Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Required to follow rules
Discretion to make decisions, judgements about clients
Routine and stereotypical approach to work
Manipulate (non-voluntary) clients
Uncertainty and pressure (large caseloads) in their jobs
Limited resources
Sense of cog in a machine
Survival tactics
Types of Questions
Define the problem
Source Kraft and Furling 2013: 118
Define and analyse the problem
Failure to follow through from policy formulation to policy goal...
What is the problem faced?
Where does it exist?
Who or what is affected?
How did it develop?
What are the major causes?
How might the causes be affected by policy action?
Think of deficit and excess
Make the definition evaluative
'Uncertainty' is central to evaluation
Quantify if possible
Diagnose conditions that cause problems
Identify latent opportunities
Don't define the solution into the problem
Don't accept causal claims too easily (e.g. cocaine use may cause family and health problems; but do all suffer this?)
Construct policy alternatives
What policy options might be considered for dealing with the problem?
Assemble some evidence
Develop evaluative criteria
Implementation assumes a prior act (formulation)
What criteria are most suitable for the problem and the alternatives?
What are the costs of action?
What will be the costs if no action is taken?
What is the likely effectiveness, social and political feasibility, or equity of alternatives?
Think before you collect; why type?
Review the available literature
Survey 'best practices'
Use analogies
Start early
Seek credibility, consensus
Be open minded
Assess the alternatives
Construct the alternatives
Which alternatives are better than others?
What kind of analysis might help to distinguish better and worse policy alternatives?
Is the evidence available?
If not, how can it be produced?
Select the criteria
Project the outcomes
Questions that need to be asked:
Who is the formulator?
Who is the decision maker?
Who is the implementator?
Are they the same or different?
If different do they have more power, legitimacy, capacity?
Confront the trade-offs
Draw conclusions
Stop, Focus, Narrow, Deepen, Decide!
Which policy option is the most desirable given the circumstances and the evaluative criteria?
What other factors should be considered?
Tell Your Story
Source: Bardach and Patashnik 2016
What both have in common is:
'I argue that the decisions of street-level bureaucrats, the routines they establish, and the devices they invent to cope with the uncertainties and work pressures, effectively become the public policies they carry out.' (Lipsky)
Passivity and action present at street level
Top-level responses: