VII. Policy formulation & implementation

How policies are made, stage by stage, with cautions

Public policy is what governments choose to do or not to do. It is made through a cycle of stages: diagnosis of the problem and agenda setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, evaluation, and revision or termination.

Definition

Thomas Dye: 'whatever governments choose to do or not to do'

Stages model

Harold Lasswell (1956), James Anderson and others

Other models

Incrementalism, multiple streams, rational model

Why good policies fail, and how to fix it

Implementation is the stage at which policies are put into practice, mainly by the bureaucracy. Many policies fail at this stage because of weak training, inertia, reluctance to decide, delays, lack of resources, political interference, and officials' inability to say 'no' to improper demands.

Classic study

Pressman and Wildavsky, Implementation (1973)

Street-level bureaucracy

Michael Lipsky (1980)

Approaches

Top-down and bottom-up

Research, coordination, secrecy and openness

Policy analysis is the systematic study of public problems and possible solutions, using evidence to help decision-makers choose the best course of action. In Pakistan, it is hampered by lack of research, poor coordination and a culture of secrecy.

Practical method

Eugene Bardach's 'eightfold path'

Pakistan think tanks

PIDE, SDPI, IPS, PIDS and others

Openness law

Right of Access to Information Act, 2017

Assessing the impact of public policy; success and failure of government

Policy evaluation assesses whether public policies and programmes achieve their goals, at what cost, and with what intended and unintended effects. It is essential for learning which government programmes succeed and which fail.

Types

Formative and summative; process, outcome and impact evaluation

Pakistan forms

PC-IV (completion) and PC-V (operations)

Nobel 2019

Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer, for experimental approaches to poverty