Building on Knoepfel’s previous book, Public policy analysis, this book offers a conceptually coherent view of ten public policy resources: force, law, personal, money, property rights, information, organisation, consensus, time and political support. The book demonstrates the interplay of the different resources in a conceptually coherent framework and presents numerous illustrations of ways of mobilising the resources and managing them in a sustainable way, resource exchanges and the role of institutions governing the interrelationships between actors and resources.
The book will be valuable to postgraduate students as well as those working in policy programming and implementation across both public and private sectors and in non-governmental organisations.
At a time when neoliberal and conservative politics are again in the ascendency and social democracy is waning, Australian public policy re-engages with the values and goals of progressive public policy in Australia and the difficulties faced in re-affirming them. It brings together leading authors to explore economic, environmental, social, cultural, political and indigenous issues. It examines trends and current policy directions and outlines progressive alternatives that challenge and extend current thinking. While focused on Australia, the contributors offer valuable insights for people in other countries committed to social justice and those engaged in the ongoing contest between neo-liberalism and social democracy. This is essential reading for policy practitioners, researchers and students as well those with an interest in the future of public policy.
This book is an English version of a successful text* on public policy analysis originally written for policy practitioners in Switzerland and France. It presents a model for the analysis of public policy and includes examples of its application in everyday political-administrative situations. This English version introduces supplementary illustrations and examples from the United Kingdom.
Structured and written accessibly for readers who may not have an academic background in the social sciences, Public Policy Analysis applies key ideas from sociology, political science, administrative science and law to develop an analytical framework that can be used to carry out empirical studies on different public policies.
British scholars, practitioners and students are introduced all too rarely to ideas from the Francophone world, and this book will contribute to remedying that. It will be particularly relevant for students and practitioners of public administration.
With an increasingly bitter secular religious divide, there is a messy, defective relationship between the state and morality in the UK. In response, Morality and Public Policy puts forward proposals to enhance the capacity of public policy to respond more effectively to morality and associated shifts in social mores in different cultural settings. Spanning religion, moral philosophy and scientific understanding of the human condition, this unique book draws together and adds to the latest thinking on morality, its causes, mutations, tensions and common features. It challenges misplaced concepts of ‘moral progress’ and the supremacy of empathy, and puts forward the management of the full span of human impulses - some complementary, some conflicting - as the function of morality with major implications for the interface between morality and public policy.
21 Public policy TWO Public policy 2.1 Policy as a response to social problems All policies aim to resolve a public problem that is identified as such on the governmental agenda. Thus, they represent the response of the political-administrative system to a social reality that is deemed politically unacceptable. It should be noted here that it is the symptoms of a social problem that constitute the starting point for the realisation of its existence and of a debate on the need for a policy (for example, decline in the state of forests, drug-associated delinquency
9 1 The foundations of public policy analysis2 Public policies Definitions: Substantive and institutional policies (in particular, ‘resource-based’) The definition of a substantive public policy adopted here is one that I have used since 2001 and formalized in our basic textbook that was published in 2006 [2011]. According to this text, a public policy is: … a series of intentionally coherent decisions or activities taken or carried out by different public – and sometimes – private actors, whose resources, institutional links and interests vary, with a
Social justice is a contested term, incorporated into the language of widely differing political positions. Those on the left argue that it requires intervention from the state to ensure equality, at least of opportunity; those on the right believe that it can be underpinned by the economics of the market place with little or no state intervention. To date, political philosophers have made relatively few serious attempts to explain how a theory of social justice translates into public policy.
This important book, drawing on international experience and a distinguished panel of political philosophers and social scientists, addresses what the meaning of social justice is, and how it translates into the everyday concerns of public and social policy, in the context of both multiculturalism and globalisation.
This important book is a response to crises of public policy. Offering an original contribution to a growing debate, the authors argue that traditional technocratic ways of designing policy are inadequate to cope with increasingly complex challenges, and suggest co-production as a more democratic alternative. Drawing on 12 compelling international contributions from practitioners, policy makers, activists and actively engaged academics, ideas of power are used to explore how genuine democratic involvement in the policy process from those outside the elites of politics can shape society for the better. The authors present insights on why and how to generate change in policy processes, arguing for increased experimentation in policy design. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students in public policy, public administration, sociology and politics.
Public policy for the 21st century is a collection of essays in memory of Henry Neuburger, an economist whose career spanned half a dozen government departments, and who was for much of the 1980s an adviser to the leadership of the Labour Party. His original contributions to economic policy analysis across the field of public policy are the starting point of the essays, whose contributors between them cover the same broad span of economic policy. The essays look forward to the new century and together form an introduction to key issues in contemporary policy making.
Policy issues covered include macroeconomic policy, the impact of the National Minimum Wage, the distributional effect of tax and benefit policies since the 1997 change of government, the debates around an ‘urban renaissance’, and the impact of European integration on policy making. Contributors also examine and explain debates around different approaches to economic analysis, and show how analysis can be carried beyond the conventional confines of the money economy and of the household as a ‘black box’. The book concludes with a discussion of Henry Neuburger’s career, looking in particular at the role of economic advisers within policy making.
This is a timely book on economic policy making and commitment to making that policy work. It is important reading for students and academics concerned with public, economic and social policy, and government economists.
are transnationally engaged in common responses to these issues. The classic definition of public policies is related to actions undertaken, generally, by governments to solve the problems of society within their jurisdictions. As Jobert and Muller (1987) put it, public policies can be referred to as ‘the state in action’ ( l’Etat en action ). But often problems do not respect national boundaries. Sometimes, public policies need to involve neighbouring countries or various nations, when governments alone do not have sufficient domestic conditions to react to
