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.

Policy analysis in Canada brings together original contributions from many of the field’s leading scholars. Contributors chronicle the evolution of policy analysis in Canada over the past 50 years and reflect on its application in both governmental and non-governmental settings. As part of the International Library of Policy Analysis series, the book enables cross-national comparison of public policy analysis concepts and practice within national and sub-national governments, media, NGOs and other institutional settings. Informed by the latest scholarship on policy analysis, the volume is a valuable resource for academics and students of policy studies, public management, political science and comparative policy studies.

This handbook provides a unique, systematic and comprehensive overview from leading experts in the field of the policy-making tools deployed at all the phases of the policy process. It covers the fundamentals of both new and established policy tools – from regulation and public enterprises to subsidies and information campaigns, as well as new tools, such as social impact investing, nudges, crowdsourcing, co-production and new digital governance and data analysis techniques. The book consists of nine sections with five corresponding to the major research emphases of studies on policy tools across the stages of the policy cycle (agenda-setting, formulation, decision-making, implementation and evaluation). These are accompanied by overviews of key research and concepts, a discussion of how different kinds of tools can be usefully combined in simple or complex policy portfolios or mixes, and a concluding section on future research directions. Consolidating the state of knowledge and uniting classic foundational material with recent advancements in theory and practice in one location, the handbook is a defining volume in this field. The Routledge Handbook of Policy Tools is essential reading and an authoritative reference for scholars, students, researchers and practitioners of public policy, public administration, and public management, as well as those interested in comparative politics and government, public organizations and the use of policy tools and instruments in individual policy areas from climate change to public health.

This book argues that ethical judgment by individual scientific policy advisors is more important than is often acknowledged. While many scientific policy advisors routinely present themselves as neutral or value free scientists, here is demonstrated that the ideal of scientific integrity as neutrality is misguided and that an alternative understanding is demanded. The book provides an overview of the type of social and political value decisions that have to be made in all phases of research and advice. It moves on to examine proposed procedures or guidelines for scientists and critically assesses plans for the democratization of decision making in science and scientific advice. The book offers a reflection on the practice of scientific advice that will appeal to practitioners and scholars of Public Administration, Public Management and Policy Analysis.

A comprehensive and comparative analysis of who advises government and how systems of policy advice operate in four Westminster countries.

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis is a classic work of the Public Policy discipline. Wildavsky’s emphasis on the values involved in public policies, as well as the need to build political understandings about the nature of policy, are as important for 21st century policymaking as they were in 1979. B. Guy Peters’ critical introduction provides the reader with context for the book, its main themes and contemporary relevance, and offers a guide to understanding a complex but crucial text.

Policy formulation relies upon the interplay of knowledge-based analysis of issues with power-based considerations, such as the political assessment of the costs and benefits of proposed actions, and its effects on the partisan and electoral concerns of governments. Policy scholars have long been interested in how governments successfully create, deploy and utilise policy instruments, but the literature on policy formulation has, until now, remained fragmented. This comprehensive Handbook unites original scholarship on policy tools and design, with contributions examining policy actors and the roles they play in the formulation process.

The continuing churn of political advisers in Donald Trump's White House serve as a reminder of the salience and relevance of political advice. Political Advice: Past, Present and Future brings several very different voices to bear on the problem of advice and influence; the distinction in so far as it is valid between political and policy advice; the two-way parasitism of adviser and advised; the nature and idioms of political advice literature; the changing (and sometimes unchanging) nature of expertise; the ever-pressing issue of access and exclusion; and how that is controlled. This volume of essays feeds into a contemporary concern, set in a wider historical context. Moreover, the volume treats political advice in an interdisciplinary fashion with contributions from classics and literature as well as from history and politics. The unique practitioners' perspective to the problem of political advice is brought by the contributions of politicians, political advisers and senior civil servants.

Policy analysis, as a practical matter, is hardly new. Throughout history, rulers have sought advice from priests or sages, and monarchs have conferred with counselors. The emergence of empirical social research in the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for policy advice that was more than an idiosyncratic political exercise, but it was not until well into this century that the systematic examination of policy issues became feasible. Advice and Consent traces the recent course of the "policy sciences," a term coined in 1951 to describe an analytic approach that draws on political science, sociology, law, economics, psychology, and operations research to examine specific social problems in context. Peter deLeon's unique contribution is to delineate two separate but related currents in the development of the policy sciences: first, the evolution of intellectual tools for analysis ("advice"); and second, the evolution of a perceived need for policy research as prompted by events such as the war on poverty ("consent"). Peter deLeon's concise and literate account of how these two trends shaped the policy sciences and affected each other clarifies the present state of policy research, explores its failure to realize fully its ideals, and frames the challenges facing the policy sciences as they struggle to complete their transformation from academic fancy to institutional fact.