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:

The same definition is adopted for institutional policies, which aim to tackle public problems involving the internal functioning of the state apparatus and whose target groups and beneficiaries are public actors in principle. These types of policies include institutional policies dealing with the allocation of action resources to the policy actors involved (‘resource-based’ institutional policies; see Knoepfel and Varone, 2009: 97ff). In contrast to the basic textbook, this publication also deals with these.

Distinction between the concept of a ‘public policy’ and the – analytically less relevant – concept of ‘public action’

Our definition of public policies differs from the definitions of the ‘public action’ and ‘collective action’ type that tend to be used in France in particular (see, for example, Lascoume and Le Galès, 2012). In my view, these definitions are too vague; they include decisions, actors and resources without distinguishing clearly between them, and neglect the empirical fact that all public activity can be characterized very accurately based on its association with one of the six products that constitute a public policy cycle: the problem definition (PD), the political-administrative programme (PAP), the political-administrative arrangement for the implementation of the policy (PAA), the action plan (AP), the outputs and the evaluative statement (ES) (see later in this chapter).