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Figure 5.2 Influences on Policy Implementation: Empowering the PoorPolicy championsPolicy environment(social structure,economic context,political/administrativesystem, informality)Policy initiative(intended expansionof justice, assetholding, labourand entrepreneurialrights)Policy stakeholders(beneficiaries, allies,practitioners, challengers)Policy characteristics(complexity, ambiguity,discord)Policy outcomeInstitutional/legalprotection/ opportunitiesfor excluded groupsthe Commission’s empowerment agenda.A policy champion can come forward at any levelof government. Many Legal Empowerment of thePoor policies do not start out not at the nationalcentre, but emerge from the periphery via local orregional governments. A mayor or town council, forexample, may want to take care of problems at anirregular housing settlement, an open air market ora waste disposal site. Acting pro-actively, the localgovernment may try to include the people wholive or work in these areas in finding the solutions.Perhaps more commonly, the local government maysimply go ahead with reforms devoid of popularparticipation, sometimes triggering an empoweringreaction as poor men and women move to legallyto protect themselves from the harm caused by thepolicy. In either scenario, the national governmentmay be on the sidelines of implementation.Protagonists dedicated to the task of implementationmay emerge out of other stakeholder groups(see below), as well, not just from the public sector.Any individual with leadership skills, initiative,and commitment can play the role of policy champion,though they may be most effective if theyalso have technical knowledge about the subject athand. Having several policy champions is generallybetter for implementation.Forces Affecting ImplementationOnce a policymaking process has been started, severalcommon factors have been found to facilitateor impede reaching the desired policy conclusion,notwithstanding the content. Some of the generalinfluences on implementation concern the peopleaffected by the policy, or the policy stakeholders.Another set of influential factors reflects attributesof the context in which the policy exists, or the policyenvironment. A third set is distinctive featuresor policy characteristics of the proposed course ofaction. We can think of these three categories ofsignificant forces as the ‘who’, the ‘where’, and the‘what’ of policy implementation. (The ‘how’ willbe dealt with in Sections 3 and 4, on implementationroadmaps and pro-poor toolkits.) Figure 5.2presents a schematic summary of these influenceson implementation in the specific context ofempowering the poor. The arrows in Figure 5.2 areshown as diminishing in size during the implementationventure, to convey the idea that these tend289