How Does It Work? Policy Implementation

The importance of implementation to policy success or failure is intuitively obvious. It matters little that the government has a clear notion of what should be done if the agency charged with implementing the law lacks the ability to actually do it. The goal of implementation is to achieve official policy objectives, to translate the intent of a formally adopted policy into action. Though one of the most complex areas in policy studies, implementation is the rare policy field where definitional issues surrounding the core concept under study are relatively straightforward, and there was initially a good deal of hope that a general theory of implementation might be constructed. Successive generations of implementation studies, however, have failed to surmount key obstacles to that goal. Notably, a long-running argument between “top downers” who put the focus on policy formulators and “bottom uppers” who argued for building from the perspective of target populations and/or street-level bureaucrats. There is some evidence that the field has moved beyond these ultimately unproductive debates by focusing less on constructing a unique theory of implementation than on importing existing, robust theories of the policy process and applying them to implementation. This provides cautious hope that the field of implementation studies is poised to make significant advances.