Two decades of implementation research: from control to guidance and learning

In: The Public Sector: challenge for coordination and learning, p. 257-270

Abstract

"This paper analyzes the extensive literature on policy implementation which has developed in Europe and North America over the past decades. It concludes that (1) official policymakers often have only a rather limited ability to control the behavior of street-level bureaucrats, particularly when the latter are rather high-status professionals; (2) a time-frame of at least 10 years is required to avoid premature conclusions concerning a program's effects and to permit some appreciation of the extent of policy-oriented learning; (3) erroneous causal assumptions are often among the most important factors explaining performance gaps in governmental policies; and (4) it may be preferable in many instances to start from the actors involved in policy problems rather than from those involved in implementing a policy design. Among the more promising recent advances in the implementation literature have been (1) the use of more sophisticated research designs and (2) efforts to synthesize the best features of 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' approaches into analyses of policy change and policy-oriented learning over a decade or so." (author's abstract)