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Public policy is a course of action or inaction chosen by public authorities to address a problem. 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 evaluate its effectiveness. Many public policy analysts earn public policy degrees like Ph.D., Master of Public Policy and Master of Public Administration in public policy schools, while others earn specialized degrees, such as an M.Ed for specializing in educational policy or an MSW for specializing in social welfare policy.
According to William Jenkins in Policy Analysis: A Political and Organizational Perspective (1978), a Public Policy is ‘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 those decisions should, in principle, be within the power of those actors to achieve’. Thus, Jenkins understands Public Policy making to be a process, and not simply a choice.
According to Thomas Birkland in An Introduction to the Policy Process (2001), there is a lack of a consensus on the definition of public policy. Birkland outlines a few definitions of public policy (Table 1.3 on p. 21):
Birkland indicates that the elements common to all definitions of public policy are as follows (p. 20):
According to Stella Theodoulou in Public Policy: The Essential Readings (2005), the public policy process is essentially the movement from the emergence of a problem, to it being placed on to the policy agenda, and finally, to its enactment and reflection on its effectiveness. The public policy process may be thus broken up into six fluid stages:
1) Problem Recognition - Problems that may potentially make their way onto the public policy agenda are recognized.
2) Agenda Setting - Problems that are deemed worthy of attention are placed on the agenda.
3) Policy Formulation - Various policies are crafted to deal with the problem that has been set on the agenda.
4) Policy Adoption - An official policy is agreed upon.
5) Policy Implementation - The public policy that has been officially agreed upon is put into action.
6) Policy Analysis and Evaluation - The implemented policy is evaluated for its effectiveness.
Policy formulation is the development of effective and acceptable courses of action for addressing what has been placed on the policy agenda.
In Implementation (1973) Pressman and Wildavsky define implementation as "the process of interaction between the setting of goals and actions geared to achieving them (p. xxi)."
According to deLeon and deLeon (2002 - Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory), implementation was first entered into "public policy lexicon" by Harold Laswell in 1956. However, no serious attempts at studying it would surface until the 1970s. The study of Public Policy Implementation has roughly experienced three generations.
First Generation - 1970s
Defined mostly by case studies. The book Implementation by Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky epitomizes this generation.
Second Generation - 1980s
An attempt to take a more theoretical and empirical look at Implementation stressing top-down implementation. Mazmanian and Sabatier's piece "The Implementation of Public Policy: A Framework for Analysis" epitomized this generation.
Alternative Second Generation - 1980s
Rather than focusing on top-down implementation (implementation that is more hierarchical in nature), these theorists stressed that implementation study was more fruitful if looked at from a bottom-up perspective, or from the vantage point of the "street level bureaucrat." Benny Hjern's (1982) piece "Implementation Research: The Link Gone Missing" epitomized this alternate generation.
Third Generation - 1990s
The third generation was proposed by Malcolm Goggin (1990) and called for implementation to be looked at more scientifically. deLeon and deLeon (2002) claim that this approach was "awash in ambiguities (p. 471)" and soon there efforts to devise contingency theories which seemed to submit to the complexity of implementation.
According to Birkland: While the study of politics has a long history, the systematic study of public policy, on the other hand, can be said to be a twentieth century creation. It dates, according to Daniel McCool, to 1922, when political scientist Charles Merriam sought to connect the theory and practices of politics to understanding the actual activities of government, that is public policy." (p.4) (see McCool, Daniel C. Public Policy Theories, Models, and Concepts: An Anthology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.)