My Thoughts on Peters Chapter 6

Once again, we return to the story of our naive policy analyst. She has gotten her issue on the agenda, formulated the best policy response, determined the best arena for successful "passage" of her policy, and the policy has been adopted. Now she is done, right? The answer of course is not yet.

A lot of policy scholars focus almost exclusively on the policy formulation and evaluation stages of policy and leave implementation studies to the public administration scholars. Implementation is the administration of the policy, and can be the most important stage of the policy process in determining how citizens experience policy and the success and failure of policies. The study of implementation really took off in the 1970s with the publication of Pressman and Wildavsky's classic Implementation. Their work examines how the failure of Great Society era anti-poverty programs in Oakland, CA can be traced to relationships within and among agencies and citizens. 

When most people think of the policy process in America, they think that the legislature passes a law and the executive branch administers it. The power to determine what should happen in this case lies with the legislature. From this perspective, when the administrator does not carry out the law exactly as the policymaker intended, the result is undemocratic and problematic. In reality, implementation rarely works this way. The political process tends to produce laws with little practical guidance, vague statutory requirements, and often contradictory instructions. Much of the work is left to administrators, who are generally experts in substantive areas, whereas policymakers are not. Of course, this brings up a lot of questions about legitimacy in a democratic country. 

Implementation takes place in agencies, which tend to be hierarchical and bureaucratic. The character of these agencies can make implementation of new policies difficult, even when everyone agrees how to implement them. Max Brooks' World War Z  is a great work of fiction that deals with the same issues that Peters discusses. In the book, Standard Operating Procedures, communication problems, horseshoe-nail problems, and interorganizational problems slow the response to the zombie-pocalypse. Further, the military and CDC treat the zombie plague and war as standard epidemics and wars, which leads to an ineffective response. The author even directly states (through the mouths of his characters) many of the problems with implementation that Peters brings up. I highly recommend reading the book.