A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective

Abstract

Political scientists Eugene Bardach and Eric Patashnik’s “a practical guide for policy analysis: eightfold path to more effective problem-solving” has attained the status of a classic in the public policy literature, and become the premier guide for policy practitioners since its first publication in 2011. The book is a culmination of years of accumulated policy design and implementation experience that the authors conjoin to provide real-life examples and case studies, underscoring the various trajectories and contours that an instrument takes before it blossoms to germinate into a hatchable policy. The authors have used their policy experiences to identify repeating patterns of activities to develop a widely acknowledged taxonomy of the policy-making process.

They have organised the often disparate, scattered and isolated activities to develop a chef’s recipe comprising actions for the practitioner to arrive at desirable policy outcomes, and meaningful and objective conclusions. Their thesis that policy analysis can be understood as a series of structured and sequential activities that are part of a logical framework has developed into a separately identifiable ideological position and become a divisive and polarising subject, leading to the rapid mainstreaming of it, and its antithesis (policy making is unstructured and non-sequential), within the policy discourse. This school of thought is challenged by scholars who postulate that the policy environment is more complex than what Bardach and Patashnik assume, and model it to be and therefore, requires a more nuanced way of looking at the entwined and interconnected web of structures, networks, institutional processes, actors, and a multitude of interactions and interests that shape their behaviour.