ImplementIng

PUBLIC
POLICY
An IntroductIon to the Study
of operAtIonAl GovernAnce

T H I R D e DI T Ion
**************************************

michael hill
& peter hupe

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the future of implementation studies

Contents

Introduction 195
The objectives of studying implementation 195
The study of governance in operation 199
Promising developments 202
Conclusion 203

Introduction

In this final chapter we need to provide our key conclusions. We do this by

addressing the question: what future for implementation studies can be justified
from our observed state of the art? Has, indeed, the subject become ‘yesterday’s
issue’, as one of us rhetorically asked a number of years ago (Hill, 1997)? The
answer given in the introductory chapter of this book remains the answer in this
last chapter: ‘No’. We think the study of implementation has a future – although
perhaps a different one than it seemed to have back in the 1970s.
In this chapter we come back again to the objectives of studying implementa-
tion (second section). What was it all about? Next, by way of a substantive rather
than systematic summary of the argument of the book, we highlight some of
our findings from the preceding chapters (third section). We continue by sketching
some developments that can be judged as enhancing the study of implementation
of public policies – under whatever contemporary heading (fourth section). The
chapter ends with a concluding fifth section.

The objectives of studying implementation

In an academic discipline several questions may lead the quest for truth. After
all, in the division of labour between ‘science’ and ‘society’ both parties have

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legitimate expectations from each other. Programmatic and methodological

considerations may embody the lines of distinction between science and other
trades in society. Fundamentally, this is not different for a social science. In the
study of politics and public administration, too, it ultimately is the combination
of an orientation towards the accumulation of knowledge, on one hand, and the
ways in which this knowledge is being gained, on the other, that make practis-
ing that study not identical to writing a novel or giving a yoga workshop.
Of course, from there the debate starts about the implications of the nature of
the object of those disciplines in social science for the ways in which that object
should be approached. In this book we have addressed implementation theory
and research as a subdiscipline of political science and public administration. As
we have suggested throughout this book, much theorizing about implementa-
tion since the late 1990s has been within a variant of the study of public admin-
istration described as public management.
In our view this means that all of the preceding statements made in this sec-
tion go for implementation studies as well. As a consequence we see the follow-
ing sorts of concerns in this subdiscipline: descriptive ones (the most realistic
way to describe implementation processes); theoretical and methodological
concerns (how to research implementation); and normative concerns (raising
issues about whose will should prevail in the implementation of policy).
Through the history of the subdiscipline – let us say since the publication of
Pressman and Wildavsky’s book in 1973 – these concerns have remained impor-
tant. It means that when we identify the objectives of studying implementation,
we should differentiate between teaching, research and consultancy.
It is clear that scholars, engaged as they are in exercises in scientific enquiry, in
principle are driven by the same search for the truth, despite the question about
whether these exercises take the form of teaching, doing research or giving advice.
Yet the fact, for example, that policy analysis is a mixture of ‘analysis of’ policy and
‘analysis for’ policy (Gordon et al., 1977) indicates that the core preoccupations of
those offering theoretical propositions will differ. Our assumption is that the stances
taken by authors on implementation may, to a certain extent, be influenced by the
kinds of concerns they are led by. What we described as descriptive, theoretical and
methodological, and normative concerns may imply, quite pragmatically, different
objectives associated with, respectively, teaching, research and consultancy. In fact,
at a meta-level different kinds of questions are leading. In teaching, the objective is
transferring knowledge: what knowledge and insights are available? Theory and
research aim at contributing to the accumulation of that knowledge and insights:
given what we know, what can we explain? In consultancy the objective is giving
advice to practitioners: how can knowledge be used to act?

Teaching about implementation

As far as teaching is concerned there is a need to be as comprehensive as possible,

identifying the multitude of factors that influence implementation and the range

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of interpretations of their impact. Therefore there will tend to be a bias away from
simplification. Analysis will be essentially ‘of policy’, and there is likely to be some
attention to the difficulties of explaining action. Obviously, therefore, within
accounts of implementation offered by some teachers will be interpretative perspec-
tives influenced by postmodern challenges to generalization and the accumulation
of hypotheses (see pp. 40–2). The word ‘some’ is important in that last sentence; we
certainly do not generalize here about all teachers. The important point is that
while, in our view, such perspectives place serious constraints upon research activi-
ties they do not necessarily inhibit teaching about implementation. Hence we find
Fox (1990) supporting arguments for a wide view of the policy arena and a broad
timespan, and also arguing for the consideration of ‘multiple standpoints’. Fox
rejects a total shift away from positivism, but argues ‘to the positive benefits of
modern social science must be added respect for the disciplined employment of
sound intuition itself born of experience not reducible to models, hypotheses,
quantification, “hard” data, or little pieces of incorrigible fixity’ (1990: 211).
Yanow develops a related argument for an ‘interpretive’ approach, with an
emphasis on ‘interpretations of policy language, legislative intent or implement-
ing actions’ (Yanow, 1993) to the study of implementation, questioning the
quest for one best way of studying the subject.
We have sympathy with this perspective but do not think that it necessarily
leads to a position in which all that teachers can do is ‘tell stories’. There are
regularities to be observed and scope for cautious generalization. We explore this
point further with reference to research.

Researching implementation

As the teaching perspective is likely to embrace all philosophical and methodo-

logical standpoints, and to be able to tolerate complex and possibly conflicting
explanations, we have started with that. By contrast the research perspective
tends to involve efforts to restrict the span of attention, recognize the specific-
ity of policy and operational contexts and confine the number of variables to
be examined to a relatively small number. The formulation of hypotheses will
generally be required in which identification of dependent and independent
variables will be attempted, and ceteris paribus clauses are likely to be used.
Quantification and comparison will be seen as important. While we do not
want to suggest that all who engage in implementation research are positivists
in any strict sense, those concerns of traditional positivist research are likely to
be in evidence. Hence it is from the particularly research-orientated implemen-
tation theorists like May and Winter, and public management researchers like
Meier and O’Toole, that we see strong efforts to limit the span of theoretical
attention, at least in respect of any particular research project.
There is also inevitably an issue in respect of the research concern about fund-
ing and other support for work on implementation. It is not surprising to find a
top-down orientation, or at least a seeking for ‘what works’, in the writings of

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those whose approach to implementation analysis is particularly linked with

research concerns. For many of the people who fund research work want to see
efforts to answer specific questions about differences in implementation, and
often about the reasons for what is called implementation ‘success’ and ‘failure’.

Advising about implementation

These practical concerns also apply to the consultancy orientation in implemen-

tation theory, with the difference that there will often not be the same pressure
towards the systematic testing of hypotheses in this case. We find thus the
impact of consultancy in the domination, particularly in the early implementa-
tion work, of the search for a series of concrete propositions (‘rules for successful
implementation’). It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the consultancy
approach is always orientated towards simplification. There is an interesting tra-
dition of stressing complexity, in which the consultant role is to help clients to
cope with this. We see this most saliently in the long career of Eugene Bardach
(1977, 1998) with his emphasis upon ‘fixing games’ and identifying key roles in
those games. Similarities exist in work in the UK in which inter-organizational
complexity is stressed, with an early but influential publication on the roles of
‘reticulists’ (Friend et al., 1974). The latter term refers to actors working across
organizational boundaries and contemporary work on how best successful part-
nerships can be formed (see particularly Hudson and Hardy, 2002). A related
development in the Netherlands is the elaboration of propositions about network
management (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004).
While consultants in the strict sense need clients who pay for their advice,
there is nevertheless in implementation studies work in which normative con-
cerns are central. In many cases these concerns include challenges to the nor-
mative simplicity of the top-down perspective, which takes it for granted that
successful implementation means compliance with the wishes of dominant
actors. We speak here of what is implicitly consultancy, but without specific
clients, although perhaps ‘advocacy’ is a better word. In this sense we see
authors, such as Rothstein, whose particular concerns are with highlighting the
normative questions embedded in implementation studies. Also work can be
observed from authors who specifically identify themselves with concerns
other than of those ‘at the top’. A grass-roots view of democracy is explicitly
embodied in some of Hjern and Hull’s work (1982). Contrary to many of the
simplifications of his view which stress the power to ‘subvert’ policy, Michael
Lipsky’s original analysis of street-level bureaucracy is concerned to recognize
the validity of the perspectives of low-level officials and of the public to whom
they relate. At the time of writing there is a strong interest in this work, with
many writers now demonstrating the complex relationship between street-level
behaviour and policy (Hupe et al., forthcoming 2015).
As indicated above, we do not suggest that those who have theorized about
implementation belong explicitly and strictly to one of the three categories of

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teachers, researchers or consultants (in an explicit or wider sense). After all,

many individual implementation scholars fulfil two or all these three roles –
although perhaps not always at the same time. We do suggest, however, that
participation in one or more of these activities may have had some influence on
approaches to theory, in terms of stances on the divergences identified in the
subsequent chapters of this book. These divergences particularly regard:

• approaches to the top-down/bottom-up synthesis, and especially the normative

issues that are embedded in it;
• treatment of the policy formation/implementation boundaries;
• the attention given to complexity, and particularly to networks; and
• simplification and the specification of policy and contextual differences.

In the following section we highlight some of our findings from the previous
chapters, by way of summarizing the argument unfolded in this book.

The study of governance in operation

We started from the position, set out in Chapter 1, that within political science
and public administration a subdiscipline concerned with policy implementation
seems to have been established. The introductory remarks included explanations
about the terminology we have used in the book. In Chapter 2 we gave attention
to the subject of implementation in general, looking at its societal embedding and
at theoretical elements that are relevant to the subject, although coming from a
different background. Next we reviewed the literature about implementation, in
Chapters 3 and 4. There we observed that it was a development from a long-
standing concern to explain, and probably try to reduce, the gap between the
initial formulation of the goals of a public policy and the actual results of that
policy. In fact attention to the relation between intentions and achievements
dates far back; otherwise the pyramids in Egypt could not have been built.
The history of ‘public policy’ as the descriptor for the strivings connecting inten-
tions and achievements of government actors, however, is relatively young. It is
seen little before the rise of the modern state. Furthermore, the period in which
public policy implementation as a modern phenomenon under corresponding
labels has been studied, is even shorter. It seems defendable to mark the beginning
of that period with the publication of Pressman and Wildavsky’s influential book
Implementation in 1973. We showed that the mainstream implementation litera-
ture, broadly speaking originating from that book, to some extent supplemented,
and to some extent bypassed, other relevant literature on politics, public law and
public organizations. Within the specific implementation literature a lively debate
developed, dominated by arguments about whether top-down or bottom-up views
of implementation were more appropriate. While that argument was partly about
methodology, it was perhaps primarily driven by concerns about accountability.

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The top-down preoccupation with the elimination of the gap between formulation
and output contrasted with the bottom-up view that this phenomenon was a
product of the inevitable, and perhaps desirable, participation of other actors in
later stages of the policy process.
Then, as is the way with debates of this kind, gradually the literature moved
away from a simple confrontation between the top-down and bottom-up per-
spectives on studying implementation. Authors became critical of the ‘misery’
kind of approach that led top-downers to be preoccupied with a process of pol-
icy modification. From a methodological point of view it became recognized
that it is much more fruitful to seek to explain and understand the implementa-
tion (sub-)process as such, than to be preoccupied by a need to explain an
inevitable gap. From a normative point of view it became recognized (a) that
there are alternative views about the accountability of public policy that cannot
be resolved by an academic literature, and (b) that in many situations the explo-
ration of the way alternative ‘accountabilities’ can fuse together is a more fruitful
way forward for those anxious to control implementation than a preoccupation
with domination by any single party.
Chapter 5 then added to that review the perspective that the evolution of the
debate needs to be seen not simply in terms of a developing academic argument,
but also in its relationship to a changing perspective on the role of government
in society. The latter has involved what we, alongside many other contemporary
writers, see as an evolution from government to governance. As the essence of that
phrase we see the decoupling of actor and activities, of locus and focus. Govern-
ance, of course, remains practised by government, but this may take various
forms. The need to specify actor/activities combinations may lead to distinc-
tions between sorts of governance, like corporate governance, government gov-
ernance or public governance. In fact, however, paraphrasing Bozeman’s (1987)
motto one could state: All governance is public.
We then asked what the implications would be of what we labelled as the gov-
ernance paradigm for the old issues about implementing public policy. It was
noted that there are authors who see in these new developments the ‘death’ of
the study of implementation. We agree that governance makes the top-down/
bottom-up debate seem rather dated, and the top-down control emphasis in the
work of some of the top-down writers particularly irrelevant. Implementation
theory has evolved away from that debate to take on board complexity in respect
both of the process and of the related issues of control. Nevertheless, it seems
wrong to see the implementation perspective as no longer appropriate. On the
contrary, in our view it is the very complexity of the issues facing modern gov-
ernance that makes it important to continue giving attention to implementation:
in practice as well as in studying it. One of the virtues of the work of the early
top-down theorists was that they emphasized issues about purposive action and
control over policy processes. Those issues remain important regardless of the
stance one takes on who should be in control. While we recognize that there has
been a tendency in some postmodernist writing on public administration to
see the policy process as having a shapeless, ‘garbage can’, character, we share the

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more widespread concern about the need to raise questions on how policy pro-
cesses may be influenced.
Having identified the prevalence of what we described as a governance para-
digm, in Chapter 6 we explored the theoretical consequences of looking at
implementation from a governance perspective. We reviewed the functionality
of the stages model and explored the pros and cons of alternative general frame-
works. It was in that chapter, too, that we gave an elaboration of the multiple
governance framework that we developed as a way to reframe the policy process.
We have elaborated through Chapters 6 to 8 what it means to do research on
implementation and to try to make recommendations based on that, given the
prevalence of the governance paradigm, on one hand, and the state of knowl-
edge about implementation, on the other. For that purpose we addressed the
agenda of issues that we identified in Chapter 4 as characteristic of the present
state of implementation theory. The search for a synthesis noted in that chap-
ter, invites implementation researchers to explain explicitly and as specifically
as possible what it is that needs explanation. If ‘implementation’ is an object of
research at all, the question where in a policy process policy formation ends
and implementation begins has to be handled methodologically. Next to that
it is important to consider how to deal theoretically and methodologically with
the fact that many policy processes involve a multiplicity of administrative lay-
ers. While network analysis has broadened the horizontal dimension in imple-
mentation research, specifying inter-organizational relationships is needed. As
far as the vertical dimension is concerned, the fact should be acknowledged
that differences in managerial action refer to an important, but only one, set of
factors causing varying agency responses. On the borders of those agencies
citizens as clients, and other actors affected by the policy involved, function as
stakeholders whose actions may influence the implementation of that policy as
well. And then there are macro-environmental factors that may be hard to
control, but nevertheless may have a pertinent influence, too. Measuring the
impact of all these factors may be difficult, certainly in their relationships. This
is why we think it is important not to champion either quantitative or qualita-
tive research methods exclusively. We note however, in this latest edition of our
work, welcome efforts to develop methodologies that can bridge the gap
between the two.
While researching in this field is one thing, practitioners, working under an
action imperative, may welcome advice on how to implement public policies.
The search for truth in academia is paralleled by the quest for appropriate action
in the practice of public administration. In Chapter 8 we explored the various
dimensions of the situations in which governance is being practised. There we
also tried to elaborate conceptually the kind of general insights about the ways
actors can ‘steer’ the behaviour of other actors, as developed by authors like
Etzioni and Lindblom. Although reality almost always is ambiguous – or rather,
because of that – it remains relevant to specify contexts for action. After all, it is
in implementation as the operational part of governance that ‘good intentions’
get materialized.

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Promising developments

As indicated, we do not see studying implementation as an obsolete matter; that

study will continue, under whatever heading. Preferring to give this book ‘an
open end’, rather than to aim at closing an ongoing discussion, it seems relevant
to identify some lines that may gain momentum in the future. Overviewing the
field we see three sorts of such developments.
First, there are the implementation studies called simply that. It can be stated
as a fact that the multidisciplinary attention to the subject of implementation
continues as before. Just as there was practice and study of implementation
before it became something that could be called a paradigm, this will be the case
after that paradigm has been succeeded by newer ones. As Sætren (2005) has
shown on the basis of a comprehensive bibliometrical study, many implementa-
tion studies are still being done. They may often be single case studies and policy
field-related – which may make them less visible – but there still is a critical mass
of mainstream implementation studies, in the literal sense.
As a second development a renewed attention to issues of implementation can
be observed in the literature on what is called ‘multilevel governance’. Looking
at governing across more than one administrative layer – as we would formulate
the subject matter – researchers, for instance, are interested in the ‘implementa-
tion’ of directives of the European Union by the various member states. In that
context the traditional questions about the relationship between policy imple-
mentation and policy formation are posed anew (but see pp. 146–7). Elsewhere
we have pointed at some methodological traps associated with such research
(Hill and Hupe, 2003). In particular there is the possibility that implementation
is presupposed where, in fact, legitimate policy co-formation is occurring.
Because of the contemporary preoccupation with traditional issues, perhaps the
label neo-implementation studies is appropriate here.
Third, there are studies of ‘implementation’ performed under different
headings. The kind of research recognized by Kettl (2000) and O’Toole (2000a)
as promising and, actually, advancing implementation studies can be valued
as broadening perspectives and enhancing chances for the development of
new insights and the use of new sources of knowledge. The systematic
research that some scholars do, particularly American ones, makes a substan-
tial theoretical–empirical contribution to the accumulation of knowledge. If
this knowledge concerns what still can be called the subdiscipline of public
policy implementation studies, or something else, this in our view is of sec-
ondary importance. One of the characteristics of these studies is that, instead
of theorizing about what should be the elements of a comprehensive, over-
arching grand theory (constantly adding new variables), they focus on con-
fronting existing knowledge about a relatively narrowly defined subject, in a
systematic way, with relevant sets of data. Next to this kind of study, it can be
expected that, if certain requirements are met (see Chapter 7), the linking of
large quantities of data with parsimoniously formulated formal models (Meier

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and O’Toole, 2001; see also Torenvlied, 2000) may advance the field – either
in the narrow or in a broader sense.
In the context of this third category two contemporary trends in the study of
public administration seem worth noting. One is that one can observe a rise of
studies in which performance is explicitly being analysed. Since the 1980s the
measuring of the results of government action, in all kinds of variants, has got
attention (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Bouckaert and Halligan, 2007; Ferlie et al.,
2005). This applies both to the practice and the study of public administration,
and is often addressed as public management. It is this trend, an ideological
movement with real consequences, which made us speak in Chapter 5 about the
New Public Management paradigm. Recently, in a limited number of empirical
studies making connections between various sorts of ‘public service perfor-
mance’ as dependent variables and specific other variables on the explanatory
side, gets explicit attention (Boyne et al., 2006).
The other trend is that the degree of rigour seems to be increasing in policy stud-
ies. Although the volume Theories of the Policy Process hardly contains ‘theories’ in
the meaning given by Ostrom and adopted by us in Chapter 6, it does give an
informative overview of what Sabatier (2007a), the editor, calls ‘more promising’
theoretical approaches. If one takes a closer look at the eight approaches, one can
identify a variety of ways to conceptualize what, in fact, can be called ‘performance’.
All of the approaches aim at explaining variation; although the social constructivist
one, as presented by Ingram et al. (2007) is perhaps not exactly oriented to causal
explanation. Some of the approaches want to explain policy change or policy adop-
tion, but the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier and Weible, 2007) and the
Multiple Streams Framework (Zahariadis, 2007) explicitly focus on explaining pol-
icy outputs and outcomes. What is relevant here is not the question whether these
approaches justifiably are labelled as ‘frameworks’. Rather, the fact is remarkable
that certainly the latter two are interested in explaining variation in what can be,
but is not, called performance: not from a public management but from a policy stud-
ies perspective.
And then, in a way, we seem to be back with what implementation studies
were all about. After all, the subject matter of these studies, as formulated by
O’Toole (2000a: 273), still concerns ‘what happens between the establishment
of policy and its impact in the world of action’.

Conclusion

In Chapter 4 we reported on the state of the art of implementation studies at the

beginning of the twenty-first century. We started accumulating the material for
that chapter in the first edition of this book while believing that we could assem-
ble a comprehensive database of implementation studies carried out during the
1990s. This belief proved to be mistaken; given the diversity of the subject we
soon discovered that it was an impossible task. Studies claiming to be about

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implementation had been carried out without reference to the mainstream theo-
retical literature, while excellent insights relevant to the theoretical debate had
been provided by studies apparently indifferent to that mainstream.
Actually this is the situation right now, as well. On one hand, the days of the
policy-implementation paradigm are over, as we argued in Chapter 5. At the same
time, however, the implementation, as legitimately as possible, of decisions
agreed upon in the face of collective ambitions goes on, while remaining to be
deemed necessary – to say the least. The labels and concepts may change, that fact
fundamentally does not. As long as collective ambitions are strived at, governance
(or whatever it may be called in the future) will be practised. And as long as that
will be the case, it will be perceived worthwhile to study the operational part of
that governance.
This situation justifies sustained academic attention to what in this book has
been addressed as implementing public policy. Such attention may keep the
threefold form we distinguished in the second section of this chapter. One may
see a certain analogy here with the trias gubernandi presented in Chapter 6. In
theory and research the leading meta-question directs the quest for truth (cf. the
directional level). In consultancy the leading meta-question is about putting
knowledge into practice (cf. the operational level). The meta-question leading in
teaching and the objective of documenting and transferring knowledge relate to
maintaining the state of the (sub-) discipline as institution. Then we are talking
about the constitutive level.
Thus specifying academic attention implies – here as well – distinguishing between
actor and activities. As indicated, many scholars are engaged both in research and
teaching, and often also in consultancy. When writing this book, however, it was
particularly concerns related to teaching that we had in mind. Eventually, presenting
once in a while what knowledge and insights are available may contribute to estab-
lishing the conditions necessary for the academic work of the future. In this book,
therefore, we have brought together many insights relevant for all who teach about
implementation. We did so, recognizing throughout that a scholarly activity in an
applied discipline should make positive contributions both to the accumulation of
new evidence from research and to the passing on of ideas for action.

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