Implementing Public Policy

Michael Hill is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the University of Newcastle, UK.  Before entering academic life at the University of Reading he was a street-level bureaucrat in a local social assistance office. He later worked on research at the Universities of Oxford and Bristol on the implementation of social policy. Since retiring from Newcastle he has held part-time visiting professorships in London University at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary College and also in the London School of Economics and the University of Brighton. His long-standing text The Public Policy Process reached its eighth edition in 2021 in a joint version with Frédéric Varone of the University of Geneva. In 2020 he published Exploring the World of Social Policy with Zoë Irving of the University of York. Peter Hupe is Visiting Professor at the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium. He is also Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, UK. While teaching Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he had academic affiliations in Leiden, Leuven, London, Oxford and Potsdam. The major part of his research regards the theoretical-empirical study of policy processes, particularly implementation and street-level bureaucracy. He discovered the relevance of the latter during an earlier career as a policymaker in the Dutch national civil service. Publishing regularly in journals like Public Administration, Public Policy and Administration and Public Management Review, in 2019 he composed the Research Handbook of Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Ground Floor of Government in Context. With Tony Evans he edited Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom (2020).

Introduction
Introduction
Structure of the book
Some matters of definition
Notes
Positioning Implementation Studies
Introduction
Concerns about implementation: Historical origins
The rule of law
The idea of democracy and its implications
Public Administration and Public Management
Institutional theory
Postmodernist theory
Conclusion
Notes
Implementation Theory: The Top-Down/Bottom-Up Debate
The discovery of the ‘missing link’
The classical top-down authors
The bottom-up challenge
Conclusion
Implementation Theory
The search for a synthesis
Where does implementation begin
Layers in policy processes
Networks: Broadening the horizontal dimension
Managing performance: Redefining the vertical dimension
Differentiating policy types
Including responses of affected actors
Conclusion
Implementation and Governance
Introduction
The age of interventionism
The age of the market and corporate government
The age of neo-interventionism
Assessment
Conclusion
Notes
Implementation Theory and the Study of Governance
Introduction
The stages model of the policy process
Alternative analytical frameworks
The Multiple Governance Framework
Studying implementation as governance research
Conclusion
Notes
Researching Implementation
Introduction
Defining studies of implementation
Explaining what needs explanation
Isolating implementation
Dealing with layers
Specifying inter-organizational relationships
Differentiating agency responses
Identifying stakes
Recognizing macro-parameters
Quantitative versus qualitative studies
Conclusion
Implementation in Context
Introduction
Implementation in practice
The quest for appropriate action
Policy settings
Institutional environments
Operational governance in context
Conclusion
Notes
The Future of Implementation Studies
Introduction
The objective of studying implementation
The study of governance in operation
Promising developments
Conclusion