Policy analysis

Policy analysis or public policy analysis is a technique used in the public administration sub-field of political science to enable civil servants, nonprofit organizations, and others to examine and evaluate the available options to implement the goals of laws and elected officials.

[8] Stakeholders is defined broadly to include citizens, community groups, non-governmental organizations, businesses and even opposing political parties.

A number of different viewpoints can be used during evaluation, including looking at a policy's effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, value for money, outcomes or outputs.

Promotion of the best agendas are the product of careful "back-room" analysis of policies by a priori assessment and 'a posteriori evaluation.

Policy creation is a process that typically follows a sequence of steps or stages: This model, however, has been criticized for being overly linear and simplistic.

For instance, it is a difficult model to apply in the public sector because social problems can be very complex, ill-defined, and inter-dependent.

[citation needed] The rational planning model of decision-making is a process for making sound decisions in policy-making in the public sector.

[citation needed] In the context of the public sector, policy models are intended to achieve maximum social gain, and may involved the following steps to achieve rational decisions:[17] The Rational planning model has also proven to be very useful to several decision making processes in industries outside the public sphere.

[citation needed] Nonetheless, there are some who criticize the rational model due to the major problems which can be faced & which tend to arise in practice because social and environmental values can be difficult to quantify and forge consensus around.

[citation needed] Further criticism of the rational model include: leaving a gap between planning and implementation, ignoring of the role of people, entrepreneurs, leadership, etc., the insufficiency of technical competence (i.e. ignoring the human factor), reflecting too mechanical an approach (i.e. the organic nature of organizations), requiring of multidimensional and complex models, generation of predictions which are often wrong (i.e. simple solutions may be overlooked), and incurring of cost (i.e. costs of rational-comprehensive planning may outweigh the cost savings of the policy).

[citation needed] Criticisms of such a policy approach include: challenges to bargaining (i.e. not successful with limited resources), downplaying useful quantitative information, obscuring real relationships between political entities, an anti-intellectual approach to problems (i.e. the preclusion of imagination), and a bias towards conservatism (i.e. bias against far-reaching solutions).

Actors analyze contemporary gender-related employment issues ranging from parental leave and maternity programs, sexual harassment, and work/life balance to gender mainstreaming.

This integrates what are usually separate bodies of evaluation on the role of gender in welfare state developments, employment transformations, workplace policies, and work experience.

There must be an authority or leader charged with the implementation and monitoring of the policy with a sound social theory underlying the program and the target group.

[20][21][22] To obtain compliance of the actors involved, the government can resort to positive sanctions, such as favorable publicity, price supports, tax credits, grants-in-aid, direct services or benefits; declarations; rewards; voluntary standards; mediation; education; demonstration programs; training, contracts; subsidies; loans; general expenditures; informal procedures, bargaining; franchises; sole-source provider awards...etc.

Following are National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy's (NCCHPP) 10 steps:[24] Details of such a plan may vary by institution and context.

For example, a Public Health Ontario revision of the above replaces the first three steps with "describe the program", "identify and engage partners", and "determine timelines and available resources", while otherwise retaining the model.

[26] Characteristics of REAM include setting clear and targeted objectives at the start of a policy cycle, participation and interdisciplinary teamwork, simultaneous collection and analysis of data, and the staged reporting of findings.

These require front-loaded effort: consulting with funders and achieving buy-in from informants who will face competing demands during implementation phases.