THE DYNAMICS OF POLICY CHANGE: WBBYING AND WATER PRIVATIZATION |
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| Authors: | JEREMY J. RICHARDSON,WILLIAM A. MALONEY,WOLFGANG RÜ DIG |
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| Affiliation: | Jeremy Richardson is Director of the European Public Policy Institute and Professor of European Integration at the University of Warwick;William Maloney is Research Fellow, Department of Politics and International Relations, at the University of Aberdeen;Wolfgang Rüdig is Senior Lecturer in Government, at the University of Strathclyde. |
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| Abstract: | The privatization of the water industry was one of the most controversial and turbulent privatizations of the 1980s. The government undertook the project somewhat reluctantly, then the first plans had to be withdrawn, but eventually, the privatization of the industry was successfully completed in 1989. In this article, we first set out to provide a thorough account of the process of privatizing water, based on primary sources and exhaustive interviews. In doing so, we identity some major problems of established theories of British policy making: the process of water privatization clearly does not conform to any single model of policy making. Instead, individual 'episodes' of the policy process conform to different models. Arguing that existing theories of British policy making may have focused too narrowly on routine decision-making processes, we propose that a theory of the transformation of policy communities is required to understand the dynamics of radical policy change in Britain. |
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