PUA 756 Program Implementation

1
PUA 756 Program Implementation

• Discussion Questions

2
Weekend One

• Discussion points
• What is implementation?
• How does it relate to public administration?
• How does it relate to public policy?
• What is a model?
• How might you model implementation of public
  policy?

3
Tools of Implementation

• Governments employ specific sets of actions,
  tools or instruments for delivering services. In
  Chapter 1, Salamon discusses that implementation
  has evolved over time.
• Why has the nature of government action changed?
  Why distinguish policies by their underlying
  tools? What does this analytic strategy help us
  understand about a given policy? What are the
  limitations?
• What is a tools approach to understanding public
  policy implementation? What are some of the
  policy tools (or instruments) are identified in
  the readings? What are examples of these tools
  from your own experience? How can policy tools
  improve implementation?

4
Weekend Two

• In recent years, implementation studies have
  shifted focus from the agency to the program in
  the hopes of discovering why program performance
  is so often disappointing. Explain this new
  governance paradigm and how it has helped us
  understand public program success and/or failure.
  
• Considering the tools discussed the assigned
  readings, how would you determine whether one
  (direct government, government corporations,
  regulatory tools, grants/loans) is more
  appropriate in a given situation than another?

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Weekend Three

• Using a current issue as an example, how has the
  political context affected the implementation of
  alternatives and solutions? How about the
  economic context? Have any other Democracy issues
  affected the implementation of your selected
  policy?
• Is it possible, given the array of policy actors
  involved, that effective implementation of policy
  is not a goal because of a lack of confidence in
  what the intended or unintended impacts should
  be?

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Weekend Four

• Within the public and political arenas, why is so
  little attention given to the practical realities
  of policy implementation?
• In the end, who is ultimately responsible for the
  effectiveness of government?