Implementation and Delivery

Implementation and networks

Unfashionable status in the mid 80s-mid 90s
 Implementation studies were rather side-lined through the mid
1980s until the mid1990s
◦ the rise of New Public Management (delivery is about performance
management)
◦ rise of ‘evidence-based’ policy
◦ complexities of the ‘congested state’

 New Public Management

◦ Claimed to address top-down Problems
◦ but eroded trust
◦ spawned new industries of regulators, performance managers, appraisers,
an ‘audit explosion’
◦ Competitive tendering, PPPs, meant ceding delivery to unaccountable
agencies/companies with different value systems
Re-emergence
 Back in fashion because ‘delivery’ was key theme of Blair
governments
◦ worried that perfect delivery was not happening
 Focus on policy failure acknowledging range of causes
◦ ambiguous objectives
◦ inadequate knowledge of causes of problems
◦ inadequate resources/inappropriate policy instruments
◦ extent of discretion of street-level bureaucrats
◦ lack of support from affected groups/govmt agencies
◦ unstable/uncertain socio-economic/political contexts
Fourth generation
 Focused on policy networks
 Complexity and increasing numbers/layers of actors

necessitates negotiation
 Top down management not possible
◦ Not much actually known
◦ What is possible?
 Coordination?
 Negotiation?
 Flexibility
Fourth generation
 Policy networks as the engine room of the modern polity has
thrown the implementation level into renewed and sharper
perspective
 The polity is composed of complex networks involving a

broad range of public and private actors where

implementation requires negotiation
 Networks are not very amenable to top-down

control/enforcement of aims but managing networks is little

understood; more to do with coordination, negotiation, need
for flexibility.