Suchergebnisse

This rejoinder challenges and refutes the alarming decline thesis posited by Howlett and Lejano in their Disputatio article in this journal in 2012. Using their own data Source - JSTOR - updated to 2009 and search term "policy design" as well as the more comprehensive Social Science Citation Index in terms of journal coverage and supplementary search terms 'policy instrument's and 'policy tool's we clearly demonstrate that policy design research instead of languishing has continued to flourish in all academic fields during the late 2000' and early 2010's at an exponential rate never observed before.

As fashionable as implementation studies were in the 1970s and 1980s, as en vogue it has become currently, four decades later, to consider implementation as an obsolete research theme. It is clear that in the study of government, new themes and concepts have been put on the agenda. In the 'age of governance', that study takes place under a variety of headings beyond 'implementation'. At the same time, a continued attention to what happens with policies-on-paper can be observed. In this special issue, the development of implementation research as a scholarly field is assessed. A closer look reveals some paradoxes, but also steady advancement.