The focus of this chapter is limited to the use of public action resources by the political-administrative actors. It is inspired by the widespread emergence of action plans that arise in connection with almost every public policy today. We have already identified action plans as a separate product of the public policy cycle located between the programming and production of individual and concrete outputs. It should be remembered, nonetheless, that such plans can also be used to manage public policy interventions carried out by large organizations of target groups or beneficiaries. They play a primordial role in public policy implementation processes.

This chapter begins with some reflections on the fundamental premise concerning the efficient and effective use of resources in the conduct of public policies, particularly in the context of their implementation. It then revisits our definition of action plans as a product whose objective is to allocate public action resources in a more targeted way than was the case prior to their – relatively recent – emergence, and demonstrates the key role they assume in the management of public policy implementation. The chapter concludes with some reflections on service-level agreements, a form of contract I consider a category of action plan.

Basic premise for policy implementation: the efficient and effective use of public action resources

The analysis of public action resources facilitates a rational debate on the relationship between the premise of efficiency and that of effectiveness. Efficiency is generally defined as the measurement of the comparative costs of the production of outputs by unit. The measurement is usually limited to traditional resources like Time, Personnel, Money and Property. In contrast, the measurement of effectiveness also includes the impacts (changes in the behaviour of the target groups) and the outcomes of the public action (the contribution of the policy implementation activities, which incur a certain cost, to the resolution of the public problem the policy sets out to resolve).

An efficient administration is not necessarily an effective administration. Of course, economies made at the level of the production of outputs – for example, by means of an acceleration in production (Time), the rationalization of production (Personnel through alteration of the adopted procedures) or not taking the position of opposing actors into account (Consensus) – can reduce the cost of their production.