In Australia and New Zealand, many public projects, programs and services perform well. But these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied. We cannot properly 'see'--let alone recognise and explain--variations in government performance when media, political and academic discourses are saturated with accounts of their shortcomings and failures, but are next to silent on their achievements. Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand helps to turn that tide. It aims to reset the agenda for teaching, research and dialogue on public policy performance. This is done through a series of close-up, in-depth and carefully chosen case study accounts of the genesis and evolution of stand-out public policy achievements, across a range of sectors within Australia and New Zealand. Through these accounts, written by experts from both countries, we engage with the conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges that have plagued extant research seeking to evaluate, explain and design successful public policy. Studies of public policy successes are rare--not just in Australia and New Zealand, but the world over. This book is embedded in a broader project exploring policy successes globally; its companion volume, Great Policy Successes (edited by Paul 't Hart and Mallory Compton), is published by Oxford University Press (2019).

"Or, a tale about why it's amazing that governments get so little credit for their many everyday and extraordinary achievements as told by sympathetic observers who seek to create space for a less relentlessly negative view of our pivotal public institutions."

In this updated second edition, internationally renowned scholar B. Guy Peters provides a succinct introduction to public policy and illustrates the design approach to policy problems. Peters demonstrates how decision-makers can make more effective choices and why a design approach to public intervention can improve policy formulation.

Fully revised for a second edition, this essential guide provides a concise and accessible overview of the public policy process: agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation. The book provides an introduction to the key policy functions, the challenges they entail, and how the challenges may be addressed by policy actors. Written from a comparative perspective, the authors include examples from a diverse range of countries at different stages of development, highlighting key principles and practices through which policy actors can effectively manage their policy processes and outcomes. Key features of the second edition: fully updated and revised content throughout; expanded references and further reading; more guidance towards understanding the key concepts in public policy. This important tool offers students of public policy and policy practitioners guidance on how to make, implement, and evaluate public policies in ways that improve citizens' lives.

Success and failure are key to any consideration of public policy but there have been remarkably few attempts to assess systematically the various dimensions and complex nature of policy success. This important new text fills the gap by developing a systematic framework and offering an entirely new way of introducing students to policy analysis.

The Public Policy Process is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the process by which public policy is made. Explaining clearly the importance of the relationship between theoretical and practical aspects of policymaking, the book gives a thorough overview of the people and organisations involved in the process. Fully revised and updated for an eighth edition, The Public Policy Process provides: Clear exploration, using many illustrations, of how policy is made and implemented; Examines challenges to effective policy making in critical areas – such as inequality and climate change – including the influence of powerful interests and the Covid-19 pandemic; New material on unequal democracies, interest groups influence, behavioural policy analysis, global policies and evidence-based decision making; Additional European and comparative international examples. This text is essential reading for students of public policy, public administration and management, as well as more broadly highly relevant to related courses in health and nursing, social welfare, environment, development and local government.

Previous ed.: South Melbourne: Macmillan Education Australia, 2000.

How to Do Public Policy offers a guide to students and practitioners on how to improve problem-solving with policies in a political world. It integrates insights from applied policy analysis and studies of the policy process to develop a framework that conceives policy-making as structured by two spheres of action - the 'engine room' of specialists and experts in government agencies, NGOs, research organizations etc., on the one hand, and the political 'superstructure' of politicians, key public stakeholders and the public, on the other hand. Understanding the different logics of the engine room and the superstructure is key for successful policy-making. The dual structure of policy-making provides a perspective on policy-analysis (interactive policy analysis) and policy-making (actor-centred policy-making) that moves from the focus on individual and specific measures, towards understanding and shaping the relation and interaction between policy interventions, the institutional context and the stakeholders involved or affected. Part I of the book presents the basic analytical concepts needed to understand the policy process and the structures and dynamics involved in it, as well as to understand how and why actors behave the way they do-and how to engage with different types of actors. Part II moves further into the nuts and bolts of policy-making, including policy design, implementation, and evaluation. Part III introduces and explores three key aspects of the capacity to make good policies: engagement with stakeholders, the process of policy coordination in a context of interdependence, and the role of institutions.

The question of why policies fail once adopted, in the words of series editor Stuart Nagel, 'goes to the essence of public policy analysis'. The volume editors, in their extensive and valuable introduction, provide a review of previous efforts to answer aspects of this question and discuss the problems of definition and research political scientists encounter in dealing with it. Louise Comfort in her essay discusses how programme goals must sometimes simply be redifined. Edward Jennings explores the thesis that changes in welfare policy came about largely because of urban unrest. David O'Brien writes aboutt the dilemma confronting agencies caught between the conflicting aims of the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act. Theodore An