The author presents concrete tips, case studies, and step-by-step methods for the budding analyst as well as the seasoned professional. He pays particular attention to "design problems" and the choice of a "base case". The book includes: up-to-date examples; a new set of environmental problems; a sample document of real-world policy analysis; a primer in how to "talk the talk" of policy analysis; and, a cheat sheet of how-to’s for solving a host of policy problems.

A guidebook describing a method for achieving effective policy analysis for solving problems.

Drawing on more than 40 years of experience with policy analysis, best-selling authors Eugene Bardach and Eric M. Patashnik use real-world examples to teach you how to be effective, accurate, and persuasive policy analysts. The Sixth Edition of A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis presents dozens of concrete tips, new case studies, and step-by-step strategies for the budding analyst as well as the seasoned professional.

In the Fifth Edition of A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving, Eugene Bardach and new co-author Eric Patashnik draw on more than 40 years of experience teaching students to be effective, accurate, and persuasive policy analysts. This bestselling handbook presents dozens of concrete tips, interesting case studies, and step-by-step strategies that are easily applicable for the budding analyst as well as the seasoned professional. In this new edition, Bardach and Patashnik update many examples to reflect the shifting landscape of policy issues. A new section with advice on how to undertake policy design in addition to making policy choices makes the book even more engaging. Readers will also appreciate a sample document of real world policy analysis, suggestions for developing creative, "out-of-the-box" solutions, and tips for working with clients.

In recent years, globalization and trade openings have become increasingly contentious. This book aims to fill a gap in the market by guiding the users through the main sources of data and the most useful empirical tools for trade and trade policy analysis in an applied, real-world context. This approach builds on the comparative advantage of the authoring organizations - the WTO and UNCTAD - both of which have a strong policy focus. It quantifies trade flows and trade policies, presents the gravity models, and covers a number of simulation methodologies to predict the effects of trade and trade-related policies on trade flows, welfare and the distribution of income.

This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.

This book offers a practical guide for policy advisors and their managers, grounded in the author's extensive experience as a senior policy practitioner in New Zealand's Westminster-style system of government. A key message is that effective policy advising is less about cycles, stages and steps, and more about relationships, integrity and communication. Policy making is incremental social problem solving. Policy advising is mostly learned on the job, like an apprenticeship. It starts with careful listening, knowing one's place in the constitutional scheme of things, winning the confidence of decision makers, skillfully communicating what they need to hear and not only what they want to hear, and learning to lead from behind, scheme virtuously and play nicely with others. The author introduces a public value approach to policy advising that uses collective thinking to address complex policy problems, evidence-informed policy analysis that also factors in emotions and values, and the practice of "gifting and gaining" (rather than "trade-offs") in the long-term public interest. Theory is illustrated by personal anecdote and each chapter offers practical processes, tools, techniques and questions for reflection, to help readers master the art and craft of policy advising. This second edition has been substantially revised and updated. It provides an expanded, step-by-step approach to stakeholder analysis and prioritisation in relation to an agency's own strategic frame; it aligns and integrates theory about the public interest, public value and anticipatory governance; and it updates a "fair go" multi-criteria decision analysis matrix with the latest iteration of the N.Z. Treasury's Living Standards Framework.

Anyone involved in the policy process analyzes policy in some sense. However, those who analyze and manage policy professionally must use a variety of tools to do their job effectively. This book, Tools for Policy Analysis and Management, discusses topics and presents tools and methodologies central to the tasks of policy analysis and management. The general approach and the specific suggestions made have been developed over many years of teaching policy analysis to graduate students as well as executive education workshops for policy makers and analysts.