Summary

Once the government has legitimized some form of public policy such as a law, statute, edict, rule, or regulation, the stipulations of that policy must be put into action, administered, and enforced to bring about the desired change sought by the policy-makers. As discussed in the first four lessons of this course, public policy is implemented to effect some change in the behavior of a target population and it can normally be assumed that this change will ameliorate some public problem. Regardless of how well intentioned, or how well formulated, or how universally supported in the adoption phase of the policy process, a public policy cannot begin to change the behavior of a target population or solve a specific public problem until someone or some organization implements the policy.

Frequently, the political give-and-take of the various policy actors in the policy process prevents a thorough understanding, and all too often a misidentification, of the true public problem at hand. Unfortunately, as solutions are developed in the policy formulation stage, improper or inadequate policy instruments are proposed that will have little if any impact. Consequently, policy-makers must be extremely cognizant of the fact that the ills of poorly designed policy cannot be miraculously healed by administrative agencies as they attempt to interpret and implement imperfect legislation.

As is the case with all of the stages of the policy process there are a number of institutions and actors who are involved with policy implementation. Some of these participants are directly engaged in the actual administration and implementation of policy while others attempt to influence the direction that public policy will take as a result of how it is administered and implemented. Administrative agencies represent the former while the president, the Congress, the courts, and whole host of interest groups represent the later. The bureaucracy is delegated a significant degree of power during the implementation stage of the policy process. The implementation stage of the policy process is by definition an operational phase where policy is actually translated into action with the hope of solving some public problem. However, there are several impediments to successful policy implementation and they include:

1. Clarity of Policy Goals
2. Information Intelligence
3. Strategic Planning

Once public policy has been operationalized through the formal adoption of laws, rules, or regulations, and the bureaucracy has taken action to implement the policy, some form of evaluation needs to be accomplished to determine if the policy has achieved the desired outcome or impact. Most models of policy evaluation ground their analytical perspective in the logical process used to determine the disparity between what was conceptualized by the initial policy goals and what has actually been accomplished by the policy or program as implemented. Theodoulou and Kofinis (2004) identify four generic types of the most commonly used policy evaluation typologies and they are:

1. Process Evaluation
2. Outcome Evaluation
3. Impact Evaluation
4. Cost-benefit Analysis.

One of the primary decisions to be made before conducting any type of policy evaluation is to make a determination of who should conduct the evaluation; organizational members, or someone external to the organization. Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages, and as long as the consumers of the evaluation data are aware of who conducted the evaluation and are also aware of the potential limitations of each alternative then neither option has any particular advantage over the other.

One of the main reasons for doing policy evaluation in the first place is to determine the difference between policy goals and objectives and the subsequent impact that a given policy as implemented has achieved, and then to do something about it. There are essentially three options: maintain the status quo if the policy is working as planned; make adjustments to the policy, in other words make changes; or the most drastic, and rare, change of all is to terminate the program or repeal the policy. It is important to understand that policy change does not occur in a vacuum. Proposed changes will essentially go through some variation of the preceding six stages of the policy process: problem identification, agenda-setting, policy formulation, policy adoption, policy implementation, policy evaluation and then once again back to the policy change or termination stage in a nearly never ending cycle.