time, resources and
brains to make totally new policies; past policies are accepted as having some legitimacy.
Existing policies have sunk costs which discourage innovation, incrementalism is an easier

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 approach than rationalism, and the policies are more politically expedient because they don't
necessitate any radical redistribution of values. This model tries to improve the acceptability
of public policy.

In other words, it views public policy as a continuation of past government activities with
only incremental modifications. On the contrary, constraints of time, information, and cost
prevent policy-makers from identifying the full range of policy alternatives and their
consequences.

Incrementalism is conservative in that existing programs; policies, and expenditures are

considered as a base, and attention is concentrated on new programs and policies and on
increases, decreases, or modifications of current programs.

Policymakers generally accept the legitimacy of established programs and tacitly agree to
continue previous policies. Second, policymakers accept the legitimacy of previous policies
because of the uncertainty about the consequences of completely new or different policies known
programs when the consequences of new programs cannot be predicted. Conflict is heightened
when decision making focuses on major policy shifts involving great gains or losses, or "all-or-
nothing," "yes-or-no" policy decisions. This search usually begins with the familiar-that is, with
policy alternatives close to current policies. Only if these alternatives appear to be unsatisfactory
will the policy-maker venture out toward more radical policy innovation.

 Could you mention some of the deficiencies of incrementalism?

Bargaining is not successful with limited resources; can downplay useful quantitative
information; obscures real relationship being political shills; anti-intellectual approach to
problems; no imagination; conservative; biased-against far-reaching solutions.

3.1.7. Rational Model: policy as maximum social gain

 Is rational policy making is possible? How?

A rational policy is one that achieves "maximum social gain"; that is, governments should
choose policies resulting in gains to society that exceed costs by the greatest amount, and
governments should refrain from policies if costs are not exceeded by gains. First, no policy

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should be adopted if its costs exceed its benefits. Second, among policy alternatives, decision
makers should choose the policy that produces the greatest benefit over cost. This model tries to
understand all the alternatives, take into account all their consequences, and select the best. It is
concerned with the best way to organize government in order to assure and undistorted flow of
information, the accuracy of feedback, and the weighing of values. This model tries to improve
the content of public policy. To select a rational policy, policymakers must:

 Know all the preferences and their relative weights

 know all the policy alternatives available,
 Know all the consequences of each policy alternative,
 Calculate the ratio of benefits to costs for each policy alternative, and
 Select the most efficient policy alternative.

Rational policymaking also requires information about alternative policies, the predictive
capacity to foresee accurately the consequences of alternate policies, and the intelligence to
calculate correctly the ratio of costs to benefits. Finally, rational policymaking requires a
decision-making system that facilitates rationality in policy formation. Large investments in
existing programs and policies (sunk costs) prevent policymakers from reconsidering alternatives
foreclosed by previous decisions.

 What are the deficiencies of rational model?

The model creates gap between planning and implementation. It ignores role of people,
entrepreneurs, leadership, etc. Technical competence alone is not enough (ignores the human
factor). Too mechanical an approach, organizations are more organic. Models must be
multidimensional and complex. Predictions are often wrong; simple solutions may be
overlooked. The costs of rational-comprehensive planning may outweigh the cost savings of the
policy.

3.1.8. Public Sector Strategic Planning

 This is an attempt to combine the incremental and rational approaches to public policy-
making. It is an attempt to reconcile the day-to-day demands with long range strategies for
the future. It doesn't see the organization as wholly determined by the political environment,
neither does it ignore risks. It takes an active stance (versus passive) toward the future with

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 an outward looking, aggressive focus sensitive to the political environment. It tries to place
the organization in a distinctive position vis-a-vis the political environment. It concentrates
on making decisions (unlike the rational model) but blends rational analysis with economic
and political analyses (unlike the incremental model). It is highly participatory and tolerant of
controversy, it concentrates on the fate of the whole organization; the fate of subunits is
secondary.
3.1.9. Neo-institutionalist Model
 Attempts to categorize public policies into four areas by the probability of government
coercion- immediate or remote- and the object of government coercion- individual or
systemic. The concern in this type of analysis is to relate these types of policy to the different
branches of government and the behaviors associated with each policy area.
 Why neo-institutionalism emerged? What is its main concern?

Section II: Institutions in public policy making

This section is concerned with the different institutions that have a stake public policy
formulation. For the sake of easy understanding, these institutions are categorized in an official
(like the legislative, executive and judiciary) and unofficial (like the media, the political parties,
the pressure groups, the individual citizens, etc) participants.

Section Objective:

At the end of lessons in this section, learners will be able to:

 Understand the various institutions that have a stake in public policy,

 Explain the contribution of each institution for policy making,
 Realize their role in public policy making as citizens

3.2.1. The official policy makers

Official policy-makers are those who possess legal authority to engage in the formulation of the
public policy. These include legislators, executives, administrators and the judges. Each
performs policy making tasks at least somewhat different from the others. It also is useful to
differentiate between primary and supplementary policy-makers. Primary policy-makers have

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direct constitutional authority to act; for example, the parliament does not have to depend up on
other governmental units for authorization to act. Supplementary policy-makers, such as
national administrative agencies, must get authorization to act from others (primary policy-
makers) and hence are at least potentially dependent upon or controlled by them. Below are
discussions on the general role of the official policy-makers in policy formulation;

3.2.1.1.The legislature
 How much do legislators want to do to advance the institution as significant actors in the
policymaking process?

Modern democracies are characterized by shared decision-making by the legislative and

executive branches: most policy initiatives are enacted into law, and thus must be approved by
the legislature. It becomes very important then to identify what exactly is the contribution of the
legislature to the overall policy-making process should be.

USAID‘s Handbook on Legislative Strengthening identifies three primary functions of a

democratic legislature. These functions are briefly described as follows:

1) Representation: legislatures listen to, communicate with, and represent the needs and
wishes of citizens in policymaking; and intercede with government on behalf of the
citizens.
2) Lawmaking: legislatures identify problems, study issues, receive expert and public
input, formulate or approve policies, and implement those polices through laws designed
to address or remedy the problem or issue.
3) Oversight: legislatures oversee the implementation of laws, policies, and programs by
monitoring, reviewing, and investigating government activities to ensure that government
actions are transparent, accountable, consistent with, and uphold existing laws and
regulations.

In addition, legislatures can play roles in executive removal (impeachment, votes of no

confidence, censure) and also serving as a recruiting pool for other government positions.

In general, a process of democratic governance is most legitimate when it characterized by

transparency, pluralism, citizen involvement in decision-making, representation, and

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 accountability. In the case of legislatures, their operations are transparent when legislative
sessions and members are accessible to the public, public information about legislative
actions is readily available, and media coverage of the legislature is widespread.

A legislature that is representative and participatory is characterized by citizens having

access to, and input in, the policy making process through the legislature; there is high degree
of interaction between members and citizens; issues are addressed or legislation amended
because of public input or pressure; and civil society organizations, advocacy organizations,
and/or interest groups are active participants in the legislative process.

In terms of enacting policy, a proactive legislature is one in which the policy formulation and
law making processes are the product of informed decision-making, and legislation is well-
thought out and drafted. In terms of policy implementation, an accountable legislature ensures
that laws and government programs are being implemented fairly and effectively; the national
budget is scrutinized and agreed upon; public revenues and expenditures are monitored; and
issues of public corruption and mismanagement are addressed. The way in which these functions
are carried out, of course, depends on the structure of the legislature, as well as a country‘s
broader political landscape.

 But the degree to which a legislature performs such functions as lawmaking, oversight and
representation depend in great degree on its own organizational structure.

The legislature performs a very important function of discussing and analyzing the policy
proposals that come before it. The success of the legislature depends upon fulfilling adequately
its role by responding to the aspirations of the people and the commitment of public
functionaries in the implementation of the approved policies and programmes. Steps have been
taken in a number of countries, both developed and the developing to increase the role of the
legislature. Those nations who had for some reasons suspended this institution have again
established it. Even in the African countries, the legislative institution exists because want it to
exist. Long-term trend is not toward the demise or decline of the legislature. Rather there is a
changing role of the legislature. It is an important channel of communication and pressure and is
the very relevant in a political system.

 What is role of legislature in macro policy formulation?

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Macro policy affects the life of a people thus it is paramount that the people and their
representatives are offered the opportunity to make inputs. In some countries, it is a
constitutional requirement that major policy initiatives are subjected to debate by the legislature.

Thus issues of national concern receive input from parliamentarians who themselves, by virtue of
their work are involved and engaged with several organizations – civil society organizations, the
private sector, the media, and most importantly their own constituents. Diverse interaction with
all these stakeholders means that parliamentarians gain access to diverse and useful information
which can help shape policy.

Involvement of parliaments in policy formation gives credibility to policy initiatives and

interventions. It is consistent with the much agitation for consensus building and ensuring
participation through the development of effective and harmonious linkages. For instance, the
guiding principles of the PRSP process include not only that they be country-led initiatives but
also that they be developed in a participatory manner. Additionally, participation of parliaments
in policy formulation is another avenue for strengthening their representative function – as they
have a direct access to constituents and the ultimate beneficiary of policy initiatives their input
will be informed by the needs of the people they represent.

In some democracies, particularly those with dominant positions in parliaments (majority

members of parliament), there is the tendency to either over indulge or excessively employ its
dominant position in the process of enacting policy. Though most of these parliaments get away
(most of the time), subjecting policy to parliamentary scrutiny serves as a useful check in the
process of formulation.

3.2.1.2.The political executive

 How do you understand the meaning and functions of the political executive?

Before examining the role of the political executive, let us understand first the meaning of the
term ‗executive.‘ According to J.W. Graner, ‗in a broad and collective sense, the executive organ
embraces the aggregate or totality of all the functionaries and agencies which are concerned
with the execution of the will of the state as that will has been formulated and expressed in
terms of law.’ Here, the role of the political executive in policy making includes the role played

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by the presidents, prime ministers, the cabinet, the council of ministers and others who can
identify policy agendas, issues and proposals.

 Is there any role difference in policy between executives in parliamentary system and
presidential system of government?
 We live what has been called an ‗executive-centered era,‘ in which the effectiveness of
government depends substantially up on executive leadership, both in policy formulation and
policy execution. For example, the legislature in USA delegates significant policy making
authority to the present. Foreign-trade legislation, for example, gives the president
discretionary authority to raise or lower tariff on imported goods. In the areas of foreign and
military policy too, the president possesses greater constitutional power and operating
freedom than in domestic policies. Foreign policy is to a great extent the domain of the
executive not only in USA but for all national political systems.

In parliamentary governments like Ethiopia, the leadership of the government is in the hands of
the prime minister, who is the real executive, the nominal executive being the president.
Through the party system and the authority of the patronage which the prime minister enjoys,
he/she has usurped (take over) the authority of the parliament. The general functions of the
executive include;

1) Maintenance of internal and external peace and order and saving the country from external
aggression. In other words, the formulation of the national policy for domestic as well as
external purposes is the chief concern of the executive.
2) The executive has the responsibility of initiating the works of the legislature. The bills
are first to be approved/initiated by the cabinet/president and the government/the president
does not face much difficulty in getting the approval of the parliament where, generally, it/his
party enjoy the majority.
3) The executive proposes the budget and decides about the imposition or abolition of
taxes. It may increase or decrease the tax rates. It also sees that provisions of the budget are
implemented after the approval of the parliament. In the developing countries (e.g., Ghana,
Iraq, Thailand, Ethiopia, etc), the executive probably has even more influence in policy-
making than in modern countries. Yehezkel Dror explains:

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 Because there are few policy issues, a larger proportion of them can reach the cabinet
level in developing countries; because there is often no professional civil service, the
executive plays a large role in formulating public policies about most issues; because
power is highly concentrated, the political executive is free to establish policies on many
more issues without worrying as much about having to build coalitions.
The policy making structure, in short, is rather simple in many developing countries;
executive policy making prevails. In such countries, too, interest groups have very little
impact on policy making because of their limited independence from the existing political
institutions. In general, when we evaluate the role of the executives, whether the president,
the prime minister, the state governor or any other executives, their focus is on policy
making than administrative activities. For example, the presidents, for their part, are more
interested in policy initiation than administration.

3.2.1.3.The judiciary
 What is the role of the judiciary in public policy-making?

An impartial judiciary is a sine-qua-non for the smooth functioning of a political system.

Nowhere does the judiciary play a greater role in policy formulation than the USA. The
courts, notably the national and state appellate courts, have often greatly affected the nature
and content of public policy through the exercise of the power of judicial review and
statutory interpretation in cases brought before them. Although the courts are using their
power of judicial review somewhat sparingly (carefully), the very fact they have such power
may affect the policy-making activities of other branches.

Courts are also called upon to interpret and decide the meaning of statutory provisions that
often are generally stated and permit conflicting interpretations. When a court accepts one
interpretation rather than the other, the consequence of its action is to give effect to the
policy preference of the winning party. The judiciary is also playing a major role in the
formulation of economic policy. Much of the law relating to such matters as property
ownership, contracts, corporations, and employer-employee relationships has been
developed and applied by the courts in the form of common law and equity.

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The judiciary ventured in to new many areas of social and political activity that previously
had been considered not under its mandate, especially in the last few decades. Legislative
appointment, the right of welfare recipients, the operation of public institutions such as
prisons and hospitals, and the location of public facilities are primary examples. Not only
are the courts getting involved but they are playing a more positive role in policy
formulation, especially not only what government can do but also what it must do to meet
legal or constitutional obligations.

The growing impact of government on people‘s lives, the refusal or failure of the legislative
and executive branches to act on many problems, the willingness of the courts to become
involved, and the increasing litigiousness of at least some segments of the population
probably guarantee a continuation extended judicial involvement in policy formulation in
the future.
Although courts in such countries as Canada, Australia, and West Germany have some
power of judicial review, their impact on policy has been much less than that of the
American courts. In the developing countries, the courts appear to have no meaningful
policy-making role.
 Evaluate the role of judiciary in public policy between democratic and non-
democratic countries?
 The judicial system in democratic countries has a major role in policy making process.
All policies are formulated keeping in view of the existing laws and legal provisions.
The judiciary enters the area of policy making by delivering suggestive or advisory
judgments aimed at effective achievement of the goals of the country. It can issue
directions for formulating a particular policy or changing the existing policy to suit a
particular purpose. It may also determine certain guide lines for the legislature and/or
executive that ought to be followed in the process of public policy making. In fact it is
the need of modern times that the role of the courts should be appreciated and
confrontation between the legislative, the executive and the judiciary should be
minimized if not totally avoided. It is thus understood that the judiciary has its share in
the political process of the country, especially in the process of policy making.

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In modern times, the government has to perform not only a magnitude of functions but also to
deal with the complexities and technical nature of functions. In the sphere of policy making the
government is helped by the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, political parties, interest
groups, the media and public opinion. Generally, the role of the judiciary in policy making can
be understood from the following points;

1. The judiciary, being the sole guardian of the constitution, ensures that none of its provision is
contravened by the legislative or execution of administrative actions. In order to achieve this
goal, the judiciary tries to formulate guidelines to be followed both by the legislature and the
executive.
2. Its decisions is facilitating a comparatively smooth working of the government
3. It helps the government in formulating its policies in a manner that does not dispute with
fundamental human rights
4. The decisions of the courts have many times led to the protection of private interests
5. Its pronouncements have molded the trust and contents of the public policy. Some policies
are partly struck down by the courts and certain directions are issued which are mandatory
for the government to follow
6. It ensures that all policies are aimed at the protection of the national interest and likely to
increase the pace of social and economic development.

3.2.1.4.The administrative agencies/the civil service or the bureaucracy

Before dealing with the role of the administrative agencies (or generally the bureaucracy) in
policy making, it is very essential to be clear about what is exactly the meaning of bureaucracy.

According to Max Weber, ‗bureaucracy is a universal social phenomenon and the means of
carrying community action to rationally ordered social action.‘ In the words of Marshall E.
Dimock, ‗bureaucracy is the state of the society in which institutions overshadow
individuals and simple family relationships, stage of development in which divisions of
labor, specialization, organization, hierarchy, planning and regimentation of large groups
of individuals either by voluntary or involuntary methods, are the order of the day.‘

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Administrative systems throughout the world differ with respect to such characteristics as size
and complexity, hierarchical organization, and degree of autonomy. Although it was once a
common doctrine in political science that administrative agencies only carried in to effect, more
or less automatically, policies determined by the ‗political‘ branches of government, it has now
become axiomatic (clear, obvious) that politics and administration are blended, and that
administrative agencies are often significantly involved in the development of public policy. The
bureaucratic administration breaks the absolute power of elected leadership or monarchy due to
its systematized administration and its strategic position between the political executives and the
general public.

Discuss on the role of the bureaucracy in public policy?

In complex industrial societies especially, the technicality and complexity of many policy
matters, the need for continuing control, and the legislators‘ lack of time and information, have
led to the delegation of much discretionary authority, often formally recognized as rule making
power, to administrative agencies. Consequently, the administrative agencies make many
decisions that have far-reaching political and policy consequences. As professor Norman
Thomas comments; ‗it is doubtful that any modern industrial society could manage the daily
operation of its public affairs without bureaucratic organizations in which officials play a major
policy-making role.‘

Agencies are also a major source of proposals for legislation in such political systems as the
USA and Great Britain. Moreover, American agencies typically not only suggest needed
legislation but actively lobby and otherwise seek to exert pressure for its adoption. The
bureaucracy also helps the executive in identifying major policy areas, preparing major policy
proposals, analyzing various alternatives and solutions to societal problems requiring urgent
attention, dividing the major policies in to sub-policies, determining programme of action and
suggesting modification in the existing policy on the basis of its experience in the
implementation front. Generally, their role can be categorized in to the following three broad
activities:

1) Informative: identifying policy issues and giving them a shape of policy proposals require a
systematic analysis of the existing problems. The bureaucracy engages itself in the collection

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 of relevant data and information in order to identify the crux (root) of the problem. It has to
determine what type of information acquired can be pure to the best use for framing a policy
proposal. As we read above, the government has to substantiate its policy proposal in order to
get public support, and hence, the bureaucracy provides the relevant data for substantiating
policy proposals. For instance, if the bureaucracy has to provide information to help produce
a policy proposal for agricultural development, it has to collect and filter information
regarding total cultivable land available in the country, types and quality of land available,
types of crops that can be gainfully sown, agricultural requirements of the country, varieties
of fertilizers to be used and their availability, irrigational facilities available, conditions of
marketing agricultural produce, levels of consumption within the country, possible chances
of export, etc. in other words the informative role of the bureaucracy in policy making relates
to the laying down of an objective base for systematic framing of policy proposals and
providing the needed data for substantiating the proposal.
2) Suggestive: as the bureaucracy is constantly engaged in the task of substantiating policy
proposals and collecting relevant data, it becomes closely acquainted with various problems
(political, social and economic) and issues facing the country. Thus, it helps the political
executive in identifying policy issues by suggesting about the nature of the problems and the
need for taking up a certain issue for consideration. These suggestions are based on the
administrative expertise and capability of the bureaucracy. The suggestive role of the
bureaucracy to a political executive includes both policy initiation as well as submission of
several alternative solutions to a given problem. It is up to the political executive to accept or
reject them.
3) Analytical: after the crucial issues requiring urgent attention are identified, it has to be
ascertained whether such issues could make viable policies or not. The bureaucracy engages
itself in analyzing the pros and cons of the issue that is taken up for policy formulation, it
frames and reframes policy proposals keeping in view of its viability, future prospect,
resource availability, acceptability, etc. moreover, it is the responsibility of the bureaucracy
to analyze policy proposals in relation to the provisions of the constitution, the laws framed
by the parliament, and other existing rules and regulations.
3.2.2. Unofficial participants in policy making

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In addition to the official policy makers, many others may participate in the policy process,
including interest groups, political parties, the media, the think thanks and the individual citizens.
They are designated as unofficial participant because, however important or dominant they may
be in various situations, they themselves do not usually possess legal authority to make
binding policy decisions.

3.2.2.1.The media

Mass media, such as newspapers, magazines, films, radio and television facilitate one way
communication from one to many. They transmit a message from a source to reach a large and
often widely spread audience. The 21st century has been blessed with the trenchant growth of the
mass media. The films and television are most effective as they combine the audio and the visual
together. Television, especially, has changed the role of mass media by making non-face-to-face
communication as practical and efficient. The use of satellite brought about a revolution in the
field of communication systems. Thanks to these communication revolutions, it is now possible
to bring people from remote corners face-to-face with a new reality.

Goals and policies are value loaded terms referring to a distant state of things that are intended to
be achieved. Removal of poverty, for instance, can be considered a goal which the government
of Ethiopia wants to pursue. Rural development, urban development, industrial development
policies are then geared to the attainment of this broad public goal. Policies, in this context, are
major instruments that are carefully formulated to move the society towards the goal. In a
democratic system which recognizes freedom of the press, of thoughts and expressions, mass
media exert a tangible influence on the formulation of policies.

The three types of roles the mass media can play in influencing public policies;

a) Information role: mass media reflect the real life problems, needs and aspirations of
various classes and groups of the society which provides valuable inputs to policy
formulation. It enlightens the policy makers with information relating to latest scientific and
technological achievements, and also with their coverage of significant events and processes
in other countries of the world. It also presents public reactions to government policies which
could be very useful for the evaluation of policy outcomes. This evaluation may lead to
major or minor changes in an existing policy.

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b) Orientation role: in countries like Ethiopia where a large number of the population lives
below the poverty line, any policy which is not directed towards attacking the problems of
poverty is unlikely to have spectacular results. A mass-oriented education policy, for
instance, has no meaning if it is not supported by a mass-oriented economic policy. The
choice, therefore, lies between elite-oriented policies and mass-oriented policies. Mass media
can assist ether the former or the later.

In any system of government, the ruling elites, by virtue of their position in the power hierarchy,
play a dominant role in the policy making. It is quite natural that as policy makers these elites
would lean towards elite oriented policies rather than mass oriented policies. By lending support
to mass oriented policies, the mass media can play a significant role in bringing about
spectacular change in the attitudes and approaches of the elite.

c) Suggestive role: mass media not only stimulate discussion of the various choices available
but also make specific suggestion in favor of one particular choice or the other. Editorial
articles of newspapers, for instance, not only make critical comments on government policies
but also suggest alternative policies or measures. Such comments and suggestions make the
policy maker‘s task easier and also enable them to arrive at a particular policy decision and to
amend or reverse wrong policy diagnoses and decisions. Furthermore, the mass media also
has a profound contribution in increasing awareness among the people and in mobilizing
public opinion that has its own consequence on policy making.

3.2.2.2.Political Parties

A political party is a group of individuals, often having some measure of ideological agreement,
who organized to win elections, operate government and determine public policy. It is a body of
persons united for promoting national interests on some particular principles on which they all
agree.

In democratic states like the USA, political parties are concerned primarily with contesting
elections in order to control the personnel government. They are, in short, concerned more with
power than with policy. Although the parties are not highly policy-oriented, they are clearly
appealing to the different segment of the society. The Democratic Party, for example, draws

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disproportionately from big city, labor, minority and ethnic voters while the Republican Party
draws disproportionately from rural, small town, and sub-urban areas, Protestants, businessmen
and professionals. These parties often come in to conflict on such issues as welfare programs,
labor legislations, business regulation, public power projects, public housing, and agricultural
price-support legislation. Their difference is also clear based on their policy inclinations on these
issues.

In the American state legislature, the importance of political parties varies significantly. In one-
party states, it is obvious that parties do not exercise much discipline over legislative voting, and
the party has little, if any, effect on policy making. In contrast, in states where both parties are
active and cohesive, parties have considerable impact on legislative decision making. When
conflict over policy occurs in such states, the function of parties is to provide alternative. In
many cities, an effort has been made to eliminate party influence on policy through the use of
nonpartisan elections for city officials. Policy is supposed to be made ‗objectively.‘

In modern societies generally, political parties often perform a function of ‗interest

aggregation;’ i.e., they seek to convert the particular demands of interest groups in to general
policy alternatives. However, the way in which parties ‗aggregate‘ interests is affected by the
number of parties. In predominantly two party systems, such as the USA and Great Britain, the
desire of the parties to gain widespread electoral support will require both parties to include in
their policy package those demands which have very broad popular support and to attempt to
avoid alienating the most prominent groups. In multi-party systems, on the other hand, parties
may do less aggregating and act as the representatives of fairly narrow sets of interests, as appear
to be the case in France. In some one-party systems, such as the Soviet Union and many third
world countries, they are the dominant force in policy-making. Generally, though, parties have a
broader range of policy concerns than do interest groups, they act more as brokers than as
advocates of particular interests in policy formulation.

In some federal states like India too, parties vary in terms of their influence up on public policy
making. Those regional parties which are closer to the national government, because of their
strong hold at regional level, seem to exercise more influence. Though the federal government
India (the ruling party at national level) has considerable policy authority by comparison, the

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strength of the regional parties to affect the public policies depends upon the extent of their
rapport with the party/parties in power at national level.

3.2.2.3.The Individual citizen

In the discussions of public policy-making, the individual citizen is often neglected. This is
unfortunate, as the individual often does seem to make a difference. Although the task of policy-
making is generally assigned to public officials, there are various instances where citizens can
directly participate in decision-making. In some of the American states (notably California) and
some countries (such as Switzerland), citizens can and do still vote directly on legislation.

Moreover, in most of the states of America, constitutional amendments are submitted to the
voters for approval. In many local jurisdictions, bond issues, increase in tax rates, local sales
taxes, the sales of liquor, operation of bingo games, etc must be authorized by the voters directly.

Despite the above justifications, citizen participation in policy-making, even in democratic

politics, is thin. Many people do not vote, engage in party activity, join pressure groups, or even
display much interest in politics. Survey research indicates, moreover, that voters are influenced
comparatively little by policy consideration when voting for candidates for public office.

However, citizen impact on policy is becoming more practical and compulsory. Even in
authoritarian regimes, the interests or desires of common citizens are consequential for public
policies. The old-style dictator will pay some attention to what his people want in order to keep
down unrest. Modern totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union, also seem concerned to
meet many citizens‘ wants even if they exclude citizens from more direct participation in policy
formulation.

Elections in democratic countries may serve indirectly to reinforce official representativeness to

citizen interests. As Charles Lindblom summarizes the argument:

The most conspicuous difference between authoritarianism and democratic regimes is that in
democratic regimes citizens choose their top policy makers in genuine elections. Some
political scientists speculate that voting in genuine elections may be an important method of
citizen influence on policy not so much because it actually permits citizens to choose their
officials and to some degree instruct these officials on policy, but because the existence of

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 genuine elections put(s) a stamp of approval on citizen participation. Indirectly, therefore, the
fact of election enforces on proximate policy makers a rule that citizens‘ wishes count on
policy making.

The rule Lindblom refers to is sometimes expressed in the aphorism that citizens have a right to
be heard and officials have a duty to listen.

Some presidential elections in the United States have been classified as ‗critical‘ because they
produce major realignments in voter coalitions and shift in public policy. For example, in the
presidential election of 1932, the Republican and Democratic candidates differ substantially on
how they propose to deal with the crisis of the great depression. The voters gave the Democrats
(Franklin D. Roosevelt) an overwhelming victory. Recently, the American voters have accorded
their vote to the Democratic candidate (Barak Obama) because of his new foreign and domestic
policy directions. In such instances, large numbers of newly elected officials, chosen because of
their stand on the critical question, enact legislation consistent with their party‘s stand. The
voters, through the electoral process, help to produce basic changes in public policy.

Some citizens, through their intellectual activities, contribute new ideas and directions to the
policy process. For example, civil rights legislation in the 1960s was certainly affected by the
activities of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and social security legislation in the 1930s by that
of Dr. Francis Townsend. In many part of the world today, individual citizens are becoming the
major source of ideas either to make policies or to revise it.

3.2.2.4. Pressure groups

Public opinion expressed by individual citizens does not reflect the intensity of view. Many
citizens lack the required expertise in both the subject matter and the procedures of policy
making. They often do not know which kind of policy issues to address to address to which
officials, with a view to wielding the greatest amount of influence. Acting alone, the individual
citizen is rarely a significant force. On the other hand, there are many citizens representing
different and conflicting interests and values. Group action is considered a more effective
method than individual action for the ordinary citizen to influence public policy. Unless large
numbers of citizens are organized for some common purpose or interest, the chances of
transmitting their messages and policy issues will become bleak (not welcoming). Interest

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/pressure groups are important means of enhancing the effect of public opinion and can
communicate more effectively with public officials on policy decisions than individual citizens.

Pressure groups influence the decisions of the government without attempting to occupy political
power. They serve as a link between individual citizens and the policy makers. To individual
citizens, pressure groups are the most important means of communication and power. They aid
them to communicate their hopes to public officials by offering personnel and expertise in the
substantive matters and the procedures of policy making. To policy makers, the interest groups
offer expertise and political support as well as the intensity of view of large number of citizens
with some common interest. In turn, the interest groups are able to create areas of influence on
citizens as well as policy makers. Sometimes, they sponsor candidates in elections for testing
support for their cause.

Interest groups appear to play an important role in policymaking in practically all countries.
Depending up on whether they are democratic or dictatorial, modern or developing, countries
may differ with respect to how groups are constituted and how legitimate they are. The exercise
of political influence by pressure groups is a predominant feature of the democratic form of
government like USA and Great Britain than they do in other authoritarian states like the Soviet
Union and China. In all systems, however, groups perform an interest articulation function; i.e.,
they express demands and present alternatives for policy action. They may also supply public
officials with much information, often of a technical sort, concerning the nature and possible
consequences of policy proposals. In doing so, they contribute to the rationality of policy-
making.

Interest groups, such as those representing organized labor, business, and agriculture,
professional, are a major source of demands for policy action by public officials in different
states today. Though their number is many and they are quite diverse in their interests,
organization and style of operation in liberal democratic countries like the USA, their role is also
becoming eminent in many countries as well. Typically, the concern of any interest group is to
influence policy in a specific subject area. Because several groups often have conflicting desires
on a particular policy issue, public officials are confronted with the necessity of having to choose
from among, or reconcile, conflicting demands. Groups that are well organized and active are
likely to fare better than groups whose potential membership is poorly organized and articulated.

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►How one group is influential than the other?

The influence of interest groups up on decisions depends on a number of factors. These may
include, other things being equal:

 the size of the group‘s membership,

 its monetary and other resources,
 its cohesiveness,
 the skill of its leadership,
 its social status,
 the presence or absence of competing organizations,
 the attitudes of public officials, and
 the site of decision-making in the political system.

Again other things remain equal, a large, well- regarded group will have more influence than a
smaller, less well-regarded groups. Also, a group may have a strong or controlling influence on
decisions in one policy area and little, if any, influence in another.

In contrast to the modern and developed nations, interest groups are fewer in developing and
underdeveloped states. In these state, they exert influence over public policy primarily through
the means of personalized relationships and overlapping elites. In developing states, the
information content of these groups is seldom rational, their goals are narrow and parochial and
they are less farsighted in comparison to interest groups in the developed nations.

►Are interest groups are the same with political parties?

Interest groups are not political parties. However, such groups are the living public behind the
parties. Their principal concern is not to hold political office but to influence the governmental
process to ensure public policy making keeping with their special interests. However, in some
countries like French and Britain (the Labor party), major political parties were grew out of
trade union movements.

In general, interest groups occupy a place of significance in the process of policy making. They
play an important role in every political set up. The present age is an age of completion and
hence a number of interest groups are in operation in different environment. They are actively

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making efforts in the direction they have kept before them. An organized interest groups claims
to represent not only those who are potentially its members, but also those who by virtue of some
common characteristics, go along with the ends pursued by the groups. The political system
which do not have strong system of parties, are subject to more direct influence on policy
making by the interest groups. Because of lack of powerful and organized political parties, the
interest groups play a dominant and direct role in legislative affairs since there is no strong
political party to moderate their influence. On the contrary, in polities which have strong,
cohesive and organized parties, interest groups are likely to be more numerous and active. Their
influence on policy formulation gets to be filtered and also subject to moderation in line with
parties interests, ideologies and programmes.

3.2.2.5. The policy think-thanks

►What do we mean by think-thanks?

Think-tanks, under this sub-section, can be defined as non-profit organizations having an

orientation mainly towards policy research and advocacy and operating at global, national,
regional or local levels. Their aim is to induce policy makers to take their positions into account
and thus affect the decision making processes at different levels of government. Some focus on
specific issues (environment, responsible citizenship, transparency, etc.), while others have
broader agendas of economic and political reform. What they all have in common is their
intent to bridge the gap between the demands of certain groups of civil society and the work of
policy makers.

Paradoxically, think-tanks act both in partnership and as a counterbalance to government

agencies. In many cases they complement and build on the work of public organizations
(particularly in the delivery of social services), while other times they act as watchdogs and
alternative sources of policy initiatives to the actions of governments. Using words from the
Freedom House Regional Think Tank Initiative:

―As alternative sources of information, research, and expert opinion, public policy
institutes, or think tanks, provide a critical balance to governmental authority.
Unencumbered by political obligations and driven by core values and principles, think-
tanks act as independent forums for debate and sources of innovative ideas and

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 recommendations. Their presence is critical for ensuring continued democratic and free
market development in the emerging democracies.‖ Freedom House (1999)

Think-tanks are generally considered to be organizations that attempt to influence policy by

producing good ideas applied to policy problems through high quality research, and then trying
to convince policymakers to implement these ideas. In a recent article on think tanks, William

Dunn argued that:

One of the main functions of think-tanks is to conduct policy analyses which offer
creative, insightful and even counterintuitive solutions for complex problems of great
public importance. Nevertheless, think- tanks are unlikely to earn a reputation for
excellence unless they concentrate on alternative solutions to a problem – rather than the
supposed certainty that a single policy will solve that problem – and judiciously employ a
strategy of multiple advocacies in reaching policy recommendations. Think-tanks must
develop specific strategies of contingent policy communication to guide the preparation
of policy documents and oral briefings. After all, the mission of think-tanks is to improve
public policy by maximizing the likelihood that policy analyses will be used to solve real-
world problems.Dunn (1996)

The role of think-tanks is pivotal in both policy formulation and its implementation. In this
regard, we argue that, think-tanks that invest resources in actual micro-policy formulation and
implementation – especially in developing countries – have a higher likelihood of influencing
policy, and can become relevant and positive actors in policymaking. They play an important
role in the formulation of policy and in increasing public awareness on certain policy issues such
as the importance of civic participation, corruption and the environment, among others.

However, the third sector can be an even more active participant in the policy process. In
particular, policy implementation think-tanks could contribute to improving the quality of
policies pursued and the effectiveness with which they are implemented, especially at the
provincial and municipal level.

We define a policy implementation think-tank as a think-tank that is involved in micro-policy

formulation, and that actively lobbies the different levels of government to promote the

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implementation of these policies. This type of organization also attempts to bridge the gap
between research and policymaking that exists especially in developing countries. In these
countries, State capacity – especially at the local level – is lower than in developed countries, and
bureaucrats are less willing or able to implement the ideas put forth by research institutions. This
means that the caveat (warning) often placed on developed country think-tanks regarding not
getting involved with actual policy implementation is counterbalanced by the added benefit of
doing so. A policy implementation think-tank would be in the upper-right quadrant. A policy
implementation think-tank is different to a typical think-tank in that its emphasis is not in
producing and publicizing research (although it does produce research when necessary to
complement the ideas of other think-tanks and researchers). Rather, the resources of the
organization are devoted to helping different levels of government implement better policies.

This can be done in two ways: either by providing technical assistance and consulting services or
by conducting advocacy campaigns to mobilize voters for a cause, so as to give incentives to
politicians to implement the desired changes.

The relevant question now is whether such an organization can play a relevant and positive role
in developing country policymaking.

In addition to the traditional contributions made by think-tanks, it can:

1) Articulate the efforts of domestic and international think-tanks and research centers, bringing
the best ideas to the hands of policymakers: this is relevant in developing countries, because
many times the bureaucracy lacks the political motivation or the ability to understand and
implement the recommendations of think tanks. Thus, an organization that concentrates on
working with the different levels of government, providing technical assistance and
consulting services can contribute to overcoming these difficulties.
2) Contribute much needed human capital at the local level of government: in many developing
countries, there are simply not enough qualified human resources to fill the necessary
positions in each province or municipality. Thus, a think tank that works on policy
implementation at the local level of government can take advantage of economies of scale
arising from the replication of projects in different regions.

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3) Help reform-minded policymakers implement their programs more effectively: in many
cases, honest, competent politicians are elected to local office. If these politicians are
successful in implementing a reform agenda, and are recognized by their electorate, the
national press, etc, this can generate a demonstration effect across jurisdictions, improving
policymaking throughout the country.

We believe that the synergies between the different activities give this type of organization the
potential of becoming a role model for think tanks throughout the region. Traditional think tanks
are not suited for this purpose, because their resources are mostly dedicated to research and
publication. Thus, however high the level of their academic production, their ideas many times
never reach the relevant policymaker, or are not implemented due to a lack of political will,
technical expertise or voter pressure.

Section III: The Policy Process in Third World Countries

 In this section, we will examine the nature and context of public policy in developing
nations. As the policy process is an intensely political matter, great attention is paid to the
nature of politics and of the state in the third world countries. In addition, we will investigate
the question of who makes policy and why. Finally, we will move from the policy-making
phase to policy implementation and examine the fierce political battles which can be fought
at this stage in the process.
3.3.1. The contribution of policy

While many factors influence the developmental record of countries, it is certainly the case that
good policy choices and their effective implementation are major explanatory variables.
Examination of the success of the eight East and Southeast Asian countries (Japan, Hong Kong,
the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) in the period
1965-90 is the clearest manifestations of this proposition.

 Could you admit that HPAEs is the result of appropriate policies?

These High-performing Asian Economies (HPAEs) enjoyed rapid and sustained economic
growth rates and were ‗usually successful‘ in sharing the fruits of this growth among the
population (WB, 1993). The HPAEs were the only group of economies with high economic

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growth and declining inequality. Shared growth has meant improved human welfare; for
example, life expectancy in the developing HPAEs increased from 56 years in 1960 to 71 years
in 1990, while the proportion of people living in absolute poverty decreased from 58 % to 17%
over the same period.

Although the WB have dubbed (called) this experience, ‗the East Asian Miracle,‘ officials
actually admit that there was little was actually miraculous. Instead, they point to ‗fundamentally
sound development policy.‘ Effective macroeconomic management (for e.g. low inflation,
competitive exchange rates) provided the strong and stable frame work for private sector
development. Banking policies improved the integrity of banking system, encouraged non-
traditional savers to utilize it and so raised the level of financial saving. An emphasis on
developing human capital was evident in policies that focused on primary and secondary
education. Agricultural policies stressed productivity and were not biased against the rural
population. Policies to limit price distortions resulted in flexible markets for capital and labor
while there was a high degree of openness to foreign ideas and technology.

The WB in its 1991development report classified this policy approach as the ‗market friendly‘
strategy. Rapid growth is achieved by governments doing less where markets work but doing
more in areas where markets cannot be relied up on for the desired outcomes. Government
responsibilities are to ensure adequate investment in people, provide a competitive environment
for private enterprises, keep the economy open to international trade and maintain a stable macro
economy. If the government tries to do more, says the bank, then it may do more harm than
good- unless its interventions are market-friendly. The northeastern HPAEs have intervened
extensively in their economies while the southeastern Asian countries have been far less
interventionists. What policy makers and administrators need to define is what a country‘s
national strategy actually is.

 Lindenberg and Ramirez (1989) have identified some common devices in order to make
national strategies (i.e., objectives and policies) realistic. These are;
1. Reconstructing the past and understanding the future- what economic strategy has the
country pursued in recent years and how successful was it? What current problems exist?

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2. Shaping the future: short-and medium-term options- what short-and medium-term
economic options might be viable for the country? What policies might be required? Which
options might be the most attractive and why?
3. Managing winners and losers- which groups might perceive themselves to be winners and
losers in the scenarios developed? What tactics might be used to maintain support for new
economic strategies?
4. Adjusting the organization to change- what organizational adjustments must be made for
any of these scenarios become a reality?

Such an approach- a policy-oriented form of environmental scanning- is broader than the

economic methodology adopted by the world bank in the East Asian Miracle and gives due
importance to political factors. It specifically identifies political management as an integral
component of policy and points to the importance of organizational reform.

3.3.2. Explanation of Third World Policy Process

National experiences with development have varied considerable. Some policies have been
effective in one place and not in others. There are countries where policy success in one sector
contrasts with failure elsewhere. To understand this situation we must enter the realm of politics
and power and examine some of the leading models which attempt to explain policy behavior in
the developing world. In this regard, let us see the distinction between society-centered and state
centered policy models constructed by Grindle and Thomas (1989).

3.3.2.1. Society-Centered Models

In society-centered models, explanations of the policy process are based in terms of the power
relations between social groups such as classes and interest groups. The mechanisms of
decisions-making take a minor role. This model includes;

a) Social class analysis- this is a characteristics of Marxist and dependency approaches. Policy
is the outcome of the conflicts between social classes. These struggles have their origin in the
economic relationships between classes which, at least in dependency theory, transcend
national boundaries to incorporate a dominant metropolitan bourgeoisie. A major concern is
to delineate dominant and subordinate classes. Policy is seen as the prerogative of the former

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 and is one method of securing the reproduction of the existing inequitable societal relations
of the capitalist mode of production. The role of the state here has often been portrayed as
functioning to provide the legal, institutional and ideological hegemony of the dominant class
or class alliance over subordinate class.

In this formulation, the state is an instrument of domination used by the ruling classes and policy
is a reflection of dominant class interests. However, with the impressive records of economic
growth in many third world countries (especially Asian countries) there has been a renewal of
interests in the identification and influence of the middle class on policy.

b) pluralism- in this approach public policy is the result of conflict, bargaining and coalition
formation among a potentially large number of societal groups, organized to protect or
advance particular interests common to their members. Power is being widely distributed
among a variety of groups, and that channels for the expression of grievances are numerous
and open. The state acts largely as an arbiter in this democratic competition and responds to
pressures coming from society. This model is simply in appropriate for many developing
countries. Even in robust third world democracies, such as Sri Lanka, interest groups who
actually influence policy-making may be few in number.

However, interest groups do exist and in some third world countries are increasing in the wake of
economic and political liberalization. Business groups, political associations, labor unions,
consumer groups, squatter associations, religious institutions, women‘s groups and NGOs are
evident in many developing countries. They all try to influence the public policy process with
varying degrees of success, and because formal channels are often poorly developed they utilize
personal ties and other strategies to secure a voice in the policy process. Even in authoritarian
regimes or partial democracies they may exert influence, but in no case does practical experience
conform to the plurality of participatory opportunities offered in western models of pluralism.

c) Public choice-has a kinship with the pluralist approach in its basic assumption about political
society being composed of organized interests. These interests are concerned with obtaining
access to public resources. Public choice theory is based on the view that people are rational,
self-interested, opportunistic, and maximizers. Both elected and non-elected officials
facilitate favored access to public goods, services and regulations. Such rent-seeking

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 behavior is common in Third-world states and goes a long way to explain why policy often
appears irrational; for example, why agriculture has been overtaxed in predominantly
agrarian society, why import substitution protection is maintained yet consumers pay high
prices for inferior products. It is the furtherance of narrow interests and not the public interest
which dominates. The weak and the poor are losers unless they can organize and articulate
their interests.
 The difference between pluralist and public choice approaches is in the perception of politics.
The former sees wise policy resulting from competing interest groups while the later has no
illusions about politics, characterizing it negatively as an often cynical and always self-
interested struggle for resources. Public choice theory is frequently associated with economic
ideas of efficiency and can support policy recommendations which come from consumer
preferences and which take advantage of market opportunities. Public choice can thus be
used as a method of criticizing the public providers of services and of looking to consumers
to find what is wanted and how it can be supplied most efficiently.

3.3.2.2. State-centered models

This model focuses on decision-making within the organizational context of the state. The
decision-maker is awarded considerably more capacity for choice while societal constraints are
less emphasized. It includes the following models;

A) Rational actor- as its name suggests, this model shares with public choice the belief that
actors (whether persons, governments or other agencies) behave as rational choosers between
alternative courses of action. But the rational actor model does not assume the actors‘
preoccupation with self-interest which takes such a central role in public choice. Also, the
focus of both analysis and action in rational actor models is on the decision-makers and the
decision- process and not on the societal players.

In its pure form, the rational actor model involves a sequence in which goals are identified,
translated in to objectives and prioritized. Alternative course of action for achieving the
objectives are evaluated, chosen and implemented. It is the stuff of a perfect world in which there
are no constraints in time, resources and knowledge. It is an ideal-type model which is never

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achieved although we have regularly encountered planners who aspire to reach some
approximation of this scientific approach in their own work.

►Is policy making is ever rational?

What has been proposed in the place of the rational ideal-type model is a series of softer
rationalities in which the effect of constraints and the sub-optimal conditions of the real world
are incorporated. Thus, decision-makers may opt for ‗satisficing‘ behavior in which they do not
search for the best possible use of resources but seek outcomes that are satisfactory and sufficient
(Simon, 1957). They operate in conditions of ‗bounded rationality‘ where time and resources are
acknowledged constraints. Decisions are thus made by the rule of thumb with limited search and
information, especially as many policy problems are recurrent. Lindblom both described and
prescribed such decision-making as incrementalist (Lindblom, 1959 and 1979). Policy making is
seen as ‗muddling through‘ rather than a search for the best policy possible. In a complex world
of today, rational decision-making capacity is limited.

Although this incrementalist model can be used describe some policy making activities in
developing countries, it is inappropriate in many circumstances. On prescriptive grounds,
incremental solutions are not the requirement for sever problems of development which require
argent and major attention. On descriptive grounds, incrementalism does not incorporate enough
of the extra-rational considerations which are evident in the politics of developing countries and
which impinge so much on the policy process.

Saasa notes that public policy-making in the third world cannot be fully converted by the rational
actor model or even incrementalism as they do not do full justice to the complexity and
turbulence of the environments in which the decision-makers operates:

It is, thus, prudent that when attempts are made to apply the contemporary, largely Euro-centric,
policy-making models to developing countries with relatively unstable regimes, minimum inputs
from the environment, resource scarcities, and rapid societal change, one needs to be aware of
these societies‘ unique circumstances (Saasa, 1985).

B) Bureaucratic politics- this decision-making model views the structure of the state as an
arena in which public officials engage in political maneuvers to secure desired policy

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 outcomes. They build coalitions, bargain and compromise, co-opt, guard information, and
devise strategies in order to further their personal or organizational objectives. The objective
is to control the overall policy process in areas which are of particular concern to the actors
involved. For example, the determination of health policy would involve the interaction of
persons in the health department.

Hospital staff and administrators would usually try to prevent reduction in spending on hospital
facilities. Other departmental players might favor the extension of low-cost primary health care
in rural areas. Specialist units, such as malaria eradication, would also be lobbying to maintain or
increase their budgets. The department of finance might be attempting to reduce health spending
as part of a structural adjustment package while other departments could well support such
initiatives to save their own funding.

►What are the some of the critics of bureaucratic model?

The bureaucratic politics model identifies the organizations of the state as being embroiled in
constant political conflict to determine which policy options are selected and how they are to be
implemented. In this regard, it may be criticized in that it awards great autonomy to officials in
the determination of policy. It also credits officials with clear policy preferences which may
simply not be there. Thus, the narrow focus of bureaucratic politics undermines some
considerations which could have a profound impact on the policy process.

C) State interest- this approach moves away from the micro-political processes occurring
between public officials and adopts a broader perspective in which the state appears to have
some autonomy in defining the nature of public problems and developing solutions to them.
It has even been evident in some neo-Marxist literature where the state demonstrates relative
autonomy in making decisions against the expressed interests of the dominant classes. The
state is seen to have interests- or to avoid reification; officials of the state identify and pursue
collective interests because of their shared location in the state. These state interests can refer
to any aspect of human activity ranging from defense of the state to attempts to change the
public morals. Different states can be seen as having different degrees of autonomy and
perhaps different interests vis-à-vis those of societal actors.

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 The great strength of this approach is that although its analytical focus is the state, the nature
of state-society relations is also of concern as this will determine the degree of autonomy of
policy elites in the state.
3.3.3. Macro-policy formulation process in developing countries
►what conditions should be taken in to consideration in macro-policy making in developing
countries?

Macro-policy represents the overarching vision of a country and contains broad statements of
national goals and priorities. It sets aspirations and defines direction for implementation
mechanisms in order to achieve targets outlined in pre-determined goals. It is a document which
relates to a number of several other key documents. In the case of developing countries, and
Africa particularly, macro policy at the national level will relate to other key documents such as
the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), New
Partnership for Africa‘s Development (NEPAD), the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
(PRSPs), the United Kingdom‘s Commission for Africa (CFA) and the United States‘
Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) initiatives. Within the context of the emerging concept
of inclusiveness and ownership of macro-policy, the implementation mechanisms for any such
macro-policy initiative generally involve actions required by state agencies, intentions to modify
the behavior of non-state institutions and agents.

The process of formulating policies is the first in a series of actions to be undertaken in order to
achieve an objective and several reasons may account for why there is even the need at all to go
through the macro policy formulation initiative. Every policy initiative has an objective to
achieve and additionally policies determine the performance of economies at the national and
international level. For instance the reference to the 1980s and 90s as ‗lost decades‘ for sub
Saharan Africa (SSA) has partially been attributed to the implementation of inappropriate
policies.

The PRSP process for instance has the overarching objective of alleviating poverty. In
formulating policy to address such an issue the building blocks need to be put in place, thus the
causes of poverty have to be identified, just as the nature and incidence of poverty. Additionally,
there is the need to define how countries intend to reduce poverty which could be through a
number of major policy decisions – increasing public spending on primary health care and/or
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basic education. A policy formulation process will determine the likely steps to take in other to
achieve the ultimate goal.

Major policy decisions are as time bound as they are time constrained thus in order to arrive at
appropriate outcomes, a process of formulation is required. Policy decisions cannot wait, and
once taken it takes a very long time if it should be reversed. This therefore calls into play a
careful analysis of the policy decision at the planning phase before it is implemented. To combat
the plethora of health problems requires in depth research and huge amount of tangible
resources. Expected outcomes take quite some time to manifest, reversing an inappropriate
policy will further stretch into later periods.

A corollary (effect) of the time-sensitive nature of macro-policies is buttressed (supported) by

the resistance that greeted the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s. It was felt that the
SAPs, wherever they were implemented, saw deterioration in standards of living; reduced access
to public services; devastated environment; and plummeted employment prospects among others.

Interestingly this policy was meant to affect the lives of a people positively. In the wake of
resistance the policy had to be revised and certain mitigating measures had to be implemented. A
diligently undertaken formulation process for such a policy would have come up with some of
the concerns raised by its critics, for instance, it could have detected that user-fees, on basic
social services, for a people living on less than $1 a day was unrealistic and unacceptable; that a
reduction of support to social programs such as education and health for a people with
disproportionate numbers of illiterate living with inadequate health facilities could be
detrimental.

3.3.4. Macro-policies in Africa

►What do you think are the basis of macro-policies in Africa?

It has been said of Africa that ―fresh starts for the continent are nothing new‖. Over the last four
to five decades, the continent has witnessed and experienced a list of macro policy shifts and
changes both at the national and the international levels. At the national level there have been
such policy initiatives as the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), the Highly Indebted Poor

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Country Debt Relief Initiative (HIPC) and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP). There
is the Lagos Plan of Action and the New Partnership for Africa‘s Development (NEPAD) at the
regional level and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the international level. Let us
see these macro-policy initiatives turn by turn.

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP): were economic policies designed and implemented by
the two Breton Woods Institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank,
which countries followed in order to qualify for new loans and helped them make debt
repayments on older debts owed to commercial banks, governments and the World Bank.

Although SAPs are designed for individual countries these policies had common guiding
principles. The features of a typical SAP policy included export-led growth; privatization and
liberalization; and the efficiency of the free market. They generally required countries to devalue
their currencies against the dollar; lift import and export restrictions; balance their budgets and
not overspend; and remove price controls and state subsidies. Resistance to the adverse nature of
the policy on beneficiary countries led to its demise after several losses of lives through rioting.

Highly Indebted Poor Country Debt Relief Initiative (HIPC): was first launched in 1996 by the
IMF and World Bank, with the aim of ensuring that no poor country faces a debt burden it
cannot manage. The Initiative entails coordinated action by the international financial
community, including multilateral organizations and governments, to reduce to sustainable levels
the external debt burdens of the most heavily indebted poor countries. Following a
comprehensive review in 1999, a number of modifications were approved to provide faster,
deeper and broader debt relief and to strengthen the links between debt relief, poverty reduction,
and social policies culminating into what came to be referred to as the enhanced HIPC debt relief
initiative.

 The HIPC initiative had certain eligibility criteria which among others included that a
beneficiary country must:
(1) be International Development Association – only (IDA-only) and Poverty Reduction and
Growth facility – eligible (PRGF-eligible);
(2) face an unsustainable debt burden, beyond traditionally available debt-relief mechanisms;

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 (3) establish a track record of reform and sound policies through IMF- and IDAsupported
programs; and
(4) have developed a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) through a broad-based
participatory process.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs): describes the macroeconomic, structural and
social policies and programs that a country will pursue over several years to promote broad-
based growth and reduce poverty, as well as external financing needs and the associated sources
of financing.

They are prepared by governments in low-income countries through a participatory process

involving domestic stakeholders and external development partners, including the IMF and the
World Bank. Five core principles underlying the PRSP development approach states that poverty
reduction strategies should be: country-driven, promoting national ownership of strategies
through broad-based participation of civil society; result-oriented and focused on outcomes that
will benefit the poor; comprehensive in recognizing the multidimensional nature of poverty;
partnership-oriented, involving coordinated participation of development partners (government,
domestic stakeholders, and external donors); and based on a long-term perspective for poverty
reduction.

New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD): is a pledge by African leaders, based on a
common vision and a firm and shared conviction, that they have a pressing duty to eradicate
poverty and to place their countries, both individually and collectively, on a path of sustainable
growth and development, and at the same time to participate actively in the world economy and
body politic. The objective of NEPAD is, to provide an impetus to Africa's development by
bridging existing gaps in priority sectors to enable the continent catch up with developed parts of
the world. NEPAD is envisaged as a long-term vision of an African-owned and African-led
development program. The long term objective of NEPAD is to: eradicate poverty in Africa and
to place African countries, both individually and collectively, on a path of sustainable growth
and development and thus halt the marginalization of Africa in the globalization process; and
promote the role of women in all activities.

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Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): is a blueprint in development aimed at addressing the
needs of the world‘s poor particularly eradicating the incidence of extreme poverty and hunger
by the year 2015. There are eight goals and eighteen targets. The goals include: Eradicate
extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and
empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria
and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for
development.

The success at achieving these goals requires sustained action by all stakeholders between now
and the year 2015. Issues and concerns have been raised at the ability of poor nations achieving
these goals judging from the slow progress that is being made at some of the major targets. The
2006 United Nations‘ report on the MDGs posits that while some of the goals and targets are
firmly within achievable limits, there is a great deal of challenge meeting others.

►What could you understand by Pro-poor macro-policies?

One of the overriding concerns of policy initiative in Africa has been how to alleviate poverty
since it is the one most important development issue that sets the progress of the continent back.

Thus objectives of the above outlined policies either at the national, regional or international
levels has been to arrive at this outcome. Thus SAP for instance aimed at reducing poverty by
embarking on free market policies; HIPC initiative through lessening the debt burden of
developing countries to free up resources for spending on social services; and the PRSPs through
broad-based poverty reducing policies.

The essential ingredients of poverty reduction informed the pro-poor policies – namely
expenditure on social services, human development and rural development. These policy
initiatives have achieved some reasonable level of success, however the modification to and the
review of these initial policies reinforces the need and importance of paying attention to detail in
the macro policy formulation. For instance, SAPs were abandoned after a barrage of criticisms
had been leveled against the policy initiative, in fact degenerating into violent resistance and
rioting. It was modified incorporating certain mitigating measures for the social costs of
adjustment. The HIPC debt relief initiative was modified into enhanced HIPC and most recently
it incorporates the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI). The MDRI – seeks to provide for

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 100 percent relief on eligible debt from three multilateral institutions – the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank and
the African Development Bank (AfDB) – to a group of low-income countries advance toward the
MDGs.

Chapter four

The Process of Policy Making and Impact of Globalization in Making and

Implementing Policies

This chapter emphasis on the process of policy-making/ formulation, the nature of public
problems and its analysis, how public problems come to the attention of policy makers, how
policy proposals are formulated to deal with particulars, and how a specific proposal is chosen
for adoption from among the competing alternatives. In this process, policy alternatives are
defined, designed and formulated, and a preliminary assessment based on their feasibility is
conducted.

We will also see the impact of globalization in policy making and implementation under the
second section of the chapter. Here, factors that needs to be kept in mind while making public
policy will be addressed. In addition, activities to check your understanding of the ideas
incorporated under the chapter were also included.

Up on the successful completion of this chapter, learners will be able to;

 Describe the policy-making process,

 Realize the dynamics of policy-making process,
 Justify the problems policy makers may face through the policy process,
 Identify the difference between policy-making and policy implementation,
 Analyze the impact of globalization on policy-making and implementation.
4.1.1. Identification of Policy Issues or Problems and Documenting Existing Conditions
 Studies of policy formulation should give due attention to the nature of the public problems. The
nature of the problem- for example, whether it is foreign or domestic- would help us to

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determine the nature of the policy process. Again, the evaluation of policy requires information
on the substance of the original problem in order to assess effectiveness, among other things.

Issues become part of the public agenda when there is a shared perception that a problem must
be solved, an issue resolved, or an opportunity realized. But everyone does not share the same
definition of problem. Existing conditions provide a reference point against which possible
actions are compared. The task of documenting existing conditions would help policy makers
identify and realize serious issues.

►How could you understand a public problem?

For policy purposes, a problem can be formally defined as a condition or situation that produces
needs or dissatisfactions on the part of people for which relief or redress is sought. This may be
done by those directly affected by others acting on their behalf. Such matters as low income,
unclear air, unwholesome food, the actions of foreign government, etc may become problems if
they produce sufficient anxiety, tensions, and dissatisfaction as to cause people to seek relief or
redress. The point to be made here is that though there are all kinds of needs and problems, only
those that move people to action become policy problems. Thus, when a group, for example, has
low income but accepts this condition and neither does anything about it nor others in its behalf,
then, according to the stated definition, no problem exists. Problems are to be articulated to exist.

Matters can be defined as problems, and therefore relief sought, by persons other than those
directly affected. For example, these days poverty was defined as a public problem in Ethiopia
and a war on poverty was declared more because of the actions of public officials and other
donor agencies, than because of the actions of the poor themselves.

A third point is that the definition of a problem is a political process whose outcome will affect
the solutions sought. Public policy in this case, is shaped by priorities set by the government to
solve a given problems.

A fourth point is that while problems are persistent, how they are defined may change overtime.

For example, in the 19th century, alcoholism (drunkenness) was viewed as a personal problem,
the result of one‘s evil, wicked, or sinful ways, and therefore as one‘s just deserts. Early in the

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20th century, it become more common to view drunkenness as a social problem, as the response
of some individuals to the social, family, and other pressures placed up on them. More recently,
alcoholism (not drunkenness) has been defined as an illness (i.e., a pathological condition)
requiring medical treatment, whatever its immediate personal causes. As the definition of the
problem has changed, so have the social attitudes toward it tended to change. Our concern now is
not merely with problems but with public problems. What characteristics or qualities make a
problem public?

Most people would agree that the fact that John Smith‘s car is out of gasoline is a private
problem, whereas the widespread shortage of gasoline in a community or region is a public
problem. What distinguishes private problems from public problems? Public problems are those
that have a broad effect, including consequences for persons not directly involved. Problems that
have a limited effect, being of concern only to one or a few persons who are directly involved
can be viewed as private.

►Discuss on any case where private problem become a public problem?

However, a private individual may seek to publicize his problem and enlist in the cause others in
a similar situation. Directly or indirectly, may people become involved or perceive themselves as
being affected. Hence a public problem exists and a bill may be introduced in the legislature to
solve it.

But, why are some matters, apart from the breadth of their consequences, seen as public
problems requiring action while others are not? The following discussion on the policy agenda
should provide some insight in to this question.

4.1.2. Get issues on the agenda: A council member has little or no power acting alone. If
there is an issue or problem that should be addressed by your city or county, it has to be
put on the public agenda. Some issues are so important that there is a consensus that
something must be done. However, your issue may be in competition with others for time
and attention. The support of other members of the legislative body is needed to commit
time and resources to study the issue. The same is true for the chief executive. A budget
is needed to carry out the studies and conduct the processes needed to bring resolution to
important policy issues.

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There are many catalysts for new or revised public policies. An economic calamity, such as the
closing of a mill in the community, might generate a need for a new economic development
policy. Technological innovations, such as networked computers and the Internet, are raising a
myriad of technology policy issues for local governments today. Ecological shifts brought about
by dramatic growth and development threatens Salmon species, requiring governments to
respond. On some issues the community may have no choice but to act because of federal or
state requirements like the Endangered Species Act and the Growth Management Act. On other
issues, there may be local discretion to address them or not. These policy issues will need the
consent and support of other elected officials to place them on the local agenda.

The policy-maker must be prepared to explain why action is necessary and why this issue is
more important than other issues that compete for time, attention, and resources. What is the
problem that needs to be solved? What are the implications of not acting? What is at stake? Why
is government involvement or action required? Can someone else, such as a non-profit entity,
address this problem?

 What is policy agenda? What type of demands (problems) constitutes policy agenda? What is a
political priority?

One constantly hears/reads about demands being made by this group or that individual for action
by some governmental body on some problem, whether it is rough streets or crime therein, the
price of grains, or industrial monopoly. Of the thousands and thousands of demands made up on
government, only small portion receive serious attention from public policy makers. Those
demands that policy makers either do chose or feel compelled to act upon constitute the policy
agenda. A policy agenda usually designates a ranking of agenda items, with some being
considered more important or pressing than others.

To achieve an agenda status, a public policy must be converted in ton an issue. An issue arises
when a public with a problem seeks or demands governmental action, and there is public
disagreement over the best solution to the problem. A rising crime rate is a public problem,
disagreement over what to do about it, f any, becomes an issue.

There will be a number of policy agendas in a political system. Cob and Elder identified two
basic types of agendas: the systemic agenda and the institutional (or governmental) agenda. The

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systemic agenda consists of all issues that are commonly perceived by members of the political
community as meriting public attention and as involving matters within the legitimate
jurisdiction of existing governmental authority. A systemic agenda will exist in every national,
state and local political system.

The systemic agenda is essentially a discussion agenda. Action to a problem requires that it be
brought before a governmental institution with authority to take appropriate action. An
institutional or governmental agenda is composed of those problems to which public officials
feel obliged to give serious and active attention. Since there are a variety of points at which
policy decisions can be made, there are also a variety of institutional agendas like legislative,
presidential, administrative, and judicial agendas. An institutional agenda is an action agenda and
will be more specific and concrete than a systemic agenda. For example, where crime in the
streets may be of systemic concern, the legislature will be confronted with more specific
proposals for dealing with this problem area, like financial aid to local law-enforcement
agencies. Below is the agenda formation process:

Private problem public problem issues systemic agenda institutional agenda

►How issues achieve institutional agenda status?

It would probably not be possible to get complete agreement on the content of a particular
agenda. At any given time, many issues will be contending for the attention of public officials;
and only a few will succeed because officials lack the time, resources, interest, or will to
consider all of them. However, inability to enumerate all the items on a policy agenda does not
destroy the usefulness of the concept for policy analysis. Thus, agenda-building is a competitive
political process.

►What determines, then, whether an issue secures a place on an agenda?

According to David Truman, interest groups are often able to place issues on an institutional
agenda, but they by no means account for all issues achieving agenda status. Political leadership
may be an important factor in agenda setting. Political leaders (presidents, prime ministers, etc),
whether motivated by considerations of political advantage, concern for the public interest, or
both, may seize up on particular problems, publicize them and propose solutions. The president,

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for example, has a prominent role to play as an agenda setter in American politics, and
presidential legislative recommendations almost automatically go on the congressional agenda.

Members of congress may also sometimes act as agenda setters when they encountered critical
problems while campaigning in their areas. There are also some ‗activist legislators,‘ motivated
by a desire to promote social change and anxious to gain reputation as reformers who constantly
search for issues that might be transformed in to new items on the discretionary agendas of the
parliament.

Items may achieve agenda status and be acted upon (brought to the attention of policy-makers
and put on the policy agenda) as a consequence of some kind of crisis or spectacular event, such
as natural disaster, protest activities (violence) in America such as the 1960s voters right march
and civil right issues, demonstrations in relation to women‘s and gay‘s rights in recent years, etc
had called attention to their problem and kept at the top of the national policy agenda.

Particular problems or issues may attract the attention of the communication media and, through
their reportage, either be converted in to agenda items or, if already on the agenda, be given more
salience. In the mid-1960s, once poverty became a major agenda item, the news media helped
keep the war on poverty in the public‘s eye by reporting fully many of the difficulties and errors
in the conduct of the anti-poverty campaign. Currently, the media is also widely disseminating
the government‘s strategy to end poverty in Ethiopia. Whatever their motives, as important
opinion-shapers they help structure the political agenda. While both the conventions concerning
how the news media are to operate and the compelling forces of some events will limit somewhat
the discretion the media have in selecting the events they call to the public attention, they
nonetheless do have much leeway (scope).

 Do all the public problems reach the policy agenda?

 It should be apparent that all public problems do not reach the policy agenda. Policy- makers
do not feel compelled to deal with some problems. To account for their inaction, the concept
of non- decision appears as a useful analytical and explanatory tool. Non-decision making
has been defined as a means by which demands for change in the existing allocation of
benefits and privileges in the community can be suffocated before they are even voiced; or

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 kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or
destroyed in the decision-implementation stage of the policy process.
 There are various ways by which problems may be kept off a systemic or institutional
agenda. These may include;
1) Force may be utilized, as in South America during the 1950s and 1960s by various white
groups to stifle black demands for equal rights.
2) Prevailing values and beliefs-political culture- may operate to deny agenda status to
particular problems or policy alternative. The belief concerning private property and
capitalism have kept the issue of railroad nationalization from ever becoming a real agenda
item in the west.
3) The crucial problem in politics is ‗the management of conflicts, and no regime could
endure issues that did not cope with this problem.‘ All politics, all leadership, all
organizations involves the management of conflicts. All conflict allocates space in the
political universe. The consequences of conflict are so important that it is inconceivable that
any regime would survive without making an attempt to shape the system. To survive, then,
political leaders and organizations must prevent problems or issues that would threaten their
existence from reaching the political arena (i.e. achieving agenda status). But the kinds of
problems they are resistant to will demand upon what kind of leaders and organizations they
are, whether, for example, conservative republican, authoritarian, or democratic.

In the study of public policy-making it is important to know why some problems are dealt with
and others are neglected or suppressed. Recall that public policy is determined not only by what
government does do but also by what it does not do.

 Discuss on policy actions and inactions of the Ethiopian government taking foreign
policy as a case?
4.1.3. Define goals and objectives: Policy action requires public support, or at a minimum, a
working majority of the legislative body. The development of goals is an important part
of the search for agreement. Conceptually, the idea is to move from the more general to
the specific: first reaching agreement on broad principles before getting to specific
means.

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Goals are qualitative in nature, for example: create a community where people can live, work,
and play in an environment that is safe, vibrant, and aesthetically pleasing; preserve greenbelts
and natural areas; provide for the efficient and safe movement of people and goods. Goal
development can be a time-consuming process that requires the full attention of the governing
board. All members should participate. There will need to be give and take among the
participants. Goals should reflect what the governing board wants to accomplish. Organizations
cannot do everything at once. Setting goals helps prioritize where time, energy, and resources go.

Objectives are quantitative, providing yardsticks to measure goal achievement. Some examples
are: create 1,500 new affordable housing units by the year 2005, acquire outright or purchase the
development rights to preserve 1,000 acres of greenbelts by the year 2005, and improve
intersections in the downtown so they function no worse than level of service at or near the
capacity of the roadway, during morning and afternoon peak hours.

4.1.4. Generate alternative: What options are there for attaining the policy-making body‘s
goals? It is important to consider a range of reasonable alternatives. If alternatives
favored by an influential interest group are excluded, it will be very difficult to reach a
decision that has strong support.
 While generating alternatives:
 Do not prematurely lock into one choice. That will impede your ability to build a consensus
and to bring other interests over to your position.
 Be respectful of costs to government. All levels of government are expected to do more with
less. This is especially true for local government. Are there low or no cost solutions? Think
creatively.
 Be mindful of ongoing costs. These have to be budgeted. For example, if the city spends
money to purchase land and develop a park, it also needs to pay for ongoing maintenance.
 Think of what it will take to implement your solution, including administrative costs. Policy
that cannot be implemented is ineffective. The more complex a solution, the more likely it is
to meet with resistance.
4.1.5. Evaluate alternatives: This task will likely fall mainly to staff and will often be
addressed through formal process requirements such as the preparation of environmental
impact statements. Some key considerations are:

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  Address the costs and consequences of doing nothing.
 Recognize that there are tradeoffs and costs to others. Anticipate criteria that are
important to others. You lose credibility if they are ignored. The same weight does not
have to be placed on other interests‘ criteria, but the real impacts cannot be ignored. In
many cases, there are legal requirements to address the impacts.
 Test the sensitivity of assumptions. How would the findings and conclusions change if
the assumptions were modified?

4.1.6. The formulation of policy proposals

 Policy formulation involves the development of pertinent and acceptable proposed courses
of action for dealing with public problems. Policy formulation does not always result in a
proposed law, executive order, or administrative rule. Policy-makers may decide not to take
positive action on some problems i.e. the fact that a public problem is on the policy agenda
does not mean that positive government action will be taken. Awareness of a problem does
not guarantee positive government action, although unawareness or non-concern pretty much
ensures inactions.
 Who are to get involved in the formulation of public policy? As seen above, there are various
actors involved in the formulation of a policy proposal. The executive branch of the
government (especially the president/prime minister and their chief aides or advisors) has
been the major source of initiative in the development of policy proposals. The
members of parliament have come to expect the executive to provide them with draft bills
embodying the recommendations of chief executives.
 Many policy proposals are developed by officials (both career and appointed) in the
administrative departments and agencies. Concerned with governmental programmes in
different field of activities (like agriculture, foreign policy, health, law enforcement, etc),
they become aware of policy problems and develop proposals to deal with them. These are
transmitted to the executive and parliament to for their consideration and many such
proposals will involve modification of existing laws.

Special study groups or advisory commissions, composed of private citizens and officials, are
sometimes created by the head of the government to examine particular policy areas and to

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develop policy proposals. Such advisory commissions are employed both to develop policy
proposals and to help win support for them through their usually prestigious membership.
Legislatures are also involved in policy formulation. In the course of legislative hearings and
investigations, through contacts with various administrative officials and interest-group
representatives, and on the basis of their own interests and activity, legislators receive
suggestions for action on problems and formulate proposed courses of actions.

In some policy areas, they are doing much of the policy formulation. Finally, interest groups
often play a major role in a policy formulation, sometimes going to the legislature with specific
proposals for legislation or they may work with legislative and executive officials of the
enactment of one officially proposed policy, perhaps with some modifications to suit their
interests. At the regional (state) level, interest groups often play an important role in the
formulation of legislation, especially on technical and complex matters, because state legislators
lack the time and staff resources needed to cope with them. Thus, a policy proposal could be
formulated by both private and official actors, basically in the context of developed countries.

4.1.7. Policy adoption (making decision on the best alternative)

A policy decision involves action by some official person or body to approve, modify, or reject a
preferred policy alternative. In positive fashion it takes such forms as the enactment of
legislation or the insurance of an executive order. It is important here to distinguish between
policy decisions, which significantly affect the content of public policy, and routine decisions,
which involve the day-to-day application of policy. Furthermore, a policy decision is usually the
culmination of a variety of decisions, some routine, made during the operation of the policy
process.
What is typically involved at the policy decision stage is not selection from among a number of
full-blown policy alternatives but, rather, action on what we have chosen to call a preferred
policy alternative- one for which the proponents of action think they can win approval, even
though it does not provide all that they might like. As the formulation process moves toward the
decision state, some proposals will be rejected, others accepted, still others modified; differences
will be narrowed; bargains will be struck, until ultimately, in some instances, the policy decision
will be only a formality. In other words, the question will be in doubt until the votes are counted

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or the decision is announced. Although private individuals and organizations also participate in
making policy decisions, the formal authority rests with public officials- legislators, executives,
administrators and judges. In democracies, the task of making policy decision is most closely
identified with the legislature, which is designed to represent the interests of the populace.

One frequently hears that a majority of the legislature represent the majority of the people. Policy
decisions made by the legislature are usually accepted as legitimate, as being made in the proper
way and hence binding on all concerned. Generally, decisions made by public officials are
regarded as legitimate if the officials have legal authority to act and meet accepted standards in
taking action.

4.1.7.1. The decision making criteria

 What factors influence policy decisions at individual or collective level?

Decision making can be understood either as an individual or a collective process (majority‘s

approval of a specific policy proposal). An individual may be subject to a variety of influencing
factors when deciding how to vote on or resolve a particular policy question. Public officials
frequently make statements explaining their decisions in the parliament record, newspapers,
press conferences, speeches, etc. The reasons they give for their decisions may be that acceptable
to the public at large or to important constituencies. There are a number of criteria that
influence policy choice as to be discussed below;

1) Values: preferences or standards that a person may employ in making decisions, including
political, organizational, policy, and personal values. The decision-makers values are
probably the most direct and pervasive criteria for deciding what to do. Officials often
develop strong commitments to particular ways of handling a given problems, such as public
rather than private development of hydroelectric power site. Decisions may also be made on
the basis of one‘s ideology, which may be defined as a coherent set of values and beliefs
concerning government and politics.
2) Political party affiliation: party loyalty is a significant criterion for most members of
parliament, although it is often difficult to separate from such other considerations as
leadership influence and ideological commitments. Party loyalties or attachments vary in
importance among issue areas. Party conflict has developed on such matters as agricultural

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 price supports, business relation, labor and social welfare legislations. In America for
example, democrats have tend to favor high price support and production control for
agriculture, while Republicans have preferred lower price support and fewer controls. In
other issue areas, such as civil rights, veterans` benefits, public works and foreign policy, it
has often been difficult or impossible to delineate distinct and persistent party differences.
3) Constituency interest: when party interests and constituency interests conflict on some
issue, the parliamentarians should vote their constituency. This is because it is the voters in
their district who hold the ultimate power to hire and fire. In acting for the interests of their
constituents, representatives may act as a delegate carrying out the instructions of their
constituents, or they may act a trustee and exercise their best judgment in their behalf when
voting on policy questions.
4) Public opinion: our concern here is with the effect of public opinion on the actions of
policy- makers. Are the choices of policy-makers shaped or determined by public opinion?
Does public opinion serve as a decision criterion? Though small proportion of the general
public have any awareness of the particular policy decision by the government (especially in
developing countries), yet, the general boundaries and direction of public policy may be
shaped by public opinion. The existing public attitudes demanding action in certain areas,
like foreign policy, have an impact on the general directions of policy letting much discretion
on details to the government. For example, during the 1960s the growing opposition to the
Vietnam War has brought a change in foreign policy of America and it appears to have
contributed to President Johnson‘s decision not to run for re-election in
1968. In summary, policy-makers do not appear unaffected in their choices by public
opinion.
The relationship between public opinion and policy actions, however, is neither simple nor
direct. But the elected public officials, who totally ignores public opinion and does not
include it among their decision criteria, should therefore be so foolish, and likely to find
themselves out of luck at the polls.
5) Deference (respect, regard, awe): officials confronted with the chance of making a decision
may decide how to act by deferring to the judgments of others. Administrative officials often
do make decisions in accordance with the directives of department heads, chief executives or
the suggestions of members of parliaments. Parliamentarians often votes on issues that are of

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 little interest to them (because they do not affect their constituents), or on which they have
little information, or which are highly complex in nature. On such matters, they often decide
how to vote by seeking the advice of other legislators whose judgment they trust, whether
party leaders, committee chairmen, or policy experts. When a member of a parliament is
unable to decide how to vote on the basis of his own analysis of an issue, deference to
someone whose judgment he trusts is a reasonably rational, low-information strategy for
making decisions.
6) decision rules: those confronted with the task of making many decisions often develop rules
of thumb, or guidelines, to focus attention on particular facts and relationships and thereby
both simplify and regularize the decision making process. Since there is no set of decision
rules common to all decision makers, what guidelines, if any, apply in a particular situation is
a matter to be determined by empirical investigation.

4.1.7.2. Styles of Policy Decision Making

Most policy decisions of any magnitude are made by coalitions, which often must take the form
of numerical majorities. Under this sub-section, three styles of decision making will be
examined; namely bargaining, persuasion and command. Our focus will turn from individuals‘
decisions to decision-making as a collective process.

1. Bargaining: is the most common style of decision making in different political systems.
Bargaining is a process in which two or more persons in a position of power or authority
adjust their, at least partially, inconsistent goals in order to formulate a course of action
that is acceptable but not necessarily ideal to the participants.

In short, it involves negotiation, give-and- take, and compromise in order to reach a mutually
acceptable position. In plural societies where constitutional practices such as federalism, the
separation of powers, and bicameral legislatures are serving for fragmenting and dispersing
political power among many decision points, major policy decisions at the national level often
require the approval of all branches of government, plus acceptance by state or local
governments and affected private groups such as labor unions, business organizations,
professional associations, environmental groups, civil rights groups, etc.

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2. Persuasion: involves an attempt to convince others of the correctness or value of one‘s
position, and thereby cause them to adopt it as their own. Unlike the bargainer, the persuader
seeks to build support for what he/she wants without having to modify his/her own position.
This may involve trying to convince others of the merits of one‘s position, or the benefits that
will accrue to them or their constituents if they accept it, or some combination of the two.
The persuader thus seeks to induce others to do it his/her way. For example, within the
parliament, appeals by party leaders as, ―your party needs your support on this issue, can‘t
you go along?‖ is essentially persuasive in content.
3. Command: bargaining involves interaction among peers while command involves
hierarchical relations among super-ordinates and subordinates. It is the ability of those in
superior position to make decisions that are binding upon those who come within their
jurisdiction. They may use sanctions in the form of either rewards or penalties to reinforce
their decisions. Thus, the subordinate who faithfully accepts and carries out a superior‘s
decision may be rewarded with favorable recognition or a promotion, while the one who
refuses to comply may be fired or demoted. In practice, the three policy decision styles
(bargaining, persuasion and command) often become blended in a given decisional situation.
The chief-executives, although they have an authority to make decisions unilaterally, may
nonetheless also bargain with subordinates, modifying their position somewhat accepting
some of their suggestions, in turn, for more ready and enthusiastic support of their decisions.
Within agencies, subordinates often seek to convert command relationships in to bargaining
relationships. However, bargaining is the most common form of decision-making in
countries like the USA.

 Is it possible to depoliticize policy decisions?

Foucault first used the term ‗political technology’ to relate to the way an essentially political
problem is removed from the realm of political discourse and recast in the neutral language of
science. Policy is set out as objective, neutral, value-free, and is often termed in legal or
scientific language, which emphasizes its rationality. In this way, the political nature of the
policy is hidden by the use of technical language, which emphasizes rationality and
objectivity. This masking of the political under the cloak (cover) of neutrality is a key feature of
modern power (Shore and Wright, 1997).

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An important effect of the simplification and de-politicization of the policy process is that it
creates a distance between policy makers and those affected by policy. This creates a mechanism
whereby policy makers are absolved (free) from responsibility for the outcomes of a policy
decision.
4.1.8. Public Policy Implementation
One of the topics in policy studies that have been gaining attention has been the field of
implementation studies. Implementation is the stage in the policy process in which public policy
decision-making must be translated into action. It has long been considered one of the most
difficult, and critical stage in the policy process – the phase in which any deficiencies in the
design of the policy or any vulnerability with respect to the external environment will become
visible. Experienced administrators know that they will be ultimately judged on their ability to
master the ‗art of getting things done‘ rather than by their good intentions.
►How implementation affects the whole policy making process?
Implementation, then, has to be understood as being part of the broader policymaking process,
and that it has a relationship to other parts of the policy cycle: design, problem definition,
formulation, and evaluation. Implementation is a complex process which involves more than
simply the management of government programs; it involves understanding the conditions under
which policy can be expected to be successful. Which is to say that there is no one uniform
model for policy construction and implementation, rather it has to be environmentally and
culturally specific. What, then, determines whether or not a policy will be successfully
implemented? According to conventional wisdom, successful implementation occurs when:
(1) The policy correctly identifies the problem, which means that the enabling legislation
or other directives that mandate policy objectives need to be clear and consistent and provide
substantive criteria for resolving goals conflicts;
(2) The policy contains unambiguous directives that organize the implementation so as
to maximize the likelihood that the target population will behave as desired. Moreover,
it has to incorporate a sound theory identifying the principal factors and causal linkages
affecting policy objectives;
(3) The enabling legislation has to structure the implementation process in order to
maximize the probability that implementing officials and target groups will perform as
desired;

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(4) Those implementing the policy should possess the necessary managerial and political
skills and commitment to its goals;
(5) The policy is actively supported by organized constituency groups and key legislators
and/or other public officials throughout the implementation process; and
(6) the relative priority of the policy objectives, especially as they have manifested
themselves in statutory form, are not undermined over time by conflicting public policies or
by changes in relevant socioeconomic conditions that limit the policy‘s purposes or political
support.
In this vein, implementation is not purely a technical enterprise, but must be viewed as an
exercise in continuous problem solving. Consequently policy failure may be as much a function
of inadequate problem definition or policy design as administrative malfeasance or nonfeasance.
And administrative failure could be viewed as stemming from the inattention paid by legislators
to program constraints during the policy decision. Problems or failures in implementation are as
much a consequence of flaws in the policy formulation process and in the environment in which
implementation occurs, as they are to specific problems of implementation per se.
Implementers are involved at every stage of the policymaking process: agenda setting, problem
identification, formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Polumbo and Calista (1990) suggest
that when one opens what they refer to as the ―black box‖ of implementation one discovers that
formulation is only a small part of policymaking. On the contrary, much of policy is actually
made during implementation itself. And it is for this reason that implementation is an important
aspect of policy studies. Good implementation must demonstrate an awareness of the
characteristics of the society in which it is to take place. The implementation analyst must know
a range of access points where formulation and implementation can influence the course of
events; and s/he must also recognize which social and institutional factors in a specific
implementation effort cannot easily be affected through present action. Those factors figuring
into implementation analysis include: available resources, economic capacities, technological
know-how, cooperation from the people, and prescribed (constitutional) political rules.

4.1.8.1. Approaches in Public Policy Implementation

These approaches are based on the modes of governance. Government is a kind of system with
many inward and outward relationship and channels. Governance refers to the processes and

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structures through which the power and authority are exerted, including the decision
making processes, i.e., who participates and how. Thompson et al (1990) has identified three
modes of social harmony or governance including: hierarchy markets and networks. Today,
hierarchical governance is replaced by the market governance, network governance or both of
them. Below we are going to describe policy implementation challenges based on the Thompson
categorization for governance modes.
A) Hard Governance: In this mode of governance, the top-down approach for policy
implementation is privileged so the vertical character of policy and administration is
maintained by clientele politics, as well as by the desire of government to serve the particular
groups of the society. Clientele groups that are involved in the public sector often believe that
they are deserved to receive some services from their organizations.
The organizations serving clients have many of the same interests in maintaining their
exclusive position as do the clientele groups, even more perhaps. Bureaucratic organizations
want to maintain their client-based approach and their close relationships with their clients in
order to preserve their budgets and their influence within political circles. In this part of the
game of bureaucratic policies clients are a resource and a source of power, so creating
coordination among the programs, even closely related programs is difficult (Guy Peters,
2005).
B) Semi- Hard Governance: this governance mode adopts a separation strategy as follows:
First, it centralizes the policy making process (especially policy goals and policy budgets)
exclusively in the hands of a core executive at the heart of the government. It makes a tightly
-knit network of the senior ministers and civil servants, i.e. it separates the policy making
process from administration system & policy implementation. Secondly, it decentralizes the
policy implementation process; i.e.it leaves the implementation of a single policy to many
miscellaneous parallel agencies (including executive agencies, local authorities, private
contractors and voluntary bodies). So this approach reduces the control of political
authorities on the lower levels of the government. Assigning the service providing
responsibility for some special executive agencies leads to the establishment of a single-
purpose organization, which intensifies the challenges of inter-organizational coordination
(Olsen, 2007).

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C) Soft Governance: networks are structures that are constituted of multiple interdependent
factors. In policy literature sometimes networks are considered as one of the most important
tools for policy making and policy implementation (Kenis& Raab, 2003). The governance
concept is more relaying on the network concept, but the disagreements and various interests
in the networks cause many conflicts in decision making. So the extent that the networks can
solve these contradictions determines the network governance capacity. If these
contradictions are not being resolved, probably the soft governance will be transformed to the
hard one because some interest groups want to take the control of the network.
In order to remove the disharmony mentioned in three modes of governance, different
governments have selected different integrating strategies under the different titles: for example
in the United Kingdom (joined-up government), Canada (horizontal government), the United
States (networked government) and New Zealand (integrated government) (Halligan, 2008:3).
They are the titles for new ideas of coordination in public sector and follow the same aims in
public policy administration through similar innovative processes. They seek an improvement in
the level of government accountability to its citizens. Strategies that mentioned above are the
ways for reinforcing the horizontal relationships in a government. In this study the horizontal
government approach is selected as one of the integrating and coordinating strategies in the
government for policy implementation.

4.1.8.2. Implementation problems

The actions the organization actually takes may often vary significantly from stated policy. This
difference is sometimes caused by political compromise over policy, while in other situations it
is caused by lack of policy implementation and enforcement. Implementing policy may have
unexpected results, stemming from a policy whose reach extends further than the problem it was
originally crafted to address. Additionally, unpredictable results may arise from selective or
idiosyncratic enforcement of policy.

 What are the challenges of policy implementation?

There are two basic vantage points from which to view the gap between policy intentions and
outcomes. The first perspective sees implementation from the viewpoint of policymakers
attempting to control outcomes at the grassroots. This so-called ‘top-down’ view can be

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described as a ‗correspondence‘ theory of implementation in that it assumes a clear articulation
of the intended policy exists and the conceptual and practical difficulty lies in how to transmit
this intention faithfully down the line of bureaucratic command. Deviations at the field level
from the intentions of policy makers count as an implementation ‗gap‘ or ‗deficit‘. Theorists
adopting this perspective look for deficiencies in the way policies are communicated, and
standards of implementation enforced, by policymakers to field-level implementers.

‗Bottom-up’ analysts, in contrast, begin with the assumption that ‗street-level‘ bureaucrats often
face an impossible task. Policy ambiguity, limited resources, and time pressures make it
impossible to implement policies as intended and to fulfill the sense of public service with which
most of them began their careers. Their response to this untenable situation is to ―develop
conceptions of their work and of their clients that narrow the gap between their personal and
work limitations and the service ideal.‖ To the extent that outcomes are deemed less than
satisfactory from a policy maker‘s point of view, this perspective would look for the reasons in
the lack of resources and in the incentives embedded in the institutional environment faced by
street-level bureaucrats.
Drawing on a combination of the top-down and bottom-up perspectives, we can lay out some of
the main conditions that may obstruct implementation processes;
The first broad category of conditions obstructing implementation is mission related. In
addition to the poor design of interventions – policies that simply will not work even if
implemented as intended – goals adopted by different stakeholders may be too vague to
meaningfully translate into operational programs and interventions. They may also fail to
adequately consider important tradeoffs between goals and objectives – supposedly the
cornerstone of an integrated approach – and therefore amount to little more than an unwieldy
aggregation of sectoral action plans.
A second category of difficulties involves the lack of adequate bureaucratic and political
support for implementation. Support for policy implementation can often stop at the rhetorical
level, or at the agencies or levels of government that initiated them; lower levels of government,
and grassroots actors on whom actual implementation success hinge, may discover they little
understanding of, or stake in, the policies they are asked to execute. Initial implementation may
also trigger resistance to an integrated plan that might not have been predicted at the beginning

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of the process, particularly if not all relevant stakeholders had been consulted. ‗Political will‘
may begin to evaporate when difficult tradeoffs need to be made in practice, not just on paper,
and as constituencies negatively affected by policy tradeoffs raise their voices, or even flex their
muscles.
Finally, a range of capacity-related difficulties may have negative repercussions on policy
implementation. Operational capacity is the bedrock (foundation) of implementation. Many –
perhaps most – ambitious attempts at integrated planning stop at the level of paper plans, with
the multiple types of capacity necessary to implement these relatively ignored or optimistically
subsumed under the heading of ‗capacity building requirements‘. Capacity includes human and
financial resources, the institutional arrangements and procedures that underpin policies and
ensure consistent delivery, and even the social capacities that help determine how social
groupings will respond to integrated initiatives.
While all of these capacity requirements may be underestimated by policymakers initially,
integrated policy implementation is particularly vulnerable to deficiencies in network
coordination capacity – the ability of organizations to work together to achieve a common
outcome. Coordination across agencies and – an even greater challenge – across sectors for
integrated policy implementation may be required in several different forms, such as sharing
information, pooling resources and (where activities fall outside the traditional gambit of any one
organization) jointly implementing assigned tasks. Yet coordination must overcome several
common obstacles including the perceived threat agencies may feel to their autonomy from
working together and the confusion or conflict over the nature of the task that stems from the
inherently complicated, multi-sectoral nature of policy goal-setting. Plans agreed among
politicians, agency and sectoral representatives at one level of government must be successfully
communicated to, and operationalized by, actors at other levels of government, raising the
specter of potential ‗vertical-horizontal conflicts‘.

4.1.9. Policy evaluation/monitoring

The final pattern of the policy process, in the sequential pattern of activities, is the evaluation of
policy. Evaluation is concerned with what happens, once a policy has been put in to effect. It
is concerned with the assessment or appraisal of policy. It is primarily an effort to determine the
worth or social utility of a policy or programme. In the words of Wholey, policy evaluation is the

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assessment of the overall effectiveness of a national programme in meeting its objectives, or
assessment of the relative effectiveness of two or more programmes in meeting common
objectives. The UN views evaluation as:
The systematic and objective assessment of an ongoing or completed project, programme
or policy, its design, implementation and results. The aim is to determine the relevance
and fulfillment of objectives, development efficiency, effectiveness, impact and
sustainability.
Evaluations of past initiatives can help a policymaker avoid ‗reinventing the wheel‘ (that is,
rediscovering what has already been discovered) and/or repeating mistakes. It can allow
policymakers to build on earlier actions that have been effective, or at least show promise. Good
evaluation can help successive stages of policy making by, for example, adding policy
refinements or termination to a succeeding policy agenda or, at the decision-making or policy
formulation or implementation stages, making available to decision-makers and implementers
the best available information on past experience with the problem to be addressed, and on
strategies for, and means of, addressing it.
Evaluation helps enhance the rationality of policy- making by:
 Synthesizing what is known about a problem and its proposed policy or program remedy,
 Demystifying conventional wisdom or popular myths related to either the problem or its
solutions,
 Developing new information about program or policy effectiveness, and
 Explaining to policy actors the implications of new information derived through evaluation.

 Is evaluation is synonymous with monitoring?

Evaluation is not monitoring. Monitoring, however, is a prerequisite for evaluation. Monitoring
is concerned with establishing factual premises about public policies. It is fundamentally about
control and exercise of power. Monitoring answers the questions: ―what happened, how and
why?‖ on the contrary, evaluation answers the question: ―what differences does it make?‖
evaluation is retrospective and occurs after actions have been taken. It is concerned with trying to
determine the impact of policy on real life conditions.
Monitoring and evaluation are often discussed jointly; although they are complementary
functions, they also have clearly distinguishable characteristics and vary in timing, depth and

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purpose, and according to who does them. According to the UN report, monitoring is the
responsibility of programme and project managers at headquarters and in field offices. It is a
continuing function that uses systematic collection of data on specific indicators to provide
managers and the main stakeholders of an ongoing development intervention with indicators to
measure progress and the achievement of objectives, including with regard to the use of allocated
funds.
Monitoring is therefore a regular part of project and programme management. It has the aim of
keeping the project or programme on track; and it focuses on implementation by comparing
delivery information with the planned objectives. Evaluation, on the other hand, takes a broader
perspective, reviewing the context and achievements of the project or programme and reflecting
on whether the course set was the best one. Monitoring is usually done by people directly
involved with implementing the project or programme. Evaluation aims to be more impartial and
is conducted by independent outsiders who are not directly involved in the project or
programme, although they will consult and work closely with project and programme staff to
gather data.
Although they are distinct activities, monitoring and evaluation are interrelated. Evaluation
draws on monitoring reports to discover what happened during the implementation of the project
or programme and to understand why things happened the way they did. Useful evaluations
depend on the collection of baseline data and sound records of progress derived from effective
monitoring systems.
Past experience shows that delivery of policy is rarely a one-off task. It is best understood not as
a linear process (leading from policy ideas through implementation to change on the ground), but
rather as a more circular process involving continuous learning, adaptation and improvement,
with policy changing in response to implementation as well as vice versa. It is therefore
important to undertake effective appraisal of policy options initially, and to build ongoing
monitoring and review mechanisms into the delivery of policy from the outset.

4.1.9.1. Functions of evaluation

The role of the evaluation is crucial in testing policy approaches and mechanics, providing
constant assessment of programme‘s performance and its adaptation. It performs several

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functions in policy analysis. In the first place, it provides reliable information about policy
performance.
1. The prime purpose of evaluation is to measure the impact of policies on society. It
reveals the extent to which particular goals have been achieved. It helps us to understand the
degree to which policy issues have been resolved.
2. Secondly, evaluation helps clarify the values that underline the selection of goals and
objectives. Values are clarified by properly defining goals and objectives. Since the
appropriateness of policy goals and objectives can be questioned in relation to the problem
being addressed, evaluation provides procedures for evaluating goals and objectives
themselves.
3. Thirdly, evaluation may result in efforts to restructure policy problems. It may also
contribute to the emergence of new objectives and potential solutions, for example, by
showing whether a previously adopted policy alternatives should be replaced with another
one or abandoned. In the course of policy implementation, the policy actions may be either
restructured to the new conditions that have been evaluated or terminated altogether, either
because the information permits the interface that the needs have been met or because policy
actions have created more problems than they have resolved. Evaluation is primarily an effort
to analyze policy outcomes in terms of some set of objectives. It determines the social utility
of policies.

4.1.9.2.Criteria (models) for evaluation

Policies can succeed or fail in numerous ways. Sometimes an entire policy regime can fail, while
more often specific programs within a policy field may be designated as successful or
unsuccessful. And both policies and programs can succeed or fail either in substantive terms—
that is, as objectively or perceived to be delivering or failing to deliver the goods—or in
procedural terms—as being legitimate or illegitimate, fair or unfair, just or unjust. The criteria
for evaluation of policy enable analyses to produce information about the likelihood that
particular course of action will result in the evaluated outcomes. In producing information about
policy performance, analyst uses different types of criteria to evaluate policy outcomes. Frohock
has suggested four concepts as helpful in evaluating public policy: equity, efficiency, pareto
optimality and public interest. Positer argues that the criteria ‘’…to evaluate policies and

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programs all relates to goals and objectives, either focusing on the objectives themselves or on
the means/ends relationship between strategies and objectives. For this man, evaluation must be
done to know policy success or failure. More recently, Smith has suggested three criteria for
policy for policy judgments: policy design, policy process and policy achievement. Here, we are
going to consider the seven major categories for policy evaluation:

1) Effectiveness: This criterion is the most common method of policy evaluation. How
effective the policy is? Is it achieving the goals it set out to achieve?
 By effectiveness is meant the degree of objective achievement. It refers to whether a given
course of action results in the attainment of an objective. It is often measured in terms of
units of products of services or their monetary costs. The policy is deemed to be a failure if it
has not achieved its objectives. If the objective of the public organizational unit is to render
in units of service a year, then effectiveness may be measured by the percentage of rendered
service in the year. For example, if thermal plants produce more energy than solar collection
devices, the former is regarded as more effective, since power plant produce more of a
valued outcome. Similarly, an effective environment policy is one which provides more
qualitative environment to more people, assuming that qualitative environment is an
objective.
However, it is a difficult exercise to measure whether or not objectives have been achieved. It
may be difficult to judge the extent of the success or failure of a particular policy meant to raise
living standards, reduce poverty, provide health and educational services, and so forth. Further
goals and objectives change as policy is being implemented. Thus, assessing policy achievement
by the criteria of effectiveness is not an easy task.
2) Efficiency: could be used to denote the output/input ratio of a public administration system
or an organizational unit. Efficiency is referred to as the amount of effort required to produce
a given level of effectiveness. It could be understood as technical efficiency or economic
rationality. Technical efficiency is a sort of allocating efficiency in the sense that inputs or
resources are allocated in such a way that shift will reduction in output. When efficiency is
equated with economic rationality, it is expressed in a monetary terms, i.e. the ratio of
monetary income from the output to the monetary costs of inputs. This ratio means
profitability which is generally used as an indicator of the policy performance. Efficiency is

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 often measured by calculating the costs per unit of a product or service. It tells us how much
time and cost is involved in providing services. Policies that achieve the greatest
effectiveness at the minimum cost and time are said to be efficient.
3) Adequacy: refers to sufficiency for a specific requirement. The question is there a possibility
that the policy will find a solution to the problem to which the policy is addressed? Adequacy
refers to whether a given level of effectiveness results in the satisfaction of needs or values.
While the policy effectiveness criterion deals with deals with the relationship between policy
goals and what is achieved, the adequacy of a policy refers to the relationship between the policy
and the problem to which it is addressed. A clear distinction exists between effectiveness and
adequacy in the sense that a policy may be judged to be a success in achieving its limited
objectives, but it has little impact upon the problem being addressed by the policy. The
dimensions of adequacy may point to the complexity of relationships between costs band
effectiveness. For example, an environment programme ‗A‘ of the regional (state) government
achieves a higher overall level of effectiveness than programme ‗B‘, but environment
programme ‗B‘ is less costly though at lower levels of effectiveness. It may be pointed out that
the beneficiaries and other target groups often view government actions as not adequate, while
the political executive is prone to argue that enough is being done. In this line, you can
conceptualize government‘s success report of the ADLI strategies and the practical implications
of the strategy on the living standard of the society of Ethiopia.
4) Equity: refers to the distribution of effects and efforts among different groups in a society. It
implies whether or not costs and benefits are distributed equitably among the different
groups. The criterion of equity is closely related to fair and or just distribution of effects
(monetary benefits) and effort (monetary cost).policies designed to redistribute income,
employment opportunities, or public services are often recommended on the basis of equity
criteria. A given programme might be effective, efficient, and adequate, yet it might be
rejected on the ground that it will result in the inequitable distribution of benefits. However,
the criterion of equity is not totally satisfactory because conflicting views about the
rationality of society as a whole cannot be resolved simply by adopting formal economic
rules. Such concepts as equity, fairness and justice are related to p[political power. These are
influenced by the processes involving the distribution of power in society. Individuals and

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 groups have different objectives and values. What satisfies one person or group may not
satisfy another.
5) Responsiveness: means a policy should satisfy the need or values of a particular group.
Policies designed to promote educational opportunity or health status of the people are
sometimes recommended on the basis of the criterion of responsiveness. An educational
programme might result in an equitable distribution of facilities but be unresponsive to the
needs of particular groups. Nakamura and Smallwood opine that constituency satisfaction
and clientele responsiveness are important because it helps the analyst to assess critically
whether the competing criteria of effectiveness, efficiency, adequacy, and equity reflect the
needs and values of particular groups.
6) Appropriateness: this criterion is closely related to rationality. It refers to the worth of the
objectives of a programme. Is the policy based upon appropriate values and ideologies? Will
the policy lead to disruption and violence or be greeted with agreement? This dimension is
concerned with judgments about a policy‘s fitness and suitability. Judging policy failure and
success by appropriateness is whether conflicts are likely to be more intense. Public policies
which are based upon unacceptable values and ideologies are deemed to be failure. Some
policies are deemed to be unpopular decisions. For example, policies regulating people‘s
behavior in traffic laws and taxes are seldom popular with the general public.
7) Process evaluations: examine the organizational methods, including rules and operating
procedures, used to deliver programs. The objective is usually to see if a process can be
streamlined and made more efficient. Towards this objective, implementation of a policy is
usually broken down into discrete tasks, such as strategic planning, financial management,
and client relations, and then one or more of these tasks are examined to see if they can be
improved upon. There are numerous different specific types of formal evaluation systems
and techniques that can be used for these basis purposes. These range from public opinion
surveys used to assess customer or client-satisfaction in areas such as social services or
healthcare, standardized testing programs to determine if results have been achieved in areas
such as education, experimental or intervention studies in areas such as drug treatments, cost-
benefit analyses in project or program assessments, hearings in areas such as environmental
assessments, reviews, as discussed above, and others.

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 4.1.9.3. Forms of policy evaluation
 Who are to get involved in public policy evaluation?
 Policy evaluation is a difficult exercise. It is carried on in a variety of ways by a variety of
evaluators. Sometimes it is highly systematic, in other times rather sporadic (irregular,
random). In some cases policy evaluation is formal; in other it is quite informal. It may be
carried out by those delivering the programme, or by private agencies outside the
government. The communication media, researchers in private and public institutions,
organized groups, commissions and public interest organizations, all makes evaluations of
policies that have greater or lesser effects on public officials. They also provide the wider
public with information, and sometimes serve as champions of common causes.

How deep or thorough the evaluation is depends on the nature of the policy actors involved in its
initiation and/or undertaking it, the amount of information available for them to analyze, and
what they intend to do with the findings. Some policy evaluations are initiated by governments,
while others are led by non-governmental actors and these tend to differ dramatically in their
level of formal rationality and technical sophistication, the depth of the data collection and
analysis which evaluation entails, and the types of conclusions drawn from these efforts.
Further complicating evaluation is the fact that in most polities or jurisdictions different actors
can undertake different forms of policy evaluation simultaneously and the results of these
multiple efforts can complement or contradict each other, affecting the types of policy learning
and any reforms or changes which might occur as a result of these processes.

Like agenda-setting, a policy evaluation comes in several forms. In one common, ‗technical‘
type of evaluation, specialist policy analysts working in departments or specialized units in the
administration may apply formal techniques such as cost-benefit analysis, randomized control
trials, regression discontinuity designs, intervention analyses, regulatory impact analysis, risk
assessments, distributional impact evaluations or various kinds of performance measures in order
to try to quantify program outputs and accurately assess program results. Some of these
techniques may be mandated by law, such as regulatory impact analyses required in many
countries when a new regulation or change to an old one is proposed. Below are a few forms of
public policy evaluation:

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A) Evaluation by operating staff: it is an evaluation by those delivering the programme. A big
advantage of this form of evaluation is that the insider an insider will have little problems
regarding access to information. He/she can have detail knowledge of just what is involved.
Secondly, the possible clashes of interests between operating staff and policy makers would
be minimal. Here, evaluation requires a well established internal reporting system which
permits the continuous generation of programme related information. The overall goal of
such analyses is usually restricted to examining the delivery of government services and
attempting to determine whether or not ‗value for money‘ is being achieved by their efficient
implementation. These evaluations, while complex and requiring a high degree of difficulty
to procure accurate data on government costs and social benefits, is intended to ensure that
policies are accomplishing their expected goals at the least possible cost and with the least
possible burden on individual citizens and taxpayers.
B) Evaluation by specialized staff: here evaluation is to be carried out by a specialized staff
concerned with evaluation and analysis rather than policy delivery. A big advantage of this
form is that the evaluators do not have any vested interest in the continuation of any given
programme. However, some tension is bound to take place between the operating staff and
the evaluators owing to the unpredictability of the evaluation and is results.
C) Evaluation by auditing offices: the auditing offices both at national and regional levels is
usually regarded as an arm of the parliament/regional governments. The offices have broad
statutory authority to ensure the accountability of the executive or even the legislature. It
assists the legislature in the effective exercise of their financial control.
D) Evaluation by public inquiry commissions: whether set up especially for evaluation in
some area or for other purposes such as fact finding, making policy recommendations or
simply creating the appearance of concern, most commissions do involve themselves in
policy evaluation. They are commissioned to ensure greater public confidence in the
evaluation results, either for reasons of expertise, or because a report from the commissions
might appear to be objective. Examples include planning commission, police commission,
anti-corruption commission, civil service commission, etc.
E) Judicial or quasi-judicial evaluations by specialized organs of government- these range
from the use of the courts to review administrative performance, to specialized ad hoc bodies
such as parliamentary or presidential commissions, task forces and inquiries that can be

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 established from time to time to evaluate program or policy performance. Both of this type of
evaluation are also quite technical in a formal, legal, sense, but have different information
needs and outcomes than more traditional formal administrative evaluations. They are often
complaint or problem-driven, in the sense that programs or policies come to their attention
only after a major policy actor has acknowledged some sort of problem or failure of existing
government activities – for example, when a government sets up a special commission to
investigate and report on the causes of a major air traffic or shipping accident – and are
formal in the sense that they must operate in accordance with the laws and regulations set out
in the establishment of their terms of reference. These usually which cover such items as the
kinds of witnesses they can call and the types of evidence they can access or compel and also
set a deadline for submission of a report to government. Such evaluations can be driven by
public actors, as is the case with, for example, commissions and inquiries tasked with
soliciting opinions from the public on a policy issue, or by private individuals, companies, or
groups as in the case of legal proceedings brought against government agencies involved in
program design and, more commonly, implementation.
F) Political evaluations- represent a range of much less formal, technical or legal evaluations to
be carried out by actors such as the media, think tanks, political parties, interest groups,
community leaders and public relations or lobbying campaigns launched by non-
governmental organizations. In democratic polities with more or less free association of
individuals and groups and free expression of political opinion, for example, the ongoing and
simultaneous exercise of formal (governmental) and informal (public) evaluation is almost
inevitable. In such polities, various interested members of policy subsystems and members of
the public are always engaged in their own assessment of the workings and effects of policies
which affect them and are very willing to express support for, or opposition to, an existing
policy and to demand changes to it in order to better achieve what they consider to be the
appropriate solution to a problem. Such informal evaluations - informal in the sense that they
do not rely upon any system or means for systematic evaluation of carefully collected data
related policy impacts - easily translate into and affect formal evaluations in government
since public opinion is an important component of policy making and judgments of policy
success and failure in democratic polities.

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 4.1.9.4.The Basic Processes of Evaluation
Equally, formal evaluation has a crucial role in assessing whether policies have actually met their
intended objectives. To be effective, policy-making must be a learning process which involves
finding out from experience what works and what does not and making sure that others can learn
from it too. This means that effective ex ante evaluation or appraisal should be carried out as part
of the policy development process; new policies must have evaluation of their effectiveness built
in from the start; established policies must be reviewed regularly to ensure that they are still
delivering the desired outcome; and the lessons learned from evaluation must be available and
accessible to other policy makers. Good evaluation should be systematic, analytical, study actual
effects and judge success.
The principal mechanism for learning lessons is through evaluation of new policies and by
monitoring and regular review of existing policies. Systematic assessment of policies,
programmes and projects helps to improve the design and delivery of current and future policies.
It also reinforces the use of evidence in policy-making by helping policy makers find out 'what
works'.
The evaluation process can be broken down into 10 key parts outlined below. This framework
should be flexible in recognition that circumstances differ within and between programmes.
However, the items listed are the essential ingredients of policy or programme evaluation and
will permit a consistency of approach across evaluations.
a) Planning an evaluation - Programmes to be evaluated should be prioritized on the basis of
importance, openness to influence and adequacy of information. Evaluation should be
planned before a programme starts. It is necessary to decide what questions the evaluation
will address and who should undertake it, and to ensure that the costs of evaluation are
outweighed by the lessons to be learnt.
b) Establish the scope and purpose of the evaluation - This might depend on whether the
objective is to identify weaknesses which need to be addressed (a process evaluation) or to
assess the overall success of a programme with a view to continuing, expanding or reducing
it (an outcome evaluation).
c) Establish the rationale, aims and objectives of the policy or programme - These should
be clearly defined prior to programme implementation, but if not, the evaluator should
determine them. Is the policy instrument the most effective to address the rationale? This

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 stage also involves identifying indicators of need and establishing the more specific targets
which underlie the objectives.
d) Specify measures and indicators - Effectiveness and efficiency measures, and input,
output and outcome/impact indicators, in order to assess the value for money of policies. As
far as possible, these should allow international comparisons to be made.
e) Establish the base case for comparison - What would have happened if the programme
had not been implemented? It may be possible to set up a control group for comparison with
a group affected by the policy. Alternatively, 'before and after' comparisons can be made.
f) Define assumptions - These may involve assumed causal relationships between a policy
and outcomes, or may relate to the external environment.
g) Identify side effects and distribution effects - Effects (beneficial or otherwise) beyond
those originally envisaged for the policy; equality/equity impacts and impacts on voluntary
activity and the voluntary sector.
h) Analysis - This will depend on whether it is a process or outcome evaluation. Both
quantitative and qualitative analysis may be important. The key measure is net additional
output. Cost Benefit Analysis provides a useful framework.
i) Evaluation outcome - Recommendations such as programme continuation, modification,
succession or termination. This leads into reappraisal and appraisal of new proposals.
Sensitivity analysis should be carried out.
j) Presentation and dissemination of results -The evaluation process and outcome should be
adequately documented. The report must reach senior management and be widely
disseminated to staff concerned with future project design, planning, development and
management.
4.1.9.5.Challenges of Policy Evaluation
 What are the problems of policy evaluation?
The field of policy evaluation has greatly matured in the last 20 years. However, there are still
many theoretical and methodological disputes that make the evaluation work very challenging
(Mathison, 2005). In the 1970s, when the pioneering work on the impact of regional policies was
done, evaluations were mainly based on the analysis of the economic data over a period of time
using econometric techniques based on statistical analysis, multiple regression analysis, time
series and input-output models to estimate the impact of policies. Due to the limitations of these

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traditional methodologies, more comprehensive evaluation approaches such as cost-benefit
evaluations were developed in the 1990s (Angeles Diez, 1999). Even those more recent
approaches were facing methodological challenges related to the accuracy with which they can
estimate net effects of the policy and to the problem of evaluating intangible benefits (Raines,
2002). Consequently, new approaches were developed introducing more qualitative
methodologies. The new concept of evaluation is understood as a dynamic process, open to the
participation of the economic and social actors, in which emphasis is laid on the mutual capacity
for learning (Guba and Lincoln, 1989).

Section II: Impact of globalization in the Formulation and Implementation of

Public Policy

Under this section of the chapter, we will try to discuss the impact of globalization in public
policy making/formulation and its implementation. To do this, it is important to distinguish
between policy formulation and policy implementation. This would help us to identify the actors
to be involved in policy formulation and policy implementation.

Section objectives
At the end of the accomplishment of the lesson under this section, learners will be able to;
 Distinguish between policy formulation and policy implementation‘
 Justify the impact of globalization in policy making and its implementation.

4.2.1. The dichotomy between policy-making and implementation

There is a tendency to split policy-making and implementation in the linear model. There is a
notion of a ‗divided, dichotomous and linear sequence from policy to implementation‘. In
general, the divorce between decision-making and implementation can be ‗ascribed to decision
makers‘ sense that politics surrounds decision-making activities while implementation is an
administrative activity‘, (Grindle and Thomas, 1990).
This is a major flaw in the linear model because policies often change as they move through
bureaucracies to the local level where they are implemented. ‗Implementation always makes or
changes policy to some degree‘, (Lindblom, 1980). ‗Policy implementers interact with

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policymakers by adapting new policies, co-opting the embodied project designs or simply
ignoring new policies, hence underscoring the fact that implementers are crucial actors whose
actions determine the success or failure of policy initiatives‘. Brickenhoff states that ‗it is
important to ..... develop both a wider and better understanding of implementation factors and the
processes linking policy goals to outcomes‘ (1996).
It is risky to assume that putting good policies in place will guarantee their automatic flow into
successful ground-level implementation. Each implementation decision can affect the quality and
the impact of the policy, so it is important to emphasize key differences between policy
formulation and implementation. The table below compares the different processes of policy
formulation and policy implementation. However, in the context of policy implementation,
several gaps exist. It was indicated that the issuance of implementation guidelines does not
necessarily mean that policies will be translated into programs.
Policy Formulation Policy Implementation
1 Primary responsibility of national Primary responsibility of provincial
governments and their departments/ministries governments and their departments
2 Focus of policymaking is all encompassing, Focus on specificity, mechanisms of
all operationalization, decentralized planning
inclusive, broad
3 Concentrated within a small group of high- Going to scale—often nationally—
level ministries and departments with inputs requires coordination with many
from different stakeholders stakeholders, government departments at
many levels, NGOs, and CBOs
4 Maximum effort on drafting; role of editing No role for either drafting or editing
committee very important committees; effective program planners
and managers needed
5 Action is at the highest levels of power and Action is at the community level
decision making
6 Does not require phasing or pilot testing Needs phasing; pilot models
7 Does not need to focus on management Important roles of capacity building,
mechanisms and processes coordination, public opinion, supervision,
monitoring and review mechanisms

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8 Major role for Justice Department and law Does not require active participation of
Professionals Justice Department
9 Clear guidelines in existence in terms of steps No guidelines or steps on how to
required to develop a new policy translate policies into practice
10 Is on paper Touches the lives of millions of people
Table 1: Differences in Policy Formulation and Policy Implementation

How does policy implementation change a policy that is made? The interactive model developed
by Grindle and Thomas (1991) is against the idea that ‗the decision to reform is the critical one
and what follows is merely a mechanical process‘. This model stresses that the process of
policymaking is interactive, not linear. A central element in the model is that a policy reform
initiative may be altered or reversed at any stage in its life cycle by pressures and reactions from
those who oppose it. ‗Unlike the linear model, the interactive model views policy reform as a
process, one in which interested parties can exert pressure for change at many points....
Understanding the location, strength and stakes involved in these attempts to promote, alter, or
reverse policy reform initiatives is central to understanding the outcomes‘.

What is the consequence of the dichotomy between policy-making and implementation?

One of the most important effects of the division between policy-making and implementation is
the possibility for policy makers to avoid responsibility. ‗The dichotomy between policy-making
and implementation is dangerous. That is because it separates the ‗decision‘ from the
‗implementation‘ and thus opens up ‗escape hatches‘ through which policy makers can avoid
responsibility (Gillespie and McNeill, 1992).

4.2.2. Impact of Globalization on Policy Formulation and its Implementation

During the past decade the role of government has been steadily changing, with increasing
emphasis being placed on setting overall direction through policy and planning, on engaging
stakeholders and citizens, and sometimes on empowering stakeholders or partners to deliver
programs and services. At the same time, the environment for policy and planning has increased
in complexity. The ownership of issues is often unclear, especially when more than one
department and often more than one level of government are involved. Community is also

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increasingly claiming ownership of policy issues and process. Globalization and fiscal resource
limitations contribute to the confusion. In this complex environment, the demand for good public
policy development is steadily increasing and as well requires the capacity of managers, policy
analysts, planners, and others involved in the design and delivery of policies and programs.

One of the underlying factors behind increasing challenge of policy making today is a shift in
economic thinking that became pronounced in the 1980s because of globalization. While the
industrialized countries were experiencing stagflation, a significant number of developing
countries had fallen into a debt crisis and experienced economic retrogression. This prompted a
rethink on prevailing economic models in both industrialized and developing countries. One
element of this revised thinking in developing countries related to import-substitution policies
which had by then begun to run out of steam. This contrasted with the evident success of the
export-oriented industrialization policies of the East Asian Newly Industrializing Economies
(NIEs).

 How export-oriented or import-substitution strategies affect public policy making?

Export-oriented growth strategy has yielded relatively high productivity and GDP growth in
many developing countries since the mid-1970s. However, it has also increased a country‘s
susceptibility to external shocks. In recent years, the process of globalization has exacerbated
these shocks. With rising cross-border investment and stronger trade linkages, the business
cycles of major industrial countries have become more synchronized (coordinated, harmonized).
At the same time, the increased integration of world capital markets, with higher capital mobility
and larger volumes of capital flows - particularly private flows - has created the potential for
large and sudden reversals in such flows.

 How structural adjustment program forces states to alter their policies?

The widespread recourse of indebted developing countries to structural adjustment loans from
the Breton Woods institutions in the aftermath of the debt crisis of the early 1980s played a
pivotal role in the redefinition of trade and industrialization strategies. Prominent among the
conditions attached to these loans was the liberalization of policies towards trade and FDI. This
was in line with the rising influence of pro-market economic doctrines during this period. Under

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these structural adjustment programmes, there was a significant increase in the number of cases
of trade and investment liberalization in many developing countries. Many trade unions and Civil
Society Organizations, as well as some policy analysts and developing country governments,
maintain that the International Financial Institutions have imposed excessive conditionality on
developing countries. In their view, this policy has been harmful both in confining them within
an inappropriate neo-liberal policy straitjacket and in inflicting heavy social costs.
 How western approaches of poverty reduction strategies affect policy making process in
other countries?
It is also argued that poverty reduction in any country is affected by the way public policies are
formulated and, more importantly, by the processes that contribute to these policies, by the key
actors of the process and indeed, by the world view and the vested interests these actors
represent. It is against this backdrop that the public policy process concerning poverty begins
with the way poverty is perceived, defined and prioritized in a society. It is also suggested that it
is the Western schools of thoughts and approaches to ―development‖ that mostly influences the
strategies of poverty reduction. Furthermore, the geo-politics of the day also influence how
―development‖ in general and the strategy for poverty reduction in particular, gets
conceptualized, defined and implemented.

The most dominant development theories to indicate how these thoughts, mostly of Western
origin, shaped development thinking, the institutional arrangements concerning development,
and the processes and procedures that underpin public policy strategies. It is argued that the
current thoughts on development and the policy processes that contribute to the formulation of
these policies are in many ways a legacy of the past, especially the colonial past or, as some
would argue, the neo-colonial present. However, what is also true is that an emerging non-
governmental organization (NGO) movement and an assertive developing country intellectual
dynamism are attempting to demystify these legacies and to make development more people-
centered and pro-poor.

 How public institutions and donor agencies affect public policy making?
Public institutions, and the public sector entities that work as intermediaries between the
government and the people and are responsible for the formulation and implementation of public

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policies and programs, are often not immune from the political & economic environment of a
country within which they function, and also the views of the external world. Their form, shape
and method of delivery of services, the nature and extent of their engagement with the poor (if
any) and the policy-making processes, all of these originate from the existing political and
governance configuration of a country. The poor‘s participation and representation of their
interests in the policy process very much depends, on the one hand, on the quality and depth of
democracy in a country and, on the other, the space given for ordinary citizens to enter those
decision-making processes. Further, exogenous factors such as donor preferences and their
schools of thoughts on poverty and development also play important roles in shaping public
policies and policy processes.
The economic policies adopted by countries in their quest for success in the global economy
have often involved far-reaching liberalization of trade, investment and financial policies. This
has been associated with collateral liberalization of the domestic economy involving
privatization, a reduction in the role of the State in economic management and regulation, and a
general expansion in the role of the market. The reduction in the role of the State that has
occurred across the world may often have been desirable, but in many cases the pace has been
too fast and the balance has tipped too far. While State economic intervention in the past may
frequently have been ineffective or misdirected, globalization has created many new needs which
the State now has to respond to. This role is especially important today in the absence of strong
institutions for global governance. This trend was seen even in highly liberal economies like
USA recently as a response to financial crisis that hit the global economy.

 Is state role in economy is always destructive?

Another important domain of State action is macroeconomic policy. The main objectives of this
include: achieving the highest possible rate of economic growth; promoting full employment;
and maintaining macroeconomic stability. The latter is essential for ensuring that the rates of
growth of output and employment are sustainable and protected from the risk of economic crises.
Macroeconomic policy must maintain business and consumer confidence, which requires
keeping fiscal deficits and inflation within acceptable proportions. However, the objective of
macroeconomic stability should not override the other two. The preferred policy stance is to seek

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to achieve the highest feasible rate of output and employment growth that is compatible with
macroeconomic stability over the medium term.

One of the effects of globalization has been to reduce the space for national macroeconomic
policy, notably because international capital markets sanction deviations from orthodoxy.
However, there remain policy instruments to achieve the objectives outlined above. The key
instrument is the rate of growth of both public and private productive investment in the
economy; i.e., together with the need to strengthen the State, underlines the importance of
domestic resource mobilization and an effective, non-regressive taxation system. It also
highlights the need to bring the informal economy into the economic mainstream. Taxes which
only extend to the formal economy not only lead to revenue shortfalls, they also provide strong
incentives for informal work.

The prospects of realizing the above strategy will be greatly enhanced by creating institutions
that ensure wider participation in the formulation of economic policies. Such policies are often
considered to be the exclusive preserve of technocrats, bankers and financiers. But consistency
between economic and social policies requires close coordination between all the ministries
concerned. Moreover, since workers, enterprises of all sizes and many other groups have a strong
stake in the outcomes; existing institutions need to be strengthened and new mechanisms created
to allow their voices to be heard and their interests taken into account.

Public investment and policy also have a strategic role to play in strengthening national capacity
to benefit from integration into the global economy, and in sharing the gains more equitably.
Partnerships between governments and private actors – business, trade unions, community
organizations, cooperatives and others – are an effective means to develop the skills,
infrastructure, technological and managerial capabilities, and frameworks that provide an
enabling environment for private investment (both domestic and foreign) in the most dynamic
productive activities. This is not about ―picking winners‖, but establishing the preconditions for
the growth of globally competitive enterprises.

 What factors should be considered in making policy in agrarian economy?

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The approach taken to strengthen national economic capability will vary greatly according to the
initial conditions. In many low-income countries, agriculture accounts for a large proportion of
economic activity and an even higher proportion of employment. The majority of the poor (75
per cent) live in rural areas and the incidence of poverty is highest in countries that are dependent
on primary commodity exports. This calls for a series of policies to support agricultural growth
including: the elimination of price distortions and practices which discriminate against some
sectors of agriculture; support for niche markets; substantial public investment in education and
health; and recognition of the key role of women in agricultural production, and therefore in
poverty reduction. In many areas the priority is investment in transport networks, electricity and
water management, which increases productivity and security and opens markets. Meanwhile,
investment in agricultural research, extension services and financial support is also important.

Many poor countries need better seeds, less harmful agronomic practices, and access to new
knowledge and techniques. It is also vital that traditional knowledge be protected, used and
extended. At the same time, diversification of the rural production structure is usually essential.
Growth of the rural non-farm economy is often hindered because it is largely within the informal
economy. While policies required to support this growth will vary widely, they should generally
aim to increase productivity and accelerate learning and technological progress. The upgrading
of primary production exports and diversification of the export structure is often a priority.

Agriculture is a particular concern. Each nation is of course entitled to develop its own
agricultural policies, but the excessive support and subsidies to this sector in many OECD
countries illustrate how domestic policies can fail to adequately take into account the
implications for other countries. Policies for this sector should be designed with the livelihoods
of poor farmers in both industrialized and developing countries in mind, and reward rural
producers for delivering public goods such as environmental services. Presently, in OECD
countries only 4 per cent of support is targeted to environmental objectives.

Many middle-income developing countries are now competing among themselves to export
similar labor-intensive manufacturing products to the same markets. As a result they are trading
more, but earning relatively less. The challenge for these countries is to move into higher-value

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exports. A strategic response is needed to promote innovation, adaptation and the learning
processes associated with it. Key to the creation of national systems of innovation is the
upgrading of skills and technological capabilities. This will both enhance the gains from trade
and participation in global production systems, and expand the domestic market through
increases in productivity and wages. Global production systems should provide opportunities for
domestic firms to be engaged in a process of learning and adaptation in both industry and
services, closely linked to ―world-class‖ production experience. Policies are also needed to
strengthen production linkages between leading economic sectors and the rest of the economy
and to take account of the needs and constraints of small enterprises. Access to financing and
financial institutions is particularly critical, as are specialized technical extension services for
micro-enterprises and poor women entrepreneurs.

These issues are no less important for industrialized countries. Here too training, financial and
technology policies and partnerships can support the phasing out of inefficient old industries and
the growth of new high value-added activities. Flanking policies for economic adjustment
include not only social protection and income security, but also the supportive policies which
help create new opportunities, notably in the knowledge economy and new service sectors.

 What was the response of end of bipolar world as far as policy study is concerned?
To some analysts, the end of the bipolar world also meant the disappearance of any systemic
alternative to the market economy. As a result, according to this view, free-market globalization
took off in 1990. Coincidentally, this was also the period when the explosive growth of the
Internet occurred, giving a fortuitous technological boost to the policy making process. Lately,
the rise of civil society organizations and their movements, both nationally and internationally,
has also created another kind of dynamism in the public policy process. As a result of these
developments, completely new standards, norms and actors are now appearing in the public
policy domain. A great deal of uncertainty caused by contradictory demands has emerged,
warranting a new look and a new approach to the public policy process.

In summary, donors and the Western academia and, more recently, globalization, liberalization,
and the rise of civil society movements are altering the institutional structures of development

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and the public policy process. As is evident, most of these are externally driven. These impulses
continue to shape the operational arrangements and the public policy process in a developing
country in a significant way. Policies for market liberalization must recognize the importance of
the point of departure – the differing situations of industrialized and developing countries, the
pre-existing policy and institutional environment, and the state of the economy and of the
external economic environment at the time the policies are applied. Otherwise, there is no
guarantee that liberalization policies will yield the universally positive outcome its advocates
foresee. On the contrary, the results are likely to be mixed, with positive outcomes in some cases
and strongly negative ones in others.

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