Writ of Public Policy

Programmes of Government

Governmentalisation of State

Statecraft derived from the structured interaction approach, involves a convocation of representative interests intent on conducting policy work as a relatively self-conscious undertaking.

Technologies of Governing

These innovations refer to underlying processes examined in social action theory whereby government is explained to involve:

‘the examination not only of normative principles derived from political philosophy but also of the expertise and know-how to of policymakers and specialists of various sorts, including academics, economists, accountants, psychologists, bureaucracies, social workers, law enforcement officers and so on. Government exists in the medium of thought, of mentalities and rationalities of government’ (Dean & Hindess, 1998 in ibid).

Legality of Policy

The governmental structure (legislative, executive, judicial, governmental agency) for decision making and policy work is conditioned by the Rule of Law which establishes basic principles for the exercise of governmental discretion and judgements, and for their review (Holder, 1999). Within the customs of the parliamentary system, judicial review imparting the legality of policy focuses on procedural issues or errors in law meaning that administrative and policy making agencies are required to operate within their jurisdiction according to principles of fundamental justice and due process (Howlett & Ramesh, 2003).

Disciplines of Government

Accountability

The term 'accountability' signifies the acknowledgement, assumption of responsibility and answerability of governmental officers to the parliament for its actions, decisions, and policies.

Windows of Opportunity

Premised in the spheres of action approach - involving a problem stream, policy stream and political stream – Kingdon (1984) has argued that the most critical policy work is done by political entrepreneurs who epitomise policy craftsmanship in seizing windows of opportunity to move issues from one stream to another.

Culture of Policy Learning

Typologies of policy learning are administrative, judicial, and political (Howlett & Ramesh, 2003) in which learning may be endogenous (Hall, 1993 in ibid) or exogenous (Heclo, 1974 in ibid). The self-reinforcing applicability of policy learning occurs as the reiterative policy cycle continues to obtain utility from feedback to any given scenario.

In many circumstances, the operation of a policy system is too idiosyncratic, the number of actors too numerous, and the number of outcomes too small to permit clear and unambiguous post-mortems. Nevertheless, such efforts are made and the results of these investigations, whether accurate or not, are fed back into the policy process, influencing the direction and content of further iterations of the policy cycle (Howlett & Ramesh, 2003).

A culture of policy learning also derives advantages of practical ‘lesson-drawing’ (Rose, 1988 & 1991 in ibid) and by social learning, which is a natural consequence of maturation of organisational processes. For example, ibid highlight leading examples of social learning as a subset of policy learning to include the move toward privatisation (to accrue efficiency gains) and also the refocus on inflation (as more significant than unemployment), both of which reflect global trends accompanied by transformational change to underlying policy thinking.

Table 1 Exogenous and Endogenous Concepts of Policy Evaluation and Policy Learning

Capacity for intrinsic policy learning is thus understood to be bound by: (i) the capacity and expertise of state; and (ii) the nature of the policy subsystem, referring to the capacity of state-society relations (ibid).

REFERENCES

Colebatch, HK (ed) (2006) Beyond the Policy Cycle. The Policy Process in Australia. NSW: Allen & Unwin Publishers.

Holder, WE (1999) Comments on What Role do Legal Institutions Play in Development? A Paper delivered at the IMF Conference on Second Generation Reforms. Washington: IMF Institute and the Fiscal Affairs Department.

Howlett, M & M Ramesh (2003) Studying Public Policy. Policy Cycles & Policy Subsystems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.