Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

it came. They developed separate professional journals, separate conferences,
and, although they shared antecedents, had very little in common at times. This
was unrealistic and unnecessary. No sharp line can be drawn between making
policy and implementing it, neither can one be drawn between policy and
administration, once the unrealistic separation thesis was discarded. But the
disciplinary separation had other effects in that it created distinct professional
groups within the bureaucracy that had little in common with the rest of the workplace.
In some agencies the people with public policy training emerged ahead,
while in others those with public administration training did so. Without this
apparent split, public policy and administration might have had more influence.
Overemphasis on decisions
In practice a relatively small proportion of a manager’s time or effort is taken up
by making decisions amenable to analytical processes. This has meant a limitation
to the training provided in public policy programmes, particularly of the more esoteric
kind. Successful managers are less analysts than organizers, less technocrats
than politicians. Rather than there being one single outcome which is optimal, as
is assumed through analysis, there is a range of possible answers, each of which
has its own costs and benefits in terms of acceptance. The absence of personality
is a problem for public policy models. Political and interpersonal factors may be
better able to be considered from a public management perspective.
Not used, or used less
Public Policy and Policy Analysis 123
Despite numerous books on policy analysis and a variety of approaches, there
is little evidence that formal methods like those set out above are actually followed.
Or, if they were followed at one time, they are now not followed as
much. The fact is that ‘many studies of public policy determination are quite
general and abstract and distant from the operating reality of government’
(Lynn, 1987, p. 13). Day-to-day management activities involve many things
other than making decisions and ‘a high proportion of the activities in which
public managers engage are not amenable to the application of analytic techniques;
a small proportion are’ (Elmore, 1986). There are no ‘correct’ answers
in practice and trying to find a single answer is akin to embracing the old ‘one
best way’ thinking of public administration.
Within the bureaucracy, as opposed to public policy programmes in the universities,
policy analysis does not seem to have passed the test of relevance.
Certainly there are positions designated as policy analyst but they may or may
not be filled by those with formal policy training. There is a constant demand
for more and better information from above, and reports have to be organized
and written quickly. The number of these based on formal analysis, or which
are markedly better because they were, is both small and declining.