The author of the article presents and analyzes the concept of the public sphere which was created by Plessner in the twenties of the twentieth century. It includes the main work of Plessner written in 1923, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism. This book presents two forms of public life organisation: community and society. Plessner shows the important differences in the understanding of the role of the individual in these two forms of human collectivity organisation. Plessner creates its own versions of anthropology for understanding the possibility of different treatment of individuals in the community and in society. He presented this concept in the paper entitled Conditio humana in 1961 which represents one of the main works of political anthropology in the twentieth century. His research effort focuses on the presentation of the role of the public sphere in the social life. Its important characteristic is neutral behavior of people performing the roles in social life. According to Plessner, there are two types of community: a blood-based type and an ideal-based type both of which aspire to control the public sphere. The meaning of Plessner's concept is very broad; both for explaining the totalitarianism creation in Germany as well as for discovering a deeper sense of political changes in the modern world.
There are also theoretical issues such as: adequacy of this discipline of knowledge to the analysis of the realities of public action in Poland. This issue arises due to the fact that public policy emerged as a discipline of knowledge in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, on the basis of its specificity. Moreover, the theories evident in public policy science have been developed in the West, mainly in America. The local realities were the basis. Therefore, the question arises whether we should build our theories or adapt those that have been developed elsewhere. Meanwhile, we do not have many or even most elements of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, even in terms of the size of our analytical achievements. We are not even inclined to conduct such an advanced analysis of social and economic phenomena. Hence, it seems important to me to ask about the theoretical potential of this discipline in relation to the analysis of public activities in Poland.
In the last couple of years, the concept of knowledge co-production has become more prominent. However, the meaning of the term and its relationship with the evidence-based policy (EBP) remains ambiguous. The main objectives of the review were to describe how the co-production of knowledge has been defined, the roles that individual actors can play in the process and the relationship between knowledge co-production and the evidence-based policy approach. The author asserted that the knowledge co-production was treated by the researchers both as a participatory research method and as an institutional solution for better policy implementation.
The paper analyses instruments used for implementation of public policy. Broad background, including descriptions of debates in scientific literature on certain instruments, typologies of instruments, as well as factors that influence the choice of instruments, has been provided. The second part of the paper focuses on the relation between policy design in Poland and the structure of public policy instruments. Policy design in Poland favours "hard" instruments of public policy at the expense of catalytic instruments which could have been used to great extend to solve complex policy problems.
The author claims that the development of the discipline of policy analysis and the professionalization of state activities in policymaking (from public education, public administration or political activities) takes the high quality policy studies. The policy analysis craft has plays many public role. Generally, its main task is to achieve the maximum of rational judgments relating to the key components in policymaking. It helps to diagnose the policy problems which affect the society and must be resolved, including capturing their dynamics before the damages are done. It supports as well the agenda setting which is to reflect the hierarchy of public problems. It helps to crystallize the evidence base which are to prove the effectiveness of policy intervention which has been planned. The author describes the historical circumstances in Poland shaping the cultural bias in policy analysis. He points to some public life practices which limit the inclination for analyzing policies or affect their quality. At the same time he emphasizes the significance of the professional policy analysis to make sure the decision making process is effective. It enables to detect many sorts of risks hidden on the stage of policy formulation and policy implementation. The public administration, political class, and many analytical institutions like think tanks have troubles in policy analysis.
The aim of this article is to present an overview of theoretical approaches to public policy. The author focuses on its two phases - design and implementation, not including evaluation. The article is an attempt to answer the following research questions: How do researchers define public policy? What are its phases? What are the characteristics of these phases? How is its implementation defined? And what do top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches mean? What is considered to be an implementation success and what factors influence it? Which direction should future research on public policy processes take? In order to answer the above-mentioned questions, the author has reviewed the subject literature, mainly in English, dealing with the issues of designing and implementing public policies. The article is a synthesis of public policy theories.
Social sciences, understood as critical and not neutral by nature, they should be equipped with specific competencies and sensivity. C. W. Mills these comptence define as sociological imagination - which is study of the relationship of history and biography, Giddens interpreted it as three basic senses: historical, anthropological, critical. The translation into political science would be a political theories imagination, it consist,, among over things like a: historicity of political phenomena, antisubstansialism, research self-awareness. Definition of political theories imagination I propose in the context of Wiktor Marzec's paper Rebelion and Reaction, which is a study from field of historical sociology, it's in itself a lot of inspiration for theorists of politics: research, theoretical and methodological. It is worth considering -in this context- fundamental categories of political science, like political subjectivity and the political, also revalidate in their range.
The main goal of the article is to present to Polish readers the most important information about one of the newer theories of the public policy process - Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The NPF assumes that public policy narratives play a fundamental role in the public policy process. These are strategically constructed stories about the causes and solutions to public policy problems. Actors use narratives to achieve their goals, for example, implementing policies closest to their preferences. On the example of the government's "Good start" ("Dobry start" in Polish) program, the article presents practical applications of the NPF at the micro, meso, and macro levels.
The examination of public policy in Poland should refer to the terms, analytical categories as well as theories, which have already been postulated in this research field. The article aims to present an overview of the development of public policy theories in the long run. To begin with, the typological and stages approaches were presented. The theories of public policy were presented as two broader classes based on the differentiation into rational and interpretative paradigms. The application of the first one was examined in greater detail in the area of defining the choices of the ways to address public issues. The interpretative paradigm was presented mainly in connection with the argumentative approach as well as an attempt to combine the rational and interpretative approaches in the context of a rational discussion. The overview ends with the presentation of a few ways of organising the public policy research field through the research questions, the research areas, the theoretical-methodological framework as well as the archetypes of the public policy analysts' activity.