The focus on policy work

This book has focused on the work that ‘makes policy’ – that is, on policy as a field of specialized professional practice rather than on policy as something created in order to bring about some desirable end. The study of policy has tended to focus on the proclaimed goals of policy, on alternative ways of achieving these goals, on the characteristics and likely outcomes of these alternatives, on the influence of other jurisdictions on policy choices (‘policy transfer’), and on the relationship between proclaimed goals, outputs (‘implementation’) and outcomes (‘effects,’ ‘impacts’). Less attention has been paid to the nature of the practice through which policy statements are generated and related to the ongoing process of governing, and this dimension of governing tended to be referred to in general terms like ‘coordination,’ which seemed to describe one of the intermediate outputs rather than the entire process through which it was achieved.

In this way, the concerns of the discipline tended to be shaped by the ‘official accounts’ of government, which saw governing as the exercise of authority by appropriately empowered leaders to achieve known goals. But it became increasingly clear that these were not the only players in the game. Policy work was becoming increasingly institutionalized and professionalized. There has been an increasing tendency among the governments of many liberal democracies to designate staff as policy officers or policy analysts, and to create policy branches, sometimes central policy units. This move has not been limited to government, as business and professional associations and non-government organizations appoint their own policy staff to facilitate dealings with government and other bodies. Policy has become a specialized form of professional practice, and this has been accompanied by the development of forms of specialist training and certification, particularly in North America, where graduate schools of public policy began to emerge from the 1960s. But the significance of this change, and the sort of practice in which these players engage, has attracted little attention in the literature on government, with some notable exceptions such as the work of Meltsner (1976) and Radin (2000).