Topic 7 Policy Process Studies: Policy Implementation 1 The Topdown

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Topic 7Policy Process StudiesPolicy
Implementation 1 The Top-down Bottom Down
Debate
EDM 6209 Policy Studies in Education
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Theories of Policy Implementation An Overview

• The rational-technical and top-down approach It
  indicates theoretical orientations taking
  implementation as a separate stage of the policy
  cycle, which is characterized as an enforcement
  and execution of the states policy decision.
• The interpretive and bottom-up approach It
  summarizes theoretical orientations conceiving
  implementation as process of interpretations,
  figuring out what to do and delivering concrete
  services to program/policy recipients on diverse
  localities and situations by street-level
  bureaucrats within different organizational
  setting.

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Theories of Policy Implementation An Overview

• The top-down and bottom-up synthesis approach It
  characterizes theoretical orientations perceiving
  implementation as process of constituting
  coalition, structuration, networking, learning or
  institutionalization, within which various
  parties in a specific policy domain/area strive
  to realize a policy, program or project.

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The Rational-technical and Top-down Approach
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Policy implementation technical control of the
execution of decisions from top down

• Sabatier and Mazmanian define that
  implementation is the carrying out of a basic
  policy decision. The implementation process
  normally runs through a number of stages
• beginning with passage of the basic statute,
• followed by the policy output (decisions and
  specifications) of the implementing agencies,
• the compliance of the target groups with those
  decisions, the actual impact both intended and
  unintended of those outputs,
• the perceived impacts of agency decisions, and
• finally, important revisions (or attempted
  revision) in the basic status. (1995, p. 153
  numbering mine)

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Implementation as Control Enforcement and
Execution of Policy Decisions

• Accordingly, implementation is perceived as
  technical problems of control over the
  internality and externality of the policy, which
  has been specified by Sabarier and Mazmanian as
  follows
• Tractability of the problem
• Availability of valid technical theory and
  technology
• Diversity of target-group behavior
• Target group as percentage of the population
• Extent of behavior change required

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Implementation as Control Enforcement and
Execution of Policy Decisions

• Accordingly, implementation is perceived as
  technical problems of control over of the
  internality and externality of the policy, which
  has been specified by Sabarier and Mazmanian as
  follows
• Ability of statute to structure implementation
• Clear and consistent objectives
• Incorporation of adequate causal theory
• Financial resources
• Hierarchical integration with and among
  implementing agency
• Recruitment of implementing official
• Formal access by outsiders

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Implementation as Control Enforcement and
Execution of Policy Decisions

• Accordingly, implementation is perceived as
  technical problems of control over of the
  internality and externality of the policy, which
  has been specified by Sabarier and Mazmanian as
  follows
• Non-statutory variables affecting implementation
• Socioeconomic conditions and technology
• Media attention to the problem
• Public support
• Attitudes and resource of constituency groups
• Support from sovereign
• Commitment and leadership skill of implementing
  officials

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Implementation as Control Enforcement and
Execution of Policy Decisions

• Six sufficient and generally necessary conditions
  for effective implementation
• Clear and consistent objectives
• Adequate causal theory
• Implementation process legally structured to
  enhance compliance by implementing officials and
  target groups
• Committed and skillful implementing officials
• Support of interest groups and sovereigns
• Changes in socioeconomic conditions which do not
  substantially undermine political support or
  causal theory.

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• According to policy analysts of liberal-economic
  perspective, such as Weimer Vining (2005),
  there are two basic mechanisms in coordinating
  collective action into attaining societal
  objectives. One is through market mechanism and
  the other is state intervention. However, Eliot
  Freidson contends that besides market and state,
  there is the third logic at work in public policy
  implementation process in modern society, namely
  professional power.

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• Mechanism of policy implementation
• Market mechanism Collective action enables
  society to produce, distribute, and consume a
  great variety and abundance of goods (and
  services). Most collective action arises from
  voluntary agreements among people - within
  families, private organizations and exchange
  relations. (Weimer Vining, 2005, p.30)
• Individual rational choice According to the
  above-cited premise of liberal economic
  perspective, the basic decision units in
  collective actions are individual choices. It is
  further assumed that these basic units will act
  in accordance with the principles of maximization
  of utility and profit.

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• Market mechanism
• Prefect competitive market At macroscopic level,
  these individual rational choices will meet and
  exchange in a prefect competitive market with the
  following operational principles/assumptions
  (Stiglitz Walsh, 2002, p. 228 and Stiger,
  1986 p. 267))
• All participants (Firms and individuals) take
  market price as given i.e. numbers of
  participants are sufficiently large
• Actions by individual participants do not
  directly affect other participants except through
  price, i.e. they act independently and freely and
  not collectively
• All participants must possess tolerable or even
  prefect knowledge of the market opportunities
• Goods are things that only the buyer can enjoy,
  i.e. they are private goods. They are of the
  nature
• Rivalry in consumption
• Excludability in use

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• Mechanism of policy implementation
• State intervention States interventions into
  collective actions of production, distribution
  and consumption in society involve legitimately
  uses of coercive power. The means employed by the
  state are commonly called in public policy study
  the policy instrument.
• Conception of policy instrument Public policy
  instruments are the set of techniques by which
  governmental authorities wield their power in
  attempting to ensure support and effect or
  prevent social change. (Veding, 1998, p.21)

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• State intervention
• Typology of policy instruments
• Regulation (Sticks) they are means undertaken
  by governmental unit to influence people by means
  of formulated rules and directives which mandate
  receivers to action in accordance with what is
  ordered in these rules and directive. (p. 31)
• Economic policy instruments (Carrots) They
  involve either the handing out or the taking
  away of material resources, be they in cash or in
  kind. Economic instruments make it cheaper or
  more expensive in terms of money, time, effort,
  and other valuables to pursue certain actions
  (either compliance or defiance to policy
  measures). (p. 32)
• Information (Sermons) They refer to as moral
  suasion, or exhortation, covers attempts at
  influencing people through the transfer of
  knowledge, the communication of reasoned
  argument, and persuasion. (p.33)

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• Mechanism of policy implementation
• Professional power
• The third logic in public policy
• For decades now, the popular watchwords
  driving policy formation (and implementation)
  have been competition and efficiency, the
  first referring to competition in a free market,
  and the second to the benefit of the skilled
  management of firms (governmental agencies). I
  will show in some detail how properties of
  professionalism fit together to form a whole that
  differs systematically from the free market on
  the one hand, and the bureaucracy, in the
  other. (Freidson, 2001, p.2-3)
• Therefore, Freidson contends that like Max
  Webers model of rational-legal bureaucracy which
  represents managerialism and Adam Smiths model
  of the free market which represents consumerism
  (p. 180), professionalism is conceived of as one
  of the three logically distinct methods of
  organizing and controlling. (p.180)

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Hierarchy and Market The Mechanism of Policy
Implementation

• Mechanism of policy implementation
• Professional power
• Constituents of Professionalism
• Professionalism is based on specialized
  bodies of knowledge and skill that have no
  coercive power of their own but only what may be
  delegated to them by the state or capital. They
  gain their protected (and legitimate) status by
  project of successful persuasion, not by buying
  it or capturing it at the point of a gun. But
  because of the special nature of the knowledge
  and skill imputed to professionals as well as the
  fact that their practice is protected, friendly
  commentators have long invoked the need to trust
  their intention. (p.214) Accordingly the
  constituents of professionalism may comprise
• Academically respectable knowledge
• Practically credible skill
• Socially trustful codes of ethnics and practices
• Effective authority and autonomy over the above
  constituents

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The Interpretive Bottom-up Model
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Michael Lipskys street-level bureaucracy model

• Lipskys book entitled Street-level Bureaucrats
  (1980) has been viewed as the leading challenge
  to the top-down model of policy implementation
  models and the starting point of bottom-up model.

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Michael Lipskys street-level bureaucracy model

• Lipsky argue(s) that public policy is not best
  understood as made in legislatures or top-floor
  suites of high ranking administrators, because in
  important ways it is actually made in the crowded
  offices and daily encounters in street-level
  workers. And the street-level bureaucrats, the
  routines they establish, and the devices they
  invent to cope with uncertainties and work
  pressures, effectively become the public policies
  they carry out. (Lipsky, 1993, p. 382)
• Accordingly, study of education policy
  implementation should look into teachers
  instructional routines delivered in crowded
  classrooms and school officials policy measures
  imposed upon teachers and students.

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Michael Lipskys street-level bureaucracy model

• Lipsky underlines that in implementing policy at
  street level, front-line worker are confronted
  with conflict and ambiguities. These may include
• Inadequate resource and unsatisfactory working
  condition, e.g. large classes for teachers, huge
  caseloads for social workers, dangerous and
  hostile neighborhood for police officers.
• Unpredictable, uncooperative, skeptical clients
• Unclear and ambiguous job specification and
  guidelines.

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Michael Lipskys street-level bureaucracy model

• Confronted with these inadequacies and
  uncertainties, street-level bureaucrats derive
  coping strategies or even survival strategies to
  deal with the unaccommodating working situations.
  Lipsky point out that in daily client-processing
  routines, street-level bureaucrats in fact have
  considerable amount of powers and discretions at
  their disposal, which may lead to substantial
  deviations from, if not complete alterations of,
  official and top-down policy specifications.

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Michael Lipskys street-level bureaucracy model

• These discretions or even deviations may take the
  from of
• Modification of client demand This may include
  various devices to delay, deter or practically
  dissolve clients demands in overcrowded and
  overloaded working situations.
• Modification of job conception This may include
  strategies of lowering the service standards or
  even alteration of the natures and features of
  the services supposed to be delivered in order to
  ease the excessive demands.
• Modification of client conception This may
  include devices of differentiating clients into
  non-mandatory categories and to provide different
  service, e.g. creaming off the deserving or
  educable and marginalizing the undeserving and
  trouble-makers

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Martin Reins down-ward puzzlement model

• Michael Rein (1983) has put forth a theoretical
  perspective of implementation by questioning the
  controllability of the implementation policy and
  injecting the concept of puzzlement and conflict
  into the study of policy implementation

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Martin Reins down-ward puzzlement model

• Rein does not conceptualize the policy
  implementation process and a clearly defined
  enforcement process, instead he contends that
• Implementation is understood as (1) a
  declaration of government preferences, (2)
  mediated by a number of actors, who (3) create a
  circular process characterized by reciprocal
  power relations and negotiations, then the actors
  must take into account three potentially
  conflicting imperatives (a) the legal imperative
  to do what is legally required, (b) the
  rational-bureaucratic imperative to do what is
  rationally defensible, and (c) the consensual
  imperative to do what can help to establish
  agreement among contending influential parties
  who have a stake in the outcome. (p.118, the
  alphabetical numbering is mine)

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Martin Reins down-ward puzzlement model

• Apart from the three components of the
  implementation process and the three conflicting
  imperatives, Rein has further specifies three
  types of primary actors in the implementation
  process. They are
• guideline developers,
• interest groups, and
• program administrators

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Martin Reins down-ward puzzlement model

• In view of such a complicate arena of
  implementation, Rein underlines that policy
  implementation is a matter not only of power but
  of puzzlement, of men collectively wondering
  what to do. (p.117)
• Such puzzlement is mainly derived from the
  following scenarios (p. 117)
• The program administrators and front-line works
  do not know what is required of them (by the
  legislation or executive policy) since they are
  asked either to pursue uncertain or evolving
  goals or reconcile incompatible requirements.
• The resources at hand are insufficient for the
  task.
• The workers lack the knowledge and skill (and
  technology) to take action.

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Martin Reins down-ward puzzlement model

• The downward spiral of puzzlement
• Rein further specifies that When the
  purposes of policy are unclear and incompatible,
  each successive stage in the process of
  implementation provides a new context for seeking
  further clarification. One of the consequences of
  passing ambiguity an inconsistent legislation is
  that the arena of decision making shifts to a
  lower level. The everyday practitioners become
  the ones who resolve the lack of consensus
  through their concrete actions. (p.117)

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Richard Elmores organizational model

• Elmore asserts that one of the vital features of
  policy implementation is the process by which
  policies are translated into administrative
  actions. (And) the translation of an idea into
  action involves certain crucial simplification.
  (Elmore, 1993, p. 313)

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Richard Elmores organizational model

• Elmore further points out that virtually all
  public policies are implemented by large public
  organization. (And) organizations are
  simplifiers they work on problems by breaking
  them into discrete, manageable tasks and
  allocating responsibility for those tasks to
  specialized units. (1993, p. 313) In other
  words, organizations assigned with the task to
  carry out policies and programs may modify,
  simplify or even re-orientate the policies
  measures to suit the internal structures and
  conventional procedures of the organization.

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Richard Elmores organizational model

• Different organizational models will translate a
  given policy in different way. They will simplify
  or localize in accordance with their
• central principle,
• power structure,
• decision making procedure, and
• implementation process

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Policy Implementation as process of translation
and simplification through large public
organization
Discrete manageable tasks responsibilities
assigned to specialized units
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Topic 7Policy Process Studies Policy
Implementation 1 The Top-down Bottom Down
Debate
END