POLICY AS A MOVING TARGET: A CALL FOR CONCEPTUAL REALISM |
| |
| Authors: | Bjorn Wittrock Peter de Leon |
| |
| Affiliation: | BJORN WITTROCK is Professor of Political Science at the University of Stockholm and co-director of the Swedish Colloquium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.;PETER deLEON is Professor of public policy at the University of Colorado-Denver. Author of books and monographs on policy analysis, his most recent work is "Policy Termination as a Political Phenomenon," in The Politics of Progrum Evuluation;, edited by Dennis Palumbo. |
| |
| Abstract: | Since the early 1970s, policy scholars have paid great attention to issues of policy implementation, treating it as the "missing link" between policy formulation and results. Most often, policy problems have been seen as static phenomena that can be corrected by carefully specified programs. This paper, drawing upon examples from Swedish energy policy, argues that this is not the case, that political and social conditions are so prone to change that implementation must be a dynamic process if it is to be effective. This has distinct conceptual and practical implications for the study and design of policy implementation. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
|
|
